Amy feels she was bought and sold as a commodity when she was adopted from Ethiopia to Denmark

When Amy was 15 years old, she found out that you were paying money when adopting a child. She asked, "Isn't it just human trafficking with a finer word?"

She's split. She feels like a man divided into two. Amy Rebecca Steen is Ethiopian, but has lived in Denmark half of her 20-year-old life. Her mother and older sister, her grandfather and the rest of her family live in Ethiopia. Her little sister lives in Næstved at the adoptive family, where she herself lived the first year and a half of her time in Denmark before moving to a foster family because her adoptive parents did not power her.

"When I was 15 years old, I found out that you pay money when you adopt. And I remember I asked if it's not just human trafficking with a finer word? "

Amy and her sister were adopted through the agency DanAdopt in 2009, and in 2013, the agency was deprived of the right to convey adoptions from Ethiopia, because the National Board of Appeal considered that there were doubts as to whether the adoptions were ethically and legally justifiable. Several Ethiopian women told then that they felt pressured to adopt their children.

Lucilas Discovered: I was kidnapped and sold as a baby

On her 40th birthday, Lucila gave herself a present. She would seek her roots in Chile and get answers to what made her at four years old end up with an adoptive family in Sweden.

Lucila traveled to Chile in the hope of finding her biological family

Lucilas adoptive parents threatened to make her hereditary if she traveled to Chile. But when Lucila was 40, she got the courage to go anyway.

When Lucila Jensen, thirty-six years after she was kidnapped and adopted away from her country of birth, for the first time, Chilean land tore her heart. From her mouth came a cry of joy; I'm finally home!

HIGHLIGHTS

Number of children of single parent is more than double that of orphan, abandoned and surrendered children

The report by WCD ministry said single parents often send their kids to care homes to ensure safety and well-being of the child.

NEW DELHI: Of the over 3.7 lakh children lodged in homes meant for care of children in vulnerable circumstances across India

in 2016-17, over 1.2 lakh were the offspring of single parents (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/single-parents). Their

F. de Combret, The Breviary of The Search for Lost Time

François de Combret

Droz

ISBN-13978-2-600-05887-2

896 p.

Mumbai,Thane,Orphanage

Bhavana Jaiswal is in Thane to get engaged.(Praful Gangurde/HT)

For 28-year-old Bhavana Jaiswal, growing up in an orphanage turned out to be better, she says, as she might not have become the person she is today if she had stayed with her parents.

Today, she works in Poland as the project head of a multinational company. Jaiswal is in the city to get engaged to Andres Schaufelberger, 33, a Swiss national.

“I was seven and my sister Priyanka was six when our father left us. My mother could not raise us and sent us to Ma Niketan - Society of the Helpers of Mary orphanage in Thane. My brother was merely two years old at the time and therefore stayed with my mother,” says Jaiswal.

Horrible! Stolen children - horrible revelation of baby trade - 'Stolen' newborn babies: babies for sale

Babies are abducted and traded as commodities. In Nigeria, there are real baby factories, which let even for the European market babies in a cruel way by abducted girls. In China, about 70,000 babies are sold on the black market every year. In Canada, there is another case of indignation after an indigenous mother was "stolen" from her child at the hospital just two days after giving birth. Indigenous children in Canada: They are stolen, placed in care facilities, even abused there. Did you know that "enforced adoption" is practiced in England? At present, there are people in court who have stolen and sold up to 300,000 babies in Catholic institutions in Spain. In India, babies are stolen from hospitals by physicians or hospital nurses and sold to "adoption-willing." Stolen children - no, that happens not only in exotic countries, but also in Europe. We've already researched a lot of topics and we've often pushed ourselves to the limit, but as we now see, things are even worse.

Stolen children

We have often written about human trafficking because we believe that this "cruel" issue deserves more attention, just because of the victims, because many of them are children. When it comes to trafficking, Germany is a transit country and thus complicit in it. Modern human trafficking is legal even in Germany. Every year, millions of people are traded, with children being sold all over the world, especially in developed countries, as well as in European countries. But in other countries too, the trade in babies is booming. She was simply torn away from the mothers and then sold to others, mostly "rich ones".

It has long been reported by the "baby factories" in Nigeria, where kidnapped girls are imprisoned. They are then pregnant and the babies are sold. The industry is booming.

As an independent child protection researcher and rights activist, I have been asked repeatedly why the government is considering drastic changes to the Child Protection Act that will potentially have a dire impact on adoptions in South Africa. I share my opinion based on my experience as a change management consultant for the past 20 years, and specifically in the child protection community for the past nine. In doing this I hope to speak for abandoned children who are left on the streets, rubbish heaps and latrines of South Africa every year, for too often they do not have a voice.

Experiences in child protection in South Africa

I entered the child protection community in 2010, the year child abandonment sky-rocketed in South Africa. Having experienced multiple miscarriages and suffering from postpartum depression, my mothering instincts were on high alert.

In July of our World Cup year, I was horrified to see a picture of a newborn baby girl who had been abandoned and who had died on a rubbish heap on the outskirts of Soweto – on the front page of a national newspaper. Calling around, I quickly realised that the issue of child abandonment was reaching epidemic proportions (estimated at 3,500 children in 2010 alone). However, the Department of Social Development at the time were refusing to acknowledge that it was a problem.

To put this in perspective, a social worker at one of the largest child welfare organisations in the country told me that a few years previously, they would see only one or two abandoned children a month, but in 2010 as many as five or six children were being delivered to their doors every week.

CBI registers cases against 2 more shelter homes in Bihar for abuse of minors

The Supreme Court had directed the CBI to probe alleged abuse of inmates at 17 shelter homes listed in a study conducted by Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has registeredtwofresh FIRs pertaining to alleged abuse of children in two shelter homes inGaya and Bhagalpur. This is in addition to its ongoing probe into sexual assault with minor girls at the Muzaffarpur shelter home.

This comes after the Supreme Court directive on November 28 to the CBI to probe alleged abuse of inmates at 17 shelter homeslisted in the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) study.

The investigating agency lodged a case against director of Boy’s children home of Bhagalpur run by Rupam Pragati Samaj Samiti, while the second case was lodged against House Mother Children Home in Gaya.

Bihar shelter home,Child abuse,Bihar

There was national outrage last year following the alleged abuse of minor girls at a shelter home run by journalist Brajesh Pathak in Muzaffarpur in Bihar.(HT File Photo)

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has registeredtwofresh FIRs pertaining to alleged abuse of children in two shelter homes inGaya and Bhagalpur. This is in addition to its ongoing probe into sexual assault with minor girls at the Muzaffarpur shelter home.

This comes after the Supreme Court directive on November 28 to the CBI to probe alleged abuse of inmates at 17 shelter homeslisted in the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) study.

The investigating agency lodged a case against director of Boy’s children home of Bhagalpur run by Rupam Pragati Samaj Samiti, while the second case was lodged against House Mother Children Home in Gaya.

Special invitation for Isabel Hövels: The 29-year-old from Emsdetten will visit Bishop Felix Genn on Thursday. The background: The hairdresser and make-up specialist was adopted at the age of six months by a German couple from an orphanage of the Missionaries of Charity in India. For decades she tried, with the help of her adoptive parents and friends in vain to locate her birth mother. She always bounced off a wall of silence in the religious community. When Bishop Felix Genn wrote a letter to the Mother Superior of the Sisters in India in 2015, everything suddenly went very fast. A few weeks later she held all the important information in her hand.

"I am infinitely grateful to the bishop for having worked so successfully for me," says Hövels. But she also wondered how it could be, "that the sisters in India have been masonry for years and suddenly give out everything just because a bishop asks." Her picture of the church had been badly damaged in the years before. Again and again she was rejected and comforted. She learned of irregularities in the mediation of Indian infants by the sisters, of money that flowed illegally and of missing consent from parents.

New view of the church

Also about this Hövels wants to talk to the bishop. Recent developments have also opened up a new view of the church for her, she says, "If the system has mistakes, then it is individual people in the church who do much good."

To these people belong for them the Indian priest Father Theo Kindo, at that time in the Pastoralteam of the St. Nicomedes municipality in Borghorst, which intervened both as an interpreter as well as travel companion and connoisseur of the church landscape in its homeland. And the Osnabrück general vicar Theo Paul, who made important contacts as a friend of his uncle and also traveled to India to help. He was the one who made contact with Bishop Felix Genn. He then turned to today's Superior General of the Missionaries of Charity, Sister Mary Prema Pierick. She comes from the Westphalian Reken.