Adoption grief - Zembla - BNNVARA
The Zembla documentary 'Adoption Sadness' deals with the story of two failed adoptions from Haiti. In September of this year, the mediation permit of the Nijmegen adoption agency Flash with regard to Haiti was suspended for six months by the Ministry of Justice. Flash Foundation is one of the six recognized mediation agencies in the Netherlands. The suspension was triggered by three very serious complaints from adoptive parents about adoptions by Flash from Haiti. Zembla investigated the complaints and spoke to the parents.
One of the complaints on which the report is based is that of the Thijssen family. They adopted the Haitian brothers Juno and Wensal, who are said to be three and four years old, through Flash. "The moment we knew they were coming was the best time of the entire adoption," says Ineke Thijssen. Upon arrival in the Netherlands, the children turned out to be five and seven years old, they soon showed very serious behavioral problems and they wanted to return to Haiti. The Thijssen parents decided on a remarkable step: summary proceedings against the State to investigate the possibilities of whether the children could return to their biological parents.
Pre-Waiver
A team from Zembla traveled to Haiti to investigate this case and the working method of adoption agency Flash. On the spot it turns out that the children hardly ever lived in Flash's children's home. They lived at home for the last six months before the adoption. According to experts, this quickly leads to adhesion problems. The documents regarding the adoption also appear to be incomplete: the adoptive parents do not have a valid 'pre-waiver'.
Behavioral problems
The inspectorate concluded that the information provided about the children 'in several cases did not correspond to the reality as it developed in the Netherlands'. The differences were mainly in the age and history of the children. Children were found to be significantly older than the documents stated and showed behavioral problems that were nowhere to be found in their social reports.
Prostitution
The second complaint that is handled in Zembla is that of an anonymous adoptive mother. She adopted a child who, according to the social report, was "a happy child from the countryside." Once in the Netherlands, she began to exhibit seriously traumatized sexual behavior. According to Professor Schulpen, who examined the girl, she had been sexually assaulted. From her behavior it could be inferred that she herself, or her mother, must have worked in prostitution in Haiti.
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