FOR most parents the idea of giving up a child is unbearable. But for Ian* and Rachael Meade* it was their only option.
They had dreamed of being parents for years but were unable to conceive and decided to adopt.
So they were delighted when, in 2014, they brought home brothers Freddie, eight, and Finn, four.
But eight years later the fairytale had become a nightmare and the couple had to make the heart-breaking decision to return Freddie to care.
Today Rachael, 50, tells the story of why she was forced to resort to the ultimate taboo.
We were in our early forties with successful careers and we were overjoyed that it was finally our turn to settle down as a family.
I’d never been someone who got clucky over babies so I was happy to take in two older boys.
We were told the boys had been neglected by alcoholic parents and their father was violent. They had been in care for 18 months.
A few weeks after they moved in with us we were given a lengthy form listing some of the incidents when the police and social workers had been involved.
I remember at the time being surprised that we weren’t given more information as some details seemed sketchy.
But our social workers insisted this was how it was always done. Those first years were full-on but loads of fun.
The boys grew in confidence. Finn loved being on the back of my husband’s bike.
They found it amazing that I, a woman, would drive our car, and my mum said she’d never seen children delight so much in the smallest of presents.
There were bumps along the way but we felt that naughtiness was just what you would expect from two little boys who’d had a lot of upheaval in their lives.
We had regular visits from our social worker and we were told that we were doing great.
We did raise a few concerns about the fact that Freddie told a lot of lies, but were told it was nothing to worry about.
But Freddie became more of a handful. As well as the constant lying, he was quite hyperactive and erratic.
He would behave like a much younger child, having tantrums over any kind of food other than junk food and over, tying his shoelaces. He would spit at other children and urinate in public.
And as time ticked on, we began to realise that not everything we’d been told was true.
For example, the boys were not “doing well at school” – Freddie could barely read. Of course as parents we did everything we could to help them.
We persevered through tears and tantrums over spelling homework and spent hours helping Freddie with reading in the hope he would catch up with his peers.
But things didn’t settle down and when Freddie went to secondary school it got worse.
His behaviour at home suddenly became very confrontational. I would drive home from work dreading the latest confrontation: He would hurt his little brother or break things in the house.
It caused friction between my husband and I as we tried every parenting technique to try to make home life happier, but nothing seemed to work.
We began to notice that, unlike his younger brother, Freddie had no empathy. If he wanted something he would go and get it even if that involved stealing.
He stole all the tips from a local cafe, £60 from my purse and even trinkets from his grandparents’ house.
When we confronted him it was clear that he didn’t care about the impact of his actions on people.
Around the same time he started to exhibit strange sexual behaviour. I caught him peeping at me below the partition in the unisex changing room in the swimming pool.
Then he began watching me doing yoga at 6.30am — a strange time for a teenager to be up.
I would hear him outside the bathroom when I was on the toilet and my underwear would disappear from my drawer or I’d find it ripped up.
I remember realising at one point that he was using every hug as an excuse to run his hands over my chest.
When I asked him why he’d stolen my underwear he said it was because he was angry with me.
Freddie was now 14 and one day he had been acting very secretive with his phone so my husband checked it after he’d gone to bed.
There was a secretly obtained video of me, naked, in the bathroom. We could see that this video had been sent to at least one of Freddie’s friends.
Freddie just couldn’t grasp the seriousness of what he’d done. To him it was a “bit of fun”.
We were advised by a social worker not to report the incident to the police because they said it wasn’t in Freddie’s best interests but this meant that there was no protection for me as a victim of a sexual crime.
Freddie was assigned a youth justice worker whose role is to work with young people at risk of criminal behaviour.
She decided he was unlikely to offend again as he told her he regretted what he’d done. But after his sessions he would admit to us that he had turned on the charm to get what he wanted.
He continued to steal my underwear as before.
Desperate, we asked for respite care to give us a break but were told none was available.
We had to lock away our money to stop Freddie stealing it and constantly watch Freddie to stop him from hurting his little brother.
He was very jealous of Finn and would play rough games. I once took a photo of Finn’s back which looked like he’d had a really nasty cycling accident — he’d just been “playing” with Freddie.
Freddie kicked the dog when she didn’t obey him and had a particular fondness for smashing up garden ornaments and furniture.
I think the breakthrough came, not because we wanted Freddie to go back into foster care, but because he wanted to.
We had been telling his social worker for months that we couldn’t carry on but it was only when he said that he didn’t like our home life either that she agreed to find a foster placement for him.
We had weekend meet-ups but they were miserable.
We thought going into foster care would make him realise what he’d lost but instead he boasted that he was given £60 a week to attend school and that he was allowed to spend all evening and weekend on his Xbox, rapidly putting on weight.
It was different to his life with us, where privileges were earned.
We were frustrated that nobody seemed to be helping him to be a better person.
He made a baseless false allegation against me, to try to get out of trouble he was in at school. The police dismissed it, but it was the final straw.
While the complaint was investigated we had no contact with him at all and, for the first time in years, we were happy.
I could relax at home without fear of being targeted. My relationship with my husband was great again and even Finn seemed to be thriving with the proper attention of Mum and Dad at last.
We felt we owed Freddie another chance so we wrote him a letter saying that we could only have a relationship if he tried to change. We never heard from him again.
Finn is a ray of sunshine in our lives, we love him unconditionally.
Freddie, on the other hand, nearly cost us everything.
It’s scandalous that there are hundreds of adoptive families in crisis like us. I’ve heard horror stories much worse than mine.
Freddie’s life will spiral out of control when he leaves foster care and I worry that the danger is not over for our family.
*Names have been changed.
