ASSOCIATION OF ACCREDITED ADOPTION ORGANISATIONS

Programme 23 – 24 April 2014

“ADOPTION FOR THE RIGHT REASONS; an option for

permanency”

English will be the working language.

Erin, a foreign student studying in a prestigious South Korean graduate school, shares her perspective on the word 'grateful' based on her experience as an inter-country adoptee. Ironically, the school of the university that she currently attends has her family's name, Underwood. ? ED.

By Erin Underwood

The word "grateful" is such a small word but it can carry a significant impact. Being "grateful" for something is supposed to have a positive effect, however, society has caused me to resent the word. Adoptees tend to hear this term from strangers, acquaintances, extended family members, sometimes even their adoptive parents (mine excluded).

Adoptees are told to be grateful by people who fail to realize the struggles that adoptees face daily due to our adoption, such as a lack of security, lack of identity, abandonment issues and more. We are told to be "grateful" toward four people: our biological parents and adoptive parents. Adoptees are told to be grateful that their biological parents were selfless enough to relinquish their rights to us. Furthermore, we should be thankful that our adoptive parents decided to adopt rather than conceive. Throughout history, society has deemed adoptees as being "model children," causing immense pressure on adoptees. Adoptees are told to do, and not do, numerous things, mainly for the benefit of another. Such as not misbehaving because that does not show our appreciation for our adoptive parents. We should do well in school because another child could have been "saved" and done better. We should never want to find our biological parents because our adoptive parents would be offended. The list goes on and on.

Adoptees should be allowed to live their lives without societal pressures that tell us to feel gratitude for our lives. How can we show appreciation when we had no say in the adoption? We, being in closed international adoptions, usually are not involved in our adoption. Adoption was a choice that was decided for us. From our relinquishment, we have no say in what country we would reside in and who our adoptive families will be. Adoptees are placed into the system and our identities are stripped from us. We grow up with parents that do not look like us, languages that are different, and names that do not match our ethnicities. We grow up in our adoptive countries that do not fully accept us and eventually discover our birth country does not either.

Establish specialist care and support for transnational adoptees with trauma-informed staff trained in adoption and racism. This is suggested by Natte Hillerberg, ST doctor in psychiatry and board member of Doctors against racism.

Care for internationally adopted people has long been neglected by Sweden's regions. Nowhere in Swedish health care is there specialist psychiatric care for internationally adopted adults, despite the fact that the patient group is strongly overrepresented in terms of mental illness, substance abuse, suicide attempts and suicide. Statistics that show this have been available for decades.

In 2020, the Swedish Agency for Family Law and Parental Support (MFoF) arranged a procurement for conversational support for adult adoptees. The conversational support would not be regarded as care, but as a complement to regular health and medical care. Several players made bids and MFoF chose the supplier that was the cheapest, Apoteksgården cognitive center in Dalarna, over more expensive alternatives with more experience and more qualifications. Apoteksgården is very inaccessible to most of Sweden's population.

Of all conversational contacts that took place during the years 2020 and 2021, only two people were physically present according to an evaluation reported on MFoF's website. The rest of the contacts have been made digitally or by telephone. The evaluation is based on a questionnaire completed by clients.

The design of the survey leaves a lot to be desired. The evaluation states that more than 50 percent of the respondents considered that the support was only to a small extent helpful in issues of racism and adoption-related issues. It has not been possible to answer that the support has not been helpful at all, but with the answer alternatives have been forced to state that the support has been helpful to some degree. It is also noteworthy that a large proportion of clients have chosen to quit after only 1-5 calls.

The vanity of being a Thalidomide child and missing an arm has held Maria Fage Ifversen back for years, but now she is stepping forward in the hope that someone can help her find the little sister she was separated from when they were sent from an orphanage in Bangladesh to Denmark.

"I do not remember anything. It is completely black. "

Again and again, 48-year-old Maria Fage Ifversen tries to think back on her first years of life.

She has always known that as a 6-year-old she was adopted to Denmark from the orphanage "Sister Benedict" in Chittagong, Bangladesh. But at Easter, she found out by a bit of a coincidence that she first came to the orphanage as a 4-year-old.

»Where have I been the first four years? I can remember nothing, and there is nothing in my papers, "she says.

She was four months old when she was adopted from India by a childless couple in the Groene Hart. Undoubtedly with the best intentions, thinks Mariël Vos from Gouderak, but according to her it turned out completely wrong.

“They were both mentally handicapped and worked in sheltered employment. They couldn't handle raising a child. Nowadays, placement in such a family would really no longer be possible, but it happened then. With all its consequences."

Uncertain

Mariel is working on a book about her eventful life. It also extensively discusses her time in a foster family in Waddinxveen. She has also recently started speaking at meetings for social workers in foster care and (future) foster parents. She still has a very good relationship with her own foster mother. He confirms the story of the Gouderakse to this newspaper.

I used to be locked in the shed in the garden. Then I once screamed so loud that neighbors warned the police and the ball started rolling

(CNN)When Russian bombs started dropping on Ukraine in late February, a country singer half a world away in Nashville says he felt the panic of a parent whose child is in danger.

The 9-year-old boy who Scooter Brown and his wife, Vicki, had started the process of adopting was among those hiding in the basement of an orphanage in central Ukraine as three Russian missiles soared overhead and slammed into a Ukrainian military base about 60 miles away.

After that episode, the Browns took matters into their own hands.

Brown, a burly and bearded former Marine who fought on the front lines of Iraq in 2003 and whose namesake band has produced songs with titles such as "Guitars, Guns, and Whiskey" and "Wine Drunk," convinced a "special forces buddy" to join him overseas. They worked with a small Nashville organization run by another military veteran in an attempt to rescue the Browns' future adoptee and a handful of other kids; Brown's wife arrived later to provide additional support.

What followed was an erratic chain of events that started with Brown and his friend setting up a fortress of computer screens and whiteboards in a Polish hotel. From there, they said they fed associates the details they needed to pick up passports from a Kyiv apartment and to make a harrowing rescue of a woman connected with the orphanage who was trapped in a bunker.

This position will be responsible for technical support and capacity building to establish the management of child protection cases and other services through the local partner's specially designed children's spaces.

He / she will contribute to the integration of protection in health institutions, as well as information strategies by raising community awareness, with a focus on concerns for the protection of young people and children.

The selected candidate will work closely with partner organizations to develop coordinated and integrated services that adequately address the protection needs of the most vulnerable, including children.

Details in the attached job advertisement.

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---------- Forwarded message ---------

From: Against Child Trafficking

Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2022 at 12:38

Subject: Re: planning overleg werkgroep beleid invloed

To: George Schuddebeurs

It almost looks like a story from a movie, but it really happened to Rob: shortly after his birth in South Korea he was kidnapped by his aunt and given up for adoption. He told FunX how this could have happened.

ADOPTION STORY

For a long time, Rob and his adoptive parents had no idea of ??the bizarre adoption story that had taken place in South Korea. It wasn't until Rob went looking for his biological parents that the truth came out. "It's a difficult story," says Rob. He explains that his family has always been a little bit against his parents' marriage.

When his mother was pregnant, Rob's father left for the Emirates to work there. The moment the labor started - two months early - he couldn't just come back to South Korea. "He then said to his eldest sister: 'Listen, you are my eldest sister, you must look after my wife, because she is going to give birth." After Rob was born, he had to go straight to the incubator. His mother was in a coma at the time. "My aunt may have bribed the whole thing and ensured that I ended up in an orphanage and that I was sent away to the Netherlands as soon as possible when I was strong."

DECEASED DAUGHTER

In Sweden, there are about 60,000 people who are adopted from other countries. This makes us the country in the world that has arranged the most adoptions in terms of population. The risk of suicide for foreign adoptees is greatly increased compared with the normal population, which has been demonstrated in several Swedish studies [1-3], where the relative risk increase is stated to be between 2.33 and 3.6. The risk is also significantly higher for eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety, inpatient care for alcohol and drug abuse and suicide attempts in foreign adoptees than in the normal population [4, 5].

When I started in psychiatry as an assistant doctor, I noticed that there was a clear over-representation of the patient group of adults adopted. Common to many was that they had a complex problem with several different and sometimes contradictory diagnoses, and that they were tossed between several levels of care and units. At the same time, there was no reception to refer patients to and no competence center to consult about further treatment. Neither during my education nor earlier in my professional life had I learned that adoptees abroad are an extra vulnerable and complex group of patients. Despite the unequivocal scientific evidence regarding mental illness in patients, there is a lack of specialist care and competence in adult psychiatry.

In 2017, I contacted a number of bodies: the Ministry of Social Affairs, the National Board of Health and Welfare, the Swedish Agency for Family Law and Parental Support, the Stockholm Region and the Swedish Agency for Medical and Social Evaluation (SBU). The intention was to sound the alarm about the acute and very serious situation in psychiatry for the patient group, with widespread and great suffering, lack of specialist care and largely non-existent competence in appropriate care and treatment. Responses and actions were completely absent.

Unfortunately, the situation is unchanged. In the absence of sufficient competence and "holistic thinking", patients adopted abroad are still moved around between different clinics without receiving adequate help based on the underlying trauma and shortcomings in early care.

The Swedish Agency for Family Law and Parental Support has procured special conversational support for adoptees [6], which is mainly offered via digital solutions. The conversational support is described as "a complement to the regular health care" and does not aim to medically investigate and treat illnesses and injuries. The agency's support is far from sufficient to provide adoptees with the care they need and are entitled to.