As soon as adoptions make money, fraud lurks around the corner

The resignation of the UNICEF director in connection with adoptions from Guatemala will have led to difficult conversations, primarily with the children's rights organization, but also in all Flemish families with an adopted child. I can participate. What can we still assume to be true? Can we open up the wound or leave the initiative to the adopted person? Adoption involves so much good intention and so much unspoken, only suspected suffering that questioning it is a big taboo.

Congo, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, India, Guatemala ... Meanwhile, it is clear that there are no good and less good countries of origin. The same applies to the countries of destination, Belgium is certainly not alone. Where adoptions make money, fraud lurks around the corner.

Dolores is now telling her story in the Belgian press for the first time, suspicious as she is, because of what she experienced as a child. At the age of five she was abducted in her village in the Guatemalan mountains. A bit like the kidnapped Maddie McCann, but without worldwide attention. Her documents were forged and hoped, another child who could go to Belgium. Only after 25 years were her mother's prayers answered and the lost daughter was at the door. The mother, the daughter, the adoptive parents, are all signed for life.

CAUTION AND RESPECT

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With references to Rapport Overwater (FIOM) = adoption as child protection

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Adoption campaigners have hit out at the "hypocrisy and dishonesty" of the Government in refusing to launch an inquiry into forced and illegal adoption.

It comes as a number of prominent independent politicians introduced a motion in the Dáil calling for an immediate inquiry and for immediate redress to be offered to survivors of Mother and Baby Homes.

The current inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes is limited to adoption practices and procedures of agencies and individuals with a direct connection to a mother and baby home. For more than a decade now, campaigners have called for a full State inquiry into adoption practices across all agencies.

Paul Redmond of the Coalition of Mother and Baby Home Survivors (CMABS) said the increasing support for a full inquiry into is encouraging:

"This Dáil motion has exposed the hypocrisy and dishonesty at the heart of a Government who have decided on a 'deny till they die' policy towards an elderly and dying survivor community.

AHMEDABAD: In the case of a 39-year-old man who sought custody of his daughter from an orphanage in Nadiad, the orphanage on Thursday informed the Gujarat high court that the child had been given in adoption in January 2018.

The orphanage supplied a Nadiad sessions court’s order passed on January 2018 showing that the child was given in adoption to a Kolkata-based couple through Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA). Justice V P Patel questioned how a child, both of whose parents are alive, could be termed an orphan and be placed in the orphanage. To this, the court was told that the surrender of the child and her adoption took place in accordance with law.

The man had filed a habeas corpus petition in the HC for his 3-year-old daughter after the divorced mother surrendered the child in Matruchhaya Orphanage in Nadiad. While the man claimed that his estranged wife was avoiding him to evade the child custody issue, the woman and her father appeared before the court and told the court about harassment on part of the man, which led the mother to give up the child. Advocate Bhunesh Rupera, who appeared for the mother, submitted that the man was never interested in his daughter’s custody. At the time of divorce, he had retained the child’s custody, but returned the custody and signed an MoU stating that he would never claim custody in future. The lawyer submitted that the man was after his divorced wife and kept on pasting posters showing her as a missing person despite the fact that they separated through a mutual agreement. To get rid of him, the woman never furnished her address to courts. The mother refused to give her present address to the high court also claiming that it would result in harassment on part of her ex-husband. The 29-year-old woman and her father told the court that she started suffering from psychological problems because of the harassment. This led them to take a decision to put the child in an orphanage and give consent to give her in adoption. The HC has posted further hearing on June 25.

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Policemen from the Warri area command in Delta State have arrested three suspects over the alleged child trafficking of a two-and-half-year-old baby girl.

Those arrested included, the matron of Divine Orphanage Home, Rosemary Johnson and Madam Rose IIogbo in Ughelli. The third person was a lady, who allegedly bought the child for N850,000 from Johnson and Ilogbo.

The arrest followed a petition by the president of Nigerian Child Welfare Fund, Comrade Joshua Omorere. Acting on the petition, detectives swung into action and arrested the suspects. The police also uncovered a baby-making factory in Agbor during the arrest.

IIogbo claimed she sold the child to one lady who had gone through adoption process in Ughelli. She also confessed that the matron of Divine Home Orphanage gave her another child to sell for N850,000 but people that were interested were offering N800,000, stressing that the matron of Divine Orphanage insisted it must be N850,000.

Meanwhile, a 50-year-old woman, Idowu Ademola, who allegedly specialized in trafficking foreigners for domestic services across the country, has been arrested by operatives of the Inspector General Police Intelligence Response Team (IRT), in Ibadan, Oyo State.

Welfare Ministry’s allocated state budget funding of EUR 619 000 was used, among other things, to pay bonuses to officials for obvious everyday tasks even though initially it was implied that employees of the ministry and State Child Protection Inspectorate (SCPI) would perform some specific tasks to prevent child and family abuse, as State Audit (SA) comments results of the 2018 financial audit.

When developing the 2018 state budget, Welfare Ministry outlined as a priority the programme On Enhancement of capacity for social-type institutions and social programmes for child rights protection. Accordingly, the ministry allocated funding of EUR 619 000 for these activities as well as IT system adaptation to help «assist child adoption and improve foster family care services». According to SA, the aforementioned amount was planned to pay employees in the ministry and SCPI.

In its audit SA concluded that only 6.6% of the allocated funding was used to pay employees for additional work. Mostly the money was used to pay different bonuses to employees from 13 of the ministry’s structural offices, including the Minister’s Office, State Secretary’s Office, Finance Management, structure fund and personnel department for employees, in which most are not involved in adoption and foster family care policy formation and implementation.

On top of that, funding was not used to pay bonuses for additional work. Most of the time, bonuses were paid for personal contribution and quality of work, payment of bonuses, as well as wages, vacation pay and vacation benefits, SA notes. For example, at least seven ministry workers have received bonus pay for cooperation with Plecs movement, which has worked in the last two years to ensure children do not end up in orphanages. Bonus pay was paid for management of problems identified by Plecs movement, opinion coordination, organization of regular meetings, as well as ensuring communication with Plecs movement for submission of proposals.

Additionally, ministry employees were paid bonuses for personal contribution and work quality, because increased intensity of work forced reorganization of the inspection in Stikli orphanage, compile results and discuss everything with the Ombudsman’s Bureau. SA auditors stress that Welfare Ministry only reacted when mass media reported information regarding significant violations at Stikli orphanage.

Around 2.2% of the population of England and Wales is now mixed race and 3.3% are from black ethnic groups. During World War II, over 70 years ago, these figures were far lower. And so, unsurprisingly, life was difficult for the 2,000 or so mixed race babies who were born in World War II to black American GIs and white British women.

They grew up in predominately white localities and experienced significant racism. I have interviewed 45 of these children (now in their seventies), hailing from all over England. Their story of institutional racism rivals the horrors of the appalling story of the Windrush generation.

Of the 3 million US servicemen that passed through Britain in the period 1942-45, approximately 8% were African American. The GIs were part of a segregated army and they bought their segregation policies with them, designating towns near to American bases “black” or “white” and segregating pubs and dances along color lines, with dances held for black GIs one evening and whites the next.

Related: US adoption system discriminates against darker-skinned children

Inevitably, relationships formed between the black GIs and local women and some resulted in what the African American press referred to as “brown babies.” All these children were born illegitimate because the American white commanding officers refused black GIs permission to marry, the rationale being that back in the US, 30 of the then 48 states had anti-miscegenation laws.

When she was growing up in Downingtown, Leslie Bernand (name changed)wondered whether she might someday locate a blood relative in India, from where she was adopted as a baby.

BENGALURU: When she was growing up in Downingtown, Leslie Bernand (name changed) wondered whether she might someday locate a blood relative in India, from where she was adopted as a baby.

But she never expected that her journey towards finding would confront her to hundreds of ‘DNA search angels’ on social media who would work like ‘detectives’ to reunite her with her family which is supposedly in India.

“These are volunteers on Facebook who are helping people from many countries including the USA, The Netherlands, China, France etc to find their roots in India through genetic genealogy. Though I am yet to trace my family in India I have found many ‘angels’ who are helping me towards this,” Leslie explained.

Speaking to TNIE, the administrator of one such group ‘DNA India Adoptees’ Mirjam Bina said, “In our site on Facebook we are for and by Indian adoptees who are forever connected with India because of their DNA. Here we share our stories and then it is taken forward by the ‘angels’ who are part of this group and many such groups and work towards finding clues to hunt for

"Legal adoptions can also be illegal"

Minister Dekker (Legal Protection) has been investigating illegal adoptions for two weeks. It will be an incomplete study, Elvira Loibl notes today in her dissertation. According to her, "legal" adoptions are not investigated, while many abuses take place there.

"In the Netherlands, adoptions are considered illegal if prospective adoptive parents circumvent the official adoption procedure and include a foreign child in their family without the involvement of a Dutch adoption agency. To cover up their unlawful behavior, they report the birth of the child as if it were their own child, after which they smuggle it to the Netherlands.

Bypassing the official adoption procedure is forbidden as it is particularly susceptible to abuse: often those prospective adoptive parents engage an intermediary - a lawyer or an agent - who exerts financial or emotional pressure on biological parents to get their consent for adoption to gain.

Since 1 May, the Committee for Research on International Adoption has been investigating illegal adoptions of foreign children by Dutch people in the period 1967-1998 and the possible involvement of the government in this.

On International Day of Families, SOS Children’s Villages of India, a voluntary child care organisation, launched a campaign to bring to light the hardships faced by children without adequate parental care in India and evoke responses to ensure support for such children.

The NGO estimates that there are currently 2 crore children that do not receive adequate care because they have lost both or either of their parents or their families are unable to take care of them. “If not taken seriously with measures like strengthening the families, or providing abandoned children with a family-like environment in an alternate care home, this figure is estimated to rise to 2.4 crore by the year 2021,” the NGO said while launching the campaign.

“The need is urgent and requires responsible partnership from individuals and corporate besides continuous support from the government,” said Anuja Bansal, secretary general, SOS Children’s Villages of India.

Elaborating on the need to support such children, the NGO said that the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, in its preamble, recognises the family as the best environment for a child.

Ms. Bansal added that currently SOS India has 440 families under its umbrella that takes care of 26,000 children and it aims to build families for children so that they grow up with love, respect, dignity and security.