MORE than three weeks have passed since the arrest of eight Croatian citizens, i.e. four married couples in Zambia, allegedly on suspicion of child trafficking. The indictment has not yet been filed, and the key circumstances of the case are still not known to the public.

Based on reports from the local and Zambian media and statements from Croatian institutions, we know that four married couples from Croatia came to Zambia to adopt children from the Congo and that the Zambian police arrested them in the town of Ndoli together with the children, who were handed over to a social welfare institution. .

According to a statement by the Police Chief of the Copperbelt Province, Peacewell Mweemba, a preliminary investigation indicates that the adoption documents issued by Congo "are not authentic", local media reported.

Zambian police said they received a tip-off on December 6 that three white men had booked rooms at a guest house in Ndola, after which immigration officials, with the help of police, tracked down the suspects, who were accompanied by children of Congolese origin between the ages of one and three. They were arrested a day later at Simon Mwansa Kapwepwe International Airport.

The local police announced their identity, which caused great public interest and calls from various right-wing politicians and portals, from the Vice President of the Zagreb City Assembly from the Homeland Movement Igor Peternel to the Narod.hr portal Željka Marki?.

Orphanage information

Over the years, FFIA has collaborated with around twenty orphanages and a few hospitals with specially established departments for abandoned children. Some collaborations have been very long-lasting, such as with Asha Sadan in Mumbai, ISRC in Kolkata and SOFOSH in Pune. We have collaborated with both private and state orphanages. In the latter part of the 1980s, licensing requirements were introduced for Indian organizations to work with international adoptions. Many state and even private orphanages could not pass the complicated procedure required to obtain a license. In many cases, therefore, children were transferred to the licensed orphanages in order for the adoption to take place.

When the Indian central authority CARA changed the rules in 2012, it was no longer possible to have a direct collaboration between us and the Indian organizations. According to the new rules, it is CARA that decides from which orphanage a family seeking adoption will receive a child. Thus, our opportunities for in-depth knowledge of and good cooperation with the Indian orphanages were impaired.

City, Orphanage

Cooperation time

FFIA was the first Swedish organization that came to Romania after the fall of the wall and worked there during the years 1990 - 2001. Almost 200 children were adopted from the big, scary institutions in different parts of the country. Gabriela Coman, President of the Romanian Central Adoption Authority in Bucharest, gives here her history description and her advice to adoptees who want to search for their roots in the country.

At the beginning of the 90s, the law on international adoptions was very lax and allowed a large number of Romanian children to be adopted without clear norms. Because of this, a new law was passed to establish a central authority in Romania to monitor and manage the cases where a native family for adoption was not found.

Despite these improvements, critical voices were raised as more measures were taken to improve the handling of international adoptions. Therefore, a new law was introduced in 2004, which allowed international adoptions of Romanian children only if the adoptive family was related to the child in the second line.

These measures were recently changed (2012) so that a Romanian child can be adopted internationally only if the adoptive parents are related within the fourth degree to the child, or if an adoptive parent is a Romanian citizen.

Adoptions today

Emmanuelle Hébert and Thomas Cadorin ask that children adopted abroad be accompanied in their search for their origin. They challenge politicians and want to raise awareness among adoptees and the general public.

One evening in May 2019, Thomas Cadorin discovered that he had been the victim of child trafficking, while watching a report by Special Envoy on France 2, "Children sold from Sri Lanka".

"One day, I was taken from my mother's arms, it's unimaginable," he says.

In December 2019, back from his country of origin, he told us, with great emotion, of his reunion with his biological family. “Today, at 38, I have made progress. I want to help the younger generations, who are coming. Finding your place in life is already very complicated; it's even more difficult, when you don't know where you come from”, says Thomas.

>> At 35, he...

IN 2000, professor of pediatrics Charles Nelson went on a trip that would change the course of his life—and the lives of dozens of others. As an expert in developmental neuroscience, Nelson was accompanying two colleagues on a visit to St. Catherine’s Orphanage in Bucharest, Romania, which was part of a network of state-run orphanages established by the former dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. A series of disastrous policy decisions by Ceaușescu had resulted in more than 170,000 Romanian children being abandoned to these institutions throughout the 1980s, where they were victims of severe neglect.

By the time Nelson arrived, Ceaușescu had been out of power for more than a decade, but the situation in the orphanages remained dire. One of Nelson’s colleagues who ran an international adoption clinic had noted that many children reared in such institutions developed neurodevelopmental problems, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, and a host of pathological behaviors; these observations matched Nelson’s own impressions on meeting young orphans in Bucharest. He and his colleagues wanted to know why institutional rearing so often led to disability and psychopathology.

His visit marked the beginning of the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP), a first-of-its-kind study on the long-term effects of psychosocial deprivation on children raised in institutions. When Nelson and his colleagues originally established the project, they enrolled 136 institutionalized Romanian children whose average age was 20 months and randomly assigned them to remain in the institution or be adopted by a foster family. They also enrolled 72 children who had never been in an institution as a control group. For the past 22 years, he and his colleagues have followed the lives of these Romanian orphans to understand how their early experience affected their subsequent neurocognitive development. The research, described in more than 100 papers and a book, traces the profoundly negative effects of psychosocial deprivation on both behavioral and brain development.

The project’s most recent research revealed that children who were removed from the institutions and raised in foster homes exhibited faster and more dramatic paring of brain matter in the prefrontal cortex from age 8 to age 16 than children who remained in the institutions.

Among children who grew up in these orphanages, “The regions of the brain where changes were most pronounced are regions that are involved in higher order social and cognitive abilities, which help explain increases in things like ADHD,” says professor of psychology Katie McLaughlin. “These findings show that far and away the best thing we can do to support healthy brain development, and development across other domains, is to ensure that children have access to stable caregiving.”

Background to the study In 2021, 

Yves Denéchère, professor of contemporary history at the University of Angers and director of the TEMOS research laboratory (CNRS UMR 9016), proposed to the Mission de l'adoption internationale (MAI) that a historical study be carried out on illicit practices in international adoption in France. On the basis of a scientific project that he had drawn up, the Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs (DFAE, Direction des Français à l'étranger et de l'administration consulaire - MAI) agreed to fund a 12-month post-doctoral mission (year 2022) and signed an agreement with the University of Angers and the TEMOS laboratory. Fabio Macedo, a PhD in history with a thesis on the history of adoption (EHESS, 2020), has been recruited by the University of Angers as a postdoctoral researcher to carry out this work under the supervision of Yves Denéchère. The agreement binding the parties, signed in December 2021, stipulated that the research work was to produce a "Historical study of illicit practices in international adoption in France". It was agreed that the scientific direction and orientations of the research would be the sole responsibility of the laboratory, that the Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs would not be involved in its drafting, which was strictly respected, and that the research report would be disseminated freely. This is why the document has been posted on the HAL SHS portal. After an introduction defining the purpose of the research and placing it in the current context, particularly European, this document is divided into four parts. A review of the academic literature analyses how, by whom and why illicit practices in international adoption have been studied (I). The bibliography lists the books and scientific articles published on the subject (II). The main part of the research report consists of an annotated guide to the sources - archives, audiovisual sources, the press - used to document illicit practices (III). Finally, t

The Afghan woman ran down the street towards her friend’s apartment as soon as she heard the news: the White House had publicly weighed in on her family’s case.

Surely her child, who she says was abducted by a U.S. Marine more than a year ago, would now be returned, she thought. She was so excited that it was only after she’d arrived that she realized she wasn’t wearing any shoes.

“We thought within one week she’d be back to us,” the woman told The Associated Press.

Yet two months after an AP report on the high-stakes legal fight over the child raised alarms at the highest levels of government, from the White House to the Taliban, the baby remains with U.S. Marine Corps Major Joshua Mast and his family. The Masts claim in court documents that they legally adopted the child and that the Afghan couple’s accusations are “outrageous” and “unmerited.”

“We are all concerned with the well being of this child who is at the heart of this matter,” said White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre after the AP detailed the child’s plight in October.

33 years of democracy have not completely changed social services in Romania. An example of incredible aggression against a minor confirms this. An employee of the General Directorate of Social Assistance and Child Protection in Bucharest revealed to Euronews Romania an abuse of a child with special needs from the Harap Alb Center in Bucharest.

A 16-year-old boy who suffers from autism was allegedly washed with the hose by the caretakers at the day care center. The aggression took place in the courtyard of the center in the summer of this year. The reason: he couldn't get to the toilet anymore and peed on himself. The Harap Alb Center in Sector 4 of the Capital is intended for children with disabilities. An employee of the Social Assistance Directorate revealed to us, under the protection of anonymity, the terrible event.

Anonymous source: "He was taken out into the courtyard of the center with other children and was hosed down by staff, and later the child was apparently placed on a hot surface because he had suffered burns on his soles, burns which were investigated by Institute of Forensic Medicine and we could see some burns of high intensity because the child, I understand, was not able to walk".

The boy ended up in a wheelchair due to burns on his soles

At the time the boy was examined, he was in a wheelchair due to burns on his legs. The doctors recommended 30 days of medical care. After the abuse occurred, the Department of Child Protection was notified. The City Hall of Sector 4 says that an internal investigation was launched, during which the two caregivers were no longer at the center.

Gauri Lama* and Rajesh Lama*, siblings from Rukum, were brought to Kathmandu sometime in 2018 by a relative, with a promise of better health care and education. They were sent to one of the child care homes in Bhaisepati, Lalitpur, along with five other children from various districts. The place fed leftovers to the children and forced them into labor.

All of them ran away from the orphanage two years later, and were reintegrated in their families through Future Generation Nepal (FGN), a non-profit organization working for the protection of children and their rights.

Krishna Thadera* from Humla came to Kathmandu in 2017. He was brought by someone from his village, who took money from the family after promising to send their child to a good school. He dropped Thadera off to an organization, who paid him off for bringing him in. Thadera was around 10 years old. During the Covid-19 lockdown, shelter was shut and, in 2020, Thadera, was found begging on the streets.

Ram BK* from Bajura was 14 when he came to Kathmandu with his uncle, a politician, who left him at an orphanage in 2018. His paperworks showed that his parents were dead. He was back on the streets during Covid-19, and rescued by Voice of Children (VOC), who later on found that his parents were alive, and his uncle had made a fake death certificate and received a commission from the organization for bringing in the child.

These are just a few representative cases among all the other cases they have encountered so far, says Bashu Phuyal, program coordinator, FGN. He says that this has been going on for a long time. Most of the children brought to Kathmandu belong to rural parts of Nepal, especially from Karnali province. They are brought through agents who take money from the family to find their children a good home in Kathmandu. “Most of these children either run away or suffer terribly in these institutions,” he adds.

I am from Romania. As I write this I am looking for my biological family. In the meantime I have found and met my sister Viorica. She and I have been in close contact for a few years now and I traveled to America, where she lives, to meet her. It felt like old times and very familiar. But because of this, my desire to find and possibly meet my parents has grown even more.

Experience story Sister found now my parents still.jpg

Together with her, I have already started with the information we have. We have names of our parents, of our sisters and brothers, but it's just not enough! I've never felt so desperate about it. Fortunately I have Viorica, I can really share everything with her, but at the same time it hurts that I just can't visit her quickly. I really want to know who my parents are, who I'm most like and if I recognize things in them in terms of character.

Sometimes I lie awake in bed for hours or I cry myself to sleep. Just because I want to know who those people are who brought me into the world and gave me up, the reason why. I'm not 100% sure yet. I've been told it's for money, that they couldn't give me what they might want to give. I often wonder: Why? I hope somewhere they want to meet me and my sister.

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