SALEM: Tamil Nadu Commission for Protection of Child Rights (TNCPCR) member V Ramaraj has appealed to the public not to forward fake social media messages about child adoption.

Pointing out one such fake message asking the people to adopt a two-year-old girl and a two-month-old baby whose parents died of Covid-19, he said, "The particular message has a fake mobile number.” He also said that no one could easily adopt a child or children without the government's consent.

Ramaraj said people who were forwarding such messages did not do it purposely. “At the same time, they have forwarded the message with an intention to help the deprived children,” he said.

Ramaraj said people could adopt a child with government’s consent from another person who is willing to give his child for adoption. Otherwise, they could approach the government agencies and get adoption from the adoption centres. “People should register themselves with CARA and SARA before they adopt the baby or the child,” he added. Ramaraj said it would be a crime if people are involved in illegal adoption.

People who have doubts on child adoption could get details from the district child protection office in their concerned districts.

Danish television presenter and sports reporter Ulla Essendrop is the latest sensation on short-form video sharing application TikTok, given the hilarious and relatable content she puts out on the platform.

Born in Calcutta in 1976, Essendrop was adopted by a Danish family when she was three years old and moved to Denmark.

Starting her own television sports show Essendrop & Eliten in 2012, she has also worked as a sports reporter at TV2 – a government-owned television network based in Denmark.

From trying out filters to her popular dance challenges, the 43-year-old has over a lakh followers with more than a million likes on her profile.

.

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

From: Roelie Post

Date: Sun, 16 May 2021, 20:30

Subject: Vraag

To:

BREDA - During the interview, policewoman Ilse Boomaars suddenly can't keep her eyes off her mobile phone. The WhatsApp vibrates continuously. "Sorry, but I have to intervene now." An underage girl she knows as a victim of illegal prostitution no longer feels safe.

And gone is the enthusiastic specialist of the Aliens, Identity and Human Trafficking Department (Avim) in the Zeeland-West-Brabant region. There is not a second to lose after such a cry for help. Criminal pimps often listen in with their victims, the detective knows from experience. They have all the power over the vulnerable girls who have to work for them and can use merciless violence.

Ten minutes later Boomaars (38) steps back into the room with relief. ,, Arranged!", she says with a slightly triumphant sigh, "We will immediately get her back from the perpetrator. Our people are already on their way."

We have an investigation underway in our region in which two girls aged 14 and 15 are victims.

Ilse Boomaars

When Pune-based school teacher Jyothika Sawant* and her college professor husband Shirish*, both in their mid-30s, decided to adopt a daughter, their family was taken aback. This was because Jyothika and Shirish were already parents to a healthy son; also, age and health were on their side to give birth to a second child if they wanted to. But as Jyothika tells us, “I have always wanted to adopt, right from my college days, and when I met Shirish, one of the reasons why I decided to take our relationship ahead was because he shared my wish. We planned to have two children, and after our son was born, we decided to extend our family by bringing our daughter home.”

Jyothika and Shirish are among a growing tribe of parents and families, wherein couples with biological children are deciding to extend their families via adoption. They see adoption as “just another way of bringing a child in their lives”. Bengaluru-based mental health counsellor Gayatri Abraham admits, “In the last few years, many families are coming forward to adopt and hybrid families are growing. New family formations are generally on the rise, which is heartening.”

Adoption second child

‘Giving birth is not the only way of making a family’

“We always wanted to adopt as we feel, and propagate, that giving birth is not the only way of making a family,” says Gurgaon resident Shruti Haksar, who is a mother of two daughters, nine-year-old Zara and three-year-old Zoya. Shruti and her husband had adopted their younger daughter.

NEW DELHI: Civil society organisation Save the Children expressed its concern about the growing number of children who lost their parents to Covid-19 in the country. The growing number of pleas to adopt orphaned children circulating on social media which have left them vulnerable to trafficking and abuse, it pointed out.

While some children who lost their parents are taken in by relatives or guardians, others were left to fend for themselves, putting them at risk of child trafficking. Save the Children urged people not to share details about orphaned children online, and instead to contact 1098- helpline to protect children from falling prey to child traffickers.

In order to prevent illegal adoptions, hospitals have reportedly been told to take declarations from sick parents, to confirm who their children should go to in case of their deaths, the civil society organisation pointed out. The organisation has been receiving around 80 distress calls from children in Rajasthan alone where it runs a helpline with the state commission. The helplines provide psychosocial support and redirect cases of children who need protection to the concerned authorities.

“Children who lose their caregivers and left to fend for themselves are extremely vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, and we’re doing everything we can to protect them from falling victim to illegal adoption or trafficking,” said Sanjay Sharma, deputy programmes director, Save the Children.

.

International Social Service and Network

Joint Submission to UN Committee on the Rights of the

Child DGD 2014: Digital Media and Children’s Rights

Jean-Noël Raoult is originally from Mali and was adopted in Nord-Finistère. He discovers, as an adult, that his story is riddled with lies, causing harm to his adoptive family as well as his biological family.

Mirjam and Doriet Begemann were adopted as biological sisters, but that turned out to be wrong. They are happy with the government's apologies for abuses in adoption practice, but believe that not enough is still happening. "We're banging on the door of a government that won't answer."

The birth certificates of Mirjam and Doriet Begemann contain the same names: mother Rasami and father Slamet. When Mirjam (43) and Doriet (41) were adopted together from Indonesia in 1979, no one had any doubts that they were sisters. Yet the names were forged in at least one of the two statements.

As a young girl, Doriet already sensed that the story was wrong. 'When I was seven years old, my adoptive mother said that it was so nice for me to be adopted together with Mirjam. That way I would always have a biological sister. "She's not my sister," I said at the time. I was just sure of that. '

Official confirmation came only 34 years later, after the sisters had taken a DNA test. 'It took me a long time to get emotion ...

For the greater part of the 20th century Ireland was marked by a culture of shame that separated thousands of women from their children, many of whom were forcibly given up for adoption. The trauma inflicted by these separations was compounded by legal barriers that prevented adopted people from accessing information about themselves.

However, on Tuesday May 12, the Irish government published a draft bill that would give those adopted the right to access their birth information. This comes in the wake of decades of activism by adopted people and their supporters, and has the potential to significantly reform an adoption system historically marked by secrecy, shame and the trauma arising from institutionalisation.

In modern Ireland, institutions such as mother and baby homes and the Magdalene Laundries were tasked by the state to deal with “fallen” women who had transgressed ideals of Irish femininity, especially by becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Their children were either boarded out to foster parents, institutionalised, or adopted by families of the same faith, some as far away as America, and – as survivors, advocates and researchers have long maintained – often under questionable circumstances.

Many searches by birth parents and children have been thwarted (as poignantly captured in the Oscar-nominated film Philomena), and adopted people in Ireland have been denied information about themselves – if it still exists – that is readily available in other jurisdictions. Although there have been media investigations and the government commissioned a 2019 review into a small sample of illegal adoptions, and published its mother and baby homes investigation in March, there has never been a fully fledged investigation into adoption practices in Ireland.

The information we do have, including testimony from adopted people and their birth parents, calls into question the legality and morality of such practices. A recent RTÉ Prime Time investigation showed how familial relationships were deliberately and systematically severed, with children taken and given away – all to enforce a particular moral code.