In good news for couples looking to adopt children, the Women Development and Child Welfare (WD&CW) Department has set itself a target of ensuring 1,000 adoptions this year.

Nearly 1,350 applications for adoption are pending in Andhra Pradesh, it is learnt. The move will benefit hundreds of orphans and half-orphans living in Child Care Institutions (CCIs) in the State.

About 32,000 children are living at more than 900 registered CCIs (shelter homes) in Andhra Pradesh.

A few months ago, officials of the WD&CW and the Juvenile Welfare Department conducted special drives on CCIs and identified about 2,700 children, who were fit for adoption, but were staying at shelter homes for the last few years. Unconfirmed reports state that many unregistered homes were illegally operating as children’s homes, without furnishing any information to the government.

“Every year, we are giving about 120 to 150 children for adoption from 14 Sishu Gruhas, also known as Specialised Adoption Agencies (SAAs), run by the WD&CW Department. Now, we want to place the children staying in CCIs, who are legally fit for adoption, under foster care,” said WD&CW Special Commissioner H. Arun Kumar.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: An in-depth study about the adopted children in the state since 1990 has revealed that 42% of the parents who adopted the children have not disclosed to their children that they are adopted children. The hesitance to reveal the truth generates mainly from the fear that the child may search for their biological roots and they may not accept the adopted parents.

The study, conducted as a joint initiative of the department of women and child development and Rajagiri College of Social Sciences (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Rajagiri-College-of-Social-Sciences), also revealed that 31% of the children who have come to know about their adopted status, have expressed keenness in finding their biological parents, while the remaining 69% had no such desire.

The study was conducted by handing over a questionnaire to adopted parents and children across the state, and then analysing the response using a statistical analysis software. The study has been prepared on the basis of response from 462 parents and 90 children who have adopted and who are adopted, respectively. The study found that the number of adoptions in the state has been on the rise, and more than 6,400 children have been adopted in the state since 1990.

While half of the parents did not reveal the truth to the children, 93% of the children responded that they are aware of their adopted status. Half of those among who know their adopted status (49%) have come to know the truth from their adopted mother, 36% from their adopted father and the remaining 15% from other relatives, peers and friends.

The majority of (91%) adopted parents have stated that they are proud about the fact that they are adopted parents and 68% of them had no problems with their adopted children. Though the minority, 32% said that they faced some problems with their adopted children. Among these, the highest number said that the children were disobedient (21%), hyperactive (17%), stubborn (16%), performed poorly in academics (13%), were in the habit of lying (11%), were lazy (8%), aggressive and had learning disability (5%) and had stealing tendencies (3%).

The UK's £1.7billion foster industry has seen a growth of firms backed by huge private equity funds raking in taxpayers' cash. They are cashing in on the anguish felt by parents who lose their children into care.

ANGUISHED parents of children taken away by social services have slammed fat-cat businessmen whose firms earn tens of millions from selling foster care.

The UK's £1.7billion foster industry has seen a growth of firms backed by huge private equity funds raking in taxpayers' cash.

They charge huge fees to councils for fostering which last year was at a record high of 53,420 children - three-quarters of all those in care - with 78,000 placements.

Thousands of parents across the country are being dragged into secretive courts each year where social services are removing children in record numbers.

For sale: Guatemalan baby for 150 Gulden Adoption babies from Guatemala

Every Friday, when the visiting hour has ended, María Catarina Socop-Cobosh has to say goodbye to her daughter for a week again ....

GUATEMALA CITY

Once a week, María travels to the other side of Guatemala City to visit her daughter in a highly secure daycare center. "It's just like a prison. I am not allowed to bring any food or candy, because the management says that it will make the children sick. I can't go for a walk with Clarisa, because the management is afraid that I will abduct her or something. As soon as I am outside again, I can no longer keep up. "

María Socop-Cobosh (25) fell victim to the adoption Mafia in Guatemala last May, immediately after the birth of Clarisa. A small network of corrupt lawyers, civil-law notaries, civil servants, doctors, nurses, midwives and 'mediators' pays an estimated twenty million dollars every year to deal with illegal adoptions abroad.

An attempt to remove a baby from a teenage mother at Hawke's Bay Hospital last week needs to be investigated independently, a health board member says.

The hospital was put into lockdown after a stand-off between midwives, social workers and police, as they tried to take a newborn baby from its 19-year-old mother due to family violence concerns.

The baby was eventually allowed to remain with its mother under a care plan originally put together by her midwives and wh?nau.

Hawke's Bay District Health Board member Jacoby Poulain said she was concerned about how the incident was handled by all agencies.

Ms Poulain said she believed the hospital failed in its duty of care to look after the young mother.

Boss Unicef ??steps aside due to "child trafficking"

Bernard Sintobin, the new CEO of Unicef ??Belgium, has to step aside one week after his appointment. He appears in a federal prosecutor's investigation into the trafficking of children from Guatemala. They were allegedly taken away from their parents and then offered as orphans in our country by a Belgian association. The payments went to the sister-in-law of the then dictator in Guatemala.

The 67-year-old Sintobin was appointed last week as CEO of Unicef ??Belgium, the children's rights organization of the United Nations. He started to combine that with his current position as business manager of Wereldmediahuis, the publisher of global magazine MO. In the meantime, however, the man has been discredited for dealing in children from the third world and he has to step aside again. There is a judicial investigation into a non-profit organization in which Sintobin played a prominent role for years. The federal public prosecutor confirms this.

The non-profit organization Hacer Puente organized adoptions of orphans from Guatemala in the late 80s and early 90s. The Bargoens One program recently brought the testimony of two women who suspect they were taken away from their parents as children and brought to Belgium via this non-profit organization. One of them, Coline Fanon, came to Belgium at the age of one and now, almost thirty years later, found her parents back in Guatemala.

Even in 2014, Guatemala was upside down when a Flemish woman, Dolores Maria Preat, discovered that her mother had not given her away from poverty, but that she had been kidnapped. She also came to our country via Hacer Puente. The Guatemalan who had abducted her at the time was sentenced for this a few years ago.

Acting director of Unicef ??Belgium dismissed after accusations on Twitter

The interim director of Unicef ??Belgium, who has been in the job for only a week, was temporarily removed from office on Sunday, the organization's president, Eddy Boutmans, said in a statement.

Messages posted on Twitter brought heavy charges against the replacement, claiming he was involved - as a former treasurer of the Hacer Puente association - in a case of fraudulent adoptions in Guatemala.

"After reading some of the messages on Twitter that make heavy accusations against the acting director of Unicef ??Belgium, Bernard Sintobin, the president has asked Mr Sintobin to withdraw temporarily" for the time that clarity is made on these accusations. "The president is personally convinced that Bernard Sintobin is in good faith and is not involved in fraudulent adoptions," said Unicef ??Belgium in a statement.

An open investigation

MO * has a new business leader

Bernard Sintobin will be working as a business leader at Wereldmediahuis from January 2016, the publisher of MO * magazine and MO.be. His main task is to ensure a solid financial and economic foundation for the association, so that the valued media initiatives can be further expanded in a sustainable way.

Bernard Sintobin has been active in commercial and general management for 35 years. In addition, he had an important voluntary commitment as an international treasurer of Amnesty International until August 2015, a mandate that has now expired.

Bernard was born in 1952 and studied civil engineering at the KULeuven. He also holds a postgraduate degree in management from S.P.S.O. (now Vlerick Leuven Ghent).

Bernard worked as a commercial director or manager for Holvoet NV (textile), Brouwerij Haacht and Varia-Pack (packaging).

After barely a week: Unicef ??boss takes a step aside after judicial investigation of child trafficking

UNICEF, the children's rights organization of the United Nations, has a problem. A judicial investigation is being conducted into a non-profit organization in which Bernard Sintobin, the new CEO-ad-interim for Unicef ??Belgium, has been active for years. It is a Walloon adoption agency that is said to have cooperated in child trafficking from Guatemala. The man himself screams his innocence, but Unicef ??has asked him to step aside.

Last Monday, Unicef ??Belgium proudly presented its new general manager. The Malinois Bernard Sintobin (67) temporarily takes over the helm of the organization that defends the rights of children on behalf of the United Nations. However, Unicef ??could now break that decision, because Sintobin appears to be involved in a file about alleged child trafficking.

There is a judicial investigation into a non-profit organization where he was director and treasurer until the end of last year. That has been confirmed by our editors. It concerns the Walloon adoption association "Hacer Puente". He is suspected of having cooperated in child trafficking. Adopted children are said to have been illegally divorced from their biological parents in Guatemala and then given up for adoption to couples in Western countries, including Belgium. The Belgian adoptions went through Hacer Puente. The federal public prosecutor's office received some tips last year and started to dig. The research officially started last month.

Help with administration

It is August, and Zimbabwean farmers are preparing for a new growing season. In a sprawling exhibition park in the capital city, tens of thousands have converged for the country’s biggest agriculture show.

But tucked amid the booths showcasing tractors and produce is a display advertising something very different: how to adopt a child.

For the past few years, the country’s Ministry of Public Service, Labour, and Social Welfare has set up a display here in hopes of meeting prospective adopters amid the crowds shopping seed packets and dairy cows.

But it’s slow going. All day, fair visitors stream past the booth without stopping. The issue, officials say, isn’t that Zimbabweans don’t care about abandoned children. Indeed, adoptions within families are so stitched into the culture here that most people don’t even think of them as adoptions at all. But try to convince many Zimbabweans to adopt a child who isn’t related to them, and you quickly hit a wall.

That kind of adoption is “frowned upon by our culture,” says Stanislaus Sanyangowe, the deputy director for child protection services at the ministry. Many Zimbabweans fear that bringing an outsider into your family risks breaking traditional protections afforded by ancestors. Between 2015 and 2018, only 27 children were adopted domestically in the entire country, and 14 more internationally, Mr. Sanyangowe says.