"Was my mother paid to give me up?" Looking for government recognition for mistakes in adoption
Eight adoptees from Sri Lanka are holding the Dutch state liable for abuses during their adoptions. Sam van den Haak, one of them, explains the extent of the damage and the questions she has struggled with all her life.
Anneke StoffelenJuly 25, 2023, 6:43 PM
In a personal interview in the newspaper, it is customary to mention the age of the interviewee. In the case of Sam van den Haak, who was adopted from Sri Lanka, this is not easy. If you base it on the date in her Dutch passport, she would have celebrated her 42nd birthday at the beginning of this month. Or do you, like Van den Haak herself, follow the version of her later found Sri Lankan grandmother? She said that her granddaughter was born on December 17, 1981. In that case, Sam van den Haak is now 41.
A date of birth is an obvious detail for others that you rarely think about. For Van den Haak it has become a crucial part of her story. 'Every time I request a repeat prescription from the pharmacy, I give an incorrect date of birth and am reminded that I am a victim of adoption fraud.'
Van den Haak published a book about that turbulent history last year with the telling title Not born on my birthday. Together with seven other adoptees, she is now starting a collective lawsuit against the Dutch state. The adoptees argue that the government, as supervisor, is liable for the abuses during their adoptions, which were arranged by the Flash foundation. Since the late 1970s, Flash has been publicly associated with baby trafficking and adoption fraud. But according to lawyer Mark de Hek, the government deliberately looked the other way.
About the author
Anneke Stoffelen is a reporter for de Volkskrant and writes, among other things, about the multicultural society. For the podcast series A Kind of God, she investigated how people end up in a cult.
As a result, some of the Sri Lankan adoptees will probably never manage to find their biological family again. The adoption files are missing all kinds of basic documents, such as waivers from the biological mothers. Personal data is also regularly falsified.
Little information in adoption file
When requesting her adoption file, Sam van den Haak discovered that 'there's actually not much in it'. It does not contain the details of her biological mother, let alone a document in which the woman declares that she is renouncing her daughter. Her birth certificate is also missing. Strangely enough, her Dutch surname is already mentioned in the Sri Lankan passport with which the adoption was arranged at the time. "So that must have been forged," Van den Haak concludes. On the handwritten document, the numbers have been scribbled with a pen, so it is not entirely clear which day of birth is meant - in her adoption file it was April 7, in her later Dutch passport it was July 4.
Also missing is a report from the Child Protection Council showing that her adoptive parents were screened before they were allowed to pick her up from Colombo as a toddler. That's strange, Van den Haak thinks, because the couple who adopted her already had three sons, two of whom have severe multiple disabilities. "In the 1980s, relatively little was known about the consequences of adoption, but was there no one who could have imagined that there was no room in this family for another child with special care needs?" she wonders.
As a lively little child, she ended up in a Hoorn household where, in her memory, it always had to be quiet. 'I used to, and still do, prefer to do things together with someone else. But in our family it was always every man for himself. One was doing a puzzle and the other was reading the newspaper. I didn't fit in there at all.'
Sexual abuse
Van den Haak saw little love in the marriage of her adoptive parents. In her opinion, this was the reason why her adoptive father sexually abused her from the age of 6 onwards. As a girl who craved attention and affirmation, she often crawled into her adoptive parents' bed in the morning, looking for cuddles. Once her adoptive mother left, those hugs turned into "things an adult should never do to a child."
For years, Van den Haak was under the impression that this was normal. 'I thought this was the way you, as a parent and child, show that you love each other. Until I was 14 and started having boyfriends, and discovered that you're not supposed to do these things with family.' Years later, when she wanted to file a report, she heard from the police that the case had already expired. Her adoptive father has always denied the abuse. Her adoptive mother kept a low profile and did not support her daughter. Van den Haak therefore no longer has contact with them.
Her unhappy childhood made the question that almost all adoptees ask themselves at some point even more pressing: how would my life have turned out if I had not ended up in a strange country, with strange parents?
Address on a note
Van den Haak traveled to Sri Lanka for the first time in his twenties. An intermediary there initially had bad news: based on the scant information in her adoption papers, it seemed impossible to find her biological family. But there was a blessing in disguise: when her biological mother gave her daughter to the Dutch in 1984, she had placed a note in the hands of Van den Haak's adoptive mother with her address scribbled on it. The note had been kept all these years. And although her biological mother died of cancer in the 1980s, Van den Haak was able to use that information to find her grandmother, plus a brother and a sister.
'At the first meeting I was sceptical. The intermediary who had helped me with the search told me that relatives of adoptees often ask for money very quickly. So I had planned to keep an appropriate distance. But when I arrived at that little old house without electricity, it turned out that my brother was even more skeptical. The first thing he did was take my hand and study my fingers. I thought: what is he doing? Until he discovered the scar he was looking for. “Nangi,” he said, which means little sister.”
The scar was proof to him that Sam was who she said he was, he said later. 'He could still remember me helping him cut bamboo as a small child. I then had to hold the stems. He once accidentally chopped my finger, that's what left the scar.'
In the passport photos he showed of their mother, she immediately recognized the woman from the photos from her own scrapbook, taken by her adoptive parents. Then all doubts were gone.
The meeting with her brother and grandmother was warm (with her sister, whom she only meets later, the contact is more complicated). This caused Van den Haak to wonder how necessary it actually was for her to be given up, if there were family members who would have wanted to care for her. Her grandmother, now deceased, said that her mother harbored a secret. She is said to have feared that she would be expelled from their village if the truth about her daughter's conception came out.
Compensation
But Van den Haak was never able to unravel the complete story surrounding her adoption. 'Was my mother paid to give me up, temporarily or otherwise? I do not know. My file does show that my adoption cost more than 10,000 guilders, a large part of which went to mediation organizations.'
In the upcoming lawsuit, adoptees will demand compensation for the costs they have had to incur in the search for their family - searches that in many cases have not led to anything. In addition, it will also involve compensation for the psychological suffering: growing up in an environment in which you find little recognition and the feelings of uprooting that follow some people for the rest of their lives.
Yet Van den Haak wants to emphasize that as far as she is concerned, it is not an exclusively gloomy story. 'I've been through a lot and there was a period when I didn't even want to live anymore. But my story shows that you can get out of it.' As a former Dutch teacher, she has written her book especially in understandable language for young people, so that they may find hope in it when they are going through a difficult time. 'I believe that you can always choose to make something of your life. I am now very happy with my son. I am also proud of the company I founded, with which I organize pub quizzes for companies.'
For her, the lawsuit is not about compensation. However, she does want the government to acknowledge the mistakes of the past, so that these problems are prevented in the future. And what would be the best and most important outcome for Van den Haak: that a passport would one day be arranged for her with her real date of birth in it.