Wednesday Weirdness-Sexual Exploiters Want Kids Back

Welcome to Wednesday Weirdness, a recurring theme where we post something truly weird and wacky in adoption or child welfare.

In South Africa, a set of Russian biological parents who lost custody 9 years ago are wanting their children back. What is weird is that the parents “concede the existence and “inappropriateness” of pictures showing them naked and performing indecent acts with some of their four children, they say this is “not such an unforgivable sin that all recognition of the relationship between us must be denied”.

In June, advocate Andre Stokes, the court-appointed curator of the four children – now aged 17, 11, 10 and eight – made an application in the Durban High Court for an order terminating or suspending the couple’s parental responsibilities and rights.

This would allow the children to be adopted by the two sets of foster parents who have been caring for them virtually from the day they were removed from their parents in August 2003, when the youngest was just six days old.

Although their parents were convicted and sentenced to jail, they were freed in June 2006 when their convictions and sentences were set aside because the photographs depicting them performing indecent acts with the children were deemed inadmissible.

Stokes said in his affidavit before the court that the couple had never denied the contents of the photographs, but had “rather sought to justify them according to religious and cultural practices”.

He said the children – who had no desire to see their parents – deserved finality and it was time to start adoption hearings.

But the father, in his affidavit now filed with the court opposing Stokes’s application, says he is not surprised the children have no interest in being reunited with their biological parents.

“This is because they have never been afforded an opportunity to participate in a reunification process,” he said.”