NEW DELHI: In a promising trend, adoptions have once again reached pre-pandemic numbers. Latest govt data show that 4,009 children were adopted between April 2023 to March 2024 by families in India and abroad. The last time the number of adoptions (in-country and inter-country) crossed 4,000 was in 2018-19 when it touched 4,027. Also, in-country adoptions at 3,560 are the highest since 2015-16.

In 2022-23, the total number of adoptions stood at 3,441, up from 3,405 in the previous financial year. Data collated by the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA), under the ministry of women and child development, show that of the 4,009 adoptions in 2023-24, 449 were inter-country adoptions.



This year, CARA has expanded the ambit of adoption to include the concept of ‘foster adoption’ as a category. So far 10 children have been placed under foster adoption across the country, in keeping with the Adoption Regulations 2022. Moreover, CARA has also been focusing on expediting cases of relatives keen on taking an orphaned child in their family or prospective parents waiting to adopt their step children.

As many as 412 children, adopted under in-country adoptions, figure in the category of ‘relative and step adoption’. The break-up of the data on domestic adoptions shows that relatives and step parents in India adopted 311 and 101 children respectively. Relatives (NRI/OCI) abroad adopted 18 children.

The break-up of 3,560 in-country adoptions shows that as many as 3,081 were in the category of ‘orphan, abandoned and surrendered (OAS)’ children who were adopted within the country by resident Indians and 57 were adopted by NRIs. In 2022-23, domestic adoptions stood at 3,010 and this number was 2,991 in 2021-22.

In the inter-country adoption category, 295 OAS children were adopted by foreigners and 91 by overseas citizens of India (OCI). Also 42 children were adopted by NRI and OCI parents under the Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act.

Officials highlight that one of the key factors contributing to the increase in adoptions during the year 2023-24 can be attributed to the focus on promoting adoption within the country and in the child’s own socio-cultural milieu as laid out in the adoption regulations notified in 2022 and Juvenile Justice Act as amended in 2021. One of the key shifts under the law was that the power to pass an adoption order was given to the district magistrate instead of the court. The officials also point to the simplification of the adoption process to cut down delays from the stage of making the child legally free for adoption to the reducing the time for the referral and matching process for children in the adoption pool with prospective adoptive parents.

Meanwhile, even as CARA is taking these measures to cut down delays in the adoption process there continues to be a big gap in the number of parents waiting to adopt and the children available in the adoption pool. CARA’s dashboard as of Monday shows that 33,809 prospective adoptive parents registered whereas the number of children in the pool remains low at a little over 2,141 children and of these 731 are in ‘normal category’ and 1,410 in ‘special needs’. Of the PAPs registered, over 31800 are resident Indians registered for adopting a child in the “orphan, abandoned and surrendered” category and a little over a 1000 are there to adopt in the “relative/step parent” category.

Discussed in this essay:

Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala, by Rachel Nolan. Harvard University Press. 320 pages. $35.

In May 1982, Blanca Luz López entrusted her son, a toddler, to a full-time caretaker in a poor neighborhood of Guatemala City. This was a common arrangement for working mothers, like López, whose long hours prevented them from assuming themselves the responsibilities of parenting. She visited her son when she could, and then, one day that next February, he wasn’t there. The caretaker said she had sent the boy elsewhere “for his greater safety,” and gave López an address. López went to the house, and a woman there told her that the boy would be returned to her at a piñata party so that he could be given a proper goodbye.

When López and four other people—three adults and a child—arrived for the party, they were shown in, offered a bottle of liquor, and then set upon by a group of attackers with knives. All four adults, including López, were murdered, and the child was kidnapped. The assailants had already shuttled López’s son out of the country, and the other child was never seen again. To this day, neither has been found.

Before Guatemala outlawed foreign adoptions in 2007, one in a hundred children born there was adopted internationally. The country was second only to China in the number of children being sent abroad, yet Guatemala had a population of about thirteen and a half million people, roughly one one-hundredth of China’s. Rachel Nolan, in her detailed and heartrending first book, Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala, uses years of research to show the way that a country destabilized by war can invite merciless profiteers to break apart families such as López’s and allow others overseas to reconfigure them according to their own desires. For the three decades between 1977 and 2007, Guatemala allowed lawyers to match children with foreign families, with minimal oversight from a court. What happened in Guatemala, along with similar scandals in Romania, South Korea, and Peru, inspired the creation of the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption in 1993. The treaty now governs the way more than a hundred countries conduct adoption across national borders.

BENGALURU: Popular social media influencer and former Big Boss contestant, Sonu Srinivas Gowda, 29, made it to the headlines again, but this time for her arrest following the illegal adoption of a girl child. Sonu Gowda was arrested by Byadarahalli police in Bengaluru under the Juvenile Justice Act (Care and Protection of Children), 2015, after a complaint was filed by an official from the Women and Child Development Department, accusing her of not adhering to the adoption protocol.

Sonu, who has over one million followers on social media, had been sharing videos featuring the 8-year-old girl for several weeks. While the influencer maintained that she had legally adopted the child from her parents in Raichur, the complainant, Geeta J, Legal-cum-Probation Officer (LPO), District Child Protection Unit, said the adoption was done illegally, and several norms, such as revealing the identity of the adopted child, were violated in the process. The complainant emphasised the adoption procedures outlined by the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) which protects children’s rights and privacy.

The FIR mentioned that Sonu had disclosed the child’s identity and neglected to enrol her in school, despite it being March, the month of examinations. The FIR also raised suspicions that the child, who was with Sonu for about 41 days, might have been sold as the woman alleged that she had compensated the child’s parents “in kind”. Additionally, the complainant cited the legal provision violated by Sonu, which mandates a 25-year age gap between the child and the adopter.

During interrogation, Sonu admitted that she had not followed the official procedure and had got the child nearly a month ago. She mentioned that she was planning to complete it but due to her lack of knowledge about the official procedure, the legal procedure got delayed.

Adoption laws

'Mij is iets vreselijks aangedaan': Ethiopische Betty doet aangifte tegen de overheid voor adoptiefraude

1. 01-04-2024 07:00
2. Binnenland
3. Auteur: Eveline Rethmeier

Betty werd als jong meisje geadopteerd uit Ethiopië

Bron: EenVandaag

INTER-COUNTRY ADOPTIONS AND CONSULTANCY IN GUARDIANSHIP

INTER-COUNTRY ADOPTIONS AND CONSULTANCY IN GUARDIANSHIP Background Adoption is a socio-legal process. If one or the other is neglected, the adoption is certainly not being carried out in the child's best interests nor in the interests of others concerned. Although adoption does not replace the biological relation which exists between the child and its natural parents, it does reconstitute a stable family through the enduring ties which it creates. Adoption is to be regarded as the most complete means whereby family life can be restored to a child deprived of its natural family. It is indispensable therefore, that adoption should become one of the effective instruments of social action. The Indian Council of Social Welfare insists that in so far as possible, adoptive parents should be sought in the child's own country. However, the possibility of adoption abroad, is not excluded, provided the efforts to find adoptive parents within the country have been unavailing and that conditions are favourable from the psychological, the economic and social points of view. Inter-country adoptions, therefore, remain a necessity in some countries for there are regions where one cannot hope to find adoptive parents in the child's own country due to persistent prejudices against illegitimacy and apprehensions about heredity. At the present time, adoption abroad involves great hazards for the child, because of the difficulty faced by those concerned to ensure suitable safeguards. The obstacles are geographical — the distances; political — the frontiers; the lack of previous contact * Mr. S. D. Gokhale is the Assistant Secretary General of the International Council on Social Welfare for the region of Asia and Western Pacific. S. D.GOKHALE* between the child and its prospective adopters; the difficulty of making a thorough case study; lack of precise knowledge of and the continuance of a legal no man's land when a child is left between two national legislations. It may be relevant here to note the sociolegal aspects of inter-country adoption. Inter-country adoptions are essentially sociolegal transactions. It is difficult to think of any other activity in which the social worker has greater responsibility for keeping both aspects continuously in his mind and in his activity. The highest level of casework in an inter-country adoption will not compensate for oversight of a legal point nor will the most thoughtful attention to all the legal considerations guarantee that the inter-country adoption will be sound from the social point of view. It is therefore of the utmost importance that social workers, judges, lawyers and administrators learn to respect each other's competence and to work together with understanding of the importance of the contribution of social work, law and good administrative practices to successful inter-country adoptions. To be put genuinely into practice, these principles must therefore be accepted, not only theoretically but with a conviction as to their validity, by members of the legal and social work professions who are concerned with child welfare services or somehow responsible for the welfare of children. Although Indian Council of Social Welfare had been functioning as a correspondent of International Social Service for a very long time, it was dealing with intercountry and intra-country adoption on a S. D. GOKHALE limited scale. However, since it took the lead in framing and supporting the draft Adoption Bill now presented to the Loksabha (Indian Parliament), the Council developed its interest in the work relating to adoption, with a wider perspective. It became known in European countries, and to some extent in U.S.A., that children were available for adoption in India, first there were a few requests which soon grew into a sizeable proportion. The Indian Council, aware of the many dangers of international adoption, was greatly alarmed at the prevailing situation. The indiscriminate placement of children in families abroad without any adequate matching of the needs of the child and those of the family and complete lack of provision for supervision of follow-up, agitated the Indian Council of Social Welfare (ICSW) and its workers. Meetings were held in Bombay with the co-operation of various other bodies at which repeatedly the Indian Council pointed out the dangers of haphazard international adoption and the necessity of proper safeguards for our children being sent abroad under the Guardians and Ward Act of 1890. The Legal Positions It is not possible for a foreigner to adopt an Indian child under the present law in India. The only adoption possible is under the Hindu Adoption Act. The Bill for Adoption is pending before the Parliament and the Indian Council of Social Welfare, along with the Indian Council of Child Welfare, All India Womens Council and Guild Service is developing a strong opinion in support of this bill. At present, child care institutions, desirous of giving a child in adoption, take recourse to the Guardian and Wards Act in the absence of an Adoption Act and submit a petition to the High Court to grant guardianship of a child to the prospective adoptive parents. After the High

From: Nigel Cantwell <cantabene@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2024, 18:57
Subject: Article
To: <roelie.post@gmail.com>
  

Roelie,

I happened to see your plea on "X" to access an article from DCI's Monitor. It was in Vol. 9.1 from 1992.

In case you have still not received it,  have attached it herewith. As you will see, it was in fact an interview I did with the very wonderful Alexandra Zugravescu. It continues and ends at the bottom of the second page. The third page - from the same edition of the Monitor - may, I thought, also be of interest to you in understanding DCI's (and my) approach at that time.

Nigel

Woo request about communication regarding the country analysis of intercountry adoption, including with the US

https://www.9news.com.au/national/how-a-startling-discovery-from-a-dna-test-led-an-australian-adoptee-to-his-birth-family/a199d96b-e0d8-4c98-b86c-488f7009a707?fbclid=IwAR2TnbIp1pZvtloOcXUan1Z0z8sAVmFd7JDZJgEVck1vHOmNqJq8mMdo0xQ_aem_AR-Vkd348HOBoXLjTHCwL5YiT-Xy-opjOHLuzB61YUXo3Ac1uI0puzpd9D7D0XbcRX7ySaLG3hUOlhlIt8RCb6oY

EXCLUSIVE: Abandoned at six months old in an overflowing orphanage in war-torn Vietnam, Kim Catford was baby number 671.

But, to his South Australian parents who adopted him as a baby in 1974, he simply became part of the family.

Growing up in the small coastal town of Victor Harbor, and later in the Adelaide suburb of Banksia Park, Kim had what appeared to be, in many ways, a quintessentially Australian childhood.

He rode bikes, played footy and had three older sisters.

MUMBAI: Within 12 hours of being kidnapped, the police rescued a five-year-old girl from Thane and arrested four women, including two of the victim’s neighbours in Bhandup, for planning to sell the girl for ₹1 lakh. The accused were planning to take the girl to Rajasthan on Monday but the police nabbed them before they could flee and rescued the girl around 8.00am on Monday.

The arrested accused are identified as Khusubu Ramashish Gupta, 19, Maina Rajaram Dilor, 39, Divya Kailash Singh, 33, and Payal Hemant Shah, 32. Police said, Gupta and Dilor both live in Bhandup area near the residence of the girl, whereas Singh and Shah live in Balkum area of Thane. 

During the investigation, the police learnt that Singh and Shah knew Dilor for a long time and they had discussed earlier with them that they wanted to adopt a girl and were ready to pay ₹1 lakh for a girl child, said a police officer. Dilor then discussed it with Gupta and they decided to identify the girl. added official. 

According to the police, the girl’s father works as a daily wager and she as a housemaid in Bhandup. Their five-year-old daughter is studying in senior KG. The incident occurred on Sunday around 9:30pm when Gupta, who lives in the same vicinity as the child, saw the girl near her house. She spoke to Maina on the phone and decided to kidnap the girl. Maina also knew the child, and both then called her on the pretext of giving her chocolate and made her sit in an auto, said police sub-inspector Abhijit Tekawade of the Bhandup police station who was part of the probe.

IN THE HIGH COURT OF KARNATAKA AT BENGALURU DATED THIS THE 26TH DAY OF MARCH, 2024 BEFORE THE HON'BLE MR. JUSTICE M. NAGAPRASANNA WRIT PETITION No.17967 OF 2023 (GM - RES) BETWEEN: 1 . SRI RAVI KUMAR C., AGED 43 YEARS, S/O CHANNIGARAYACHAR C., 2 . SMT. B. TANUJA AGED 42 YEARS, W/O SRI RAVI KUMAR C., BOTH THE ABOVE PETITIONERS RESIDING PERMANENTLY AT NO.34, GOPAL KRISHNA LAYOUT, VASANTHAPURA MAIN ROAD, SUBRAMANYAPURA POST, BEHIND SAMASTHA HOSPITAL UTTARHALLI BENGALURU – 560 061. ALSO AT NO.C4, TAJ VILLAS, GREVELLIA GROOVE, BROOKSIDE DRIVE, WESTLAN