Ms Claire McGettrick:

With respect to the Senator, I have spoken to many mothers with many different types of experiences. When we hear about mothers saying no to contacts, we need to be very careful about what we read into that because it is always a complex "No". Not everybody who is on the receiving end of that "No" - by that I mean advocates and counsellors - will know how to handle that "No". Actually, the "No" sometimes means that they are living in shame and fear of going back to what happened to them. It should by no means be constituted as fear of their adult children or fear of their adult children getting information about themselves. We need to be very careful about calling this a hierarchy because as I said, we are compounding the secrecy and shame. That is exactly what that does.

To answer the Senator's question about the privacy element, there is a duty to inform an adopted person that a no-contact preference has been registered. That suffices. What is the problem with simply informing the adopted person that a no-contact preference has been registered? That is more than sufficient to protect someone's privacy. An adopted person is not going to go and demand a relationship where a relationship is not wanted. There is, therefore, no need to ram that down the adopted person's throat in the form of an information session, which at the moment is not framed in a supportive context. It is framed as a disciplinary measure.