Suspend intercountry adoption, but choose one mediator quickly

The government has failed to combat adoption abuses, but the same government can also organize safe adoption, argues René Hoksbergen.

After the publication of the report of the Joustra committee, there was immediately a lot of attention in the media and also in the Volkskrant for international adoption. It was to be expected that adoptive parents and some adoptees would resist an adoption stop.

The committee's recommendations: acknowledge that the government has failed to combat adoption abuses and suspend all adoptions for the time being, are after all painful for those involved. Serious abuses in intercountry adoption had been known for decades . Only the lawsuits of a few adult adoptees forced the government to set up the Joustra commission of inquiry.

Of course, immediate reactions followed that an adoption stop would be at the expense of foreign children . After all, they are now living well with their adoptive parents. Parents who indeed often devote themselves with love and attention to these children in need. And that's how intercountry adoption started around 1970, with idealism and the involvement of possible adoptive parents. They themselves often already had children. The taboo on adoption had virtually disappeared in the meantime. By the way, the world became more and more open due to the increasing air traffic and the rise of television . Poverty and misery entered the living room almost every day through the CRT . The need for aid to the Third World was widely accepted.

Abuses

Several organizations successfully approached children's homes in the Third World. Soon the foreign adopted children poured in. More than 1,000 annually between 1975 and 1980 . Four organizations, led by the director of the Child Care and Protection Department, decided to work together to prevent abuse. The Bureau Interlandelijke Adoptie, later called Wereldkinderen, was established in 1975. The idea of ??one large professional adoption organization, however, failed almost immediately, with the government only watching.

People who wanted to have a child could go abroad themselves to arrange this as a 'self-doer' . Sometimes they also did this for others and twelve new adoption organizations were added. Intercountry adoption became increasingly popular for unwanted childless couples . Waiting lists of six thousand or more adoptive parents encouraged nearly 1,600 foreign children to have Dutch adoptive parents in 1980.

After that, however, this quickly decreased. Reports were made of all kinds of abuses. Information about the adopted children was often incorrect, financial abuse in countries of origin, baby farming and child theft . Reliability of intermediaries in countries of origin was a problem for Dutch intermediaries. Adoptive parents also faced serious parenting problems.

However, there was no question of the necessary guidance immediately after the arrival of one, two, even three or four children in the family at the same time. There was hardly any attention for possible problems of growing adopted children about their identity, why they were adopted and a possible interest in their origins. For the government, however, intercountry adoption remained a private matter. The Joustra Committee also rightly points out the major risks involved in allowing surrogacy. After all, this is at the expense of the children.

The time is right for a temporary adoption stop, but caution remains in order to assess the need for this. More than 40,000 intercountry adoptions took place in the Netherlands. The vast majority of their adoptive parents are fully committed to the future of these children. Most adopted children are positive about their life in the Netherlands.

Recommendations

At the same time, we know that we were naive and that more is required for the happiness of these children . Intercountry adoption cannot be a private affair organized by a number of stakeholder organizations, often mistakenly with too great a reliance on foreign intermediaries.

Let's choose:

- one mediator in the Netherlands who is directly accountable to the relevant ministry;

- expert guidance of adoptive parents immediately after placement of the child;

- help adoptees in their search for the past;

- only work with organizations in countries of origin that try to find out and record all the background data of the children as much as possible .

There must be no obstacles of any kind that make access to this data difficult or impossible.

In any case, let the 'suspension' proposed by the committee only last until the necessary changes have been made. Just like the apology advised by the committee and almost immediately expressed by the minister to adoptees, this could have happened relatively quickly .

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