Adoption in Malta is often criticised as slow, complicated and discouraging. For prospective parents, the long assessments, training sessions and legal hurdles can feel excessive, even heartless. Yet this frustration, understandable as it is, risks obscuring the central truth of adoption: the process does not exist to serve adult aspirations, but to safeguard children who are already vulnerable.
As explained to The Malta Independent on Sunday by Laura Fenech, Service Manager for Adoption Services at the Foundation for Social Welfare Services (FSWS), Malta's adoption framework has deliberately evolved into a child-centred system. Its length and strictness are consequences of an ethical commitment shaped by international conventions, professional standards and hard-earned experience with childhood trauma.
Many of the children involved have experienced neglect, instability, stress, or repeated disruptions in caregiving. Before adoption is even considered, the State is obliged to exhaust every effort to support biological families, pursue rehabilitation and explore reunification. This is not bureaucratic stubbornness; it is recognition that severing biological ties is a profound and irreversible step. Adoption is therefore, by design, a measure of last resort.
This reality explains why most children freed for adoption in Malta are not infants, but older children who may have spent years in care. It also explains why training for prospective adoptive parents is mandatory and uncompromising. FSWS does not promise an idealised version of family life. Instead, it prepares parents for the complexities of trauma-informed parenting, attachment difficulties and identity loss. Love and stability are essential, but they are not cures. Pretending otherwise would be unfair to both children and parents.
Calls to "speed up" adoption deserve careful scrutiny. Yes, delay can be damaging. Children need permanence, and prolonged uncertainty can deepen emotional wounds. If there are inefficiencies in legal procedures, staffing shortages or avoidable administrative bottlenecks, these should be addressed with urgency. A child's sense of time is not the same as an adult's, and unnecessary waiting carries real costs.
However, speeding up cannot mean cutting corners. Shortening assessments, weakening safeguards or prioritising application order over a child's specific needs would risk replacing one form of harm with another. The temptation to measure success by numbers or timelines must be resisted.
Misconceptions around inter-country adoption further complicate the debate. While sometimes perceived as faster, international adoption involves additional scrutiny precisely because of the risks of exploitation and trafficking. Under the Hague Convention, Malta is bound to ethical standards that place the child's welfare above all else. The global decline in inter-country adoptions reflects a growing consensus: wherever possible, children are best raised within their country of birth, culture and language.
Equally important is the need to reject harmful narratives around gratitude and entitlement. Adopted children do not owe gratitude for having their rights fulfilled. Adoption always involves loss, even in the most loving families, and acknowledging this is part of respecting children as full persons rather than symbols of success.
Finally, fostering must not be misrepresented as a shortcut to adoption. Its primary purpose is family support and reunification. Entering fostering with adoption as the goal risks emotional harm and misplaced expectations, again placing adult desires ahead of children's needs.
If Malta is to improve its adoption system, the guiding question should not be "How can we make this easier?" but "How can we make this better for children?" Where processes can be refined without compromising safety, they should be. Where safeguards feel heavy, they should be explained, not dismantled.
Children in care deserve urgency, yes - but above all, they deserve protection, stability and decisions made with their long-term wellbeing at heart.