Adopted children are allowed to search for their parents and there is a lot of understanding that they want to do this, but the State is not responsible for paying for this search. This is apparent from the vast majority of responses to a Radar poll about compensation for the search for biological parents. Of the 852 responses, 691 are against financial compensation from the State. 128 of the respondents do think that compensation should be made and 33 people do not know or have certain conditions under which this compensation must take place.

The NOS recently reported that the Dutch government does not intend to offer financial compensation to adoptees who want to look for their biological parents. This is apparent from the rejection of a liability claim by lawyer Dewi Deijle. She argues that the Dutch State is legally liable for abuses in adoptions from abroad.

Ban on intercountry adoptions

Intercountry adoptions have been in the news a lot lately. These were banned after the Joustra Committee ruled that too many abuses had taken place. 'The Dutch government has failed to act by looking away for years', said outgoing Minister of Legal Protection Dekker when the new ban was announced.

Juris Dewi Deijle believes that there should therefore be a compensation fund for adoptees who want to find or have sought their biological family. However, Minister Dekker did not agree. 'Extremely disappointing', says Deijle.

„Kinderwens is beste motief voor adoptie"

Stichting Flash viert tienjarig bestaan

3 minuten leestijd

HILVERSUM - Een reünie van meer dan duizend adoptie-ouders en enkele honderden jonge, donkere kinderen. De adoptiestichting Flash vierde zaterdag in Hilversum haar tienjarig bestaan.

Uit de lotsverbondenheid van een wekenlang verblijf in het exotische, maar onbekende Verre Oosten, waar de aanstaande adoptieouders hun verwachtingen en onzekerheden hebben gedeeld, zijn vaak goede vriendschappen ontstaan. In een Hilversums schoolgebouw haalden zij herinneringen op, vaak aan emotionele gebeurtenissen, te midden van hun spelende kinderen.

It’s the story that shames Britain – a quarter of a million unmarried mothers made to give up their babies. Now they, and the children callously wrenched away, want justice. Here, five victims reveal: The cruel legacy of forced adoption

Every night, Alison Devine used to lie in bed planning how she would escape with her baby son. At 17 she’d fallen pregnant after a one-night stand with a ‘Jack the Lad’.

And when she started to show at six months, she was swiftly packed off to an unmarried mother and baby home called The Haven, run by the Baptist church, in Yateley, Hampshire. It was 1961.

At night she could hear the babies cry in the nursery, but wasn’t allowed to go to them. ‘I often thought I’d just take a pram and do a bunk with him,’ she says. ‘But they had someone on guard at the nursery door, and anyway, I thought they’d catch me and lock me up.’

Alison was one of an estimated quarter of a million pregnant women and girls — almost all unmarried and under the age of 24 — who, in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, were sent away to have their babies at a network of church-run homes that stretched across the UK.

Rani, who runs a tea stall, has six children to raise. Three of them are her own. The other three are children of her friend Sujita, who succumbed to Covid-19 six months ago. Bound by an unspoken commitment, Rani took Sujita’s children under her wing.

With children orphaned in the second wave of Covid-19 gaining national attention, Sujita’s children appeared on the radar of the district authorities. Rani was directed to produce them before the district’s child welfare committee (CWC). To her horror, the children were sent to the local shelter home on the grounds that Rani is unable to provide for them. Since then, she has been knocking on every door she can in the hope of getting them back. Rani’s agony brings into focus the issue of foster care versus institutional care. Fostering has yet to gain currency as an established form of child protection in India. It is a temporary arrangement in which the foster parents have only guardianship rights and are responsible for nurturing the child in a secure and personalised family set-up. The foster family exercises no control over the child’s assets, nor is it bound to extend inheritance rights over its own assets to the foster child. By contrast, in the system of adoption, the adopted child becomes a legal member of the family, entitled to property rights.

There is currently a global push for non-institutionalised care solutions for orphaned children, in acknowledgment of every child’s right to be raised in a family. A growing corpus of research highlights delayed physical and mental development in the often overcrowded and under-resourced shelter homes, and increased likelihood of social and behavioural problems.

India is home to nearly 30 million orphaned and abandoned children. The legal adoption of these children presents a two-fold challenge. Long-winding adoption procedures result in just a fraction of them finding a home. The annual adoptions facilitated by the Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) are as low as 3,000-4,000. Secondly, there is a reluctance to adopt because of the onerous life-long commitment and enforceable legal rights of the adopted children. Foster care, by comparison, offers a more flexible ecosystem. It has the added security of regular follow-ups on the well-being of the child, compared to legal adoption where there is little or no follow-up. Denying foster care to parents below a certain economic threshold, as in Rani’s case, is not only ethically revolting but also legally untenable. In most countries, foster parents are financially supported by the state for the child’s care. There is great merit in extending state support to foster parents of modest means, especially when they can provide a socio-cultural environment similar to the one the child comes from. In India, too, district agencies receive annual funds to support fostering, which largely languish unutilised.

A legal framework to promote foster care in India was introduced by the central government through the enactment of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act. However, the Act left it to the states “to make rules for purposes of carrying out the scheme of foster care of children,” resulting in a sporadic and uneven implementation. Even today, several CWCs are not aware of the relevant legal provisions. Many avoid the responsibility of selecting foster families, approving childcare plans, and conducting mandatory monthly inspections to help check misuse of the foster system for abuse and exploitation.

Two public interest litigations (PIL) have been moved in the Bombay high court (HC) seeking protection and various reliefs to over 1,450 children orphaned after their parents succumbed to the Covid-19 infection and setting up of special Covid wards in Covid care centres with specially trained medical staff to attend to visually-impaired patients and special vaccination facilities for them

The first PIL filed by Gayatri Patwardhan, a social worker from Pune through advocates Asim Sarode and Ajinkya Udane has claimed that while the state has announced various reliefs and gave assurances of taking care of children orphaned due to Covid, there was no guarantee of the authorities keeping their word, hence the PIL sought various directions for the benefit of such children.

The petition has sought to increase the grant of ?1,100 per month for children up to the age of 18 years under the Child Care Scheme and Foster Care Policy to ?5,000 per month. The petition also seeks free education for orphaned children and to start and implement Education Sponsorship Programme (ESP) under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection) Act and the Integrated Child Protection Scheme (ICPS) guidelines.

The PIL also seeks directions to authorities to properly identify and prepare documents pertaining to caste certificate, birth certificate, property documents and identification records of orphaned children.

The second PIL filed by Swagat Thorat, editor of a Braille Magazine, has raised concerns over the lack of healthcare facilities for visually impaired people and seeks reliefs including special Covid-19 wards, ‘barrier-free’ hospitals with specially trained medical staff to attend them and special vaccination facilities for them. The PIL also seeks direction to the state Disability Commissioner to provide data of visually impaired people who succumbed to Covid-19 infection, so that their families can be compensated through various government schemes.

Forty children from orphanages in Mumbai, Pune, Solapur, Amaravati and Palghar are set to get foster families. As part

of an experimental scheme initiated by the state government, those wanting to be foster parents can register online with

the Women and Child Welfare (WCF) Commissionerate (https://wcdcommpune.org), which is located in Pune.

After a scrutiny of family backgrounds and a rigorous selection process by the District Child Protection Unit, these

families will get Rs 2,000 per month from the government to ensure the protection and rehabilitation of orphaned

Kolkata: Cops at Bowbazar police station have registered an

FIR against fake adoption posts on under

the stringent IT Act, Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of

Children) Act and the Disaster Management Act. A special

team has been formed to probe the case.

The guidelines also say that before declaring a child abandoned or orphan and available for adoption, the committee will make efforts and an inquiry to trace parents or guardians.

NEW DELHI: The Delhi government has decided to allow individuals, institutions or groups to temporarily adopt orphaned or abandoned children staying in its shelter homes.

For the first time, the State Children Protection Society (SCPS) of the department of women and child development has invited applications urging people to come forward to take responsibility for such children.

Any person, institution or group, willing to take care of a kid in need, can write to the member secretary of the society with social-cultural status, family composition, and financial capacity. The details are on the department’s website.

"Such provisions already existed in the Juvenile Justice (JJ) Act. This is our awareness campaign for child welfare committees (CWCs). After assessing the needs of the child and families, foster care may be allowed. For the first time, a public notice has been issued to invite people or organisations and make them aware of the arrangement. We have also issued a set of guidelines for the same as per the rules," said Rashmi Singh, director of the women and child development (WCD) department.

FOLEY, Ala. (WKRG) – Jen and Andy Bengel are growing their family and are ready to bring their 4-year-old adopted son, Moses, home from Uganda. The journey hasn’t been easy.

“We got an email from the United States Embassy that said we are no longer doing any visa application. We are temporarily stopping all visa applications,” said Jen Bengel.

That’s because last week on June 18th the country imposed new lockdown restrictions as the number of COVID-19 cases climb. Schools, non-essential travel and public gatherings have all been put on pause. The lockdown is reported to last up to 45 days. The Bengels say the U.S. Embassy is also closed during the lockdown.

The adoption process began 17 months ago, and while Jen is back home in Baldwin County with the couple’s other children, Andy is stuck in Uganda waiting to bring Moses back to the states. She left the country in April when they believed everyone would be returning home just a short time later.

“It’s been 9 weeks now since I’ve seen my son and it’s been really hard,” she added.

Her siblings hated Leanne. She had small eyes and black hair. Leanne was the only person of Asian descent that lived in her small neighborhood located in the city of Detroit, Michigan. Her three siblings bullied her and her adoptive parents abused her. It was a different story though when Leanne was first received into the arms of her adoptive parents in December of 1966. They voluntarily adopted Leanne. They must have once had sympathy for a baby coming from a poor country.

However, Leanne’s adoptive mother began to treat her coldly. Later the mother attempted a suicide ? she had a weak character and was unable to give Leanne the motherly love that she was supposed to receive. The adoptive father sexually abused Leanne until she was 13 years old. Leanne did not know what he was doing to her when she was little, and did not realize what it was until she grew up, but by that point, she had to remain silent because she did not want to be abandoned again. She found herself surrounded by white people like her adoptive father and she ran away from home when she was 18 years old. She got married before she reached 20 years of age, but got divorced five years later.

Is she unhappy? It is too soon to tell. Leanne Leith, now 44 years old, says that her life was one of “continuous isolation,” but she still has hope in her life--to meet her biological parents. For a year she has been requesting Holt International to let her see her records. Holt International U.S. replied that they do not have any of her records from South Korea, and Holt Children’s Service in South Korea said that they had passed her record to the U.S. After 42 years, Leanne returned to South Korea last February.

The only part of her record she has managed to extract from the adoption agency is a page of paperwork and a photograph of a two year-old baby who has no idea about her future. The photographed is labeled ‘#4708.’ That was the number given to the baby who was abandoned outside Wonju City hall in Gangwon province on March 1966. The photo must have been sent to the adoptive father who sexually abused Leanne and the adoptive mother who suffered from depression. Now the photo is the key to meeting her biological parents. It has been over three months since she arrived in South Korea, but she has not had much success. Her tragedy has not yet reached its conclusion.

Leanne shares the future of thousands of South Korean children that are being abroad for adoption every year. Not all of them will end up living tragic lives; however, there will be sadness and complications throughout their lives. The wrongs of adults are put onto the shoulders of children, and it is the State’s fault.