Adoption by Lesbian Women and Gay Men: Perceived Challenges and Training Needs for Professionals in Portugal

Abstract

Lesbian women and gay men face many barriers to accomplish a parental project, including when seeking to adopt. In Portugal, same-sex couple’s adoption was recently allowed and we sought to understand adoption professionals’ perspectives regarding this issue. We conducted two focus groups with adoption professionals using a semi-structured interview script. We aimed to explore (i) the main challenges for adoption by LGs and same-sex couples; (ii) knowledge, skills, and personal beliefs regarding about these family settings; (iii) the importance of gender (couples, child) in the matching process; and (iv) topics to address in any training for this area. The participants’ discourses oscillated between a certain awareness of the prevailing social prejudice and discrimination toward sexual minorities on one hand and a heteronormative discourse on the other hand. Challenges in working with this population and training necessities were identified. Findings point to the need for guidelines for the home study of LG applicants and cultural competency training to deal with this population in three aspects: knowledge, skills, and awareness of personal attitudes.