Recommendation 19

Beyond this, it was clear from our evidence that as well as safeguarding and maintaining records, organisations holding records must ensure they take steps to respond to and help survivors in a way that is sensitive to the challenges for survivors in approaching an organisation that may have been complicit in the harm that was done to them. This should involve not only enhanced training for staff, but also ensuring that organisations reflect on their history and present it in a way which reflects the evidence as we now understand it - that women were coerced into adoption without consent, and suffered abuse, and that this resulted in lifelong trauma both for mothers and for their children; and that the system was cruel, traumatising and stigmatising for women who were placed in Mother and Baby Homes, even when they were able to keep their babies. (Recommendation, Paragraph 65) Improving intermediary support for adoptees and birth families