ICAFSS meets only the tip of the iceberg of needs in the intercountry adoption community. I can only speak for intercountry adoptees like myself but we have spoken up for years about the need for ongoing counselling. The budgeted 10 sessions of therapy a year is simply not enough for most adoptees. As an idea, personally I spent over $25k in ongoing therapy across 5-10 years for the traumas involved in my reliniquishment and adoption. The current budgeted amount of $900,000 per year, if all the budget was spent on counselling alone, only equates to $90 per adoptee given we have over 10,000 intercountry adoptees recorded in our AIHW statistics. That’s not including those who are here as expatriate adoptions or the private adoptions that were done prior to the statistics being captured which only began in 1979. Many of us Vietnamese adoptees arrived prior to this, approx 500 of us. So the hugest change I recommend would be a substantial uplift to the budget so that counselling can be unlimited and the service adequately resourced to administer it, and provide ongoing education and training to the community and professionals providing the service, and to best utilise the resources trained up in this area.

There needs to be more than 1 administrator of the service at head office. If training of those counsellors is to be done properly, the budget needs to also include accessing the experts from other countries to upskill our therapists and create an Adoption Competency Training which includes speciality components on Race, Culture, Return to Birthland, Searching/Reunion, as these are aspects not covered adequately from a local adoption perspective because our situations are so much more complex covering other countries, languages, races, customs, values, expectations.

The service needs to be provided so that there are more face to face points in major areas of Australia not just 1 – Melbourne. The current advertising of ICAFSS makes it falsely appear to be a Melbourne only service. I have had many adoptees who tell me they didn’t make contact because as soon as they saw the flyer, they thought they would not be serviced as they were not located in Melbourne.

The service needs to be provided by a broader range of therapist. Currently it appears there are 1-3 counsellors per state who are providers of the service. That is not enough as there is a wait list to speak to one. Also, there is not enough diversity represented in those counsellors – most are white females who, to many adult intercountry adoptees, feel they are sitting there facing their adoptive mother. We want to see people who understand our racial and cultural issues. We want people of colour, people of diversity (LGBQTi), we want more males for the male adoptees. We also want different modes of therapy not just talking cognitive therapy. Eg constellation, emdr, psychosomatic, gestalt, etc.

The advertising of the service needs to connect into the first ports of call of other major services eg. Lifeline, Suicide hotlines, mental health services, GPs, schools. Many adoptees share how they had no clue about there being a service so that means, so far, the service is hugely under utilised because people don’t know it exists. Unless they contact ICAV, adult intercountry adoptees don’t know. More needs to be done to become visible on Social media platforms and advertise to targeted groups eg adolescents, young adults.

ICAFSS meets only the tip of the iceberg of needs in the intercountry adoption community. I can only speak for intercountry adoptees like myself but we have spoken up for years about the need for ongoing counselling. The budgeted 10 sessions of therapy a year is simply not enough for most adoptees. As an idea, personally I spent over $25k in ongoing therapy across 5-10 years for the traumas involved in my reliniquishment and adoption. The current budgeted amount of $900,000 per year, if all the budget was spent on counselling alone, only equates to $90 per adoptee given we have over 10,000 intercountry adoptees recorded in our AIHW statistics. That’s not including those who are here as expatriate adoptions or the private adoptions that were done prior to the statistics being captured which only began in 1979. Many of us Vietnamese adoptees arrived prior to this, approx 500 of us. So the hugest change I recommend would be a substantial uplift to the budget so that counselling can be unlimited and the service adequately resourced to administer it, and provide ongoing education and training to the community and professionals providing the service, and to best utilise the resources trained up in this area.

There needs to be more than 1 administrator of the service at head office. If training of those counsellors is to be done properly, the budget needs to also include accessing the experts from other countries to upskill our therapists and create an Adoption Competency Training which includes speciality components on Race, Culture, Return to Birthland, Searching/Reunion, as these are aspects not covered adequately from a local adoption perspective because our situations are so much more complex covering other countries, languages, races, customs, values, expectations.

The service needs to be provided so that there are more face to face points in major areas of Australia not just 1 – Melbourne. The current advertising of ICAFSS makes it falsely appear to be a Melbourne only service. I have had many adoptees who tell me they didn’t make contact because as soon as they saw the flyer, they thought they would not be serviced as they were not located in Melbourne.

The service needs to be provided by a broader range of therapist. Currently it appears there are 1-3 counsellors per state who are providers of the service. That is not enough as there is a wait list to speak to one. Also, there is not enough diversity represented in those counsellors – most are white females who, to many adult intercountry adoptees, feel they are sitting there facing their adoptive mother. We want to see people who understand our racial and cultural issues. We want people of colour, people of diversity (LGBQTi), we want more males for the male adoptees. We also want different modes of therapy not just talking cognitive therapy. Eg constellation, emdr, psychosomatic, gestalt, etc.

The advertising of the service needs to connect into the first ports of call of other major services eg. Lifeline, Suicide hotlines, mental health services, GPs, schools. Many adoptees share how they had no clue about there being a service so that means, so far, the service is hugely under utilised because people don’t know it exists. Unless they contact ICAV, adult intercountry adoptees don’t know. More needs to be done to become visible on Social media platforms and advertise to targeted groups eg adolescents, young adults.

It said that in recent days, there have been a number of media reports giving the figures of disruption in adoption cases as 1100 during the last five years.

The Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) has termed media reports about figures of disruption in adoption cases during the last five years as incorrect. It said that in recent days, there have been a number of media reports giving the figures of disruption in adoption cases as 1100 during the last five years. In a clarification issued in New Delhi, the CARA said that the actual figures are 246 cases of disruption and 10 cases of dissolution over the period of the last five years.

The Central Adoption Resource Authority said that it appears the figure of 1100 has been misquoted from the RTI response given by it, which also included the figures of withdrawal from the adoption process. It further stated that disruption implies returning back of the children to the institution after being placed with a family and is not a happy situation as the children face rejection and are scarred for a long time. There have also been 10 cases of dissolutions during the last five years, where the parents returned the child after concluding the legal adoption process through adoption order by the court. The total number of disruption and dissolution reported have been less than 2% of the total adoptions under the JJ Act, 2015 and not approximately 6% as has been reported by the print media.

There is a difference between parents withdrawing from the adoption process after accepting the profile of a child referred for various reasons, and those who return the child after taking them in pre-adoption foster care, which is called disruption. While the former is about helping parents make an informed decision of adopting the child, the latter is completely detrimental to the best interest of the child which is the guiding principle for any organization working for children. In order to check this trend, CARA has formed a sub-committee of experts who have been travelling to different states to help them in building the capacity of social workers at the grass-root level.

CARA is an apex body of Government of India under the Ministry of Women and Child Development for promoting and facilitating in-country adoptions and is the designated Central Authority for regulating inter-country adoptions.

John Erik Aarsheim is contacted by many who doubt his adoption history. The organization Adopted demands a full investigation of adoptions carried out in the 80s from Colombia.

- I have received around 20 inquiries from people who feel that they are in the same situation, says John Erik Aarsheim.

Before Christmas, Aarsheim discovered that he was kidnapped in the 80s before he was adopted in Norway. This month he got to meet the biological family after 32 years.

- But with the knowledge I gained after being in Colombia now, I am not surprised by the number of inquiries. This is a huge problem there, and it should just be missing that there are no more cases like mine in Norway, says Aarsheim.

In 2019, Dagsavisen wrote about another boy who was kidnapped and adopted to Norway in the 80s.

YEREVAN/TBILISI, Jan 30 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A probe into the suspected sale of dozens of Armenian babies to foreign families has left hundreds of women wondering what became of their own lost children in the biggest illegal adoption scandal to hit the former Soviet republic.

Police say a criminal ring tricked mothers out of their newborns in what is the latest smear on a lucrative international adoption market, with growing calls for a total shutdown to end similar abuses.

While the scale of the problem is hard to estimate, child protection experts say high adoption fees of up to $100,000 fan a black market that affects children from India to Uganda.

Anti-slavery groups consider illegal adoptions, when a child is brought to another country in breach of regulations or as a result of wrongdoing, a form of child trafficking.

The scandal in the Caucasus surfaced in November, when authorities revealed that more than 30 children had been sent to Italy for adoption between 2016 and 2018 after their mothers were pressured into giving them up.

MT — . One of the accusations levelled at gender-critical feminists, even those with decades-long track records of leftwing activism and gay rights campaigning, is that we are somehow in league with the Religious Right.

Trans-rights activists like to portray themselves as the vanguard of liberal progress, and use this to justify their

rejection of any public debate or scrutiny of their insistence that the legal and everyday definition of ‘woman’ is

changed, which feminists argue makes it harder for women to protect their boundaries and rights.

What the trans-rights activists are less willing to do is cast a critical eye over their own bedfellows, be they Big Pharma,

GOOD MORNING. Now, walking out in style is an art in itself. Before we get to other news, we’ll take a look at a very different type of exit due February 1. Whether one of the EU’s top HR people publicly accusing her new bosses of being cold, distant and — more generally speaking — mean, sets a good example is questionable. But if you’re on your way out anyway, why not make a statement you’ll be remembered for.

Just one piece of advice, kids: Don’t try this at home. (If you do, get your Umlaute right.)

BOMBSHELL EMAIL: Irène Souka, who will retire at the end of the month as the Commission’s director general for human resources, left a stinky parting gift in the inbox of Björn Seibert, the president’s chief of Cabinet, in the form of an email with thousands of people in copy, seen by Playbook. The subject line: “It’s all about respect.”

Spreading the word: On Tuesday afternoon, Souka sent a farewell note to her department (and her high-level network, which includes other DGs) announcing her departure after what she described as a “protracted period of uncertainty” since the new Commission took office. In the email, Souka shared a note she said she had sent to Seibert the night before and “forwarded to the Commissioner” Johannes Hahn.

Left in the dark: In the email to “dear Bjoern,” Souka said she had offered to stay longer to “help the new Commission during the first year of its mandate,” but did not get the response she had hoped for and was left in the dark about how long she was needed, or wanted. “Today, just 4 days from my retirement date, I am still no closer … to knowing the final position of the political authorities in order to provide the staff of DG HR with some clarity about my situation,” she wrote.

Rennes: the battle of a Breton family to obtain French nationality for their adopted daughter

More than two years after her first application for French nationality, little Lola, is still not officially French. Adopted in 2013 by Laurence and Bertrand Thébault, residents of Laillé in Ille-et-Vilaine, the young Haitian woman no longer has a passport.

At the Lola center, surrounded by her brother Rémy and her parents Bertrand and Laurence Thébault. © Radio France - Valentin Belleville

 Rennes, France

It's a never-ending fight. Adopted in 2013 by Laurence and Bertrand Thébault, a family residing in Laillé in the south of Ille-et-Vilaine, Lola, a young Haitian woman struggles to gain French nationality.

Mismatch of expectations leads to traumatic parting with parents; Centre launches remedial plan.

Nine-year old Arun (name changed) was returned by three families between 2015 and 2019 after he spent varying periods — four months to nearly two years — with them as either their adopted son or soon-to-be adopted son. Now, the government’s apex adoption body has stopped any further attempts at placing him with a family so he can be counselled and healed of the trauma caused by multiple rejections.

The Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) has recorded 246 instances of disruption over a period of five years between 2014-15 and 2018-19, which translates into six in 400 children being returned at an advanced stage of adoption. On an average there are 4,000 legal adoptions annually within and from India, as per official data. With the number of such cases showing a recent increase, CARA has begun a nationwide capacity building programme for social workers who help assess the suitability of the adoptive family and prepare a child for a new home.

CARA’s CEO, Lt. Col. Deepak Kumar, says, “This is not a happy situation. Children returning to the institution after being placed with a family face rejection and are scarred for a long time. In order to check this trend we formed a sub-committee of experts last year who travelled to different States to help us build capacity among social workers. A media report cited that there were 1,100 disruptions over the last five years, which is incorrect, as the correct figure is 246. We need to understand the difference between parents withdrawing from the adoption process for various reasons after accepting the profile of a child, and those who return the child after taking them in pre-adoption foster care, which is called disruption. While the former is about helping parents take an informed decision on adoption, the latter is completely detrimental to the best interests of the child.”

He adds that there have also been 10 dissolutions since 2015 when CARA underwent a massive reform. In such cases, parents return the child after they have received the adoption order from a court, which can take a year, if not more.

President of the Adoption Authority: We will resume the steps for international adoptions because it gives children with disabilities or other ethnicities a chance. Families in Romania resort to adoption only if they cannot have biological children

ARTICLES • JANUARY 22, 2020 • EDITORIAL OFFICE • 1,664 VIEWS • 12 COMMENTS

We will resume the steps for international adoptions, because they offer a chance to a family of children with disabilities or other ethnicities in the protection system, in the context in which the Romanian families do not adopt such children, said the president of the National Authority for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Children and Adoptions (ANDPDCA), M?d?lina Turza, in an interview with Agerpres.

Turza said she is considering more measures regarding adoptions: simplifying the procedure for internal adoptions, evaluating case managers, because it is a problem with opening adoption files, and will launch an adoption promotion campaign.

"The families of Romanians who adopt children are those who cannot have children naturally, mostly. I think this story of adoption must be popularized among people. I do not think Romanians necessarily refuse to adopt, I believe that there is simply not a very strong awareness of this option and I think that a campaign in this sense is very useful ”, said M?d?lina Turza.