A 5-year-old boy whose skull was fractured when his mother's live-in boyfriend struck him with a mop handle, breaking it in half, has been beaten, neglected, and tortured repeatedly, the Volusia Sheriff's Office revealed on Saturday.

Investigators discovered video surveillance from inside the DeLand-area home revealing the child once had his hands tied behind his back for more than 19 hours. Doctors examining him found, in addition to the skull fracture, 46 visible injuries as well as internal injuries, Volusia Sheriff's spokesman Andrew Gant said in a news release.

There were three children in the home, including an 8-year-old girl and a 9-year-old boy.

"The torture these kids endured is hard to imagine. The good news is they're in safe hands now, and their scumbag abusers will have to answer for what they did," Sheriff Mike Chitwood wrote in a Facebook post Saturday.

At least 19 children and young adults were abused in several ways in an SOS Kinderdorpen in Suriname fore more than 30 years. In a report, the research firm Verinorm speaks of sexual, emotional, physical, and financial abuse. This includes rape, neglect, beating, and whipping.

The study was commissioned by SOS Kinderdorpen following reports of violence and sexual abuse in Children's Villages in 2021. For the study, Verinorm analyzed documents and conducted 35 interviews, including with victims and former staff. It emerged that the abuse took place from the founding of the Children's Village in 1972 until its closure in 2006.

Among others, five managers, almost half of the responsible managers, were allegedly guilty of abuse. According to the report, this "creates the impression that the abuse by managers was structural in nature”. One of the managers was sentenced by the court to 3,5 years in prison for sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl.

At the SOS Children's Village, investigators said, there was "too little supervision, monitoring and enforcement," and indications of abuse were "not taken seriously enough" by the humanitarian organization.

On February 01, 2023,a Polish-Swedish seminar was held at the Institute of Justice. The subject of the seminar was legal regulations and practice concerning intercountry adoptions of Polish citizens to Sweden. The Swedish delegation was presided by Professor Anna Singer, the Dean of the Faculty of Law at the Uppsala University, also appointed as Inquiry Chair by the Swedish government, Ministry of Health and Social Affairs to investigate the issue of intercountry adoptions.

The Swedish delegation, apart from Professor Singer, comprised of other members of the Committee in the person of: Tina Nilsson, Pernilla Krusberg and Anders Tordai. The Polish party was represented by the employees of the Institute of Justice: professor Marcin Wielec, the Director of IWS, professor Paweł Sobczyk, the Deputy Director of IWS, employees of the Family Law Section of IWS: professor Elżbieta Holewińska-Łapińska, Dr. Maciej Domański, Dr. Jerzy Słyk, professor Piotr Mostowik, the Head of the Fundamental Rights Section of IWS, and Dr. Bartłomiej Oręziak, the Coordinator of the Center for Strategic Analysis of IWS.

In addition, the seminar was attended by: professor Piotr Fiedorczyk, the Faculty of Law of the University of Białystok and dr hab. Bogusław Lackoroński, the Faculty of Law and Administration of the Warsaw University. In the course of the seminar Professor Elżbieta Holewińska-Łapińska presented Polish regulations on intercountry adoption procedures and practice in the light of file research conducted at the Institute of Justice.

What started as a complaint from the Leithgöb family about the slow progress on their criminal case against the accused, and following the PPU’s involvement, culminated in the police identifying dozens more victims of the alleged scam.

Van den Berg is alleged to have offered services as an adoption social worker, where she would charge prospective adoptive parents, many incapable of having children, for various services in the process to adopt a child. It is alleged that the accused did this, when in fact there was no child to adopt or a child had been offered to the hopeful parents, despite the biological mother not giving consent for adoption. Her alleged offences date back to 2014.

When the PPU took on the case, the police were only investigating a charge of fraud. In a letter in May last year, Adv. Gerrie Nel, head of the PPU, advised the investigating officer on the serious nature of the alleged offences. “We are concerned that more babies have been sold under similar circumstances that the complainant had to endure. The prevalence of such conduct does raise serious consideration that the suspect’s alleged behaviour could be likened to and fall within the ambit of trafficking.

“Furthermore, the suspect seems to be continuing with her devious manipulation because of the vulnerability of childless people. Decisive investigation and action by the South African Police Service (SAPS) and the National Prosecuting Authority are essential to deal with, what seems to be, a serial fraudster or trafficker of babies,” said Nel.

 

PPU spokesperson, Barry Bateman says Van den Berg preyed on the vulnerability of men and women who yearned to be called mom and dad. “It is alleged that the prospective parents’ were shown pictures of a child they hoped and prayed they would one day adopt, meanwhile the same child was promised to another couple, who were shown the same pictures, and who eventually adopted that child.”

Abstract

Background

Illegal adoption, which mainly includes child trafficking and informal adoption, has long been a prevalent social issue in China. However, the processes and patterns of illegal adoption are not well understood due to the scarcity of data.

Objective

The findings are expected to provide insightful clues for the government and the public to better understand the two categories of illegal adoption.

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When Nicole Koman is a few months old, she is adopted from a home. Although she ends up with loving foster parents, her adoption always plays a role. Sometimes in the foreground, then again in the background.

Nicole wrote a book about her adoption. The discovery of my other history has been in stores since this spring.

Nicole: 'Loving youth'

“There was never any secrecy about my adoption. My parents, as I prefer to call my adoptive parents, always talked about it openly.” But Nicole didn’t really know much about her biological father and mother. “Not much was known about it and I never really felt the need to know. I had my parents, family and friends. My childhood was very loving.” Nicole was therefore never ‘bothered’ by the fact that she was adopted. “People were sometimes surprised about my adoption. Many people think that it always concerns children from abroad. But Dutch children are also adopted.”

Lost between two continents, Priyangika starts a quest to uncover the truth about her adoption.

Adopted from Sri Lanka to Norway at only seven weeks old, Priyangika has always longed for her biological family.

She travels to Sri Lanka to fill in the missing pieces of her identification papers, her family history and her broken heart. But finding her birth mother does not bring her the peace of mind she is searching for. Instead, a need to uncover the secrets of her past leads her to an investigation of the complexity of the international adoption process.

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Revealed: Members of alleged illegal adoption gang that sold babies to Italy keep high-profile jobs despite charges

The alleged ringleader of an illegal network that is accused of selling Armenian children to Italian couples is still working in adoption while on trial, a year-long investigation has discovered.

A joint probe by openDemocracy and Italian investigative website IrpiMedia has found that Anush Garsantsyan is seemingly still involved in arranging adoptions.

And many of her 10 co-defendants – including Armenia’s top obstetrician, a key government official responsible for international adoptions and child welfare workers – also continue to hold senior positions in maternal healthcare and the government.

The news comes four years after a criminal investigation opened into the adoptions of 20 Armenian children between 2015 and 2018, all of whom are said to be alive and living in Italy.

Holt Children’s Services will explain its decision to appeal a recent court ruling ordering the agency to compensate an adoptee for his botched adoption in a press conference on Thursday.

In a press release on Tuesday, the adoption agency said some media companies have been reporting malicious and one-sided assertions and that it would like to express its position based on objective facts. 

The Seoul Central District Court earlier this month ordered the Seoul-based agency to pay Adam Crapser, also known by his Korean name Shin Song-hyuk, 100 million won, or around 75-thousand U.S. dollars, in damages for a suit he had filed against Holt and the South Korean government in 2019.

The court said the agency had failed in its duty as the adoptee's guardian to confirm the acquisition of U.S. citizenship following his 1979 adoption, which eventually led to his deportation. It, however, did not recognize state responsibility.

While Crapser’s biological parents were alive prior to his adoption, his birth had not been registered, making it possible at the time for the agency to register him as an orphan and therefore eligible for international adoption.

Crapser was subsequently abandoned by two sets of adoptive parents following abuse and was unable to properly apply for citizenship, leading to his deportation back to South Korea in 2016.