When did child abuse, long considered a private matter, became a public concern? The 1874 case of ten-year-old Mary Ellen Wilson of New York City is usually considered the first great challenge to a violent tradition.

“Despite the fact that for hundreds of years history records instances of cruelty to children by parents and other caretakers, few cases of child abuse were acted on in the courts before the nineteenth century,” explains scholar Lela B. Costin.

As Costin writes, many legends have arisen about Mary Ellen, including most prominently that, on the basis her being an “animal,” the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) stepped in to save her from her vicious foster parents.

Bergh and SPCA counsel Elbridge T. Gerry decided the child was entitled to protection under the laws against animal cruelty.

When no public or private entity would step in to help Mary Ellen, Etta Angell Wheeler (“variously termed a mission worker, a tenement visitor, and a social worker”) appealed to Henry Bergh of the SPCA. The story goes that she suggested that Mary Ellen should surely be thought of as “a little animal,” too. Bergh supposedly affirmed that “[t]he child is an animal. If there is no justice for it as a human being, it shall have least have the right of the cur” to not be abused. In this legend, Bergh and SPCA counsel Elbridge T. Gerry decided the child was entitled to protection under the laws against animal cruelty.

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From: JUST-C2-CHARTE@ec.europa.eu

Date: Fri 25. Nov 2022 at 22:19

Subject: Reply to Citizen's Letter - Ares(2022)8175473

To: info@againstchildtrafficking.org

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Illegal international adoptions

How adoptees demand enlightenment

In the 1970s and 1980s it was relatively easy for couples with an unfulfilled desire to have children to adopt a child from abroad. Today these children are grown. When they search for their biological parents, they often find out that their adoption was illegal and documents were forged.

ISTANBUL, TURKIYE - JANUARY 8: 3-year old Syrian girl, Rana is seen playing at a park with her foster family in Beylikduzu district of Istanbul, Turkiye on January 8, 2022. Parents of 2 boys, Doganer couple adopted 3-year- old Syrian girl Rana after deciding to become a foster family. Ali Atmaca / Anadolu Agency

Knowing the biological origin is important for identity formation. Not knowing anything about their birth family plunges some adoptees into deep crises. (picture alliance / AA / Ali Atmaca)

Franc Weerwind, the Minister for Legal Protection, must disclose more information about adoptions from Sri Lanka in the period between 1984 and 1994, the Council of State has decided. It concerns a file of Dilani Butink.

Dilani Butink was adopted from Sri Lanka in 1992 and still does not know who her biological parents are due to abuses. According to her, the Dutch government has done too little to prevent fraudulent adoptions.

Passages painted black

Butink had requested access to a file in which certain passages had been painted black via an appeal to the Government Information (Public Access) Act (Wob). Weerwind must now make these illegible passages public from the highest administrative court.

In addition to making it public, the minister must forward the woman's request to the National Archives, because there are also documents that fall under Butink's Wob request. These are documents referred to in the report of the Joustra Committee.

Bertha Holt’s The Seed from the East (1956), an account of herhusband Harry’s pivotal role in the history of international Ko-rean adoption, offers this vivid summary on the back cover: ‘‘Ko-rea . . . 1954 . . . Thousands of children suffered in crowded, un-derstaffed and poorly supplied orphanages—children, it seemed,that no one wanted. But God gave one couple a heart to love thesechildren. This most ordinary family—a lumberman with a heartcondition, a farming wife and six children—changed the worldwhen they adopted eight Korean-Amerasian children. The storyof the Harry Holt family testifies to God’s ability to use ordinarypeople to bring about extraordinary change. Intercountry adop-tion flourishes today, largely because God used the faith anddetermination of the Holts to adopt homeless children into fami-lies of their own.’’ This is, in fact, the story that is conventionallytold about the origins of Korean overseas adoption.? Not only anarrative of Christian charity and divine selection, it is also one ofthe ‘‘extraordinary’’ capabilities (even if God given) of ‘‘ordinary’’individuals. The key characters in this story are thousands of needychildren, a quintessential American frontier figure, and a ChristianGod. Bertha Holt, Harry’s ‘‘farming wife,’’ penned The Seed from theEast (1956) and also Bring My Sons from Afar (1986),? both ofwhich borrow their titles from verses in the Book of Isaiah. Theseare the primary texts that compose the legendary story of Harry’sefforts to bring Korean children to families in the West.

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An estimated 29.6 million stranded, orphaned and abandoned children live in India, out of which just up to 4,000 get adopted annually.

While thousands of prospective parents are waiting to adopt in India, there is still a stigma associated with adoption that deters many from that route.

A social movement needs to develop to get adoption considered ahead of other alternatives, such as surrogacy or IVF.

There are many life stages that change the direction of our lives. Becoming a parent is one such turning point. Parenthood changes the way we live and the way we think. When our daughter came into our lives, via adoption at four months old, it changed all of our lives for the better.

When we decided to adopt, we registered with the Central Adoption Resource Authority-Nodal Agency for Adoption in India (CARA), which is a legal requirement. After two and a half years of waiting, we were matched with a baby girl and after completing the legal paperwork we welcomed her into our family.

The two men, now aged 45 and 46, were taken from their mother to be adopted in France, and only discovered the truth in 2019. By publicizing their case, they hope that other victims will be identified, and will not hesitate to assert their rights before international courts.

Javier and Lorenzo (their names have been changed) were 3 and 4 when they were taken from their mother in Guatemala. While she thought she was placing them in a center for malnourished minors, they were sent to France through a private organization approved by the State, Les Amis des enfants du monde (AEM), to be adopted by a Parisian couple. For thirty-eight years, they lived in the fable of abandonment. And only discovered the truth of their theft in January 2019. Their mother, torn all her life by the disappearance of her little boys, had just died two months earlier in Guatemala.

It is for what Javier describes as "trafficking in human beings" that the two men, now aged 45 and 46, filed a complaint, Thursday, November 17 in Paris, for "kidnapping". The complaint is based in part on documents found in Guatemala by Le Monde at the end of an investigation into the channels of international adoption, the various sections of which were published in December 2021. The two children, underlines the text of the complaint, entered France in 1981 "in violation of French immigration laws, a violation which could not be ignored by the organization Les Amis des enfants du monde and which was permitted by the serious negligence of the State authorities of the two States". Contacted by Le Monde,the AEM did not wish to speak.

“I am convinced that our complaint will move a lot of lines, says Javier. It is shown that the irregularities were also committed here, not only in Guatemala. My fight is for France not to normalize child abduction and allow full compensation for victims like my brother and me. »

Prescription pitfall

The association Rayon de soleil for foreign children, still approved by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in five countries, is of interest to French justice for its activities in Mali in the 1990s. Similar cases have been listed in Romania and the Central African Republic.

It is a first relief after years of despised combat. On September 6, the Paris court called for the opening of an investigation for concealment of fraud following a complaint filed in June 2020 by nine French people adopted in Mali against their adoption organization and their former correspondent in Bamako: Sunbeam of the foreign child (RDSEE) and Danielle Boudault.

All criticize this French organization, still approved by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in five countries (Bulgaria, Chile, China, South Korea and India), of having implemented "stratagems" to allow "the circumvention of the law with the aim of having them adopted in France, between 1989 and 1996, thus deceiving their parents, both biological and adoptive . To the first, this association would have promised a temporary stay in France for the children. To the latter, RDSEE would have assured that the little Malians had been abandoned by their families of origin.

For five years, Le Monde investigated this association, one of the most important French organizations responsible for the adoption of more than 7,000 children around the world. In Mali but also in the Central African Republic, Madagascar, Haiti, Peru and Romania, RDSEE is suspected of having had children adopted who should not have been, to satisfy international adoption requests. French couples.