Social worker put the child at the centre of adoption

Marianne (Mary) Iwanek (nee Kolijn), social reformer and social worker, b November 12, 1943; d April 1, 2019

Becoming an orphan at the age of 15 gave social worker Mary Iwanek a great empathy and understanding of those she went on to help.

As head of adoption services in New Zealand in the 1990s, she was a leading figure in changing the adoption practice and law in this country.

Iwanek, the youngest of Adriana and Leendert Kolijn's 10 children, was born in Vleuten, the Netherlands, in 1943. Her father, a police commander, was in the Dutch underground resistance after refusing to work for Hitler.

After her parents died, and most of her siblings had emigrated, at 15 she became a state ward. Her brother Herman, on holiday from New Zealand, became her guardian. If she had stayed, she would have become a domestic servant. Instead, she became the first state ward to emigrate.

In 1959, as a Hutt Hospital nurse aide, Iwanek learnt English in the children's ward. She saw the cruelty to unmarried mothers who were separated from their babies. Having experienced a happy childhood before her parents died, she believed in strengthening families to raise their children and involving extended families and other support.

After a lengthy stay in hospital stay herself, suffering with rheumatic fever, she nannied for an East Coast farming family. This led to nursing training at Te Puia Springs Hospital. Here she learnt te reo, experienced wh?nau and wh?ngai care, and joined the M?ori Women's Welfare League.

Beginning a psychiatric nursing course at Hokitika's Seaview Hospital, Iwanek transferred to Porirua Hospital, near family, to finish.

In 1965, she married Josef (Joe) Iwanek, a Polish immigrant, who had been a displaced child and was raised for some years in a Russian orphanage.

After 12 years of nursing, she retrained as a social worker, which led her back to Porirua Hospital, and the job of finding homes for the 35 child residents.

On becoming Lower Hutt's first qualified social worker, Iwanek set up a single mothers' support group. "I was told I was encouraging other unmarried mothers to keep their babies," she later recalled.

She began getting calls from adopted people asking about their birth parents, and from parents asking if they could contact the child they had adopted out.

Iwanek's philosophy was, "If it wasn't in the Adoption Act 1955, and it wasn't in the social work manual, and many things we wanted to do weren't, there was no reason why we couldn't do it if it meant we could support people in better ways."

She developed the practice of open adoption first in Lower Hutt, then Wellington and nationwide by the 1970s. The practice remains unique in the world.

She volunteered with the Rev Keith Griffith, who started community adoption support groups and sought change in adoption practice and law, having been adopted himself.

The Adult Adoption Information Act 1985 made New Zealand the first country to allow adopted people access to their birth records. Iwanek led the national implementation, which included a process to reconnect adopted people with their birth parents.

A Victoria University social work lecturer from 1988-92, she consulted internationally, including advising on Australia's adoption legislation. Her progressive views influenced many, including the "mother of adoption reform" in the United States, Jean Paton.

While leading Child, Youth and Family's Adoption Information and Services Unit, from 1992-2005, she mobilised her staff to make adoption practices more child-centred, despite the difficulty in getting the Adoption Act legislation updated.

This role supported international agreements like the Hague Adoption Convention, to prevent child trafficking and to ensure intercountry adoptions occur "in the best interests of the child".

She proactively responded to the British Government's Child Migrant Support Fund by establishing a search and trace project for the 593 British child migrants sent to New Zealand between 1949 and 1953. Her trained ISS social workers found most of the migrants, telling them of their entitlement to family search services, counselling and access to this fund.

A team player, she would say, "It doesn't matter who gets the credit for it, it matters that it was done", a former staff member remembers.

After retiring, Iwanek worked for a change in adoption legislation. Her focus was to put the child at the centre to ensure legal connections with natural families (wh?nau, hap? and iwi) were protected in law, and to remove outdated secrecy practices such as the provision to seal birth certificates.

Her expertise assisted Adoption Action, of which she was a founding member, to win a Human Rights Review Tribunal discrimination case in 2016 about the Adoption Act 1955. Led by fellow member and retired lawyer Robert Ludbrook, they argued that the Adoption Act discriminated against people based on sex, age, marital status and disability.

She was active in the Petone and Wellington community for 53 years, including as a Petone Borough councillor.

In 2018 she set out to complete her PhD studies on identity and open adoption at Auckland University of Technology. She started studying before her husband Joe died in 2010, after 44 years of marriage.

She never got to finish her doctorate. In April, while holidaying in the Netherlands, Iwanek died after urgent heart surgery resulting from rheumatic fever damage in her youth.

She leaves behind her brother Henk and sisters Christine and Pia, many nieces, nephews and extended family worldwide.

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