Unmarked graves containing the remains of 215 Indigenous children have been discovered on the grounds of a former residential school in the interior of southern British Columbia.

The grim discovery at the former school near the town of Kamloops was announced late on Thursday by the Tk’emlups te Secwépemc people after the site was examined by a team using ground-penetrating radar.

“We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify. To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” said Rosanne Casimir, chief of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, in a statement.

Canada confronts its dark history of abuse in residential schools

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An environment in which family members support one another and express their feelings can reduce the effects of social deprivation on cognitive ability and development among adopted children, suggests a small study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health.

In contrast, rule-driven households where family members are in conflict may increase an adopted child's chances for cognitive, behavioural and emotional difficulties. The study was conducted by Margaret F Keil, PhD, and colleagues in the Section on Endocrinology and Genetics at NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). It appears in Pediatric Research.

Researchers enrolled children who had spent at least eight months in Eastern European orphanages before their adoption by American families. The children ranged from 14 to 40 months of age and were evaluated with physical, psychological and developmental tests twice during the following two years. Families also responded to questionnaires on the children's development and on various aspects of their home lives. The study included 10 adopted children and 19 similar children born to American families.

Overall, the adopted children had significant deficits in growth, cognitive ability and development in comparison to the American-born children. However, differences were smaller among children from families scoring higher in cohesion, where family members provided help and support for each other, and expressiveness- families whose members are encouraged to express their feelings. Children had greater deficits if their families scored higher in conflict- an open expression of anger and aggression- and in control-- a family life run according to set rules and procedures.

The authors concluded that family cohesion and expressiveness could moderate the effects of pre-adoption adversity, while family conflict and adherence to rules could increase the risk for behavioural problems. The authors added that larger studies are needed to verify their findings.

In commemoration of the 2021 World Children’s Day (WCD), the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), has urged governments at all levels, to adopt and enforce the rights of the child in all the 36 states of the federation.

Executive Secretary of the Commission, Tony Ojukwu who made the call in Abuja while marking this year’s WCD, noted that children deserve special attention and protection in order for them to fruitfully pass through the various stages of survival and development.

He said, “ it has become imperative for states who are yet to adopt the Child’s Rights Law to do so to avoid further violations of the rights of these vulnerable children”.

The Chief Human Rights Officer in Nigeria observed that “ the issue of out-of-school children, child labour, poor antenatal and postnatal care, child wandering, child abandonment, child denial of necessaries, Almajiri children syndrome, kidnapping, malnutrition, etc. still rear their ugly heads and therefore pose a serious challenge to the proper development of the child especially in states where the Child’s rights law is not in place”.

According to him, “ the impact of COVID-19 pandemic brought to the fore the level of vulnerability of children in most parts of the world including Nigeria where a lot of children could not continue with their education as a result of poverty and deprivation because their parents or guardians could not afford an online system of education”.

(CNN)I adopted my daughter from foster care. It took a specialized village to help her succeed.

The day our daughter toddled around a corner of her foster mother's house in a peach pantsuit and flashed my husband and me a mischievous grin, we knew we were her parents.

We also knew we had made the right choice in adopting her from our state foster care system. What we didn't know was how much we'd rely on medical professionals, educators and mentors over the next 13 years to raise her.

She'd had a rough start in life. Relinquished at birth to the state, she spent her first 18 months in a foster home with three other children her age. The repercussions of too-little eye contact and too-little cuddling in that critical first year of life didn't surface until she entered first grade, when she suffered from separation anxiety so severe that we finally pulled her out of the classroom and found her a pediatric psychologist and alternative schooling.

Longing for love

Hundreds of women who were forced to give up babies for adoption in the 1950s, 60s and 70s are demanding a formal government apology.

Many of the women were unmarried teenagers when they became pregnant, and gave birth in church-run “mother and baby homes” in the UK.

An estimated quarter of a million women were coerced into having babies adopted during the period. In recent years, some have said they were made to feel shame and guilt.

Three years ago, Jill Killington told the Observer: “I was never asked whether I wanted to go ahead with the adoption. It was a fait accompli.”

She became pregnant in 1967 at the age of 16. Her baby Liam was taken from her nine days after she gave birth. “I was expected to just go on with my life as though nothing had happened … I’m certain it has had an impact on my life. There’s a cycle of grief and anger. A kind of melancholy is always there in the back of your mind.”

Mumbai: As many as 2,290 children in Maharashtra have lost either one or both parents to COVID-19 infection so far, sources said on Thursday. While 2,183 children have lost one parent, 107 lost both the parents during the pandemic, the sources in the state Women and Child Development Department said.

"The government has got custody of 10 out of the 107 children as there is nobody to look after them," they said. The data about the orphaned children has been compiled based on the inputs given by the district task forces headed by the collectors.

The government had set up a 10-member task force in each of the 36 districts in the state to identify the children, who were orphaned due to the pandemic.

The task force will also oversee the arrangements of their shelter and supervise their adoption to ensure that there is no trafficking and exploitation.

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Danish television presenter and sports reporter Ulla Essendrop is the latest sensation on short-form video sharing application TikTok, given the hilarious and relatable content she puts out on the platform.

Born in Calcutta in 1976, Essendrop was adopted by a Danish family when she was three years old and moved to Denmark.

Starting her own television sports show Essendrop & Eliten in 2012, she has also worked as a sports reporter at TV2 – a government-owned television network based in Denmark.

From trying out filters to her popular dance challenges, the 43-year-old has over a lakh followers with more than a million likes on her profile.

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The Supreme Court is expected to make a decision in a case over religious foster care agencies discriminating against same-sex couples.

The case pits religious conservatives and those who don’t believe in same-sex marriage against the LGBTQ+ community.

LGBTQ youth are over-represented in the foster care system compared to cisgender and heterosexual youth.

Since the day after the last presidential election, LGBTQ parents and hopefuls have been on edge, waiting for the Supreme Court to decide whether they can have a family of their own.

Kolkata: The detective department has launched a probe into social media posts appealing for adoption of children orphaned

during the pandemic. The probe was ordered by joint CP (crime), Murlidhar Sharma, after a Twitter user lodged a complaint in

this regard and shared a contact number with him.

Activist Sumita Dutta Basu lodged the complaint on May 20 through Twitter. She said that the adoption message had been

circulating on social media for about a month even though it was illegal to adopt children in such a manner. “The message is

For the greater part of the 20th century, Ireland was marked by a culture of shame that separated thousands of women from their children, many of whom were forcibly given up for adoption. The trauma inflicted by these separations was compounded by legal barriers that prevented adopted people from accessing information about themselves.

However, on 12 May, the Irish government published a draft bill that would give those adopted the right to access their birth information. This comes in the wake of decades of activism by adopted people and their supporters and has the potential to significantly reform an adoption system historically marked by secrecy, shame and the trauma arising from institutionalisation.

In modern Ireland, institutions such as mother and baby homes and the Magdalene Laundries were tasked by the state to deal with “fallen” women who had transgressed ideals of Irish femininity, especially by becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Their children were either boarded out to foster parents, institutionalised, or adopted by families of the same faith, some as far away as America, and – as survivors, advocates and researchers have long maintained – often under questionable circumstances.

Many searches by birth parents and children have been thwarted (as poignantly captured in the Oscar-nominated film Philomena), and adopted people in Ireland have been denied information about themselves – if it still exists – that is readily available in other jurisdictions. Although there have been media investigations and the government commissioned a 2019 review into a small sample of illegal adoptions, and published its mother and baby homes investigation in March, there has never been a fully fledged investigation into adoption practices in Ireland.

The information we do have, including testimony from adopted people and their birth parents, calls into question the legality and morality of such practices. A recent RTÉ Prime Time investigation showed how familial relationships were deliberately and systematically severed, with children taken and given away – all to enforce a particular moral code.