Deborah's painful adoption story: 'I made good money at the time'

Deborah was brought to the Netherlands from Sri Lanka together with her twin brother. At least, that was the story. At the age of fifteen, she discovers that her alleged twin brother is not related to her at all. The real twin sister was too sick to fly, so two very young children were hastily swapped.

Deborah's fight to put this right appears to finally be coming to an end this summer. 

By Jeroen Pen

Deborah Hageman was adopted in 1985 and left Sri Lanka for the Netherlands. She is one of many: thousands of fellow sufferers travel the same route. The demand for adopted children rose to a record high at the end of the last century. There is a lot of money to be made from Sri Lankan babies and toddlers, so the supply should not lag behind. In a short time, an industry is created in which shrewd and malicious intermediaries call the shots. There is widespread tampering and fraud with birth data and adoption documents. Blinded by their desire to have children, Dutch adoptive parents turn a blind eye, or worse.

Something continues to gnaw at them, they are still too young to put their finger on it, but many of them feel that their adoption story is not right. Once the adopted children become teenagers, adolescents and adults, they start exploring. With often drastic consequences.

Opportunity

Take Deborah Hageman, adopted from Sri Lanka to the Netherlands in 1985, together with her twin brother Radjiv. This fulfills a wish of their adoptive parents: they really wanted twins, but could not have children of their own.

The adoption agency that was responsible for this opportunity ceased to exist in 2010, a number of years before research by Zembla exposed how widespread and serious the foundation had committed fraud with adoption papers. Much of what the adopted children have been told about themselves turns out to be incorrect. Alleged siblings who are not related at all, birthdays that fall weeks or months after someone's birth, even the names of birth mothers have been tampered with.

Deborah is fifteen years old when she starts asking her adoptive father questions that she believes noticeably embarrass him. After some insistence, his resistance breaks and the confession follows.

Deborah's twin brother – above, as is often the case, dressed in matching outfits to emphasize their kinship – is not her brother at all, let alone her twin. They are not even related based on blood ties. Radjiv's real twin sister was in a hospital when they were to be adopted, malnourished and too weak to fly back to the Netherlands.

A setback for the adoptive parents, who had settled on two copies. A contact person from the adoption agency will help. He just conjures up a new twin sister. The passports are completed and ready. Deborah comes to the Netherlands in the name of the sick sister, where she will celebrate a birthday that is not hers for years to come.

No one knows what Deborah's mother thought about that. Maybe she wasn't aware of it. Deborah has no idea where she comes from, she says. “I could have been kidnapped or stolen. Maybe they told my real mother I was stillborn. Don't know."

Things no longer work out between Deborah and her adoptive parents. “They misled me so much for fifteen years. It wouldn't occur to me to do something like that. It has been a very unpleasant development within our family, we have completely fallen apart.”

She is still close with Radjiv, says Deborah. “I am very happy with him and despite everything we see each other as brother and sister. We didn't have such nice parents, but we had each other. Furthermore, it especially triggered me to look for my real parents. And to go through a years-long struggle to have my birth certificate and IDs changed.”

Now there is a date of birth and name on it that are not hers. “On paper my name is Mary (the name of the twin sister who stayed behind in Sri Lanka, ed). I'm not that. Why should I have to tell this whole story every time I identify myself? Or should we keep it quiet? I want to be honest. This is not me, it is not my data. ”

A tangle of rules

Deborah would like to officially change her personal data, but that turns out not to be that easy. She ends up in a tangle of birth certificates, rules and people who enforce those rules. Ultimately, there has to be a lawsuit before anything can be changed. Earlier this summer, the court ruled in her favor after years.

Yet there is hardly any euphoria. For the time being, it shows all the hallmarks of a Pyrrhic victory. The struggle she waged, concludes the Limburg woman, consumed time ("2.5 years"), energy ("I would have preferred to do other things) and money ("the costs are not small").

“I made good money seven or thirty-eight years ago. Everyone came to take a beating out of me. Now I may have been right, but good money has been made from me again. I find it disappointing that I am not being reimbursed. Is it reasonable to charge me for this? I will be allowed to change my details later, but I will also have to pay for that myself.”

“I didn't get the feeling that something had happened to me, rather that I had done something. Every time you go to court alone, with one lawyer in front of three judges. All that mistrust. I felt like a criminal, while here I am the one who was illegally adopted. I thought it was cold and chilly. I received interim decisions by email, and there was hardly any explanation as to what a decision entailed. I was allowed to find that out for myself.”

Ultimately, she concludes, an adoptee just wants to feel heard and understood. Then, dryly: “And don't pay for everything.”

Shortly after the interview, eight victims join forces for the first class action lawsuit on adoption fraud. They are taking the Dutch State to court and demanding compensation. The State was supposed to supervise all adoptions, but has secretly failed, according to lawyer Mark de Hek. “It was evident that the adoption organization and the adoption files were not good and therefore they should never have been adopted in this way. The government has looked away and the State is therefore liable for the consequences. With this case we want to ensure that this suffering is recognized and that the government compensates for the damage.”

One of the eight victims is Deborah Hageman.

Since the 1970s, more than forty thousand children have been adopted from abroad to the Netherlands. This involved large-scale fraud and tampering with paperwork. Zembla follows this file closely and has conducted various studies on it.