Ethnicity and transracial adoption
Gita Ramaswamy
In Mumbai the other day, I met Arun Dohle, a German adoptee of Indian origin. I had been corresponding with him for quite some time, and had spoken to him on telephone several times. I had even seen a photograph he had sent me. Yet his German accent, his way of articulation, and methods of communication (sending a photograph, etc.) marked him as German for me. I was completely unprepared for the encounter when I did meet him. I had expected a German, and here was someone I could clearly identify as my countryman. He could have been the boy next door. He could have been the assistant at the eSeva counter, your banker, just anybody in Hyderabad. We travelled together over the next two days and I could then get some understanding of what moved this thirty year old young man brought up in Germany since he was three months old, to visit India year after year and search, search and search. This is his sixth visit to India.
Thirty one years ago, the Dohles, a German couple came to stay with a leading Maharashtrian family in Pune. The same family helped the couple to adopt a little boy from an orphanage run by a relative of theirs. This was Arun. `I was a very welcome and loved child. I was loved by my adoptivefamily, grandparents and my parents’ friends,’ says Arun. `I grew up in a tolerant and somewhat elite environment. My parents were both teachers and were of the `68 student revolt generation. Of course, when I was young, I did face racism. On the public playground, this was worse. My sister (also adopted from India) reminds of the day I was badly beaten up by some kids because of my skin colour. I also lost one of my front teeth in another quarrel over my skin.` In the discussions over the eforum of which Arun is a member, Arun had never insisted on racism as an integral part of the West as other adoptees had. Yet Arun’s experiences recall pretty much the same experience. The confident young financial consultant has had nasty experiences.
`I have always been an outsider in Germany – I have been different. I recall a bad encounter with a conductor in a train – he didn’t want to accept my valid ticket and threatened to beat me. I think he didn’t do so, because he worried over my perfect German.’ He could have understood Gandhi’s trauma in South Africa. `One day when I was travelling first class, one passenger told me sit in the second class. Dating was always a bit difficult’
When Arun was fourteen, he wondered where he was from. Later he travelled back to Pune, to stay with the very same leading Maharastrian politician’s family. As soon as he announced his intent to them, they tried to put him off. In fact, when he first wrote staying that he was coming to stay, they never answered his letters. Nevertheless, refusing to be put off, he stayed with them for three months. Dohle kept returning to India, once with his then-girlfriend, now wife. “I took her all over the country, never deciding where I wanted to stay. Until I reached Pune, and that’s when it hit me that I was searching for something.”
Dohle became a rather successful financial consultant in Aachen, Germany, and it wasn’t until 1999, that he realised he still felt as though something was missing. Arun thinks he has located his father’s family, though they refuse to acknowledge him (A DNA test of his half-brother’s hair has confirmed 94%shared genes.) Arun is now visiting courts, police stations, adoption agencies, newspaper offices, politicians, social activists – to anyone who will listen to him and help him in his search. His German friends who come to visit India stay in star-hotels and visit tourist destinations, but you find this young man on a shoe-string budget, brought up just like them, but working with passion at everything Indian. `This is my country. These are my people. My children are half-Indian. I want to bring my family out to India to live here, at least some of the time,’ says Arun.
The autorickshaw driver asks me Arun’s story – he is curious at this boy who looks Indian, but cannot talk any Indian language, and has the typical luggage of a foreign tourist – backpack and money belt. He is frankly disbelieving when I sketch a bare outline of Arun’s search, `Doesn’t he know what is good for him? Here are all of us, dying to get out, dying for a foreign visa, and he wants to return and be an Indian?’ When I tell Arun that some Indians comment that he doesn’t know his own good, Arun says, `Do they know what it is to be sent out without a name, home, country, culture? I would have been happier to be in India with with my mother even if she was a poor prostitute. Only those secure in their home, country and culture, can talk like this.’ We tend to forget that adoptees, even they look and talk like NRIs or immigrant Indians, have lost out on their roots in India. They have lost out on language, culture and country, and the love of an adoptive family need not necessarily compensate for this tremendous loss. We also know, and the adoptees too have come to know that there are grave charges of trafficking by adoption agencies to fuel intercountry adoption, that mothers have been induced to part with their babies, that poor, vulnerable families have been broken up so that richer people could build up their families. Babies and children are now only commodities, worth so many thousands of foreign dollars. To know, as Arun does, that one was forcibly taken away from a mother’s arms, is a terrible cross to bear.
Arun’s search is fuelled by this loss that causes adoption distress, common to all adoptees, whether adopted abroad or in India. In open adoptions this distress is rare. Children adopted into Indian families in India probably have this distress mitigated. The reasons could be that in many cases, the adoption is open (everyone – community, the child, knows about it); in many cases, it could be entirely secret – the child may not know at all about the adoption; it could be because of closer identification with their adoptive families and extended family networks. It could also be that this distress is largely unrecorded and unreported – we do not rule this out. Indian children adopted into white families abroad, on the other hand, have extensive psychological trauma. As Arun says, `I’m like a computer with Indian hardware, but running on German software. Sometimes this causes errors. People attemped to cut my roots. How can a tree grow without roots?’ This distress has caused a separation between Arun and his wife who has taken custody of their year-old twins. `How can I be a good father to my twins when I cannot be a good son to my mother?’ cries Arun.
Another adoptee says, `It's really hard, because at root I know my mother didn't love me and I've been taught that mothers do NOT abandon their children so I wonder what I did wrong or if I am wrong. Just inherently. I haven't found a balm for that pain and knowledge. And no matter how many times my mom, or other adoptive parents, tell me I was loved and that I am loved... I know I was left someplace in Seoul on my birthday. And I've been taught that if my mother loved me she would have kept me. I don't know if adoptive parents can step outside of the propaganda enough to appreciate that. I don't know if anyone can really other than another adoptee. ‘[1]
Birth searches by adoptees of Indian origin is not new to India. Several such stories have been reported by the Indian media. Alexis, adopted from Kolkata says, `Returning to my roots, to my motherland of India, has been the most liberating event of my life and has given me the closure I've needed for many years.’[2] However this has not been an easy task for Indian adoptees, because they are generally not encouraged to return and identify with their country of birth. Says an adoptee, `The majority of adoptive parents are completely in the dark, and they're not even groping for a light. As long as we say what they want to hear (everything's fine, we're happy, etc), all conversations are positive. As soon as some adoptees begin expressing real truths, about pain and loss, parents start labeling us as angry, sick, pathetic, blah blah. ‘[3]
Adoption agencies positively discourage their searches. It is as if the collective guilt and shame that Indian must harbour for sending tens of thousands of children out into the cold – away from the country, away from their parents, away from their culture – this guild must be hidden from public gaze. Arun says, `All Indian adoptees are discouraged from searching for their birthparents. We are told lies – your mother gave you away because she loved you so much. She wished a better future for you. But I know for sure that no mother who loves her child gives it away for adoption if she is not in distress. Mothers in India are counseled to give away the child, they are pressurized, they are forced, they are induced.’
Supporters of international transracial adoption would have us believe that adoptees, with the support of their parents can work their ways through the myriad barriers of racism. These however do not balance or compensate for the agonies of those who ‘don’t have a perfect fit’. While this is certainly possible in many cases, it seems pretty much like the arguments against feminists in the seventies, `All women adjust. Why can’t you? Why should you want to change what is so natural to most women?’ Women who went to therapists were told to `fit and adjust to the reality, not demand that the reality should change.’ All shades of experience undeniably exist. Adoption-identity crises do exist; adoption agency professionals should be the first people to tell us that they exist in all adoptions – whether Indian-adopted or not. In a foreign culture these assume greater importance. While most people would like children to remain with their parents, and would consider separation of child from parent only in the rarest of rare circumstances, adoption agencies would like adoption to go up, alongwith their incomes, and it is felt that many adoptive parents generally feel that the child is already in an orphanage, why should we worry where s/he came from, as long as someone (however unreliable their word) vouched that s/he was an orphan. Nobody joins common cause with the adoptees who have actually experienced the loss and pain, commonly called adoption distress.
What do adoptees feel?
- Confusion about ethnicity - a sense of feeling “white” inside while appearing “different” in appearance.
- Sense of loss of a racial and cultural identity and a sense of being caught between two cultures.
- Dealing with racism, particularly apparent in regional (Australia) where the population remains predominantly Anglo-Saxon, and often further hampered by being an only child, or having siblings of different ethnicity to their own.
- Dealing with the intrusion of people as a result of the inability to choose who knows of their adoption.
- Parents’ lack of knowledge to impart to adoptees regarding birth family and racial and cultural identity.
- Parents’ difficulty in acknowledging family differences and in dealing with the adoptee’s questions and issues
Racism was experienced, to some degree, by most adoptees and the way it was dealt with depended very much on the adoptee’s resources within their family and the degree to which such delicate issues could be openly discussed. For those unable to talk about it, or where the power of the racism had gone unrecognised, the experience of racism was traumatic and, ultimately, damaging to the essence of their self esteem. The fragile sense of self described by adoptees generally is perhaps further compounded by cultural difference and, for many, racism is experienced as truth; the verbal attacks and rejection experienced in childhood damages their ability to develop a love of self. Several of the participants have feelings of dislike, bordering on racism, towards their own race. Their own appearance, at odds with the way they imagine themselves to be, becomes a focus for their own distaste and self-loathing.[4]
`There is so much that ICA adoptees hold inside that others don't see. To this day I am still searching for a place where I belong. It is so frustrating and at times the walls come down and I find a private place to be sad without embarrassment. The tears flow for a short bit, then I collect myself and move on with my struggles,’ this from an Indian adoptee, Alan[5]. Alan once wrote to me,`I ran across this statement which I think accurately reflects most adoptees. “In some ways, adoption makes us the ultimate survivors. We have to cope with many losses ; of a birth parent, of identity, of our home country, of our ethnicity. We carry it in our hearts, everyday.”’
Why has this question of the mental well-being of our children adopted abroad not made news before? Well, for one, `adoption stories’ are those put out by agencies who would naturally have us believe that the children did go to a better future. Hence the `success stories’ of those who have made it good. Research studies hitherto conducted have largely been conducted by adoptive parents themselves or people close to adoption agencies – most of these studies go to show that transracial adoption has ‘worked’ in the broad sense of the term. They tend to assert that there is only a marginal difference in the self-esteem and adjustment of adoptees as compared to that of local populations. Adoptees argue that this body of research consisting of qualitative works, is based on small groups of children or adolescents, and focuses on issues of attachment, adjustment and self-esteem, and interpreted as positive. Any problems identified were always attributed to pre-adoption factors (initial abandonment by the birthparents, stay in an orphanage, inadequate stimulation, lack of medical care, etc.), but never to the inherent problems of a coloured child transplanted to a racist society. Says an adoptee from Vietnam, `We have very few journalists, authors, lawyers, policy and PhD type graduates among us. It is the reverse for potential adoptive parents and the non-adopted individuals in research community that are well established in their power to voice their opinions through their comparative maturity, qualifications and status backing their decisions of what's best for adoptees.’[6]
While we are not able to comment on the origin of the research and researchers, we do find that the latter issue – problems identified, are always attributed to the lack of care in the country of birth. Till adult adoptees themselves raised the issue recently, this had gone uncontested. First world bias in studies of the Third World are notorious, given their orientalist biases. The unilayered view of foreign researchers is represented in their views of Third World poverty, malnutrition, social constructs like family and marriage, its effect on children and family life. These issues are also presented as singularly Third World-in-origin, without noting, for instance, that the West, barely forty years ago, had severe problems with unwed pregnancies. Poverty among marginalized communities like the native Indians, Afro-Americans, etc. and its effect on child-raising or child abandonmentelinquishment is also not a factor in any of the studies. In this context, researchers also do not mention strategies the Western world used to successfully combat the problems of unwed pregnancies and abandonment of children by building up large-scale support programmes for unwed mothers, as also social security for poor parents with children. Hence the stigma on unwed motherhood and vulnerable women is portrayed as an `Asiatic’ phenomenon – a cross which only the Asiatics have to bear. Researchers have also not gone into the active agency of local elites who literally `harvest’ children of the poor for intercountry adoption. They could examine, for instance, why Russia, China, India and Korea top the sending countries, while most African countries, lowest though they are on the economic scale, have refused to allow their babies for adoption abroad.
There are two studies specifically on adopted children from India that are available. One is a study by Joan Goodman and Stacy Kim[7] - ‘Outcomes of Adoption of Children from India : Subjective versus Normative view of Success. (340 American families, between 1973-1987, adopted children from the Missionaries of Charity under the auspices of Kathy Sreedhar, now with the Holdeen Foundation). 76 families returned parent questionnaires, and 57 returned adoptee questionnaires of the 110 families who responded. The study concludes that though, normatively the children were not doing well (significant disability beyond the normal growing pains of development, very few entering the professions or attaining the status of their parents – this is common to most studies) they were doing extremely well subjectively, that is, most of them were satisfied with each aspect of their lives and optimistic about their futures (though a reading of the enclosed narratives are disturbing – the parents reporting high promiscuity, racial abuse of their children at school and later, and children’s racial identity problems). It must also be noted that over 58% of the adoptees still lived with their parents, at the time of the study. Problems begin after this point – from a privileged adoptive child whose adoptive parents make believe that they are ‘special’, they now become just one of many non-white immigrants.
The other is a study done in Sweden by Anders Lange on 217 adoptees born in India: 24% had been refused employment, 25% had been harassed at the work place, 7% had been refused to hire an apartment, 17% had been badly treated in school, 14% had been harassed by neighbours, 33% had been threatened on the streets, 7% had been beaten physically, 13% had been refused entry at a restaurant, 15% had been badly treated in a shop, 12% had been badly treated by the police, 11% had been badly treated at a hospital and 12% had been badly treated by social workers. [8] The rates of suicides for adoptees are five times that of ethnic Swedes – a rate comparable only to forced migration and cultural genocide.[9]
Between 1945-2001, of a total of 43,882 children adopted into Sweden, 6,503 are from India. Sweden is considered the more liberal of the Western countries. Yet recent studies have revealed that adoptees fare worse than the Swedish-born control group and general population in levels of education, earn less at work and have less fulltime work, are less likely to be married/cohabiting. They earn less than their adoptive parents and Swedish-born biological siblings, are more unemployed than them. (This is important in the light of the argument that children adopted abroad automatically get the advantages of the adopted family.)
Adoptees are over represented in psychiatry centers - 170% overrepresentation in child psychiatry centers, 400% overrepresentation at mental health institutions, 200% overrepresented for abuse of alcohol (boys) and narcotics (girls), 200% over represented for anoxeric behaviour (girls), 200% over represented as perpetrators of violent crime (boys) and victims of violent crime (girls) and 300% over represented for suicide attempts (boys) 200 % for girls. They are also 240% overrepresented for placement in foster homes, and 260% over represented for placing in youth homes. The studies also show higher unpleasant sexual experiences for adopted girls, higher frequency of early sex, several sexual partners, early pregnancy and abortion, as well as higher substance abuse.[10]
The purpose of citing these statistics is not derive a rather nauseous air of invincibility. It is not lend credence to what many adoptees feel and experience as their life. We need to acknowledge the problem (and here, it does not matter that half suffer, not three-fourths); it could even be argued that those adoptees who suffer abroad could suffer in the country of origin. When the issue is so problematic, it seems awkward that those who really suffer, had no say in the matter at all.
Arun says, `I would love to actually meet at least one Indian adoptee who is happy with the adoption and his/her life. I have never met one. Agencies and adoptive parents constantly tell everyone that they are all very happy, but I have never heard adoptees themselves say it.’ Arun talks of different adoptees whom he knows intimately, ` XXX, for example, also an Indian adoptee has a painful life. She had various problems – she finds it difficult to have relations with men, she is addicted to drugs, etc. She has been in psychotherapy for many years now. And she refuses to come to India. She says it is too painful. YYY has been diagnosed with borderline syndrome and has been institutionalized twice. It is only when she began looking at India as a source of strength and visited India, that she improved. She is now married to a Pakistani and active in social issues in Germany.’ Alan, another adoptee looks at it differently. He tells me, `I have met other adoptees from India. The problem is pretty common in all of the adoptees I have met. The majority of adoptees I have met from India are underachievers and social drop-outs. A lot are in denial of who and what they are. Many are just struggling to survive emotionally and working to fit into "white America" any way they can. After all, what options do they have, what options were they given?’
The African American movement in the US has great clarity on the issues of transracial adoption.
The position of the Black movement on transracial (across race) adoption :
While white adoptive parents largely do not care to adopt African-American children, the African-American movement in the US has also categorically rejected transracial adoption; approximately 43% children available for adoption in the US are African-American. (Only 4% of available children are toddlers under the age of two; the rest are school-age and/or have special needs. The majority of white families want infants and toddlers only.)
The clearly enunciated position of The National Association of Black Social Workers in 1994 against transracial adoption was to enable to :
- to preserve African-American families and culture
- enable AA children to appreciate their cultures of origin
- enable AA children to learn how to cope with racism through living with families who experience racism daily and have learned to function well in spite of that racism
- to break down the systemic barriers that make it difficult for African Americans and other families of color to adopt.
What was life like being raised in the West?
Alexis, adopted from Kolkata says, ` Being raised in a racially-mixed family with white parents has made me more open and tolerant of differences, but it has also caused extreme racial displacement.
I recall times, as a child, shopping in the mall with my pale-skinned father. We would be followed from store to store because the security officer could not believe that he was actually my father. As I grew older, the predominant Barbie Doll image of the ideal
American woman distorted my personal concept of beauty. White, blond, tall, blue-eyed Barbie was an image I could never achieve. I saw brown skin as a dirty mark, almost a curse. I could not appreciate the value of brown skin, exotic cheekbones, and racial differences.
My middle school and high school years were painful. I knew I wasn't the girl that young boys wanted to date. Sometimes boys were attracted to me for my exotic look only.’
Korean adoptees are the single largest homogenous group of adoptees abroad, and the most outspoken as well. They say, ‘White parents can never teach their non-white children strategies of surviving in a racial society. Adoptees are stranded in the West, prisoners, vulnerable and without the place of refuge which immigrants have. When ICA adoptions diminish, and our adoptive parents pass away, virtually our only direct link to the West will disappear. …
To feel subordinated is not only the adoptee’s experience. The difference is that an immigrant can find strength in a birth culture which our adoptive parents refused us………..To be an adopted Korean is to live outside both cultures.’[11]
This is not to gainsay efforts made by many sensitive White parents to encourage children in exploring their heritage and roots, to make connections with immigrant Indian communities so that the adopted children have a fund of knowledge about India to tap. While it is commonly acknowledged that this is necessary for the child’s mental health and development, it is also a problematic issue whether encouraging children to explore their heritage is also not exoticisation; this could be argued so, if these efforts were accompanied by downgrading the native country of birth for its filth, poverty, bad mores, cultural differences, etc.
“There is a fine line between embracing your child’s culture and exploiting it. I cringe when adoptive Caucasian parents, say, “We’re Chinese’, because whatever they do, they’re not Chinese. Their child is Chinese, but they are not and never will be. It is disrespectful to take ownership of a culture like that. The last thing the children need, after everything that has been been taken from them, is to take the culture that is theirs, too. “We appreciate our parents for all they’ve done, just as most children should be appreciative of their parents, adopted or not. But people should remember that it was not our choice to be adopted or to leave Korea (the country of birth of the writer).[12] Another Korean adoptee, is more forthright,[13] `We live lives as non-white people, and many of us come from the conditions and countries whose histories you know so well and love to tell us about.
For myself, I am quite aware of what the trade off was. By buying me, my white parents “saved” me from sleeping on a concrete bed in the South Korean orphanage I was housed at until I came to the US when I was three and a half years old. This transaction gave me the “opportunity” to live a middle-class upbringing and to have an entry into the lives of white people. Of course, I was never really a full member of the household. That is, it was clear that my presence in the house was something to be both ignored and monitored. On many times my family would say stuff to me like, “I love you. I don’t see you as Korean. I see you as my daughter.” Or, when debating immigration, my family would be quick to point out that my presence in the US was fine—it was all the other immigrants that had to “get the hell out of the country” (our presence is always “allowed” if white people can regulate it and determine the terms of acceptability). but getting really would be quick to point out that my presence in the US was fine—it was all the other immigrants that had to “get the hell out of the country” (our presence is always “allowed” if white people can regulate it and determine the terms of acceptability). Often, my beloved family would make fun of how Asian people talked by speaking in a mock “Chinaman” voice, never batting an eye but getting really heated when I said something to them about it. Once, my father told me to “Get your wok and go” in front of his new wife, and they laughed and laughed. But the white supremacy I experienced, like that others experience, is also highly sexualized. My father controlled my sexuality by making a point to tell me in high school that I was allowed to date only white guys and Asian guys (and of course, only guys). He monitored my friendships with Black, Latino/a and Arab men and Black women. For some reason, he obsessed over who I dated and hung out with in a way that he never did with my white sister. My father also obsessed over my body. For some reason, I was just way too big for him (read: for an Asian woman to be desired by white men), and so I have had a membership to a health club since I was thirteen years old.’
A cursory visit to websites also reveals similar patterns elsewhere of racist reactions: here are some voices -
`I don’t trust middle-America, townie, white people. Actually I really feel most comfortable with other Asians. Although I am trying to get over the racist attitudes that I was indoctrinated with as a kid towards Latinos and Blacks, I’m only partially successful. Mostly I am weary of how non-Asians think of me. As foreign, exotic, etc. so I am not any better than the racists that I meet other than I am trying to overcome it I guess.’
`That’s an interesting observation. For me, my best friends are either Asian or Puerto Rican or Black. I don’t think I have any white friends. I got so tired of the racism I felt with white people that I stopped hanging out with them in high school. My adopted family even once made an odd comment about all my black friends, which was really significant to me because they also adopted a black son.’
`For me, racism has ALWAYS been a problem in my life. Every year I experience a few acts of racism no matter how big or small. Growing up in high school, I think I tried to ignore it. Now that I look back on my experiences, I really can’t believe some of the stuff that I put up with. It was so bad in fact that I even started resenting white people because they were the ones who had never accepted me. Now I realize that not all whites are racist but it took me awhile to trust them.’
`My first experience with racism was in high school. I guess it had always been there, but I never noticed until then. My world history teacher stood up in front of the class and taught my peers that all Asian people generally have yellow skin and jet black hair and that we were the sea people because we had squinted into the sun too much and that was why our eyes are made the way they are. I could have let that go, but then one of my peers whom I had known all my life asked why our eyes were made so weird because nobody else had eyes like ours. It should be noted that I was the only Asian much less adopted Korean in my high school and had been used to being the only one in school all my life. After that, everything had more of an impact on me. When someone asked me if I was the foreign exchange student, it bothered me more.I already was the loner because in my school all the black people hang out together and all the white people hang out together. ……………. I saw what realityheld and how my adoptive parents hadn’t given me all the things I needed asan adoptee. So I found out about all this stuff myself. It’s not that they didn’t care, but they just couldn’t help me where we live in MS. Which makes me all the madder.[14] ‘
“My way of coping with the fact that I am a Vietnamese girl adopted into an Australian family was to ignore it. I didn’t want to be different, I wanted to blend in. As a young child, my mother said I used to stand in front of the mirror hitting it and crying. I wanted to know why I looked different. As I got older my reflection would disappoint me because it reminded me I was Vietnamese. As a teenager, I felt like a white person trapped in a Vietnamese body”. [15]
To feel subordinated is not only the adoptee’s experience. Very many of us think that an adoptee has the same advantages an immigrant has. When so many immigrants have made it good abroad, what should be the difficulty for adoptees? The difference is that an immigrant can find strength in a birth culture which is refused to an adoptee. The stand of African American people discussed earlier is precisely because of this.
The issues of intercountry adoption gain importance in the context of the salvation fantasy. The narratives of Indian children adopted abroad have largely been framed in the escape-and-salvation fantasy. These children, supposedly, were saved from a fate worse than death in their countries of birth, and placed in loving and positive families in the West. Most adoptive parents in the West of both categories – those who desperately want a child, and those who want to give a child in need, a home, are convinced that children in the Third World need their intervention. Even if they acknowledge that there is a strong trafficking element in international adoption, they are doubtful that India (or other countries) can be left alone to deal with its vulnerable children. What has fuelled this agency ? Alarmist pictures created by international agencies raising funds? Sweeping generalizations by UN agencies that present problems out of proportion? Articles in the media that have a strong undercurrent of the inevitability of Western liberal intervention? Or the general syndrome of privileged-Whites-should-get-what-they-want? Of course, this concern with children meshes well with the present need of Western families for children to build their family. That this concern is specifically targeted to children of the Third World is clear when we see that it does not seem to extend to the children-in-need in their own countries, to mothers-in-need in their own countries, and certainly not to any other community-in-need in the country sending babies. In true colonial style, agency is taken out of the hands of the country of birth and firmly entrenched in the West.
How about the adoption agencies with their airconditioned offices (for the foreigners, and the ordinary one for the Indians) and airconditioned Tata Sumos and Qualis vehicles? This is by nor means, a simple rhetorical question, but a significant dilemna, particularly important in the caste-class context. They certainly know that all adoptees have `adjusted’ well. There have been many instances of adoptions being disrupted (adoptive parents have returned the children) that have not been brought to the notice of authorities. Why do they put our children in a position where they have to `adjust’? We are so careful with our own children when we send them to newer environments – boarding schools, music classes, games, holidays to an aunt’s house, etc. Why are we so disrespectful of these children’s needs that we send them out into the cold without support?
Elites like to think that they have done the children of the poor a great favour by sending them abroad to white parents. Of course, the issue whether these children would have been better off raised in India is inappropriate today; yet, we need to consider if we have not them a great wrong.
Life is better abroad? I think it depends on what one considers life in this question. Does life just mean money? If that is the determining question and answer then yes life is better abroad in a monetary sense. However, there is more to life than money, all money does is make the world go around and give people power. It does not solve the problems I have listed above and in my previous answers. What I am living does not feel like life to me, it feels like a punishment the majority of the time. So where do I fit? That is a question I've often wondered myself. I don't fit in the U.S. since I am not white or black. I don't fit with the Indians since I do not meet their standards. Honestly I feel pretty alone in the world and disconnected from humanity at times. My life has been pretty painful and lonely and it doesn't seem to be getting any better even at my age.
Intercountry adoption from India having begun in a large way in the seventies, will now face its death-knell from the very adoptees themselves. Now that these children have grown up and are able to tell us their stories, the myth of intercountry adoption stands exposed, as well as its complete unpackaging as yet another device to `breed’ another kind of goods for foreign markets. `Yet we are the least respected and consulted individuals as having authority on our community than almost any other group I can think of. People with disabilities, gay/queers, feminists, people of colour – all are considered having legitimate voices to spread their concern about say prejudice against people in wheelchairs, homophobia, unequal pay or sexism in the work place against women or racism in society. Their lived experience is respected as giving their opinions legitimacy and respect.
`We are the experts because we have lived this life. We do have good advice and information, because we've lived through the good intentions, the racism, the feeling of otherness..
Three boxes that can be used here and there to explain the context of intercountry adoption :
If intercountry adoption was to be shut down, two things would immediately happen : abandonment of babies and children and parents would go down most adoption agencies running in the name of child welfare would close down. They have no incentive other than hefty fees to operate.
The background - adoptions in India were done anyhow till the Supreme Court guidelines came in 1984. The Supreme Court took this issue up in a public litigation over scandals of child trafficking. Since then, an agency, funded by the Ministry of Social Justice, but controlled by adoption agencies - CARA,( Central Adoption Resource Agency) looks after international adoption. It takes about six months from the time of referral, but this could go upto a year
By Supreme Court guidelines, Indians have to have first option. Rejection letters by Indian adoptors are commonly fabricated - Indian adoptors are routinely turned away, unless they are well-connected
c) By the same guidelines, siblings and physically/mentally challenged children are allowed to take an NOC straightaway. Many cases of children being shown as the above have been noted.
The procedures - the foreign adoptors have a home study and referral done by a recognised adoption agency in their country. A child is matched, and application for an NOC (no objection certificate) is made to CARA, As soon as this is got (within a week), a petition is filed before either the Family Court/ High Court (if original jurisdiction) or Juvenile Court for guardianship of the child. As soon as this is got, the child is sent out with escort or the adoptors come flying down
Intercountry adoption in India has been dogged by grave irregularities. AP has been particularly notorious. The broad features are :
a) As the going rate of the child (what the foreigners pay) is attractive - $15,000 upwards, children are specifically `orphanized' so that they are available for adoption. Vulnerable single mothers are coerced, poor parents are `persuaded', etc. etc. All effort is made to part the parent and child. Documents of relinquishment are regularly fabricated and forged. Children are even kidnapped. Normally, there is an efficient system of paid touts/commission agents who bring babies and children.
There are plenty of adoptive parents available in India. Agencies have however not encouraged Indian parents to adopt – two possible reasons are the elitist natures of the agencies who want parents who can compare with foreign adoptors successfully, and the large sums of money flowing in from foreign adoption. In fact, most agencies negotiate advances from adoption agencies abroad who fund their buildings, cars and living styles. These advances are a form of `tied aid’ – against a steady stream of babies to be supplied. Consequently, Indian adoptors stand a poor chance – they are rejected outright, they are asked to supply inconsequential information, they are asked to wait, and very often, they are all shown the single child who needs medical attention to repel them.
Do we want interviews with adoptive parents? If you think it necessary, I’ll do this part. These are some rough transcripts.
`TransRacial adoptions are pretty tough on kids. I feel like a broken record and I don't care. That's all I know. I've seen and watched how hard it can be for some of them as adults...including my own son.’
My son is *successful* in many areas of his life, Gita, but not inside of his own heart. He feels that India left him....we took him...and he had no choices....yet, he does feel that we have helped him in his life...it's complicated for so many of our adult adoptees. I know too much after 30 years of raising children....I stopped being naieve about ICA a very long time ago. There was no help for us as his parents....there is more help today....finding help for our son was like *trying to find a needle in a haystack*.
Inger - `I guess my view is that if an individual or family goes to the enormous trouble, expense, and heartache of adoption, they intend to love that child
and invest themselves in helping that child to cope with is or her life issues. It is, then, a task of education and support to be sure that those parents are able to anticipate and react to common issues faced by families in their adoptive situations. Those issues are not issues you can help us with, because you don't know the issues we face: you can't know. You have to trust that we love our children and worry about them and advocate for them.’
[1] Kathy’s interviews – please change the name
[2] www.journeysoftheheart.net/international/india.html
[3] interviews by Kathyn (change name)
[4] http://www.bensoc.asn.au/parc_resources/papers_adopteestransracial.html
[5] name changed
[6] from interviews with adult adoptees done by an adoptive mother herself
[7] Published in the Adoption Quarterly, Vol 4(2), 2000
[8] Anders Lange: Diskriminering, integration och etniska relationer, quoted by Tobias Hubinette in International adoptees in Sweden according to statistics and research, interadopt communication
[9] tobias, www.goal.or.kr
[10] Tobiaas Hubinette, Swedish Adoptees : International adoptees in Sweden according to statistics and research, Intadopt???
[11] Transracial Abductees : A critique of Intercountry adoption by Tobias Hubinette
[12] Liz Rogers, Korean adoptee in www.oregonlive.com/search/index.ssf?/base/living/106198560940220.xml?oreg\onian?lvls, 27.8.2003
[13] Bought coloured kids : kiljakim2003@yahoo.com
[14] quoted in www.alsoknown as
[15] quoted in http://www.bensoc.asn.au/parc_search/transracial_fp