Erin, a foreign student studying in a prestigious South Korean graduate school, shares her perspective on the word 'grateful' based on her experience as an inter-country adoptee. Ironically, the school of the university that she currently attends has her family's name, Underwood. ? ED.

By Erin Underwood

The word "grateful" is such a small word but it can carry a significant impact. Being "grateful" for something is supposed to have a positive effect, however, society has caused me to resent the word. Adoptees tend to hear this term from strangers, acquaintances, extended family members, sometimes even their adoptive parents (mine excluded).

Adoptees are told to be grateful by people who fail to realize the struggles that adoptees face daily due to our adoption, such as a lack of security, lack of identity, abandonment issues and more. We are told to be "grateful" toward four people: our biological parents and adoptive parents. Adoptees are told to be grateful that their biological parents were selfless enough to relinquish their rights to us. Furthermore, we should be thankful that our adoptive parents decided to adopt rather than conceive. Throughout history, society has deemed adoptees as being "model children," causing immense pressure on adoptees. Adoptees are told to do, and not do, numerous things, mainly for the benefit of another. Such as not misbehaving because that does not show our appreciation for our adoptive parents. We should do well in school because another child could have been "saved" and done better. We should never want to find our biological parents because our adoptive parents would be offended. The list goes on and on.

Adoptees should be allowed to live their lives without societal pressures that tell us to feel gratitude for our lives. How can we show appreciation when we had no say in the adoption? We, being in closed international adoptions, usually are not involved in our adoption. Adoption was a choice that was decided for us. From our relinquishment, we have no say in what country we would reside in and who our adoptive families will be. Adoptees are placed into the system and our identities are stripped from us. We grow up with parents that do not look like us, languages that are different, and names that do not match our ethnicities. We grow up in our adoptive countries that do not fully accept us and eventually discover our birth country does not either.

The vanity of being a Thalidomide child and missing an arm has held Maria Fage Ifversen back for years, but now she is stepping forward in the hope that someone can help her find the little sister she was separated from when they were sent from an orphanage in Bangladesh to Denmark.

"I do not remember anything. It is completely black. "

Again and again, 48-year-old Maria Fage Ifversen tries to think back on her first years of life.

She has always known that as a 6-year-old she was adopted to Denmark from the orphanage "Sister Benedict" in Chittagong, Bangladesh. But at Easter, she found out by a bit of a coincidence that she first came to the orphanage as a 4-year-old.

»Where have I been the first four years? I can remember nothing, and there is nothing in my papers, "she says.

When Maria Lundberg Ström's mother and father learned that the biological parents demanded their daughter back, it was the beginning of one of history's worst adoption scandals. It turned out that Maria had been stolen from her home in Seoul. Her new Swedish parents became desperate.

FJung Yoon Huh's life in Sweden began on 18 February 1968 at Arlanda. It was the day when her expectant adoptive parents, Ulla and Stig, received their adopted child from Korea.

They were a childless couple in their 40s who had longed to start a family, but did not succeed. The 2.5-year-old Korean girl was received with open arms. They called her Mary.

The girl was precocious for her age. In fact, she was four years old. But about that and about Mary's real background, they knew nothing. They thought she was orphaned.

Maria Lundberg Ström, who is now 56 years old, agrees that her story is exceptional. Few adoptees find their biological parents. In her case, on the contrary, it was the biological parents who, after two years of searching, found their lost daughter. Because she was anything but poor and orphaned, she came from a wealthy entrepreneurial family in Seoul.

Establish specialist care and support for transnational adoptees with trauma-informed staff trained in adoption and racism. This is suggested by Natte Hillerberg, ST doctor in psychiatry and board member of Doctors against racism.

Care for internationally adopted people has long been neglected by Sweden's regions. Nowhere in Swedish health care is there specialist psychiatric care for internationally adopted adults, despite the fact that the patient group is strongly overrepresented in terms of mental illness, substance abuse, suicide attempts and suicide. Statistics that show this have been available for decades.

In 2020, the Swedish Agency for Family Law and Parental Support (MFoF) arranged a procurement for conversational support for adult adoptees. The conversational support would not be regarded as care, but as a complement to regular health and medical care. Several players made bids and MFoF chose the supplier that was the cheapest, Apoteksgården cognitive center in Dalarna, over more expensive alternatives with more experience and more qualifications. Apoteksgården is very inaccessible to most of Sweden's population.

Of all conversational contacts that took place during the years 2020 and 2021, only two people were physically present according to an evaluation reported on MFoF's website. The rest of the contacts have been made digitally or by telephone. The evaluation is based on a questionnaire completed by clients.

The design of the survey leaves a lot to be desired. The evaluation states that more than 50 percent of the respondents considered that the support was only to a small extent helpful in issues of racism and adoption-related issues. It has not been possible to answer that the support has not been helpful at all, but with the answer alternatives have been forced to state that the support has been helpful to some degree. It is also noteworthy that a large proportion of clients have chosen to quit after only 1-5 calls.

This position will be responsible for technical support and capacity building to establish the management of child protection cases and other services through the local partner's specially designed children's spaces.

He / she will contribute to the integration of protection in health institutions, as well as information strategies by raising community awareness, with a focus on concerns for the protection of young people and children.

The selected candidate will work closely with partner organizations to develop coordinated and integrated services that adequately address the protection needs of the most vulnerable, including children.

Details in the attached job advertisement.

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A major church has apologised to a mother who was one of hundreds of young women coerced into giving up their newborns for adoption in the "baby scoop" era. Nicholas Jones was in the room for the historic meeting.

Fifty-seven years after her baby was taken, the Bishop of Auckland stood in Maggie Wilkinson's living room and apologised.

"You were sent to a place that should have offered you support and care…you received exactly the opposite," said Ross Bay, Bishop of Auckland for the Anglican Church, which was responsible for the unwed mothers' home where Wilkinson was sent at 19.

She begged to keep her daughter, but her newborn was removed and an adoption arranged.

Vivienne found her mum as a teenager, after 18 years of feeling like an outsider.

Residential and institutional care is not a question of extent or degree, but rather a question of absolute abolition on account of what it historically represents and continues to perpetuate

Recently the world celebrated Black History month and it was an opportunity to take stock of the progress that Black and other ethnic minority groups have made since emancipation from slavery and colonialism.

It was also a time to reflect and learn from the atrocities of the past and reinforce mankind’s covenant never to allow history to repeat itself. The discovery of mass unmarked graves on sites of former Canadian Indian residential schools in Canada prompted me to add to the discourse of ending residential and institutional child care from a historical perspective. I will argue firstly that children from countries with a history of racial segregation and an established system of residential and institutional child care form the highest percentage of children in such institutions. Secondly, that despite provisions in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the United Nations Guidelines for Alternative Care of Children, residential and institutional care poses serious developmental risks and violations to the rights of children such that under no circumstances should it ever be an option – a family environment is the only appropriate setting for a child.

The effects of colonialism, slavery and apartheid still reverberate within those marginalised communities and are reflected in child care data. The theory of historical trauma provides a nexus to explain this phenomenon. In a nutshell, the theory propounds that societies subjected to long-term mass trauma are more likely to display higher prevalence of disease and experience social inequity even several generations after the original trauma occurred. In Canada, the discovery of graves since the 1990s (and the recent discovery of 715 last year) around sites of former Canadian Indian Residential schools culminated in the Truth and Reconciliation Committee calling it ‘cultural genocide’. It is estimated that between 3,200 to 30,000 children died as a result of neglect, illness or abuse in those institutions. It has also been reported that survivors suffer from deep-seated dissonance and dissimilation from their family and communities that has resulted in high prevalence rates of intergenerational suicide, alcoholism, domestic violence and the disintegration of families and communities. A report by the Ontario Human Rights Commission established that children from native indigenous and black communities are disproportionately represented in the child care system. It also further established as a matter of fact that such representation is on account of the nation’s colonial past. In 2018, African American children in the United States of America were 13.71% of the child population, yet 22.75% of them are in some form of child care. The same statistics also show that African American and Native American children were disproportionately identified as victims by protection services and waiting to be adopted. South Africa has experienced a bourgeoning surge of children entering residential child care institutions. For example, it is estimated that 1.8 million children are in need of adoption and are placed in institutions. Estimates vary as to the actual number of children in the child care system but the number ranges between 3.7 – 5.8 million with the majority being from the black population. It is clear from the data that across the board there is a correlation between the experiences of historically disenfranchised groups of people and the disproportionate representation of children of these groups in residential care in comparison to their counterpart, thus amounting to discrimination.

Allowing the continuation of residential and institutional child care by any degree under international or domestic law is a condonation of historical trauma and a perpetuation of intergenerational racial discrimination as it creates a vicious cycle. Article 9 of the CRC and the UN Guidelines on Alternative Care of Children agree that children must be kept within a family environment. However, they also allow for the removal of children from a family environment in circumstances where leaving the child there would not be in the best interests of the child and offers special protections under Article 20 CRC. The caveat here is that this must be done for the shortest period possible. The danger is that what amounts to the shortest period of time differs depending on the circumstances and may last for a matter of days, months and even years. Ultimately, the result is that a child placed in such institutions will still suffer from the adverse effects of the system. The dangers of residential and institutional care have been linked to detrimental effects on child development resulting in antisocial behaviour and risky behaviour. When measured up against the CRC general principles, residential care is discriminatory, it is not in the best interests of the child, it is devoid of child participation and detrimental to a child’s life and development.

Last week, the cabinet announced that it would now only wish to allow intercountry adoptions to go through a government organization. Patrick Noordoven would rather see the Netherlands renounce intercountry adoption altogether.

In 1980, with the help of a Dutch diplomat, with the cooperation of the consulate in São Paulo, I was illegally adopted from Brazil. Because my identity has been forged – a common problem for adoptees – it has been virtually impossible to obtain vital information about my ancestry.

As a result, I do not know under what circumstances I was handed over and as a result, after more than twenty years of searching for my identity, I have not yet been able to find my father.

According to the District Court of The Hague, the Dutch state has acted unlawfully towards me by failing to take measures to protect my right to know my origin. The state was required to make every effort to ensure that I, as a victim of criminal conduct, would actually receive parentage and other identifying information, the court ruled.

Gross violations of children's rights

Orphanages are bad for children. And adoption often makes happier. Don't forget that in the debate on intercountry adoption, write Marinus van IJzerdoorn and Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg, professor of pedagogy in Rotterdam and professor of neurobiological backgrounds of upbringing and development at VU Amsterdam.

Marinus van IJzerdoorn and Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg 18 april 2022, 13:23

The debate about intercountry adoption has flared up again. The government and the House of Representatives will soon discuss what to do with intercountry adoption. Stop or continue? In the meantime, opinions abound, but what are the facts?

First, children who grow up in orphanages (orphanages) experience enormous delays in their physical and neural growth, as well as in their cognitive and psychological development. For example, in our study with Natasha Dobrova-Krol in homes in Ukraine, many children had severe growth retardation and hormonal stress imbalance. We saw that picture confirmed in our recent overview analysis in the Lancet Psychiatry of more than 300 empirical studies in more than 60 countries involving more than 100,000 children. The longer the stay in a home, the greater the arrears.

Incidentally, by no means all children in the 'orphanages' have lost their parents through death, but reliable data are lacking. There is simply too little good research into parents who have abandoned their children because of poverty, cultural or religious taboos, or demographic politics, and how this could have been prevented.

ASSOCIATION OF ACCREDITED ADOPTION ORGANISATIONS

Programme 23 – 24 April 2014

“ADOPTION FOR THE RIGHT REASONS; an option for

permanency”

English will be the working language.