Following Russia’s invasion, the widespread internal displacement of families in Ukraine has led to a precarious situation for vulnerable children, with reports of forced deportations and illegal adoptions to Russia raising particular concerns.

More than five million women and children have fled Ukraine since the outbreak of the conflict on 24 February.

According to reports by Ukrainian officials, Russia has forced over 150,000 children to leave Eastern Ukraine and enter Russia’s adoption system – although, it should be noted that these figures are based on limited information on the whereabouts of the children.

“In violation of international humanitarian law and basic standards of humanness, Russia is engaged in state-organised kidnapping of children,” said the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry in a statement.

Russian media reported that Ukrainian children from the Donbas region are being integrated into their adoption system. Russian ombudswoman Maria Lvova-Belova stressed the importance of placing these orphans, who may or may not have living relatives, in Russian families.

Eight years ago, Oldenburg bus driver Jasbir Singh Dhot and his wife adopted a baby in India. To this day, the authorities do not recognize this adoption and the family has to live apart.

A fully furnished children's room has been waiting for eight-year-old Anoopjot in Wahnbek for eight years. For eight years, Jasbir Singh Dhot has only seen his wife twice a year. And for eight years, the 59-year-old has not given up hope that his family can still live together.

He himself came to Germany 31 years ago. Many people in Oldenburg know him – Jasbir Singh Dhot has been a driver in the VWG city bus fleet for over ten years. His wife Charanjit has lived with him since 2003. "We always wanted children, but it didn't work out," he says. The couple was all the happier in 2014 when the chance arose to have a baby. “My nephew and his wife were unable to provide for another child and wanted to put him up for adoption. We wanted to accept it.” They adopted Anoopjot as soon as he was born, and since then the boy has been living with Dhot's wife and family in north-west India, 80 kilometers from the Pakistani border.

All requests denied

Contrary to what was planned, the couple has not yet been able to bring their son to Germany. In 2015, the youth welfare office had already inspected the apartment and the surrounding area in Wahnbek and classified it as suitable and forwarded the so-called home study report to the authorities in India and Germany. The Joint Central Adoption Office (GZA) in Hamburg nevertheless refused to recognize the adoption in 2017. Another application was rejected at the end of last year. The family court in Oldenburg and the higher regional court also rejected the recognition of the adoption. A court in India has already confirmed the adoption twice, in 2015 and again in 2017. However, the procedure there is not internationally recognized.

My name is Radhika, and I was adopted from India when I was 17 months old. My birth mother gave me up when I was 10 months old, and I was in an orphanage for 7 months before being adopted. For the majority of my life, I have shoved anything related to my adoption down so far that I couldn’t feel the pain. But it’s all coming up and has overwhelmed me to the point that I feel lost. I am now a 25-year-old living in South Dakota going through so many emotions revolving around being adopted: grief, loss, anger and sorrow.

Growing up I didn’t deal with the trauma of losing my birth parents because, well, I was adopted and had a family. But I hated the fact that I was different from my adoptive family. Except for my brother who was also was adopted from India, they were all white. But my brother wasn’t biologically related so I felt like an outsider. To be honest I still feel like that to this day.

I hated my skin color, oh how I hated being brown! I hated it so much that I would wear long-sleeve shirts and pants to just hide my skin. I did this up until my high school years. I also hated my name, I hated the fact I was from India. I would act like I wasn’t from another country. I literally hated EVERYTHING about myself. All I wanted was to fit in with my family and the town I lived in. But that was damaging, and I am still recovering from the pain I put myself through. I am saddened looking at it now, as an adult. That little girl definitely did not deserve that.

I was 12 when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety. Along with being adopted with trauma, it felt like too much. Though I had a family, I felt alone. All of this impacted my life into being either good or bad. There were no in-betweens. After being diagnosed with my mental illness, I began hating my birth mom even more than I already did. Back when I was 12, all I saw was how she had given me up. I felt like I hadn’t been good enough for her and she hadn’t loved me. And the realization that she may have given me a mental illness made me even angrier and more resentful toward her.

I began therapy sessions soon after and this resentment became a large part of it. Though it seemed pointless to talk about, I began to understand how traumatic it was for me. A child that needed unconditional love had been given up. Though my memories before being adopted are shaky, the emotions that the trauma left behind remained.

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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