Adoption system based on a colonial past
Adoption system based on a colonial past
CHILD'S best interests? Missionary couple with their two foster children. - Photo: Danmission. Year: approx. 1905
The performances adoption system is rooted in the Christian European civilization superiority.
SEND
Karen Vallgårda
PhD, postdoctoral fellow. in the history of Saxo-Institute, University of Copenhagen.
The immediate reaction in a large proportion of the more than 1.1 million viewers that came with the Ethiopian girl Mashos tragic fate portrayed in the documentary film 'Mercy, mercy - adoption come price', which aired on TV 2 in late November , was outrage.
Offense against a adoptivforældrepar who by all accounts had not managed their parenting good enough. A lynch spread and adoptive parents felt obliged to ask for police protection.
The film's director, adoption researchers and other critics tried redirecting the turbulent emotions and channel them towards problems in the adoption industry. They tried in other words, to convert moral outrage to political indignation.
ALSO READ Ministry scrutinizes the Masho-case violates children's Convention
It was an unspoken and sometimes spoken recognition of emotions political potential. Emotions can encourage certain behaviors and make other unacceptable. Emotions also play a more fundamental role in relation to adoption. The emotions that nourish the desire for a child, and that makes it unimportant, the skin or hair color child.
It is also emotion that makes it possible to neglect the fact that a large proportion of the children who are up for adoption, have living biological parents - and to override their wishes, dreams, conditions and rights.
These feelings have a story that we should deal critically. It is my contention that important parts of the international adoption system is a continuation of a pattern of love and protection urge toward children and pity and contempt toward their parents, going back to the Europeans' colonial expansion. Feelings that create community and draw boundaries.
ALSO READ adoption come story: Children have become a scarce
At the beginning of the 20th century Europeans began to regard non-white children as lovable. Those children who had previously been seen as fundamentally different from European children were now incorporated into a Christian European sense together.
Thus, it was also conceivable to take them to himself 'as his own'. At the same time, the non-white adults still perceived as backward and unable to offer their children an equally good and loving upbringing that Europeans could. This development made it possible to try to take over responsibility for the non-European children without taking the major terms of the children's parents.
It is also emotion that makes it possible to neglect the fact that a large proportion of the children who are up for adoption, have living biological parents - and to override their wishes, dreams, conditions and rights
In Denmark's case was such an emotional pattern, among other things created through Christian missionary activities in the overseas European colonies and communicated to the Danes through text and images in mission magazines, booklets and books, as well as in the slide show in the mission houses across the country. Given the Danish Missionary Society began its activities in the British colony of India in the 1860s and in the following decade, the missionaries' approach to the Indian population characterized by contemporary colonial notions of Indians civilizational backwardness and the prevailing biological theories of race and racial differences. Many missionaries described the Indians in general as a sinful, lazy and a dependent people, which is difficult to achieve real spiritual progress.
Although the mission was ideal love to the Gentiles, the tone often characterized by contempt, condemnation or pity. Emotions were an expression of an unequal power relationship between the white missionaries and Indians, but they also helped to maintain this particular power relations. Also worked with the colonized children was a source of disappointment and frustration. Readers of Danish Mission-sheet could ensure that Indian children were fundamentally different from European children. They were previously mature, they were dependent, and they seemed unable to play as European children. Although they were considered more malleable than their parents, they were still almost from the beginning marked by paganism.
As a missionary Carl Ochs explained, had the pagan children tend to steal, cheat and lie without shame. Enough to individual children instill hope for a bright future, and missionaries also found occasionally general prosperity, but they were basically inferior to European children. This view of non-white children were in other words, significantly different from the one that dominates in Europe today, and from that underlying the transnational adoption. At the end of the 1800s there was however a noticeable change in the Danish missionaries rhetoric and approach to the Indian children. They drew increasingly the Indian children's positive qualities and described them now as innocent, sweet and even lovable creatures. Children's wrongdoing was now interpreted as a manifestation of general childlike playfulness rather than as an expression of deep-rooted paganism. There was no longer talked about differences between them and the European children. And compared the yet the Indian children with the Danish, dropped it like out to the former's favor.
ALSO READ Parents criticize DanAdopt for failure
Missionary Villads Hansen told, for example, about his visit to a village school, how impressed he was by the Indian children: "How was it amusing the other day in Sengalmødu to hear about. 40 Gentile Children tell the Bible story so skillfully and so willingly that many Christian children in Denmark perhaps can hardly compare with them. " Children's skill, willingness and ability to amuse the adults repealed in its own way their paganism. Indian children were now seen as individual members of a universal childhood community.
In this emotional inclusion of non-white children in a European custom community is one of the most important prerequisites for the desire to take the children themselves or even adopt them. missionaries told also like about their own emotional response to the lovable Indian children. Disappointment and frustration had been replaced by joy and love. In 1904 wrote missionary Viggo Møller for example, whether a boy at his boarding school, "Strong and well built as he is, he does with his characteristic face, surrounded by a thick, wavy hair, an exceedingly pleasing impression. (...) The childish smiling face always makes my heart happy. "
The statement was not just about the boy, it also signaled that Viggo Møller as other of his colleagues in India were able to relate with emotional warmth to the Indian child. The missionaries laid the emphasis on the 'winning children's hearts' and' be there for them. " They would gain their confidence, even their love. For readers in Denmark described their gentle parenting methods in detail, showing that they were worthy to educate the lovable Indian children.
The missionary field replied that he considered just the separation and alienation of "absolutely necessary" for the children's salvation
Being able to love and risk on 'the brown children "had been a hallmark of the moral and formed European man whose feelings corresponded to the modern standards of childhood and child care. This change was part of a major development in childhood perception and educational ideals in large parts of the Western world, including Denmark. It is said that childhood was sentimentaliseret. Discipline should be replaced with care, patient guidance and love. Children gradually went from being an economic resource to be an emotional resource for their parents.
Instead of income to the children now contribute more to family life with joy, recreation and emotional fulfillment. This development has increased over the twentieth century. In Denmark today, children are economically only a cost to their parents. On the other hand is considered to be an emotional enrichment for the whole family. Children are a necessary part of the good life. Meanwhile, adult way of relating to children still important for our identity. At the individual level, we humans, how they relate to their children.
More generally, the loving, gentle and protective approach to child become an important part of the Western self-understanding. Here we give children good upbringing in economic prosperity with education, and access to a well-functioning health system. Here we have the emotional energy to give them the loving care as is necessary for a happy childhood. But this identity is not created in a vacuum, it is partly developed through juxtapositions of adults in non-Western societies. It becomes obvious when you look at the Danish mission history. As parents defined the Danish missionaries in India primarily in contrast to the Indian child's parents and other Indian adults. For these, did the colonial dogmas it as still valid. Many missionaries considered even the adult Indians as potentially damaging to their own children. In 1893, expressed the board of the Danish Missionary Society good enough in a letter to a broadcast missionary concern that growing up on a mission boarding schools through the 'unnatural separation, (as) children torn from parents' would make the children strangers to their families and communities .
ALSO READ Adoption is not without cost
, however the missionary field replied that he considered just the separation and alienation of "absolutely necessary" for the children's salvation. The missionary got what he wanted. In the following decades expanded mission boarding schools and orphanages opened on the mission field in India. Some children on the mission institutions had living parents, but many felt it was better for the little ones to be there than in their pagan mother and father.
In 1908 described the missionary Johanna Lind, VA, for example, the grief she felt when two parents after a short time had brought their little boy back to the orphanage where she worked: "It is sad to see children die, but this was far sadder; for our little boy went all out again to paganism and darkness, while those who die, go to the light. " the Indian parents were not only detrimental to their children because they brought them to idolatry, but also because lavkastefolkets social degradation , the poor living conditions and especially pagan negative influence apparently made ??them unable to love their children in the right way. The exposed them to sinful talk, they did not worry about giving them training, and they proved callous in their treatment of children.
In Danish mission leaves could read that mother love was indeed a universal feeling, but that superstition got parents to do cruel things about their own children. Child marriage, child prostitution, unreasonably hard work and physical violence against children, according to the missionaries widespread in Indian society. therefore believed many Danish missionaries also that as loving, civilized European Christians could give Indian children a better upbringing and the possibility of a better life, both on Earth and in the Hereafter, than their parents could. Several Danish missionary train Indian foster children into their home and tried to educate them as if they were their own.
The firm belief that growing up in the West, of course, must be in the child's best interests, as well as the tendency to neglect the biological mothers and fathers are not naturally given or unproblematic
Missionary Viggo Møller told how a boy whose father had sent him to the mission boarding school, not thrived there, and that they had taken him, "now we had got him so dear that we could think of to send him back to school again. So was he with us as our own child. And we have gained thereby, for a child Love is a precious thing. "
He did not mention whether they had contacted the father in this 'adoption'. His focus was on the child's well-being and salvation - and the enrichment of their own lives, as the boy's love involved. Generally there was little empathy for Indian parents' experience of losing daily contact with their children. Maybe imagined missionaries did not agree that the colonized pagan parents could experience grief and hardship on an equal footing with European parents. Maybe they were just so convinced that they did the right thing for the Indian children that trumfede interests of the adults' feelings. Many of the children who were given up for adoption today are orphans, but many of them have live parents - in Africa's case estimated share of approx. 80 percent. Few would argue that Europeans are more worthy parents than the non-European biological parents. Yet based adoption system in a structural failure of these mostly poor and socially marginalized biological mothers 'and fathers' rights and feelings.
On a negation of the fact that the choice of rare original separation process can be described as freely. That it is regarded as legitimate due to the fact that these parents have not been incorporated in our community, we do not have to deal with their emotions.
ALSO READ Journalist assaulted after adoption case
after the emergence of the new emotional childhood ideal and norm that non-white children are just as lovable as white children, however, we are eager to do what is good for the kids.
Although Christian players at international level still plays a major role in the system's life-saving rhetoric subsided in the adoption world in Denmark. But we still operate with a basic assumption that the children who are abandoned in transnational adoption, must necessarily get better 'up here' than in low-income countries where they were born. That, after all, must be in the child's best interests to be adopted by a loving Danish parents - as long as they do not appear to manage their parenting as Mashos. More than missionaries prevents us today contact between adopted children and their biological parents out on the assumption that precisely this separation is necessary, not for the child's salvation, but its association with adoptive family and integration into the new society - and thus a good childhood and a good life. But the firm belief that an upbringing in the West, of course, must be in the child's best interests, as well as the tendency to neglect the biological mothers and fathers are not naturally given or unproblematic. Both parts must be seen as an extension of the feeling pattern that was established just over a hundred years ago and which helped to underpin a colonial world order. It is time that we are critical of this colonial heritage in adoption system.