NEW DELHI: A parliamentary panel in a report on the review of guardianship and adoption laws has highlighed that with few children available in the adoption pool, average time taken for prospective adoptive parents (PAPs) registered with the Central Adoption Resources Authority (CARA) to get a referral for children in the age group of 0-4 years is approximately two years.

The report tabled in the just concluded monsoon session of Parliament on Monday noted with “grave concern” that as per the adoption statistics of CARA, the number of children adopted in the country declined from 5,693 in 2010 to 3,142 in 2020-21. Also the number of children taken in inter-country adoption showed a sharp fall from 628 in 2010 to 417 in 2020-21.

As per the information furnished by CARA, as on December 16, 2021, as many as 26,734 PAPs had registered with CARA and are waiting for referral for in-country adoption and 1,205 prospective adoptive parents were awaiting inter-country adoption. As per the information furnished to the department related parliamentary standing committee on personnel, public grievances, law and justice, by the ministry of women and child development, the average time taken for PAPs to get a referral for children in the age group of 0-4 years is approximately two years. Data provided by CARA, as on December 16, 2021, shows that a total of 6,996 orphaned/abandoned/surrendered children are residing in child care institutions linked with specialised adoption agencies, out of which 2,430 were declared legally free for adoption and 4,566 children were in process at different levels prior to being declared legally free for adoption by the child welfare committees.

The committee took note of the “paradoxical situation” where on one hand there are a large number of parents willing to adopt a child, on the other, there are not many children available for adoption.

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Lydia (39, occupational therapist in elderly care) and Jaco (39, training advisor in a hospital) have two children: Rebekah (10) and Sam (4). The children were both adopted when they were 2.5 and come from the same orphanage in Johannesburg.

something wrong

Lydia: 'After trying for a year and a half to get pregnant, we went to see the doctor. Maybe something is wrong, we thought. This turned out to be the case after research: we had a zero percent chance of a pregnancy. A hard message. The door was closed, but that quickly gave us room to think about other options. Like adoption.

this is me

Jaco had a colleague who was in an adoption process. Not long after our conversation with him, we also signed up. From that moment it took five years, with both children, before we could hold them in our arms.

A parliamentary standing committee has expressed serious concern over the decline in the number of children coming to adoption agencies over the years, saying it points to trafficking or a thriving illegal child adoption market.

The committee on personnel, public grievances, law and justice tabled its report on the review of guardianship and adoption laws in Parliament in the recently concluded Monsoon session.

The committee stressed the need to increase surveillance, especially on unregistered child care institutions and adoption agencies/hospitals with the past record of trafficking.

The committee also expresses serious concern about decline in the number of children coming to adoption agencies over the years. This decline, by and large, points to trafficking or a thriving illegal child adoption market, the report stated.

The committee stressed it is important to get a true picture of the number of children who are orphaned/abandoned through a district-level survey and the data needs to be updated on a regular basis.

Disabled children are being abused and neglected in institutions across Ukraine, UN experts have warned.

The human rights officials said the war had made their situation even worse and called on the Ukrainian government to right its "historic wrongs".

Their statement comes after a BBC News investigation uncovered widespread abuse in the country's orphanages.

There were more than 100,000 children and young people living in institutions before the war.

When Russia invaded in February, thousands of disabled people were removed from the institutions and sent back to their families.

Two sisters who were adopted as babies and lived thousands of miles apart have been reunited thanks to a home DNA test.

The popularity of at-home DNA testing has boomed in recent years, as anyone can purchase a simple kit for themselves or a loved one and uncover secrets hidden in their own DNA.

MyHeritage, a leading genealogy site, ran a pro bono initiative called DNA Quest in 2018, where it donated 15,000 tests to adoptees to support them in being reunited with their birth families through DNA testing. This resulted in hundreds of reunions, according to the company. Sisters Ashleigh Brown and Laurinda Collado are one of those.

Brown and Collado are now aged 33 and 35. Born in the Dominican Republic to the same biological parents, Collado was adopted when she was 5 months old and raised as an only child in Bristol, Connecticut. Two years later, her adoptive parents were given the choice to take in her sister Ashleigh but they chose not to. Instead, Brown was adopted at 6 weeks old and grew up in Barbados.

While each knew that they had biological siblings somewhere, they lived with the fear that they might never meet their biological family, with nothing but pictures of their biological parents in baby albums. It wasn't until the DNA Quest initiative was launched by MyHeritage that they were able to take steps to find each other.

The timeline of the case that took 28 years to bring justice to the victim was recently shared by Uttar Pradesh police.

Gang-raped at the age of 12, a woman’s remarkable journey to justice come to fruition recently. The timeline of the case that took 28 years to bring justice for the victim was recently shared by Uttar Pradesh police.

The young girl was raped by two individuals in 1994 at the age of 12. She had been living with her sister and brother-in-law in Shajahanpur when the accused barged into her home and gang-raped her.

The rape led to her becoming pregnant and she gave birth to a child at the age of 13. She was forced to part ways with her child in 1996 who was taken in by a couple in another district. The family migrated to Rampur.

The victim tried to restart her life and married another man. However, he divorced her after 10 years when he became aware of the gang-rape that she had been subjected to.

Governments across Europe must apologise for the adoption scandal that took place in the latter half of the 20th Century, and help victims trace their relatives and heritage, writes James P. Axiotis.

When I was just nine months old I was ripped away from my birth mother, just because she wasn't married.

So when I read that a report published by the Joint Committee on Human Rights has recommended that the government apologise to women like my birth mother, it resonated. It reignited in me the frustrations I have at the lack of remorse by governments that allowed this to happen.

Some 185,000 women in 1950s, 60s and 70s Britain were "shamed" and "coerced" into giving up their babies, a committee inquiry found. But that is only half the story. What few people know is that the same was happening across Europe at the same time including in my homeland, Greece.

Governments need to make a collective apology, and to acknowledge the harm they have caused to both mothers and children. They also need to remove barriers facing victims that prevent them from tracing their relatives, as well as do everything they can to help reconnect these lost generations to their roots. We are all victims in this scandal, and the emotional scars are ones that live with us throughout our lives.

Arrest of one of the most influential men in Spain, the communicator and consultant Nacho Jacob (his real name is Ignacio de Jacob y Gomez), 41, called "The Count of the Sweet Wells" (Conde de Pozos Dulzes) royalist and affirmed and assumed Catholic. He was caught red-handed in a room at the Nelva Hotel in Murcia, on July 19, 2022. Other sources inform that he was caught in the hotel parking lot. The police have already managed to identify 3 other victims and are looking for others whom the police presume are numerous.

He is a partner of the Vicente Ferrer Foundation and collaborator of “Nuevo Futuro” and “Terre des Hommes”, which promotes the development of the most disadvantaged children In an interview given in 2020 to the magazine Mujer Hoy, he answered the question of knowing if children are among the groups that concerned him the most. His answer: 'I remember that, as a young man, I started in San Cristóbal, with Father Ángel, helping excluded children, with significant social uprooting'.

He is the founder of Jacob Fitzgerald Events & Communication. More than 2000 prestigious events organized around the world from Paris to Miami via Los Angeles.

His career in the world of public relations and communication has earned him numerous distinctions, such as the Dove of Peace, which was awarded to him by the "Fundación Mensajeros de la Paz", jointly with the King Queen of Spain, the Pompidou Prize for Communication which he received in Paris from the hands of Leonardo Di Caprio or the “European Citizen Prize” granted by the Europa Forum.

The aforementioned police sources confirm that Nacho Jacob has already hired the criminal lawyer Raúl Pardo-Geijo, named Spain's best lawyer in criminal law in 2020 by the prestigious legal publishers Client Choice and Best Lawyers.

In the age of 'Instagram adoptions', sophisticated con artists are defrauding prospective parents of large sums of money by digitally posing as viable birth mothers. With the scope of this fraudulent industry only just emerging, Sarah Green speaks to victims of the burgeoning crime, and those who are fighting it in the dark.

Christmas Day 2021 should have been one of the happiest of Breanne Paquin’s life. After almost a decade of disheartening doctor visits and diagnoses, Paquin and her husband boarded a last-minute flight from Cleveland, Ohio to Houston, Texas for what they thought was their Christmas miracle.

The hopeful couple were expecting a baby boy, and they were flying almost 1,300 miles to meet him. Leading up to their trip, Paquin had been in near-constant communication with a pregnant woman named Ingrid Hernandez — their online relationship developed through daily good morning and good night texts, picture updates, video messages and FaceTime calls, along with an expectant promise that grew with each passing day.

Five months prior, Hernandez had promised the Paquins her unborn baby boy via social media. In the months that followed, they had spent dozens of hours and thousands of dollars perfecting every detail for his homecoming — from building and furnishing his nursery, to stocking frozen breastmilk and baby supplies.

The young couple never could have predicted the trauma that waited for them in Texas. Instead of spending their Christmas with Hernandez in a hospital delivery room, the Paquins found themselves in an emergency meeting with their lawyer on a deserted restaurant patio.

Body of North Dakota child was found in the woman's basement

A North Dakota woman has been sentenced to life in a federal prison for fatally abusing her 5-year-old foster child.

Tammy Longie, of Tokio, earlier pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, child abuse and neglect in the May 2020 death of Raven Thompson. His body was found the basement of Longie's home on the Spirit Lake Indian Reservation.

Longie was sentenced in federal court Monday in a case that U.S. Attorney Jennifer Klemetsrud Puhl called "tragic and horrifying."

The FBI and Bureau of Indian Affairs responded the Longies' home and found Raven dead and his 7-year-old brother in need of medical care due to abuse and neglect.