Elvira Loibl awarded Hustinx Prize for research into illegal adoption

03-09-2024 · Interview

Child trafficking, corruption, falsified documents: international adoption has its dark sides. Elvira Loibl, Maastricht criminologist and assistant professor at the law faculty, has been researching them for years. She was awarded the Edmond Hustinx Prize during the Opening of the Academic Year.

“The ultimate humanitarian act.” That was the image Austrian Elvira Loibl had of adoption before she came to Maastricht for her PhD track in 2014. “Just like so many people, I saw it as a purely positive thing: you’re saving the life of a child on the streets and offering them a life in a prosperous country. But this turns out mostly to be a romanticised, Western perspective. It is often paired with serious malpractice. In many countries, there are human traffickers who actively pursue adoption as a way to earn money. They kidnap children, or buy them off poor families, to then offer them up as ‘orphans’ to adoption agencies. Furthermore, the procedures are often corrupt.”

It’s an interesting topic for a criminologist. “But I did frequently ask myself, who am I doing this for? The number of adoptions has been falling steadily for years, thanks in part to IVF and surrogacy. I assumed that my dissertation would disappear straight into an archive forever after my promotion.”

Australian Securities and Investments Commission's

Compass explores the changing nature of inter-country adoption in Australia. In the 1970s hundreds of babies were airlifted out of Vietnam for adoption by Australian families. Today increasing affluence in the developing world, and tighter controls on adoption procedures mean fewer babies are available to would-be Australian parents. It's no longer common for overseas babies to be adopted. They are more likely to be young children. This program explores what happens when a child is adopted out of its birth culture, and examines whether an adopting parent has an obligation to manage ongoing relationships with their child's birth parents and culture.

Credits

• Geraldine Doogue, Presenter
• Deborah Boerne, Producer
• Francoise Fombertaux, Researcher

With final adoption orders stalled in Maharashtra from January 11, about 170 prospective parents have been hit. However, international prospective parents are the worst hit as they have no right to foster

The joy was palpable even over the telephone. A call from a Mumbai-based adoption centre to a city in Europe in September 2022 reduced a couple in their mid-30s into a bundle of hugs and tears of joy. After a painful wait of almost 2.5 years, they were finally going to be parents to a 10-month-old. Giddy with joy, they clicked on an email attachment containing their daughter’s photograph.

The adoption process moved fast after that. In the first week of January, a District Magistrate (DM) concluded the hearing in their case, the penultimate step to adoption. The excited parents-to-be started planning their trip to India but that wasn’t to be.

On January 11, the Bombay HC directed the Maharashtra government not to transfer pending adoption proceedings to DMs, as mandated under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Amendment Act, 2021. In July 2021, the Rajya Sabha (RS) had passed an Amendment that transferred the power to issue adoption orders from civil courts to the DMs. The Amendment — which aimed to “strengthen” child protection under the JJ (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, and ensure “faster” delivery of adoption cases — was passed despite protests and without any discussion in the RS.

VISAKHAPATNAM: The waiting period for adoption of a child has been increasing for the prospective adoptive parents (PAPs) with each passing year in Andhra Pradesh. It is taking more than three to four years even for the referrals. For instance, only 90 children were placed for adoption in 2022-23, while thousands of PAPs registered their names for adoption with the 14 specialised adoption agencies of AP. Among the 90 children, 11 were intercountry adoptions. According to officials, more girls are being adopted in recent years, indicating a change in the society.

Speaking to TOI, Andhra Pradesh State Commission for Protection of Child Rights member Gondu Sitaram said that the long waiting period of the PAPs can be attributed to the fact that there are more waiting parents in comparison to a lesser number of children available for adoption in the state. "However, there should be no scope for any illegal adoptions, which may put the children at risk. The guidelines and rules formulated by Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA) should be strictly followed for adoptions. Back in 2022, I had reported an illegal adoption case in Visakhapatnam to the police," said Sitaram.

The district children protection officer Ramesh said that the child welfare committee is taking care of these children. "Even for the children surrendered by parents due to financial issues or other problems, there will be a one month waiting period before registering them with CARA for adoptions. The limited number of adoptable children is making the wait longer for the PAPs," said Ramesh.

As per the eligibility criteria for the PAPs set in by CARA, they shall be physically, mentally, emotionally, and financially capable.

They shall not have any life-threatening medical condition. They should not have been convicted in a criminal act of any nature or accused in any case of child rights violation. No child shall be given for adoption to a couple unless they have at least two years of stable marital relationship except in the cases of relative or step-parent adoption.

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The name Pankaja refers in Sanskrit to the Lotus flower, from which the Hindu god Brahma was born. The Lotus is a sacred symbol in Indian mythology and represents the development of an individual. This flourishes when the petals unfold one by one and the core (the inner source) becomes visible. Brahma is also the god of Creation, the creating.

According to a report by Bhilwara police in the court, the woman, a resident of the district, was 17 years old when she gave birth to a girl in August last year

odhpur: A nine-month-old baby was seized from her adoptive parents and returned to her biological mother on the directions of the Rajasthan high court, which observed that the infant was illegally given up for adoption by the woman’s father as he opposed her inter-faith relationship.

“When I gave birth to the child, I was not even told whether it was a boy or a girl. I was not even allowed to see her face. Now that I have got my daughter back, I cannot express my happiness in words,” the infant’s biological mother said.

According to a report by Bhilwara police in the court, the woman, a resident of the district, was 17 years old when she gave birth to a girl in August last year. She had eloped with her Muslim friend and realised she was pregnant after she returned home.

After the minor gave birth, her father, who was against the inter-faith relationship, handed over the infant to a former Child Welfare Committee (CWC) member who, in return, gave it to a childless couple in Mumbai.

Even the most sheltered among us have heard horror stories of foster care and adoption, but back before there were arms of government to protect wards of the state, there were orphanages. And before orphanages, there was baby farming.

“Baby farming” was a term coined during the Victorian Era to describe the practice of taking custody of unwanted children or those whose parents were unable to care for them, for a small fee. Essentially, a baby farm was a for-profit orphanage. The practice of baby farming was most widespread in urban areas of late-Victorian Era England, but it was also prevalent in North America and Oceania.

In an era when the most prevalent form of contraception was abortion, for working-class Victorian women who found themselves unable to care for a child, a less dangerous alternative was to surrender their newborn or, “put them out to nurse” at baby farms for a small weekly fee. Most women who chose this route assumed that their child would be properly cared for and receive a wet nurse, attention, room and board at the very least. After all, as referenced heavily in the writings of Jane Austen, wealthier women were also known to put their infants in the care of wet nurses – women who were not the childrens’ biological mothers, but who would breastfeed the children. The fictional character Grenouille of Perfume, as well as the titular character of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist were both residents of baby farms.

Holt Children’s Services will explain its decision to appeal a recent court ruling ordering the agency to compensate an adoptee for his botched adoption in a press conference on Thursday.

In a press release on Tuesday, the adoption agency said some media companies have been reporting malicious and one-sided assertions and that it would like to express its position based on objective facts. 

The Seoul Central District Court earlier this month ordered the Seoul-based agency to pay Adam Crapser, also known by his Korean name Shin Song-hyuk, 100 million won, or around 75-thousand U.S. dollars, in damages for a suit he had filed against Holt and the South Korean government in 2019.

The court said the agency had failed in its duty as the adoptee's guardian to confirm the acquisition of U.S. citizenship following his 1979 adoption, which eventually led to his deportation. It, however, did not recognize state responsibility.

While Crapser’s biological parents were alive prior to his adoption, his birth had not been registered, making it possible at the time for the agency to register him as an orphan and therefore eligible for international adoption.

Crapser was subsequently abandoned by two sets of adoptive parents following abuse and was unable to properly apply for citizenship, leading to his deportation back to South Korea in 2016.

Romania’s minister of family Gabriela Firea announced the Government’s intention to close all orphanages and move children to family-style homes, a project that is almost two decades in the making.

“Closing all placement centers, the so-called orphanages, in the country is our primordial interest, so that children left in the care of the state will have a better, warmer, friendlier life in [the care of] foundations or in family-style homes,” said Gabriela Firea, Romania’s minister of family, youth and equal opportunities. She added that there are currently nearly 47,000 children in orphanages throughout the country, out of which six thousand are up for adoption.

Romania has a dark past when it comes to orphanages. In the aftermath of the 1989 revolution that toppled the communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, a series of pictures came out showing the squalid conditions in orphanages. Subsequent investigations estimated that between 1966 and 1989 there were up to 20,000 unnecessary deaths of children left in the care of the state. The vast majority of those who died were disabled.

“Roughly 70% of the registered deaths were from pneumonia. They were dying of external causes that were preventable and treatable,” said Florin Soare, an investigator, quoted by The Guardian.

Firea’s recently announced intention, however, has been part of the Government’s commitments for years.