"The positive image of adoption is not true!"

Taina Adolfsson was adopted to Sweden as a six-year-old - and never became herself again.

In her column, she writes about how her experiences have made her, in principle, completely opposed to adoptions and that the image painted by adoptions is both false and beautifully painted.

I came to Sweden as a Finnish post-war child in 1949. I was six years old and my biological mother had died a year before of pulmonary tuberculosis.

My relatives in Finland had said that I would only stay over the summer and then return home to start first grade. That did not happen.

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Lost a sense of belonging

Instead, I was abused by adults who should have protected me, I also lost my language, my culture and a sense of belonging in my native Finland.

There are approximately 60,000 children adopted abroad in Sweden today and we adopted abroad are a marginalized group. In the past, it was thought that the adoptees felt well, but the research that has come to the field shows a completely different one than that of a happy couple who picked up their adopted child at the airport.

Anders Hjern, professor of social epidemiology at the Department of Medicine, researches the health of particularly vulnerable children and in 2002 published a dissertation in which he and his colleagues concluded that the risk of suicide is four times higher in children adopted abroad. They also have a higher risk of suffering from other types of mental health problems.

Had more difficulty establishing oneself in the labor market

Sweden is the country that has received the most children for adoption per capita, but the mental illness of the adoptees is kept quiet.

The adoptees also more often have problems with alcohol and drug abuse, crime and mental illness. The group also finds it more difficult to establish itself in the labor market.

Then I ask myself how can it be that psychiatrists and psychologists have not raised their voices to politicians and talked about this so that one can curb adoptions as much as possible for the benefit of children? Sweden is so good at seeing the child perspective from other points of view - but when it comes to adoptions abroad, you are silent.

The positive official picture of the adoptees' situation is not correct, behind the façade are hidden tragic lives of great extent.

Many in the research world have also turned a blind eye to this, which may be due to the fact that the research world, the adoption movements and relevant authorities have been dominated by adoptive parents and they do not want to talk about how their adopted children feel deep down. They are a resourceful group and simply do not fit into the group of care seekers for their adopted children.

Suffering from self-harming behavior

As for myself, I suffered from self-harming behavior later in life. I started relationships with men who sexually exploited me but I did not see it then because I was looking for love and confirmation.

My will had been shattered early on and I was used to doing what other people told me. I was sent as a package across the Baltic Sea without being able to protest. I was so used to being offended that I hardly understood that it was wrong.

Only when I approached the fiftieth year did I begin to realize in all seriousness that I had actually been the victim of many crimes, and it was sad to understand that I could have reported those who exposed me.

Believes that it is a form of child trafficking

I later participated in the Neglect Investigation but was refused damages with reference to the fact that it was not possible to prove that I had stayed at home two years before the adoption went through. Where would I have been as a child then, did they mean? I never got an answer to that.

So my attitude to foreign adoptions remains. I think it's a form of child trafficking.

Two of my brothers who came to Sweden from Finland a couple of years before me with the war transports, and were also adopted, took their own lives. I often think of you my beloved little brothers. I sometimes wonder what would have happened to all of us if we had been allowed to stay in our home country?

Now I have two wonderful children and five wonderful grandchildren and I am so happy that none of them have been sent as packages to earth to meet an uncertain future.

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