Adoption tourism to Sri Lanka

In the early 1980s, I was adopted from an orphanage in Sri Lanka. No adoption organization was involved in the mediation of the adoption. I was adopted privately or informally by my Swedish adoptive parents.

My adoptive mother's brother worked in the tourism industry in Sri Lanka and mediated the contact between my adoptive parents and a local couple who handled adoptions abroad. The couple found children for tourists who wanted to adopt and assisted with the legalization of the adoption. They facilitated the adoption process and realized the family formation projects of thousands of charter tourists.

That Swedish charter tourists in particular adopted informally during this time has been discussed and reported in several contexts in both Sweden and Sri Lanka. A Swedish social worker who has reasoned about a reason why Swedes adopted informally believes that the waiting times for adoption were long in Sweden. In the late 1970s, for example, an adoption organization had waiting times of 3-4 years. From this, the social worker believes that it became understandable that those who wanted to become adoptive parents chose informal paths to form their family.

The first so-called long-haul flights from Sweden went to Sri Lanka and Gambia as early as 1971. The countries were marketed as relatively cheap destinations far away in relation to Sweden. The marketing was aimed at Swedes who were at a normal income level with capital to spend and time to spare for a trip.

The tour operators 'travel catalogs offer an opportunity to get closer to a motive for many Swedish charter tourists adopting children during their holiday stay in Sri Lanka and an understanding of the Swedish tourists' expectations of the country. One theme that went through the marketing was that Sri Lanka was presented as different in comparison with Sweden.

Among other things, poverty was transformed into a tourist attraction with an embedded benefit aspect and built up expectations of what could be seen during the holiday stay.

In an information brochure from a tour operator, it can almost be seen that the orphanages were transformed into a tourist attraction when potential charter tourists were invited to bring small gifts and clothes to donate to an orphanage in the tourist resort.

On the whole, I believe that marketing played an important role in the kind of stories that were created before and during the holiday, as well as the stories that were retold in the tourists' home countries.

Since 1969 , the percentage of visitors who stated pleasure as a reason for their trip to Sri Lanka has always been over 75% and frequently around 90%. Hundreds of thousands of tourists have stayed in Sri Lanka during a period that included armed conflicts between the government and the locals. It raises questions about what pleasure may have meant from different people's perspectives. The interesting thing about so many tourists staying in Sri Lanka during the 1980s, for example, is that Swedish and Danish tourists, for example, made themselves known for their willingness to adopt children. Whether it can be considered a pleasure or not to adopt children, it tends to reflect the power of these charter tourists' activities in the country.

According to anthropologist Malcolm Crick, who was in Sri Lanka in the early 1980s, there was an illegal sale of children to tourists from which lawyers were said to make big money. Sri Lanka had a reputation as one of the world's centers for child trafficking.

Furthermore, the social scientist Asun Garcia believes that tourists, as soon as they had arrived in Sri Lanka, received offers from the locals to adopt. But due to the fact that the supply of adoptable children did not meet the demand, Garcia believes that so-called 'baby farms' had emerged, ie. an industrial-like mass production of children that was so widespread that a coded language had been developed with special sayings indicating that a child had been born who could go for adoption abroad. Those who pointed out the massive production of children were met with negative answers and references to the fact that in developing countries it was a tradition to have too many children.

Given that even tourists who did not want to adopt were asked, Garcia believes that these tourists may have retold this story in their home country to people who for various reasons did not want to adopt formally but rather went to the country personally to adopt informally.

The tourism project in Sri Lanka was founded in 1966 by the then Prime Minister. It could be developed relatively freely, partly because there were no powerful groups in opposition to tourism but above all because the design of the tourism project took place in close collaboration with foreign experts whose main function seems to have been to foster tourism development, not to raise questions about such development was favorable to the country itself.

Tourism to Sri Lanka was presented as an easy opportunity for economic development as it was founded in natural resources such as sand, sun and friendly locals. The locals were urged to greet the tourists with a smile, not by outstretched arms begging for money. In 1967, a characteristic theme for the reception of foreign travelers was launched , 'Tourism - Passport to Peace'. This theme demonstrates, among other things, the expectations that bridges would be created between foreign tourists and the local population, which could possibly contribute to forgetting historical contradictions and reducing the risk of conflicts.

There is a tendency in the dominant research and literature on adoption to establish in 1960 as a starting point for Swedes' discovery of the world. Adoption researcher and adoptive parent Madeleine Kats has, for example, claimed that Swedes began to travel in the 1960s and in the adoption researcher and adoptive parent Barbara Yngvesson's anthropological study, a representative of the adoption organization Adoptionscentrum says that Swedes have been a homogeneous population without a colonial past and let the notion of adoptions from other countries emerge.

Both Katz and the representative of the adoption organization probably associate travel in terms of going on holiday, but by focusing only on contemporary travel, the role of missionaries in traveling orphanages outside Sweden during the Western colonial era is excluded. The Church of Sweden's largest mission field was located in southern India and in Sri Lanka during the decades around the year 1900.

In addition, Nils Matson Kiöping can be seen as a historical Swedish tourist who has visited Sri Lanka. Matson Kiöping was one of the tens of thousands of Swedes who from the middle of the 17th century until the end of the 18th century took employment in the Dutch East India Company. Then there are examples of the first Swedish slave trade expedition to Africa departing as early as 1646.

In this context, the adoption literature's delimitation of tourism and Swedish tourists' historical travels appear problematic, especially when the information about the displacement of Sweden's colonial past is used as a pretext to represent adoption as a legitimate family formation method for other and potential adoptive parents.

Traveling in different forms and at different times has been a prerequisite for the implementation of the adoptions from Sri Lanka to other countries. A contemporary example of how missionaries' raising of orphanages has played a major role in the emergence of transnational adoption practices can be seen in the author Birger Thuresson'sdepiction of a Swedish missionary who married a Sinhalese pastor and their start-up of an orphanage in Sri Lanka in the years around 1970. The stated purpose of the start-up of the orphanage was not to adopt children to other countries. Still, it was so initially. One reason why the first adoption was carried out in Sweden was because a Swedish couple had read about the orphanage in the Swedish media. However, the adoption activity was soon terminated in connection with it becoming associated with a business activity.

Many of the children who were adopted from Sri Lanka to Sweden were mediated through the adoption organization Friends of Sri Lanka Children (SLBV). Mainly due to the collaboration with the Sri Lankan businessman who ran an orphanage as well as a hotel and transport service for prospective foreign adoptive parents. This adoption organization's handling of its responsible task of mediating children came into question over the years, both in Sweden and in Sri Lanka as this adoption activity was characterized by market rational elements and adoption procedures that were later criminalized in Sri Lanka.

The travel reports written by Swedish government officials during the series of trips made to Sri Lanka to address the informal adoptions play a major role in Sri Lanka's adoption practices, especially with regard to how government officials reflected on the upbringing environment in orphanages and described local conditions. in Sri Lanka. During several of the trips, they met the Sri Lankan businessman who collaborated with SLBV.

Government officials reported that SLBV's partners showed great pathos and interest in adoption issues, including the single mother's situation. He was said to understand European thinking, which had made a strong and sympathetic impression on the Swedish families with whom he had come into contact. SLBV's partner considered that it was impossible for an unmarried woman in Sri Lanka to keep her child and that it often took too long for her to get help from social authorities.

Among other things, the civil servants reconciled with a Sri Lankan government official who became the partner of the adoption organization Adoptionscentrum. After this reconciliation, it was stated, among other things, that the alternative for the woman was that she could leave her child to a so-called reception home for adoption or in the worst case to an orphanage, where the standard could be such that the child's health was endangered and he died.

Unlike most of the civil servants' representations of orphanages, the orphanage from which SLBV picked children was presented as perfect by Swedish standards. Government officials perceived the situation as SLBV's partner was the subject of much jealousy and rumors, and on the whole believed that the need for adoptions abroad was indisputable.

One reason why SLBV's orphanages stood out in relation to other orphanages was that it was financed by prospective adoptive parents who stood in line to adopt children from the home. When it was later discovered that SLBV's partner mediated children in addition to the collaboration with SLBV, the man explained that it was difficult to deny families who had traveled to Sri Lanka, some who were also SLBV families and supported his own development projects in the country.

According to government officials, the large sums the adoptive parents had to pay were remarkable. But based on the civil servants' travel reports, it can be read that already in the late 1970s they knew that SLBV's partner had a reputation for being too efficient when he took children directly from hospitals and offered to Swedish citizens and that over the years he acted for that only the Swedish adoption organization would be given opportunities to mediate children from Sri Lanka.

In 1992, an amendment was made to the Adoption Act in Sri Lanka which limited the possibilities of carrying out transnational adoptions. This contributed to a significant reduction in foreign adoptions. In 1995, the year when informal adoptions were criminalized in Sri Lanka, twenty children were adopted to Sweden. After that, about two children a year came up to and including the year 2010.

Since Sri Lanka already in 1966 opened up the country to foreign tourists, it is conceivable that prospective adoptive parents, not only from Sweden, were a very welcome category of tourists. The implementation of an adoption seems to have required at least a stay in the country of five weeks, provided that all the documents were in order.

During their stay, they stayed in hotels, hired lawyers to legalize the adoption documents, spent money in the country and created relationships with the locals, which aptly fell within the scope of the tourism project's goals; the introduction of foreign capital and the peacekeeping aspect that seems to have arisen when individuals from the local population brought tourists together with children.

Furthermore, it can also be seen that the child who was adopted represented a promise that the adoptive parents and the adoptee would one day in the future make return journeys through the bonds created to Sri Lanka. Although the intensive adoption activity was relatively short, almost 13,000 foreign adoptions were registered between the years 1970-1995 and Sweden became one of the world's largest recipient countries.

Souvenirs from paradise. Between the 1940s and 1960s, Sri Lankan society was governed by a social-rational form of government or a welfare model. The tourism project, which was founded in the mid-1960s, can be seen as an ongoing transition from the welfare model to a governance of society where market rationalities play a greater role. Anthropologist Jonathan Inda calls this governance a post-social governance. The goal is for individuals to realize themselves as free and autonomous citizens. They are asked to take calculating and well-thought-out dispositions against risks and not to rely on welfare-related rights.

When local people brought tourists together with children, it can be seen that they took on a role as entrepreneurs, who in parallel with the state, took part in the responsibility of handling adoption matters while fulfilling the peacekeeping aspect of the tourism project. Instead of stretching out their arms asking for money, the fun-loving tourists, for example from Sweden and Denmark, provided with children who enabled the realization of their family education project.

As for the Swedish charter tourists who, on the one hand, traveled to Sri Lanka to adopt informally, they can be said to have carried out entrepreneurial action. This action was included in a calculating and well-thought-out disposition for the future in that it did not rely on the state or the adoption organizations authorized by the Swedish authorities to constitute ways to establish itself as an adoptive family.

The Swedish tourists who, on the other hand, formally adopted through the adoption organizations realized themselves as self-regulating and ethical citizens within the framework of a policy on life that related the act of adoption to cultural ideas that named living conditions as citizens in Sweden better than in Sri Lanka.

A common denominator to the fact that many Swedes adopted during their holiday stay had to do with the fact that they found it advisable to carry out an adoption and / or reunite other tourists with Sri Lankan children.

On September 20, 2017, the documentary Zembla: Adoption Fraud was broadcast on television in the Netherlands. It addressed the consequences of the intense transnational adoption activity in Sri Lanka. The documentary drew particular attention to the children who were stolen from their biological parents and families and the children whose parents were persuaded to leave their child for adoption who were then sold by a 'child finder' to foreign adoptive parents using forged documents.

It could be about women who pretended to be the child's mother before authorities and in courts but who were in fact 'child finders' as well as hospital staff who falsely informed the biological parents that their children were stillborn and then received financial commission on the children.

Sri Lankan Health Minister Rajitha Senaratne has stated that nearly 11,000 foreign adoptions may have been carried out using false and manipulated documents. If this is true, it affects the majority of all transnational adoptions carried out in the years 1970-1995. The Minister of Health takes what has happened very seriously and has stated that he will take responsibility for investigating the adoptions from Sri Lanka to other countries.

What has emerged about how the transnational adoptions took place in Sri Lanka is similar to what has happened and unfortunately still happens in a very large number of other countries from which Swedes have adopted. Not only the adoptees are affected in this context but also their biological parents and their adoptive parents as well as the adoptees 'own children who in the future will "inherit" their parents' fictional and fabricated adoption stories.

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