Kudos: Telling Like it Is in Sri Lanka

From time to time, REFORM Talk will offer our kudos to particularly insightful blog posts, articles or opinions. This post delves into the question of what is really going on in Sri Lankan international placements.

“‘Adopt a poor child and change his life!’, ‘Every child deserves a family. Be that family!’, ‘Give an orphan child a mother and father to love him!’ A recent campaign of child adopting agencies and organisations across the world, claiming to champion the cause of orphaned, abandoned and destitute children and urging prospective parents to respond on line, came up with a stunning result. A staggering 68,000,000 has responded!

In spite of the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Inter-Country Adoption (of which Sri Lanka is also a signatory), and numerous other Conventions and Acts, young children are being spirited out of their native lands under the ‘Adoption’ banner.

Baby farms which house so called orphans, who it has been found are actually abandoned children by unwed mothers or destitute pregnant women, although a novel concept for Sri Lanka, are common the world over. In the 1970’s when the baby trade was at its peak in Sri Lanka, more than 1500 children were give away to foreign nationals for adoption, a study by the Lawyers for Human Rights Desk had revealed.

“We came up with that figure after we did the study from the mid 1970’s upto 2004,” says K Tiranagama, a Human Rights lawyer who has been in the forefront of child adoptions for over three decades. “After it was decided to amend the Adoption Ordinance related to foreign adoptions, the numbers of foreign adoptions came down sharply. In 1992, it came down to 22. But by the time our study ended it had gone up to 60.” Probation and Child Care Commissioner, Sarath Abeygunewardene, on the other hand, maintains that the figures are now almost negligible with no more than a handful (less than 10) children being given to foreign nationals, last year.

However, the issue of Baby Farms and young children being ‘exported’ under the ‘adoption’ banner has once again emerged following a raid of a Children’s Home run by a Catholic organisation by the National Child Protection Authority (NCPA) recently. The NCPA charged that the Home was actually a Baby Farm, a claim which was refuted by the Catholic Church. However, Tiranagama insists that most of the children given for foreign adoption came from four religious organisations, one of them the Home that had been raided.

He dismisses the argument that some of the children taken for foreign adoptions fare better than children left behind in state homes, saying, “In my experience, some people adopt children of different nationalities as a hobby – like rearing dogs of different breeds, and not because they have a genuine love for these children.” As for the charge that there are only very few local takers for such children, he says, “Our statistics prove otherwise. There are more than enough local childless couples who want to adopt a child. Consequently, first preference in selecting a child should be given to them and not foreigners.”

Adopting children – a hobby?
[The Nation 2/4/12 by Carol Aloysius]

2008 is the last year that Sri Lanka reported statistics to the Hague. See this pdf for the 2008 placement statistic of 69 children internationally. Italy, Germany and The Netherlands had the most children received that year. Only 2 children were placed to the US in FY2008. Sri Lanka did not specify the ages of the children placed. In 2008, 1215 children were placed domestically in Sri Lanka.

A 2007 article by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says that of the 21,000 Sri Lankan children that were in orphanages at the time, over 19,000 had at least one living parent.

REFORM Puzzle Piece

We are looking for  honest representation of the statistics of children that need international placement and to not confuse the issue with the number of children in poverty.