The Cradle Baby Scheme that provides for cradles at government hospitals and Primary Health Centres to receive unwanted newborns, and put them up for legal adoption, could prevent illegal sale of babies. But, the system needs to be tightened.

For instance, the Cradle Baby Centre at the Dharmapuri Government Hospital itself needs resuscitation. The centre has remained dysfunctional for close to a year, after its lone staff, who was paid Rs.100 a day, found a better job.

Babies, however, find their way to the cradle because the centre is located within the hospital, and the babies come from the hospital's maternity ward, says District Child Protection Officer M. Sivagandhi. “We get routine calls from the doctors and the nurses from the maternity ward, alerting us on parents who have a third girl child, or an unwed mother wanting to give away a baby.”

All the 24 private homes run by NGOs and the two government homes in the district have a cradle. But, babies are almost never dropped in them, says the director of a home.

This is where PHCs can play a crucial role.

What is Guidance and socio - legal advice to the family?

It is a service that seeks to orient, advise and carry out the pertinent procedures required by the Family that presents problems in aspects related to Family and Minors Law, to prevent through conciliation the initiation of judicial processes, in order to solve an existing conflict or prevent one eventual.

What is sought with Sociolegal Counseling and Counseling?

Advice and social and legal guidance.

Legal Consultation (Family and Minors Law).

The state government plans to maintain a centralised data on each child, his or her progress, education, medical history, and where the child’s file stands in adoption procedure. This will also include linkage with Aadhaar card.

In a bid to streamline the process of tracking an infant in government shelter homes, the state Women and Child Development (WCD) department will soon start digitising records of each child brought under its care, right from admission till adoption.

The state government plans to maintain a centralised data on each child, his or her progress, education, medical history, and where the child’s file stands in adoption procedure. This will also include linkage with Aadhaar card. Currently, very few shelter homes, both private and government, link admitted infants with Aadhaar, that too once the child turns five.

Officials with the WCD department said the data on orphans or abandoned children is mostly documented in hard copies in individual shelter homes without a standardised format. “The Juvenile Justice Act has a uniform procedure for each child. For instance, filling of Form 17 when child is produced before child welfare committee. All these legal requirements need to be streamlined and made available on a central database,” said Idzes Kundan, newly appointed WCD secretary.

Plans to boost foster care, where a child is placed with a family rather than a shelter home, are also underway. According to the Central Adoption Regional Agency (CARA), in 2016, foster care guidelines were amended under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection) Act, 2015. The central government introduced group foster care concept where a family could look after more than one child and look until their adoption. The government also allows foster family to adopt the infant if they look after him for at least five years.

As soon as adoptions make money, fraud lurks around the corner

The resignation of the UNICEF director in connection with adoptions from Guatemala will have led to difficult conversations, primarily with the children's rights organization, but also in all Flemish families with an adopted child. I can participate. What can we still assume to be true? Can we open up the wound or leave the initiative to the adopted person? Adoption involves so much good intention and so much unspoken, only suspected suffering that questioning it is a big taboo.

Congo, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, India, Guatemala ... Meanwhile, it is clear that there are no good and less good countries of origin. The same applies to the countries of destination, Belgium is certainly not alone. Where adoptions make money, fraud lurks around the corner.

Dolores is now telling her story in the Belgian press for the first time, suspicious as she is, because of what she experienced as a child. At the age of five she was abducted in her village in the Guatemalan mountains. A bit like the kidnapped Maddie McCann, but without worldwide attention. Her documents were forged and hoped, another child who could go to Belgium. Only after 25 years were her mother's prayers answered and the lost daughter was at the door. The mother, the daughter, the adoptive parents, are all signed for life.

CAUTION AND RESPECT

Shareable link to entire report: https://drive.google.com/open?id=12zmis6XdXnYFJ_IuAPelAZ54YiTJxfpu

With references to Rapport Overwater (FIOM) = adoption as child protection

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Adoption campaigners have hit out at the "hypocrisy and dishonesty" of the Government in refusing to launch an inquiry into forced and illegal adoption.

It comes as a number of prominent independent politicians introduced a motion in the Dáil calling for an immediate inquiry and for immediate redress to be offered to survivors of Mother and Baby Homes.

The current inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes is limited to adoption practices and procedures of agencies and individuals with a direct connection to a mother and baby home. For more than a decade now, campaigners have called for a full State inquiry into adoption practices across all agencies.

Paul Redmond of the Coalition of Mother and Baby Home Survivors (CMABS) said the increasing support for a full inquiry into is encouraging:

"This Dáil motion has exposed the hypocrisy and dishonesty at the heart of a Government who have decided on a 'deny till they die' policy towards an elderly and dying survivor community.

AHMEDABAD: In the case of a 39-year-old man who sought custody of his daughter from an orphanage in Nadiad, the orphanage on Thursday informed the Gujarat high court that the child had been given in adoption in January 2018.

The orphanage supplied a Nadiad sessions court’s order passed on January 2018 showing that the child was given in adoption to a Kolkata-based couple through Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA). Justice V P Patel questioned how a child, both of whose parents are alive, could be termed an orphan and be placed in the orphanage. To this, the court was told that the surrender of the child and her adoption took place in accordance with law.

The man had filed a habeas corpus petition in the HC for his 3-year-old daughter after the divorced mother surrendered the child in Matruchhaya Orphanage in Nadiad. While the man claimed that his estranged wife was avoiding him to evade the child custody issue, the woman and her father appeared before the court and told the court about harassment on part of the man, which led the mother to give up the child. Advocate Bhunesh Rupera, who appeared for the mother, submitted that the man was never interested in his daughter’s custody. At the time of divorce, he had retained the child’s custody, but returned the custody and signed an MoU stating that he would never claim custody in future. The lawyer submitted that the man was after his divorced wife and kept on pasting posters showing her as a missing person despite the fact that they separated through a mutual agreement. To get rid of him, the woman never furnished her address to courts. The mother refused to give her present address to the high court also claiming that it would result in harassment on part of her ex-husband. The 29-year-old woman and her father told the court that she started suffering from psychological problems because of the harassment. This led them to take a decision to put the child in an orphanage and give consent to give her in adoption. The HC has posted further hearing on June 25.

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Policemen from the Warri area command in Delta State have arrested three suspects over the alleged child trafficking of a two-and-half-year-old baby girl.

Those arrested included, the matron of Divine Orphanage Home, Rosemary Johnson and Madam Rose IIogbo in Ughelli. The third person was a lady, who allegedly bought the child for N850,000 from Johnson and Ilogbo.

The arrest followed a petition by the president of Nigerian Child Welfare Fund, Comrade Joshua Omorere. Acting on the petition, detectives swung into action and arrested the suspects. The police also uncovered a baby-making factory in Agbor during the arrest.

IIogbo claimed she sold the child to one lady who had gone through adoption process in Ughelli. She also confessed that the matron of Divine Home Orphanage gave her another child to sell for N850,000 but people that were interested were offering N800,000, stressing that the matron of Divine Orphanage insisted it must be N850,000.

Meanwhile, a 50-year-old woman, Idowu Ademola, who allegedly specialized in trafficking foreigners for domestic services across the country, has been arrested by operatives of the Inspector General Police Intelligence Response Team (IRT), in Ibadan, Oyo State.

Welfare Ministry’s allocated state budget funding of EUR 619 000 was used, among other things, to pay bonuses to officials for obvious everyday tasks even though initially it was implied that employees of the ministry and State Child Protection Inspectorate (SCPI) would perform some specific tasks to prevent child and family abuse, as State Audit (SA) comments results of the 2018 financial audit.

When developing the 2018 state budget, Welfare Ministry outlined as a priority the programme On Enhancement of capacity for social-type institutions and social programmes for child rights protection. Accordingly, the ministry allocated funding of EUR 619 000 for these activities as well as IT system adaptation to help «assist child adoption and improve foster family care services». According to SA, the aforementioned amount was planned to pay employees in the ministry and SCPI.

In its audit SA concluded that only 6.6% of the allocated funding was used to pay employees for additional work. Mostly the money was used to pay different bonuses to employees from 13 of the ministry’s structural offices, including the Minister’s Office, State Secretary’s Office, Finance Management, structure fund and personnel department for employees, in which most are not involved in adoption and foster family care policy formation and implementation.

On top of that, funding was not used to pay bonuses for additional work. Most of the time, bonuses were paid for personal contribution and quality of work, payment of bonuses, as well as wages, vacation pay and vacation benefits, SA notes. For example, at least seven ministry workers have received bonus pay for cooperation with Plecs movement, which has worked in the last two years to ensure children do not end up in orphanages. Bonus pay was paid for management of problems identified by Plecs movement, opinion coordination, organization of regular meetings, as well as ensuring communication with Plecs movement for submission of proposals.

Additionally, ministry employees were paid bonuses for personal contribution and work quality, because increased intensity of work forced reorganization of the inspection in Stikli orphanage, compile results and discuss everything with the Ombudsman’s Bureau. SA auditors stress that Welfare Ministry only reacted when mass media reported information regarding significant violations at Stikli orphanage.

Around 2.2% of the population of England and Wales is now mixed race and 3.3% are from black ethnic groups. During World War II, over 70 years ago, these figures were far lower. And so, unsurprisingly, life was difficult for the 2,000 or so mixed race babies who were born in World War II to black American GIs and white British women.

They grew up in predominately white localities and experienced significant racism. I have interviewed 45 of these children (now in their seventies), hailing from all over England. Their story of institutional racism rivals the horrors of the appalling story of the Windrush generation.

Of the 3 million US servicemen that passed through Britain in the period 1942-45, approximately 8% were African American. The GIs were part of a segregated army and they bought their segregation policies with them, designating towns near to American bases “black” or “white” and segregating pubs and dances along color lines, with dances held for black GIs one evening and whites the next.

Related: US adoption system discriminates against darker-skinned children

Inevitably, relationships formed between the black GIs and local women and some resulted in what the African American press referred to as “brown babies.” All these children were born illegitimate because the American white commanding officers refused black GIs permission to marry, the rationale being that back in the US, 30 of the then 48 states had anti-miscegenation laws.