Madurai: Taking into account that there was no column in the application form to declare whether a child is natural or adopted,

Madras high court quashed the letter issued by Madurai regional passport officer summoning a man for inquiry on the ground

that he had suppressed the fact that his daughter was adopted while applying for passport for her earlier. The court also

directed the authorities to process the petitioner’s application and re-issue passport to his daughter.

The petitioner and his wife had adopted a girl child through the child welfare committee in 2015 by following the procedures

All seven, including five women, hail from "well-to-do families" that operate businesses of their own in the steel city, Bikram Keshari Bhoi, the additional superintendent of police (ASP), Rourkela, said.

Rourkela: A child-trafficking racket has been busted with the arrest of seven persons, and a one-and-a-half year-old girl rescued from their clutches, a senior police officer said on Tuesday.

All seven, including five women, hail from "well-to-do families" that operate businesses of their own in the steel city, Bikram Keshari Bhoi, the additional superintendent of police (ASP), Rourkela, said.

The eighth member of the racket, also a woman, is at large, and the police are on the lookout for her, he said.

"This has been a real revelation ... We are not going to leave anything to chance and find out all about this illegal activity. We will investigate every possible angle that might be involved, including organ trade," Bhoi asserted.

Born in Ethiopia, they were adopted like thousands of other Ethiopian children. Torn from their family by a malicious association, they landed in French families who wanted to adopt. Now adults, they have been able to reconnect with their Ethiopian family.

These are stories marked by lies and concealment, where symbolic and physical violence mingle and entangle, split, troubled and broken identities. They were born in Ethiopia but were taken from their families, adopted through a Catholic association, the Children of Queen of Mercy.

Samuel is one of them . He arrived in France in 1996 with his two sisters. He remembers little of his biological parents, who died as a child. Before his adoption via the Children of the Queen of Mercy, he was placed in an orphanage.

I was not prepared for a departure for France. We were cleaned like cars to make us presentable.

When he meets his adoptive parents, very practicing Catholics, Samuel remains in the dark. With his two sisters, he arrived in Limousin in a family of six children, two of whom were adopted.

MANILA - The House of Representatives on Wednesday approved on final reading House Bill 8998 or the proposed "Domestic Adoption Act", without rejection from any lawmaker.

The bill will be sent to the Senate for approval.

According to the congressional fact sheet, the proposed measure seeks to streamline and hasten the domestic adoption process, to establish the policies and rules on domestic administrative adoption, and eliminate the judicial phase of adoption.

It provides for pre-adoption services by the local government units and child-caring agencies to prevent the child’s separation from the biological parents.

It prescribes rules on who may adopt, who may be adopted and whose consent is necessary to the adoption.

A WOMAN WHO received personal documents from the Department of Children says her signature was forged on a letter sent to nuns from a Mother and Baby Home in 1980 thanking them for their help.

Mary* maintains she never wrote the letter and was not aware it existed until last month. She believes her late mother wrote the letter, pretending to be her.

A number of religious orders have previously used such letters to show that some women who spent time in mother and baby homes and similar institutions were grateful for the help they received, as noted by the Commission of Investigation’s final report in January.

Now aged in her 60s, Mary was sent to Ard Mhuire Mother and Baby Home in Dunboyne, which was run by the Good Shepherd Sisters, in the late 1970s when she became pregnant outside marriage in her early 20s.

Mary wanted to raise her daughter but felt compelled to give her up for adoption in 1980, despite repeated attempts to keep her.

Summary

This report presents the findings of the National Research Study on the Service Response to Past Adoption Practices.

The aim of the study was to strengthen the evidence available to governments to address the current service needs of individuals affected by past adoption practices, including the need for information, counselling and reunion services.

In particular, the study has targeted a wide group of those affected by past practices, including mothers, fathers, adoptees, adoptive parents (and wider family members); and professionals currently working with affected individuals.

Findings from the Senate Inquiry into the Commonwealth Contribution to Former Forced Adoption Policies and Practices were also taken into account.

In recent times, amendments to the laws have resulted in dilution of the juvenile justice system and child protection legislations.

Amendments to the juvenile justice legislation have once again been passed in Parliament, without comprehensive debate, leaving child rights practitioners confused regarding the rationale for such amendment.

Concerns regarding non-implementation of child-rights legislation and provisions that are not child-friendly have been constantly raised by child rights practitioners. Certain problems that hound the general legal system, such as, delays in administration of justice, also impact children, and require to be addressed. In recent times, amendments to the laws have resulted in dilution of the juvenile justice system and child protection legislations, whereby well-entrenched philosophies are being overturned and child protection services are substituted or placed under the control of the general administration, who has no expertise or inclination towards child-related issues.

Similar is the situation regarding the amendments to the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, that were passed by the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha on March 24 and July 28 respectively, despite opposition by academics, professionals and civil society organisations, as these were injurious to children’s interests.

DMs given powers to deal with adoption process

The Ministry of Labor announced that the Government approved on Wednesday the Methodological Norms for the application of the Adoption Law, which makes the procedures more flexible and increases the state support provided to the adoptive families.

According to a communiqué of the Ministry of Labor, the normative act ensures equitable access for entry on the lists in the matching process for all adopters or adoptive families, establishing a single ranking criterion, namely the seniority of the certificates. It also provides for the obligation to notify the adopter or adoptive family of the outcome of the match, the reasons why the practical matching procedure has not been initiated and the setting of a deadline for this.

„The document adopted today also establishes the procedure for granting the monetary rights provided by Law no. 268/2020, respectively the support allowance and the fixed amount in the amount of 1,500 lei, through the payment and social inspection agencies of the county and of the municipality of Bucharest ”, it is also shown in the communiqué.

According to him, considering the extension of the validity of the certificate from 2 years to 5 years, the norms of application of the law establish the procedure of annual verification of the fulfillment of the conditions that were the basis for the issuance of the certificate. The verification involves at least a visit to the home of the adopter / adoptive family and a psychological counseling session at least 60 days before the deadline of one year from the issuance of the certificate or, as the case may be, from the last assessment.

Excessive bureaucratization of certain stages of the adoption process will be eliminated

Children aged 4 to 10 who have been adopted from China and who no longer know a word of Chinese have been shown to have stored a basic knowledge of their native language. This knowledge can be activated in young children. This baggage may even help in later years when they want to learn a Chinese language again.

Linguists Wencui Zhou, Mirjam Broersma and Anne Cutler of Tilburg University and Radboud University Nijmegen write this in the journal Cognition . They demonstrate this unconscious knowledge in children for Cantonese and Mandarin, so-called tonal languages ??with properties that Dutch does not know.

The linguists tested 46 children who were adopted when they were between nine months and 4.5 years old. As a test group, they set 47 non-adopted Dutch children against this. The subjects were on average seven years old.

The researchers visited all the children at home to have them take individual tests. Mirjam Broersma: 'The tasks are as playful as possible to motivate the children.' On a screen you see a panda mother with two panda babies. For example, the mother says the Chinese sound 'atshhhé'. Then one screen baby repeats 'atshhhé', the other 'atsé'; the test children have to say which baby says the same thing as the mother and which doesn't. If the test child gives the correct answer, flowers will appear and the baby panda will jump up and down.

Tone language

In his 1927 book Possible Worlds, J. B. S. Haldane claims that ‘until politics are a branch of science, we shall do well to regard … social reforms as experiments’. This is certainly confirmed by the successive reforms undertaken in child protection over the past decades.

A history of child protection (yet to be written) would reveal a history of good intentions that often led to abuse, lost childhoods and struggling adults. The children sent to Australia and Canada after the First World War until the late 1960s or placed into adoption against their mothers’ will (as in Philomena’s story) are such examples. The well-intended policies continued in the 1970s and 1980s with the closure of children’s homes, in a desire for children to be raised by families, following disclosure of abuse in residential care and Goffman’s work on asylums. This policy shift was not based on children’s outcomes or on consultation with children. Private boarding schools, which share the same characteristics as residential institutions, have not been closed down; rather, safeguarding measures have been taken and they have maintained a standard for high-quality education.

Although England has been one of the hubs for groundbreaking and ethically conducted research in the field, reforms were mostly borne out of high-profile cases that involved the death of a child rather than evidence based. They led to a ‘risk-oriented’ culture set out in a document of just over 100 pages and a few thousand pages of appendices. As a result, childhood, which is essentially a space of trial and error, became a red-tape exercise. This makes care a disempowering experience for the young people it aims to protect, and one which hinders the development of their autonomy. Unsurprisingly, this system is marked by a low retention rate for social workers, stressed professionals and children whose sense of worth has been eroded by frequent changes of foster families, schools and social workers. In addition to these systemic flaws and challenges, the last ten years have seen a significant rise in the number of children in care, and budget cuts as well. Moreover, the lack of children’s homes, which some children prefer, has pushed many young people into unregulated accommodation.

Voices from the Silent Cradles, based on 40 life history interviews with young people who grew up in care in Romania or were adopted in and from Romania, suggests that it was the quality of care that had an impact on young people’s lives, and not whether it was residential or foster care. This finding is similar to a longitudinal study conducted in Ireland.

The results for the young people who entered adulthood from different types of care were mixed. An exception was those who were adopted in Romania who were able to overcome inherent challenges posed by adoption and whose lives were no different than those of any other young people who never entered care and had supportive parents. Most of the young people who were adopted internationally continued to have identity struggles in their (late) 20s. Irrespective of the age at which they were adopted, their Romanian identity was an important element of who they were, and for most of them, their adoption experience became an invisible barrier to achieving stable careers or stable and healthy relationships. Mixed experiences were reported also by those who grew up in foster care. Some felt that they belonged to their foster homes; others experienced foster care as an isolating, disempowering and ‘unbelonging’ experience that led them into depression and troubled adulthood. Those who left unhappy foster placements to go into kinship care, residential care or other arrangements, did better in the long run compared to those who stayed in those placements until they became 18. Perhaps the most surprising outcomes were those related to residential care. Because they were able to stay in care beyond age 18, some went to university while others took (sometimes precarious) jobs before getting a stable one. Most of them benefitted from the support of child protection staff to get apprenticeships during their teenage years or developed hobbies with mentors they met during their time in care. Having had a personal relationship with a staff member or mentor was crucial to how they experienced residential care. The striking difference was in their personal life. Those placed in institutions at birth did not speak of any romantic relationship before the age of 25. In contrast, most of those who went into children’s homes a few years later were married or in long-term relationships or had experienced romantic relationships. The overall findings of the study confirm Bronfenbrenner’s statement that every child needs at least one adult who is crazy about him or her. The good news is that it is never too late to overcome early adversity with the right support, if the right carer or mentor is found.