Two public interest litigations (PIL) have been moved in the Bombay high court (HC) seeking protection and various reliefs to over 1,450 children orphaned after their parents succumbed to the Covid-19 infection and setting up of special Covid wards in Covid care centres with specially trained medical staff to attend to visually-impaired patients and special vaccination facilities for them

The first PIL filed by Gayatri Patwardhan, a social worker from Pune through advocates Asim Sarode and Ajinkya Udane has claimed that while the state has announced various reliefs and gave assurances of taking care of children orphaned due to Covid, there was no guarantee of the authorities keeping their word, hence the PIL sought various directions for the benefit of such children.

The petition has sought to increase the grant of ?1,100 per month for children up to the age of 18 years under the Child Care Scheme and Foster Care Policy to ?5,000 per month. The petition also seeks free education for orphaned children and to start and implement Education Sponsorship Programme (ESP) under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection) Act and the Integrated Child Protection Scheme (ICPS) guidelines.

The PIL also seeks directions to authorities to properly identify and prepare documents pertaining to caste certificate, birth certificate, property documents and identification records of orphaned children.

The second PIL filed by Swagat Thorat, editor of a Braille Magazine, has raised concerns over the lack of healthcare facilities for visually impaired people and seeks reliefs including special Covid-19 wards, ‘barrier-free’ hospitals with specially trained medical staff to attend them and special vaccination facilities for them. The PIL also seeks direction to the state Disability Commissioner to provide data of visually impaired people who succumbed to Covid-19 infection, so that their families can be compensated through various government schemes.

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Highlights

Holistic Review of Alternative Care Provision in an area of Thailand with a high number of migrant children: The border District of Sangklaburi, Kanchanaburi province by Mahidol University Professors and One Sky Foundation. The review was conducted in different form of Institution cares: Private Residential Care, (Charity) Boarding Schools, and temple as well as (informal) Kinship Care. Finding and recommendations were presented to the Provincial Social Development and Human Security Office and Department of Children and Youth to further develop an Alternative Care road map and plan of action.

Author(s)

Department of Children and Youth, One Sky Foundation, UNICEF Thailand, Kanchanaburi Office of Social Development and Human Security

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"I always thought my parents abandoned me," says Meilan Stuy, who was born in China's Henan Province but raised by adoptive parents half a world away in the US state of Utah. She says her US parents showered her with love, but the older she got, the more she wanted to know where she really came from. As the story of her background emerged, so too did the cruel circumstances that led many Chinese couples to give up their children.

International adoption is widespread in the US, with China the most common country of origin of the children involved. More than 80,000 adoptees in the US were born in China, where the regulations governing adoption used to be comparatively lax.

"I decided to adopt a child from China because I learned about the terrible situation of an orphanage in Shanghai through a documentary. I simply wanted to provide a home for a child that I thought needed one," says Meilan's adoptive father, Brian Stuy.

Brian and his wife Longlan, who is Chinese by birth, have three adopted daughters from an orphanage in China. The daughters have often inquired about their biological parents, but all the couple knew was what the orphanage had told them: that the girls had been abandoned.

Elusive truth

An environment in which family members support one another and express their feelings can reduce the effects of social deprivation on cognitive ability and development among adopted children, suggests a small study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health.

In contrast, rule-driven households where family members are in conflict may increase an adopted child's chances for cognitive, behavioural and emotional difficulties. The study was conducted by Margaret F Keil, PhD, and colleagues in the Section on Endocrinology and Genetics at NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). It appears in Pediatric Research.

Researchers enrolled children who had spent at least eight months in Eastern European orphanages before their adoption by American families. The children ranged from 14 to 40 months of age and were evaluated with physical, psychological and developmental tests twice during the following two years. Families also responded to questionnaires on the children's development and on various aspects of their home lives. The study included 10 adopted children and 19 similar children born to American families.

Overall, the adopted children had significant deficits in growth, cognitive ability and development in comparison to the American-born children. However, differences were smaller among children from families scoring higher in cohesion, where family members provided help and support for each other, and expressiveness- families whose members are encouraged to express their feelings. Children had greater deficits if their families scored higher in conflict- an open expression of anger and aggression- and in control-- a family life run according to set rules and procedures.

The authors concluded that family cohesion and expressiveness could moderate the effects of pre-adoption adversity, while family conflict and adherence to rules could increase the risk for behavioural problems. The authors added that larger studies are needed to verify their findings.

This article is the first in a series about Koreans adopted abroad. Apparently, many Koreans never expected that the children it had sent away via adoption would return as adults with questions demanding to be answered. However, thousands of adoptees visit Korea each year. Once they rediscover this country, it becomes a turning point in their lives. We should embrace the dialogue with adoptees to discover the path to recovering our collective humanity. ? ED.

By Lee Kyung-eun

If you are from South Korea and have had the opportunity to live and work in either the U.S. or in a Western European country, you may have come across a situation where someone says to you, "Oh, I have a friend whose brother/sister was adopted from Korea", or alternatively, "Do you know that our boss/friend has adopted a child from Korea?" Or you may have approached a person whom you thought was a native Korean, but after starting a conversation, discovered that this person has a very western family name and has said to you, "Oh, I am adopted.

In English-language literature, there are many books written on the subject of adoption, encompassing such diverse topics as: individual memoirs by adoptees or adoptive parents, investigative reports on unlawful and unethical adoption practices, birth family search stories, and so on. Many of the authors of such books are of Korean ethnicity.

In Western countries, there are many stories that connect Korea to the narrative of transnational adoption. Why? Because Korea is the country that has sent the largest number of children out of the country for adoption. The length of the period in which Korea has been involved in transnational adoption is more than 68 years and the total number of adoptees is estimated to be over 200,000. It is a singular record in the world history of adoption.

Luca Trapanese is a single gay man living in conservative southern Italy. Not the most ideal circumstances to adopt a child. Yet he has been the father of Alba, a girl who has Down syndrome, for almost four years. A video of the two together recently went viral.

“When I first saw Alba, I knew she was my daughter and I was her father.” After more than three years, Luca (44) can still be moved by it. “I knew we belonged together.”

ALBA

Alba was just thirty days old when Luca first held her in her arms. She was left in the hospital by her mother. Alba's birth mother didn't think she could handle caring for a child with a disability. She chose to give up the girl. “A brave choice that is regulated by law,” says Luca on the phone. “I have nothing to say about that. She has the right to choose. Most importantly, she left Alba in a protected environment.”

Luca is a lot less positive about the sixteen families that did not want to adopt Alba. “There is still too much fear of children with disabilities. It's a taboo.” The fact that the Italian government often leaves parents of disabled children to their own devices does not help either.

Colombia has opened its doors to adoption by Maltese same-sex couples, giving them a second option to adopt internationally.

The civil unions law gives local same-sex couples the same rights as in marriage, including the right to adopt, with the first such adoption taking place in 2016.

Until now, same-sex couples could only adopt children from Portugal.

Meanwhile, Ghana has joined the list of countries open to Malta for adoptions by newly-weds, since it will not require prospective parents to be married for any length of time before adopting.

Prior to the addition of these two countries to the list, the Maltese were able to adopt from six countries: Portugal, Slovakia, Bulgaria, India, Vietnam and the Philippines.

In commemoration of the 2021 World Children’s Day (WCD), the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), has urged governments at all levels, to adopt and enforce the rights of the child in all the 36 states of the federation.

Executive Secretary of the Commission, Tony Ojukwu who made the call in Abuja while marking this year’s WCD, noted that children deserve special attention and protection in order for them to fruitfully pass through the various stages of survival and development.

He said, “ it has become imperative for states who are yet to adopt the Child’s Rights Law to do so to avoid further violations of the rights of these vulnerable children”.

The Chief Human Rights Officer in Nigeria observed that “ the issue of out-of-school children, child labour, poor antenatal and postnatal care, child wandering, child abandonment, child denial of necessaries, Almajiri children syndrome, kidnapping, malnutrition, etc. still rear their ugly heads and therefore pose a serious challenge to the proper development of the child especially in states where the Child’s rights law is not in place”.

According to him, “ the impact of COVID-19 pandemic brought to the fore the level of vulnerability of children in most parts of the world including Nigeria where a lot of children could not continue with their education as a result of poverty and deprivation because their parents or guardians could not afford an online system of education”.

Unmarked graves containing the remains of 215 Indigenous children have been discovered on the grounds of a former residential school in the interior of southern British Columbia.

The grim discovery at the former school near the town of Kamloops was announced late on Thursday by the Tk’emlups te Secwépemc people after the site was examined by a team using ground-penetrating radar.

“We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify. To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” said Rosanne Casimir, chief of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, in a statement.

Canada confronts its dark history of abuse in residential schools

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