A Perth woman who was adopted by a West Australian family after her parents died in Ethiopia is sharing her story to help older adoptees hold onto their cultural identities.  

Meseret Cohen was 13 years old when she and her three siblings were thrust into a new life with a Busselton family.

She said being adopted as a teenager was difficult because she had already spent her formative years in Ethiopia.  

Ms Cohen now provides consultation, coaching and peer support to adoptees and their families to provide the kind of guidance she said would have been useful to her and her family.

"You have all the worldview and the values that you bring with you, and then knowing that you have to completely shift and put that away, was how I dealt with life," Ms Cohen said.

BENGALURU: An adopted son cannot continue to exercise rights as a coparcener in his genitive family, the Kalaburagi bench of the Karnataka high court has observed in a recent judgment.
Dismissing the regular second appeal filed by Bheesmaraja, a resident of Secunderabad, Justice CM Joshi has pointed out that in M Krishna vs M Ramachandra and in another case, the HC had already held that on adoption, the adoptee gets transplanted into the family that adopts him with the same rights as that of a natural-born son, and such transfer of the adopted child severs all his rights with the family from which he was taken in adoption.
 

“It was categorically heldthat he loses the right of succession in genitive family properties,” the judge added.
Son of Pandurangappa Ellur and Radhabai, Bheesmaraja was given in adoption to Hyderabad-based couple P Vishnu and P Shantabai. The adoption deed was executed on December 22, 1974; at that time, Bheesmaraja was 24 years old. His biological father died in 2004.
Thereafter, in the very same year, he moved the Raichur court for partition. He argued that the adoption was without his consent and was prohibited under the provisions of Section 10 of the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act, 1956. His mother, sister and brother resisted his claim, saying he was a consenting party to the adoption, and the suit was dismissed on December 10, 2007. OnJanuary 22, 2010, Bheesmaraja’s appeal, too, was dismissed.
Challenging both orders, he moved the HC, reiterating he is a coparcener in his genitive family and, therefore, had an existing right in family properties.

On the other hand, his mother, brother and sisters, and the children of his deceased brother, Ashokraj, argued that in the Arya Vysya community, to which they belong, adoption of a person aged more than 15 is allowed.

“If we accept the contention of the counsel for the appellant herein, it would lead to a situation whereby an adopted son would continue to be exercising rights as a coparcener in the genitive family as well as the adoptive family. Therefore, this contention at any rate cannot hold good,” the judge noted.

I first came into contact with the Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC) many years ago. They were hosting our transracial and transnational adoptee group at the time. It was decided that they would rebrand our group ‘International Searchers.’ You don’t need a degree in English to work out the connotations attached to this rebranding. I was told by quite a few adoptees that this name is what drew them to join, in the hope that they would find help to trace their birth families across borders.

That help never came. We would sit and talk about the frustrations of being people of colour in a white privileged society and how this has affected our entire lives. How being raised in a white adoptive home meant we internalised that racism. Our parents claimed to be ‘colour blind’ but the world around us was far from it. Social workers were privy to those meetings and one of them, a Black staff member, spoke of how she was raised by a white mother and had grown up with racism. This does not equate to understanding how it feels to be a transracial and intercountry adoptee. Her lack of knowledge and reflection on what it means to be separated from your biological family and raised without any genetic mirroring was quite shocking. We were not advised or supported on what routes to take to trace our biological families or how to navigate foreign bureaucracy. I was even approached after one meeting by another member of staff to say they did help with tracing – for a fee!

On 1st July 2023, IAC joined the Coram Group. The amalgamation would enable them to “transform the lives of vulnerable children worldwide who…need a loving home in the UK” they proudly announced, but let’s take a closer look at this collaboration. Coram has a history. I’ve visited the Foundling Museum a number of times for various events and what shocks me is the absence of the children whose lives they moulded. Where are their stories and where are their portraits? There are large portraits of the founders hanging from frames everywhere. Noble men and women who did right by society at the time. The foundlings they ‘rescued’ are voiceless, faceless; they exist but are hidden. This is how many of us adult adoptees feel today. We are no longer living in times of colonial empire. Gone are the days of the workhouse, although poverty is rife and coexists with the privileged aristocracy just like in the days of Thomas Coram. The founders believed they were helping the children who had been deserted by their mothers because of poverty and stigma. Sounds familiar, right?

IAC is the only organisation in the UK that facilitates international adoptions and proudly lists their ‘special programmes’ — countries with which they have negotiated to be the exclusive supplier, as if they are purchasing excess or unwanted children from orphanages. As history tells us the word orphan is a global term to mean a child who has been abandoned, but we all know there are so many stories of those same children who have grown into adults, and learned after years of tracing that their birth families were forced to give them up; some were even illegally traded. 

What I find astonishing is IAC’s refusal to acknowledge that these children had a history prior to the orphanages they ended up in. They have participated in the removal of these children from their countries of origin and have an absolute duty of care to ensure that all their identifying paperwork is intact. They have a moral duty (though sadly not a statutory one) to assist us on a governmental level to return to our countries of origin and reinstate our citizenships if we choose to reconnect with our roots. Taking a child from an orphanage and replanting that human being thousands of miles away from their native home comes with a responsibility to see that that child grows into a whole intact adult with complete knowledge of why they were left and where they came from. We should not be attempting to navigate the long and difficult process of trying to contact organisations in our native countries for documents pertaining to our biological history without the help of a registered governmental intermediary and interpreters provided and paid for, where needed. Alongside this, all avenues for access to cultural heritage should be made available to the intercountry adoptees that they place here in the UK. 

There is a half-crumbling church, covered in red dust, at Radium Hill, a former uranium mine deep in the South Australian desert. It was built by Father Vincent Shiel, with his own hands, in 1956. Six years later, his son Brendan was born in Melbourne to a former nun — a secret the priest kept until he died 37 years later.

Brendan was one of the lucky ones. Both he and his brother Damien were adopted by Roy and Bet Watkins, in Richmond, Melbourne. As Damien, who was adopted two years before Brendan, recalls: “One day a clergyman was talking to Roy and said, ‘Uh, how come you don’t have children yet?’ And Roy said, ‘Well, we haven’t been blessed’. And he said, ‘Maybe that’s something we can help you with’.”

Brendan and Damien had an idyllic life with Roy and Bet, who were huge Richmond Tigers fans. They told the boys they were adopted when they were young, but it was Brendan who was most curious about finding his biological parents.

In 1990, at the age of 29, Brendan decided to apply for his original birth certificate because it would carry the names of his biological parents. A meeting was set up at the Catholic Family Welfare Bureau in Melbourne. But it wasn’t what he expected.

“I was hoping that the birth certificate would have both parents’ names,” says Brendan. “It just had my mother’s”. And she wasn’t 16, 17 or 18, as he expected, but much older — 27 — and from South Australia.

Guwahati, Aug 12 (PTI) Union minister Munjapara Mahendrabhai on Saturday said that amendments in the Juvenile Justice (JJ) Act, 2015, have been made for better protection of children in need of care or in conflict with law.
    He said these changes have also made it mandatory for states to deliver on all aspects of juvenile justice, including constituting child welfare committees and registration of child care institutions.
    The minister was speaking at the fifth one-day regional symposium on child protection, child safety and child welfare, organised here by the Ministry of Women and Child Development (MoWCD).
    Representatives from all the eight northeastern states participated in the symposium, which was also attended by over 1,200 representatives from child welfare committees (CWCs), district child protection units, Juvenile Justice Boards (JJBs), members of village child protection committee (VCPC) and Anganwadi workers.
    The programme is part of a series of regional symposiums to be held across the country to raise awareness about child protection, child safety and child welfare issues, a PIB release said.
    In his address, Mahendrabhai, Minister of State, MoWCD, highlighted the changes made in the JJ Act 2015, its rules and adoption regulations.
    "These changes will help in delivering better quality services to the children in need of care and protection and also children in conflict with law," he maintained.
    He said definitions of terms such as foster care, inter-country adoption, specialised adoption agencies and sponsorship have been duly amended.
    Similarly, it has been made mandatory for states to constitute Juvenile Justice Boards in every district, constitution of one or more child welfare committees in every district, mandatory reporting of a child found separated from guardian and registration of child care institutions, the minister added.
    Additional Secretary, MoWCD, Sanjeev Kumar Chadha, in his speech, appreciated the work being done by all the functionaries in different states for child welfare under the JJ Act.
    He highlighted the success of Child Helpline in various states and focused on the implementation of the principle of "no child is left out" to help them become responsible citizens of the country.
    National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) chairperson Priyank Kanoongo shared the changes made in the spheres of child trafficking, street children, child adoption and monitoring of children care institutions.
    Giving an example of how NCPCR has been spearheading child welfare, he mentioned the case of Kiphire district in Nagaland.
    "We travelled for 17 hours by road from Dimapur to reach Kiphire. It was the first time that child welfare functionaries were visiting the district. We received over 250 complaints from the residents. We noticed the 20-year-old Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya there was functioning without a building. The issues were subsequently addressed. JNV Kiphire now has a school building," Kanoongo said.
    The successful interventions under Mission Vatsalya were also disseminated during the symposium, the release said.
    Mission Vatsalya is a roadmap to achieve development and child protection priorities aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It lays emphasis on child rights, advocacy and awareness along with strengthening of the juvenile justice care and protection system with the motto to 'leave no child behind'.
    The Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 provisions and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 form the basic framework for implementation of the Mission.

An organisation involved in reconnecting families devastated by the forced adoption era has called for compensation for mothers, fathers and children who were adopted out as babies in a strongly-worded submission to Western Australia's inquiry into the practice.

So far, Victoria has been the only state in the country to promise redress to thousands of mainly unwed mothers who were coerced into giving up their babies for adoption from the 1930s to the 1980s.

But now the head of the organisation Jigsaw WA, which has been supporting people traumatised by forced adoption since 1978, has called for all parties – mothers, fathers and adoptees — to receive redress which would be a national first.

In her submission to the ongoing WA inquiry, Jigsaw manager Isabel Andrews called for a base rate of redress for anyone involved in forced adoption, many of whom have had to deal with life-long consequences including PTSD, depression, grief and identity issues.

"It's important to acknowledge that some individuals experienced additional layers of trauma, such as adoptees who were abused by their adoptive parents," Ms Andrews said in the submission.

Today is International Youth Day — a day to celebrate the promise and power of young people all over the world. An important part of that celebration is reckoning with the unique hardships that youth so often have to overcome, and the wisdom they bring to the table as a result.

Particularly deserving of our attention this International Youth Day are those who live or used to live in residential care facilities, sometimes called orphanages or children’s homes. The statistics vary from country to country, but an overwhelming majority — 80% or more — of children in residential care actually have at least one living parent.

The reason children end up in residential care is often due to poverty combined with another factor, like lack of access to school. A poor family may experience a crisis that results in their child being placed in residential care where they hope their child’s basic needs will be met. In Guatemala, approximately 4,000 children live in the care of these types of facilities, many placed there by poverty-stricken families who think they are doing the right thing. Nearly half of Guatemalan families live below the poverty line.

However, a group of Guatemalan young people is coming together to improve future generations' outcomes.

One of those young people is 21-year-old Rebeca. Rebeca grew up in residential care and wants more for herself and her country. She understands firsthand the challenges of living in residential care and being separated from her family. As she was nearing 18 years old, the age when she would need to leave residential care, Rebeca recalls lying awake at night wondering how she would forge a path forward in the overwhelming, sometimes frightening world waiting for her outside the orphanage. Where would she work? Who would support her if she needed help? Would opportunities come her way? Would she struggle to care for herself? 

In 2019, ZEIT ONLINE reported on a Greek clinic where couples from Germany had children born. Now the police have arrested the doctors.

Greek police have closed a surrogacy clinic on the island of Crete and arrested eight employees, including the facility's two senior doctors. The police in Athens said it was a "criminal organization whose members are said to be guilty of human trafficking and illegal child adoptions," the police in Athens said in response to the case , which is currently causing a stir across the country . ZEIT ONLINE had already reported on the same clinic in the city of Chania in an investigative research in 2019 and uncovered a number of inconsistencies back then. Some media in Greece also accuse the investigators of thisthat they should have intervened sooner. Surrogacy is permitted in Greece under strict legal requirements, but even back then research showed that these were not being adhered to in the now closed clinic.

As the police further announced, in the far-reaching investigations since last December alone, at least "182 cases of exploitation of women in the area of ​​egg retrieval and surrogacy have been registered", and there have been a further 400 cases of fraud in the area of ​​artificial insemination. According to the police, the 73-year-old director and founder of the clinic, whom the ZEIT ONLINE reporters spoke to during their undercover research, together with other employees, set up an international network of "brokers" to bring "vulnerable foreign women" to Greece and "exploit them there as egg donors or surrogate mothers".

The Greek police continue to say that the aim was to meet the “wishes of the organization’s customers from all over the world”. These were childless couples, as well as single or same-sex men who wanted to have children. In 2019, the two reporters from ZEIT ONLINE posed as a childless couple from Germany at the clinic under a false identity and met one of the surrogate mothers. The head of the clinic confirmed at the time that he had already worked “with many couples from Germany”. In Greece, however, surrogacy is only permitted on condition that there is no commercial purpose associated with it. For example, a friend or relative may carry a baby for a childless couple. A prerequisite is also judicial permission for such surrogacy. According to the police, the clinic often forged these.
 

Women housed in 14 controlled apartments

The police said they have registered a case of conspiracy and illegal trafficking of a human being but have not arrested anyone in the case so far.

The Bhoiwada police on Wednesday registered a case against a Bhiwandi-based couple for illegally adopting a seven-day-old child from an Uttar Pradesh-based woman. The police said the child was born to a woman through an illicit relationship and as she did not want to keep the child, the infant was handed over to the childless couple.

According to the police officials, the three persons who have been booked have been identified as Irshad Rangrez, his wife Tahira and a woman named Rubina Bano.

The police said that Irshad, who is a vegetable vendor, stays with his wife in Bhiwandi while Bano was their neighbour there till four years ago. In 2019, Bano left her Bhiwandi residence and shifted to Pratapgarh in Uttar Pradesh with her family and she was aware that the couple were not able to conceive a child and were undergoing treatment.

“So on July 18, she allegedly called the couple and informed them that one of her relatives had delivered a child and they wanted to give him away. Bano further asked them to come to UP and take custody of the child immediately,” said an officer.

For years, Bibi Hasenaar felt rejected because she was adopted aged four. Then she saw a photo that described her as missing – and began to uncover an astonishing dark history

Bibi Hasenaar has had two lives. One began in November 1976, when she was about four, arriving in the Netherlands to meet her adoptive parents. “I remember it vividly. There’s a photo of us at the airport with other children arriving from Bangladesh – it was published in a Dutch paper.” Her older brother Babu was there, too.

Her other life appears only in fragments. She remembers being in a children’s home with another older brother and having her food stolen by older children. “It was not a nice place to be,” Hasenaar says. Her only memory of their mother is her long black hair. But of the flight out of Bangladesh, she remembers every detail. At her kitchen table in the village of Muiderberg, 30 minutes’ drive east of Amsterdam, sipping hot water and fresh ginger, the 51-year-old slowly recounts the long journey that changed her life.