Adoption in the News

Adoption In The News

 

 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/sep/06/china-ending-foreign-adoption-international-intercountry

China says it is ending foreign adoptions, prompting concern from US

 

78 countries at Swiss conference agree Ukraine’s territorial integrity must be basis of any peace

The Ukrainian government believes that 19,546 children have been deported or forcibly displaced, and Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova previously confirmed that at least 2,000 were taken from Ukrainian orphanages.

In Kyiv, at a regular demonstration by relatives of soldiers captured by Russia, the response to the Swiss gathering was muted.

“I would really like to believe that this (conference) will have an impact, but some very important countries did not sign the communique,” said Yana Shyrokyh, 56, whose army serviceman son has been in captivity since 2022. “I would really like them to find powerful levers of influence on Russia.”

Associated Press journalists Derek Gatopoulos, Illia Novikov and Dmytro Zhyhinas in Kyiv, Ukraine, contributed to this report.

Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

Jamey Keaten, The Associated Press

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abductions_in_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War

Child abductions in the Russo-Ukrainian War

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Child abductions in the Russo-Ukrainian War
Part of the Russo-Ukrainian War
1,500 Ukrainian children from Kherson and Zaporizhzhia at Yevpatoria, Russian-occupied Crimea, October 2022
Location Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine
Date 2014[1][2][3] – present
Target Ukrainian children
Attack type
Deaths 549[4]
Injured 1,354[4]
Victims 16,000[4] – 307,000[5] (as of August 2022)
700,000 (as of July 2023)[6]
Perpetrators
Litigation International Criminal Court arrest warrants for Putin and Lvova-Belova

During the Russo-Ukrainian War,[3] Russia has forcibly transferred almost 20 thousand Ukrainian children to areas under its control, assigned them Russian citizenship, forcibly adopted them into Russian families, and created obstacles for their reunification with their parents and homeland.[7][8] The United Nations has stated that these deportations constitute war crimes.[8][9] The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for President of Russia Vladimir Putin[10] (who has explicitly supported the forced adoptions, including by enacting legislation to facilitate them)[1] and Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for their alleged involvement.[10] According to international law, including the 1948 Genocide Convention, such acts constitute genocide if done with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a nation or ethnic group.[11][a]

Ukrainian children have been abducted by the Russian state after their parents had been arrested by Russian occupation authorities or killed in the invasion,[12][13] or after becoming separated from their parents in an active war zone.[14] Children have also been abducted from Ukrainian state institutions in occupied areas, and through children’s “summer camps” on Russian territory.[12] The abducted children have been subject to Russification;[1][14] raising children of war in a foreign nation and culture may constitute an act of genocide if intended to erase their national identity.[1]

Ukrainian authorities have verified the identities of[15] over 19,000 abducted children,[16] compiling and actively updating the data as part of an online platform: “Children of War”. Russian authorities have claimed that over 700,000 Ukrainian children have been “evacuated” by mid-2023,[6] and Ukraine’s ombudsman on children’s rights believes that the actual number of abducted children may be in the hundreds of thousands.[15] A charitable organisation, Save Ukraine, facilitates the repatriation and family reunification of abducted Ukrainian children.[17][13]

History

See also: Russian invasion of Ukraine and Russian irredentism

Russia started transferring children from Ukrainian territories as 2014, the first year of the Russo-Ukrainian War.[1][2] The first such large-scale program was initiated by Russian charity celebrity Elizaveta Glinka.[3] In early February 2022, Russia “evacuated” 500 supposed orphans from Donetsk Oblast to Russian territory.[18]

The first reports of forced deportations to Russia as part of the Russian invasion of Ukraine came mid-March 2022, during the siege of Mariupol.[19] The same month, Russian children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova has stated that a group of Ukrainian children transferred to Russia from Mariupol had initially asserted their Ukrainian identity, but that it had since transformed into a love for Russia, saying that she had adopted one of the children herself.[1]

Map of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine

On 22 March 2022, Ukraine and U.S. authorities claimed more than 2,300 children had been kidnapped by Russian forces from the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts.[20][21]

On 30 May 2022, Vladimir Putin signed a decree that streamlined the process of adopting Ukrainian orphans or those without parental care and giving them Russian citizenship.[1][22][23]

By 11 April, two-thirds of Ukraine’s 7.5 million children had been displaced according to the U.N.[24] Ukraine’s human rights commissioner, Lyudmila Denysova, and U.N. ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya, stated at that time that more than 120,000 children had been deported to Russia.[25][24] By 26 May, more than 238,000 Ukrainian children were reported to have been deported to Russian territory.[22]

Ukraine raised the issue at a meeting of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in early June, where the head of Ukraine’s mission, Yevhenii Tsymbaliuk, quoted a message from a Ukrainian child who had been forcibly adopted despite having close living relations; addressed to his aunt, it read, in part, “They say I’m an orphan. But I’m not an orphan, I have you, I have grandparents. There are so many children like me here. They say they want to leave us in Russia. And I don’t want to stay in Russia!”[26]

According to Ukrainska Pravda, Russia has taken 267 orphans from Mariupol to Rostov to be made Russian citizens, supervised by Maria Lvova-Belova. It also reported that Russian authorities had looked for and collected orphaned children, to be taken to an unknown destination.[27]

Sky News released CCTV footage dated June 2022 of Russian FSB officials entering an orphanage Kherson to search for orphans. Aware of the risk of child abductions, the staff hid the children prior to their arrival. Finding the orphanage empty, the FSB agents seized records, computers, and the CCTV system from the orphanage in an apparent effort to track down the missing children. Russian authorities subsequently sent abducted 15 children to be housed in the orphanage, only to be taken away by the Russian occupiers as they retreated from Kherson. Russian forces also successfully abducted children from a different Kherson orphanage, an eyewitness told Sky News.[28]

In June 2022, Mikhail Mizintsev, head of the National Defense Management Center, claimed 1,936,911 Ukrainians had been deported to Russia, of whom 307,423 were children.[29]

On 7 September a United Nations official reported that there were credible accusations that Russian forces had sent Ukrainian children to Russia for adoption as part of a forced deportation programme, and the US ambassador informed the UN Security Council that more than 1,800 Ukrainian children had been transferred to Russia in July alone.[30]

Child abduction during “filtration” procedures was documented in a 10 November 2022 Amnesty International report entitled “Russia’s Unlawful Transfer And Abuse Of Civilians In Ukraine During ‘Filtration'”. An 11-year-old boy testified to Amnesty International:[31]

They took my mom to another tent. She was being questioned… They told me I was going to be taken away from my mom… I was shocked… They didn’t say anything about where my mom was going. A lady from Novoazovsk [child protection] service said maybe my mom would be let go… I didn’t get to see my mom… I have not heard from her since.[31]

In December 2022, a report published by the Eastern Human Rights Group and the Institute for Strategic Research and Security concluded that the deportations in Donbas were prepared by the Russian Federation under the guise of “evacuation” ahead of time.[32]

According to an August 2023 Reuters report, Alexei Petrov, an aide to the office of Russia’s presidential commissioner for children’s rights, had employed neo-Nazi rhetoric and symbols in his online activity, and associated himself with neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and Russian far-right movements online.[33]

Abductions

The vast majority of the abducted children have been abducted from southern and eastern Ukraine (Kherson, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Luhansk and Mykolaiv regions).[12] According to Ukraine’s ombudsman on children’s rights, Russia is carrying out the abductions with the goal of supplementing its own population, and that Russia is conducting health examinations on the children in order to integrate only healthy Ukrainian children into the Russian nation.[15]

Parental separation

Some children have been abducted after becoming separated from their parents while fleeing active war zones,[12][14] and some have been abducted after their parents were detained in filtration camps.[12][13] Some children have been abducted and taken to Russia by family friends or relatives seeking financial and material gain from incentives instituted by the Russian state intended to promote adoption of Ukrainian children by Russian families.[34] Ukraine’s ombudsman on children’s rights has alleged that Russian occupation authorities have used abductions as a punitive measure against parents who disobey occupation authorities, revoking their parental rights as punishment for dissent.[15] Some children are abducted by Russian authorities after their parents are killed by Russian forces, Ukrainian officials have said.[14][15]

State institutions

Children have been abducted from Ukrainian state-run institutions such as orphanages,[14][35][36] group homes,[14] care homes, hospitals,[36] and boarding schools;[37][14] many of the forcibly transferred children were taken from orphanages and group homes.[14] State institutions furthermore lost track of thousands of children in their care amid the turmoil of the war.[38]

Most children in the care of Ukrainian state institutions (including some of those in orphanages[18]) are not orphans but were only temporarily or permanently placed under the care of the state by parents facing personal hardships such as poverty, illness, or addiction. The Ukrainian state facilitates the voluntary temporary or permanent placement of children under the care of state institutions by parents.[14] Some 90% of Ukrainian children living under state care were thus “social orphans” – children with family members who are for various reasons unable to care for them.[12] The United Nations estimated that some 90,000 children resided in state-run homes in Ukraine prior to the 2022 invasion. Regardless of whether the children had living parents or were indeed wards of the state, such forced transfers during wartime likely constitute a war crime.[14]

Summer camp stays

Parents in Russian-occupied areas have been encouraged by Russian occupation authorities, Russian forces, and teachers to send their children to so-called “summer camps”[39] (in fact re-education camps for Ukrainian children) for a respite from the Russo-Ukrainian War. Some parents were pressured to allow their children to go to the camps, while others agreed in order to get their children out of an active war zone, or to take advantage of an opportunity to provide them a free trip (many families that agreed to send their children were economically disadvantaged) or better living conditions amid the ravages of war.[18]

Some of these children have been subsequently detained in the camps indefinitely, while others were returned weeks or months later than promised. Some parents who sent their children to the “summer camps” were subsequently told that their children would be returned only if their parents pick them up in person, but travel between Ukraine and Russia is difficult, dangerous and expensive, some camps are located far from Ukraine (including as far as Magadan Oblast in the Russian Far East, which abuts the Pacific coast), and many children are from low-income families that cannot afford the journey (some had to sell their belongings to afford the journey and travel through four countries to collect their children from the camps); even relatives granted power of attorney by parents are not allowed to collect the children, and all men (including parents) of ages between 18 and 60 are forbidden from leaving Ukraine as they are eligible for conscription and additionally risk “filtration” and possible persecution when attempting to enter Russia, so that in practice, in most cases only the mothers are able to retrieve the children. In some instances, camp officials said that the return of children was dependent upon Russia recapturing since liberated Ukrainian territory where the child’s family lives, and one child was told that he would not be returned home due to his “pro-Ukrainian views”.[18] Some children said they were told they would be given up for adoption or placed into foster homes if their parents did not come to collect them soon.[40] Some children were retrieved through intervention by the Ukrainian government. Parents’ ability to communicate with their children during their stay in the camps has been curtailed, and parents have been denied information about their child’s status.[18]

Maltreatment

According to witness testimonies obtained by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, some of the children have experienced poor living conditions, inadequate care, and verbal abuse while living under the custody of the Russian state.[8] Some returned children have attested to harsh punishments and restrictive living conditions while in Russia.[13] The Ukrainian government has claimed that some children have experienced sexual exploitation after being forcibly transferred to Russia.[39] Children detained in summer camps have testified to frequent punishment, bullying by peers, and pressure to sing the Russian anthem.[40]

Abducted children are offered a three month-long rehabilitation with mental health care teams upon returning to Ukraine.[13]

Russian policies

Adoptions

Russian law prohibits adoptions of children who are citizens of other countries by Russian citizens without the consent of the child’s home country. In May 2022, Vladimir Putin signed a decree[1] facilitating the granting of Russian citizenship to Ukrainian children to enable their permanent adoption into Russian families – this change represents a legal obstacle to future reunification of the abducted children with their Ukrainian families[1][31] or their repatriation to Ukraine.[31] Orphanages, group homes, and social service agencies are also allowed to file for adoption of abducted children, thus initiating their naturalisation.[38]

The Russian government created a register of Russian families that may adopt Ukrainian children, and a hotline for Russian families seeking to adopt Ukrainian children from Donbas. Adoptive families receive a cash payment for each adopted Ukrainian child that is granted Russian citizenship.[1] Lvova-Belova suggested the creation of a database of Ukrainian (ostensible) orphans to improve matching of these children with prospective adoptive families in occupied Ukraine or Russia, and expressed a wish to systematise the adoption process.[31]

BBC news reported that Sergey Mironov, a Putin ally, had illegally adopted a toddler from a children’s home in Ukraine.[41]

Russification and re-education

According to The New York Times, “Russian officials … made clear that their goal is to replace any childhood attachment to home with a love for Russia”.[14] Upon arriving in Russia, the children are placed in homes and subjected to re-education.[42] During the occupation of Novopskov, occupation authorities threatened to deprive parents of parental rights if their child did not attend a school with a Russian curriculum.[43]

In 2022, the Russian government established a large-scale system of at least 43 children’s camps in Russia and Crimea (most of which previously served as children’s summer resorts) the main purpose of which appears to be “integrating children from Ukraine into the Russian government’s vision of national culture, history, and society”, according to a report by Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab.[18] Some children have been placed in summer camps in Belarus that are run by Belarusian state-owned corporations by virtue of a decree issued by the Russo-Belarusian Union State.[44] Children in such camps have been subjected to Russification, Russian state propaganda, and military education (including firearm training). Children have also been provided with formal education in accordance with Russia’s educational standards (either at the camps or at local schools) in an effort to steer them towards attending university in Russia.[18]

Parents in Russian-occupied areas are encouraged or coerced to send their children to these camps (described to them as children’s “summer camps”) for a respite from the war, with the children subsequently subject to indoctrination during their stay and sometimes not returned to the parents as promised. Orphans, children from Ukrainian state institutions, and children who have become separated from their legal guardians due to the conflict are also sent to these camps before their eventual adoption and/or placement in foster care in Russia. At least 6,000 Ukrainian children have attended such camps; analysis of information from public accounts and satellite imagery has indicated the number of children housed in such camps to be far higher.[18]

All levels of the Russian government – federal, regional, and local – are involved in the operation of the camps, and their operation is supported by Russian occupation authorities and proxies, and by members of Russia’s civil society and private sector. Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova advocated for the camps.[18]

Using children for propaganda

The Russian state begun using abducted Ukrainian children for propaganda purposes during the War in Donbas.[38] The domestic narrative of the Russian state is that abandoned children are rescued from the ravages of war by the magnanimous Russian state.[12][14][36] The forced transfer of Ukrainian children forms part of a broader propaganda strategy by Vladimir Putin attempting to portray Ukraine as part of the Russian nation, justify the invasion,[14] and bolster support for the war.[36] Abducted children were paraded at a government pro-war rally marking the first anniversary of the invasion, where they were shown thanking Russian soldiers for “saving them”.[45] The Russian state has carefully crafted the portrayal of the forced transfers of children to the Russian public. Russian state television has broadcast footage of Russian officials handing out teddy bears to newly arrived abducted children, and Russian officials in Donetsk have invited reporters to events where gifts were handed out to abducted children.[14]

Preventing repatriation and family reunification

Many parents wish to reunite with their children (some do not, either due to financial reasons or previous estrangement). Russian authorities do not make any attempt to contact parents to notify them that their children are in the custody of the Russian state[14] and have refused to cooperate with the Ukrainian government and international organisations in tracking the children.[40] Likewise, they do not release any information regarding the identities of the transferred children, making it difficult for Ukrainian and international authorities to locate and identify the children.[12] The first and last names of the abducted children are also changed, making it even more difficult to track down and identify the children.[46][47] Ukraine’s ombudsman on children’s rights has said the process of tracking down abducted children is especially difficult with young children that may not remember where they are from.[15] Even in cases where parents have successfully tracked down their children and formally applied to the Russian authorities to be reunited with them, Russian officials have attempted to pressure or persuade the parents and children to consent to transfer, promising creature comforts and a better life. In cases where parents (or other legal guardian) and children are unable to establish contact or parents are unable or unwilling to personally come collect the children, children are deported to Russia even if they personally express a desire to remain in Ukraine.[14] Abducted children have been lied to by Russian officials about their parents having abandoned them.[1][35]

Funding

For the year of 2024, according to an investigation published in February 2024 by a coalition of journals including VSquare, Delfi, Expressen and Paper Trail Media, Lvova-Belova was scheduled to be paid from the Russian Federation budget the equivalent of €420,000 “for the removal of children from the Special Military Occupation Zone”.[48]

Belarusian involvement

The Belarusian state and state-affiliated organisations have actively participated in the forced transfers of Ukrainian children. Ukrainian children have been deported to Belarus where they are held in recreational camps. The National Anti-Crisis Management Group, a Belarusian organisation headed by Belarusian opposition figure Pavel Latushka, used open-source information to report in August 2023 that at least 2,100 Ukrainian children had been transferred to Belarus.[49] According to Latushka, they were being held in summer camps administered by state-owned corporations. He also said that to state documents showed the transfers are being conducted under the authority of the Union State.[50] The transfers of Ukrainian children have been shown on Belarusian state television. There are indications of re-education efforts by the Belarusian state. Much of the information about the child abductions has come from their parents; children that have been deported to Belarus were abducted from regions of Ukraine which were still under Russian occupation as of August 2023, impeding investigations.[49]

According to international humanitarian law, children in war zones should be evacuated to neutral third countries whenever possible; Belarus lent its territory to be used as a staging ground for the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.[49]

In a July 2023 interview with the Belarusian state TV channel Belarus-1, Dzmitry Shautsou, the head of the Belarus Red Cross, clad in military clothing embellished with the Z symbol, admitted to the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied areas to Belarus for “health improvement” reasons, saying that it would continue to do so. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies distanced itself from his statements while expressing “grave concern”, demanded a halt to the practice, and launched an investigation by its investigative committee.[51][52]

Belarusian president Lukashenko has dismissed concerns regarding the transfers, suggesting that Ukrainian children were instead being trafficked to Western countries for organ harvesting.[49]

In February 2024, the European Union blacklisted Shautsou, as well as several other persons and organizations from Belarus for their involvement in the Ukrainian child abductions.[53] The United States, Ukraine and Australia have also imposed sanctions in relation to the forced deportations.[54][55][56][57]

Sanctions

Russian children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova has been sanctioned by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.[1]

Arrest warrants

International Criminal Court building at The Hague

Main articles: International Criminal Court investigation in Ukraine and ICC arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova

On 17 March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Putin and Lvova-Belova, alleging criminal responsibility for the unlawful deportation and transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia.[58][59][60][61][62] It decided that they are covered by articles 8(2)(a)(vii) and article 8(2)(b)(viii) of the Rome Statute and intended by Russia as permanent.[62] The charges carry a potential life sentence.[60] It is the first time the court has issued an arrest warrant against the leader of a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.[59] ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan said, “We must ensure that those responsible for alleged crimes are held accountable and that children are returned to their families and communities. We cannot allow children to be treated as if they are the spoils of war.”[60]

Reactions

Russia

Lvova-Belova has claimed that the Russian state is entirely willing to reunite the children with their parents if they come forward.[38]

On 17 June 2023, Vladimir Putin rejected the request of a peace delegation from Africa to return the children back home, saying that “We moved them out of the conflict zone, saving their lives and health.”[63]

Ukraine

Ukrainian authorities have claimed Putin’s decree to be a way to “legalize the abduction of children from the territory of Ukraine”. They have maintained this “grossly violate[s]” the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, and the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.[22]

The Foreign Ministry of Ukraine also believes that the actions may qualify as a forcible transfer of children from one human group to another. In a statement: “The most serious international crimes against children committed by Russian high-ranking officials and servicemen in Ukraine will be investigated, and the perpetrators will be prosecuted. Russia will not be able to avoid the strictest accountability.”[22]

By 31 May 2023, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty‘s Ukrainian Service reported that Zelenskiy said 371 deported Ukraine children have been returned by Russia.[64] More than 19,000 children have been deported to Russia.[65]

United Nations

UNICEF Emergency Programs Director Manuel Fontaine told CBS News that UNICEF was “looking into how we can track or help on that”, though stating they did not have ability to investigate at the moment.[24]

Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, announced on 15 June 2022 that her agency had started an investigation into allegations of children forcibly deported from Ukraine to the Russian Federation.[66]

On 15 March 2023, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released a report declaring these forced transfers of children are illegal and a war crime. It broadly gave three categories of deported children: those who lost contact with their parents due to the Russian invasion, those who were separated when their parents were sent to a Russian filtration camp, and those who were in institutions. The report concluded:

International humanitarian law prohibits the evacuation of children by a party to the armed conflict, with the exception of a temporary evacuation where compelling reasons relating to the health or medical treatment of the children or, except in occupied territory, their safety, so requires. The written consent of parents or legal guardians is required. In none of the situations which the Commission has examined, transfers of children appear to have satisfied the requirements set forth by international humanitarian law. The transfers were not justified by safety or medical reasons. There seems to be no indication that it was impossible to allow the children to relocate to territory under Ukrainian Government control… The Commission has concluded that the situations it has examined concerning the transfer and deportation of children, within Ukraine and to the Russian Federation respectively, violate international humanitarian law, and amount to a war crime.[9]

Civil society

On 21 December 2022, a French NGO, “For Ukraine, for their Freedom and Ours!”, submitted via the law firm Vigo a communication to Karim Khan, Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, to contribute to “the investigation opened on 2 March 2022 by the Office of the Prosecutor, upon referral of the situation in Ukraine by a coordinated group of States Parties to the Rome Statute“.[67]

Genocide question

See also: Allegations of genocide of Ukrainians in the Russian invasion of Ukraine

The 1948 Genocide Convention states:

Article II. In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: …
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.[68]

Russia’s kidnapping and forcible transfer of Ukrainian children to Russify them has sometimes been mentioned as meeting the requirements of the Genocide Convention. According to a May 2022 report by the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights in Montreal and the New Lines Institute in Washington, there are “reasonable grounds to conclude” that Russia is in breach of two articles of the 1948 Genocide Convention, among them the forcible transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia, in itself a genocidal act.[11]

Genocide scholar Timothy D. Snyder tweeted: “Kidnapping children en masse and seeking to assimilate them in a foreign culture is genocide according to Article 2 Section E of the 1948 genocide convention.”[69] Professor in Law Yulia Ioffe wrote that the child abductions satisfy the prima facie elements of the crime of genocide.[70] Lily Muelrath of the University of Wisconsin Law School agreed with such classification,[71] as did Azeem Ibrahim, Research Professor at the Strategic Studies Institute.[72]

British sociologist Martin Shaw included it as just one of several Russian acts in Ukraine amounting to genocide.[73] Criminal law Professors Denys Azarov, Dmytro Koval, Gaiane Nuridzhanian and Volodymyr Venher argued that the permanent separation of Ukrainian children from their families and national identity amounts to a larger plan of the destruction of Ukrainian nation.[74] Others have compared it to a cultural genocide.[75]

In April 2023, the Council of Europe deemed the forced transfers of children as constituting an act of genocide in with an overwhelming majority of 87 in favour of the resolution to 1 against and 1 abstaining.[76]

See also

Notes

  1. Article II. In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: …
    (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

References

  1. ·  Taylor, Harry; Henley, Jon; Sullivan, Helen (27 April 2023). “Forced deportation of children from Ukraine by Moscow is genocide, Council of Europe says – as it happened”. the Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2 May 2023.

External links

Categories:

  • This page was last edited on 3 June 2024, at 04:53 (UTC).

 

Dr. Phil Return to Sender  June 2’2010

http://www.adoptionpolicy.org/archive/2010/jun10.html

 

Thousands offer to adopt Syrian newborn girl pulled from the earthquake rubble

Staff and Wire report

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2023/02/10/syrian-baby-born-earthquake-adoption/11227621002/

Thousands have offered to adopt a newborn girl whose mother gave birth under the rubble of a five-story collapsed apartment building in Syria following Monday’s earthquake.

Baby Aya — meaning miracle in Arabic — was found buried under concrete more than 10 hours after the quake struck with her umbilical cord still connected to her deceased mother, Afraa Abu Hadiya. Her father and all four of her siblings also died after the devastating earthquake hit the northwest Syrian town of Jindayris, next to the Turkish border.

After a female neighbor cut Aya’s cord, she was rushed to a nearby children’s hospital and placed in an incubator. The physician treating the baby, Dr. Hani Maarouf at Cihan Hospital in Afrin, said Aya’s condition is improving by the day and there was no damage to her spine, as initially feared.

Footage of a man sprinting from the collapsed debris of a building, holding Aya covered in dust, went viral on social media. Maarouf said the baby’s lowered body temperature indicated she had been born about three hours before being found.

Since Aya’s rescue, hospital manager Khalid Attiah says he’s fielded dozens of calls from people worldwide wanting to adopt baby Aya. Additionally, thousands of people are asking for adoption details on social media.

For now, Attiah’s wife, who has a daughter just four months older than her, will breastfeed Aya alongside their own child.

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Dennis Eckersley, family release statement after daughter’s newborn child found abandoned in the woods

Story by Roxanna Scott, USA TODAY • 3h ago

Hall of Fame pitcher Dennis Eckersley and his family released a statement saying they are “utterly devastated” by the events that unfolded involving his daughter, Alexandra Eckersley, who faces criminal charges after police say she abandoned her newborn baby in the New Hampshire woods.

In a file photo from 2017, Hall of Famer and former Boston Red Sox pitcher Dennis Eckersley before a game at Fenway Park.© Winslow Townson, AP

“We are utterly devastated by the events that unfolded on Christmas night when our daughter Allie delivered a baby while living in a tent,” the statement said, according to WMUR and other media outlets. “It is heartbreaking that a child was born under such unthinkable conditions and in such tragic circumstances. We learned with everyone else from news reports what happened and are still in complete shock. We had no prior knowledge of Allie’s pregnancy.

“We are extremely grateful to the first responders in Manchester, NH for saving this innocent newborn boy and to the hospital staff for everything they are doing to ensure his well-being.

“Allie is our beloved daughter who we adopted at birth. Though it is painful to share, we feel it necessary to offer greater context of Allie’s circumstances and background. Allie has suffered from severe mental illness her entire life. Allie was hospitalized numerous times for her illness and lived in several residential programs. We did our very best to get Allie all of the help and support humanly possible.”

Police respond to a 911 call

According to police, Alexandra Eckersley, 26, called 911 shortly after midnight Dec. 26 stating she had given birth in the woods in Manchester. She told police and emergency medical personnel she went into labor in the woods and didn’t remember where the child may be. Multiple officers, fire fighters and paramedics were on the scene, with the temperature 15 degrees as they searched the woods after first being led by Eckersley to nearby baseball fields.

While placed in an ambulance to warm up, Alexandra Eckersley later told a paramedic the baby should still be inside her tent, according to the police report. Police found the baby inside a tent at a campsite made of tarps.

The baby, a boy who weighed 4.41 pounds, consistent with a baby born about six months into pregnancy, was transported to a hospital for treatment. Officers on site reported that it appeared Alexandra Eckersley was under the influence of some form of narcotics. She told police she had used cocaine within the previous two days. Eckersley told police she had no idea that she was pregnant.

During a subsequent interview, Eckersley told police she believed she was constipated or hemorrhaging when she went into pain in the afternoon of Dec. 25.

Eckersley pleads not guilty to charges, family files guardianship petition

Alexandra Eckersley, who is the adopted daughter of Dennis Eckersley and his wife Susan, pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree assault, falsifying physical evidence, reckless conduct and endangering the welfare of a child, according to WMUR.

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Nicholas Kristof

Russia Traffics in Ukrainian Children

Viktoria Borysenko, left, and her sister-in-law, Nadia Borysenko. When Russians occupied Balakliya, Ukraine, they took the women’s children to a summer camp and have not returned them.
Credit…Emile Ducke for The New York Times

Opinion Columnist   

BALAKLIYA, Ukraine — The children left this town in August for a free summer camp sponsored by the Russian occupiers, enticed by assurances of gifts and of safety from constant shelling

“The Russians promised it would be two or three weeks, and then the children would be back,” Nadia Borysenko, 29, told me. Her 12-year-old daughter, Daria, was among 25 children from this town in northeastern Ukraine who boarded a bus to the camp.

Russia did not return them, however. Daria and other children are now across the border in Russia, and Moscow is making it very difficult for families to recover their children.

The youngsters here are among many thousands of Ukrainian children whom Russia has taken from Ukraine and in some cases put up for adoption.

The Ukrainian government count is 11,461 children known by name and taken without families to Russia or Russian-controlled areas. President Volodymyr Zelensky told the G20 summit that there are “tens of thousands” more who are known about only indirectly or with less detail.

Credit…Emile Ducke for The New York Times
Credit…Emile Ducke for The New York Times
“Among them are many whose parents were killed by Russian strikes, and now they are being held in the state that murdered them,” he said.

The transfer of thousands of children is a stark reminder that this is not a typical armed conflict. These may be war crimes. They should be a wake-up call to Americans and Europeans fatigued by support for Ukraine.

Do you really want to boost a state sponsor of child trafficking?

Russia doesn’t hide the transfer of Ukrainian children but trumpets it on its television propaganda programs, portraying itself as the savior of abandoned children and showing Russians handing teddy bears to Ukrainian boys and girls.

Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, boasted last month that she had adopted a Ukrainian boy, and many of these stolen children seem to have been adopted into Russian families.

That is not charity; it may be genocide. A 1948 international treaty specifies that “forcibly transferring children,” when intended to destroy a nationality, constitutes genocide.

Yet the situation is also nuanced. I reached Daria on her cellphone, and she didn’t sound like a traditional prisoner: She has friends, takes classes and can use her phone each evening to call her mom. But she unmistakably wants to go home to Ukraine.

“I miss home all the time,” she said.

Russian authorities allow parents to pick up their kids, but only by traveling to Russia through Poland and then other countries. That means that parents have to scramble to obtain passports and other documents — even as their homes and possessions may have been destroyed by Russian shells — and then take on a substantial expense just as the war has impoverished them. Some parents have managed to do this; most haven’t.

“Of course it’s a war crime when they take our children,” said Dementiev Mykola, a local prosecutor. “And they commit a crime by not making it easy for those children to come back.”

Mykola noted that the summer camp was attractive because it seemed the only way to keep kids safe from Russian shelling. He added that if the Russians wanted to, they could establish humanitarian corridors to repatriate children.

Another mother in Balakliya, Nadia Borysenko’s sister-in-law, Viktoria Borysenko, whose 12-year-old son, Bohdan, is at the camp, said he told her in phone calls that he and others are treated well but want to return. “They are crying and want to come home,” she said.

My best guess is that Russia takes the children to serve as props in its television propaganda shows. And afterward it doesn’t bother to return the props.

Many of the children taken to Russia were removed from institutions such as children’s homes, boarding schools and hospitals. Some of these youngsters didn’t have parents, but when they did, families were apparently not consulted.

Olena Matvienko told me that her 10-year-old grandson, Illya Matvienko, was in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol with his mother, Natalya, when both were badly injured by shrapnel. She died in front of Illya, and Russian troops took the boy not to a local hospital but to one in an enclave that Russian-backed separatists have declared the Donetsk People’s Republic.

The family had no idea what had happened to mother and son until a relative in Russia chanced to see a report on Russian television about heroic doctors in Donetsk saving Illya.

“He was kidnapped,” she told me. “He was taken forcibly.” She said that Russian authorities prepared papers so that Illya could be adopted in Russia.

To recover her grandson, Matvienko traveled through Poland and Turkey to Russia.

“It was just an accident that this video was seen and reached our family,” she said. “He would have been a Russian boy, and he would have grown up in another family.”

Children are not spoils of war. A government should not traffic in thousands of children. These elementary propositions underscore the moral stakes of the war in Ukraine, and it’s important for the world to stand firmly on the side of right — and to bring Daria home to her mom.

Opinion | Nicholas Kristof and Emile Ducke
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 25, 2022, Section A, Page 25 of the New York edition with the headline: Russia Traffics in Ukrainian Children.
What Harrison Mooney brings forward in terms of adoption can not be ignored.

https://fvcurrent.com/article/harrison-mooney-abbotsford-invisible-boy/

An ‘Invisible Boy’ takes a risk to find himself

Harrison Mooney knew that writing a book about his upbringing could cost him his family. He wrote it anyways.

By Tyler Olsen | September 27, 2022 |5:00 am

Harrison Mooney didn’t just want to write a book about how he was raised. He needed to tell his story.

Even if doing so could cost him the family that raised him.

As an 11-day-old baby, Mooney, who is Black, was adopted by a deeply religious white family in Abbotsford. His childhood was disorienting, confusing, and disturbing.

Later, he would come to see abuse in how he was raised and moments like when he was five years old and tied to a chair until he finished his steak. He would also see how his own life and upbringing connected to larger societal issues about race, adoption, religion, and childhood.

But they were still a family. His family. And telling that story could sever his connection to them.

This month, years after he first conceived of it, Mooney published the story—Invisible Boy—of his youth.

The book is about how Mooney figured things out for himself. It’s about who he came from. It’s about where he came from. And it’s very existence is a reflection of who he is now.

Invisible

Invisible Boy is a coming-of-age story about a kid discovering himself and learning how the colour of his skin shapes the world and the family in which he lives.

But though he has felt the need to write about his life started when he was still a teenager, he also had to consider the ramifications of writing honestly about that life.

“It was terrifying,” Mooney told The Current. “One of the reasons this book has taken me so long to complete is that I didn’t know how to tell these stories without hurting my adopted family.”

Eventually, he realized that was impossible.

“These stories don’t make them look good,” he said. “Some of these stories make them look very ignorant; they certainly seem quite racist, and I know if there’s anything you really can’t say, it’s that another white person is racist. You just can’t do that. So to do it to your own family, I knew that would be viewed as a kind of betrayal.”

On the other hand, not writing about it would exact a profound cost.

“If I can’t tell my story, it really feels like I don’t exist,” he said. “That’s my life. It’s the framework for everything. And if I … can’t speak about any of the things that happened to me, then I’m living a secret life, I’m living an invisible life, or I’m suppressing who I really am in order to keep fitting in this family that took me.”

So he started writing. During the project, Mooney, a former Vancouver Sun reporter, interviewed people in his life. Talking with those, and running a first draft past his adopted brother, who was supportive, confirmed many of his memories and gave him the confidence to continue.

A singular experience

The family that adopted Mooney in the 1980s was proudly conservative and deeply religious—even more than most families in a city with no shortage of churches. After a tent revival they left the Abbotsford Pentecostal Assembly for an even more personalized religious experience. And beginning in Grade 4, Mooney was homeschooled using materials from a Christian curriculum published in the United States.

In his book, Mooney takes readers inside the churches, revivals, and schools in which he was raised. He is sometimes critical. But often, he just writes about what he observed: a boy, later a teen, in a world full of discovery, and drama. He’s not always a passive observer: a long chapter chronicles his frustrating, sometimes amusing, struggle to speak in tongues.

In church, in school, and across east Abbotsford, Mooney stood out. Just about everyone around him was white and he was Black. The colour of his skin seemed to influence how others acted around him—even if they insisted that wasn’t the case. But he had nobody who could relate to him and his challenges.

“After the upbringing I had, it felt like I needed to explain to people some of the things that I went through and how it led me to the person I am now,” he said. “It’s such a singular experience, being adopted and raised in a conservative white family as a Black kid. You see a lot. There are a lot of unusual happenings, things that are said to you that are strange, and you wind up kind of performing instead of just feeling who you are.”

There was also a larger purpose: to speak to the experiences of those like him, who grew up feeling alone, disconnected, and isolated in their respective communities.

An author changes

There is another thread running through Invisible Boy that charts how Mooney, the author, changed while writing down his story. It informs every paragraph but is often below the surface.

As he was writing, Mooney was also reading authors like Toni Morrison, Bell Hooks, and Toni Cade Bambara. And as he wrote, and read, he became more confident about himself as both a Black man, and the teller of his own story.

“If you know what you’re looking for, you can really see that progression happening to me as a writer at the same time that it’s happening to my younger self as a character.”

And as he wrote, his opinions also solidified, particularly when it comes to the systems and world that takes children from one mother and gives them to another.

Invisible Boy shows the damage and problems that can result when a Black kid is placed in a family who cannot, by definition, understand what their child might experience.

“They don’t have enough context for the experience,” he said. Mooney’s family didn’t have the life experiences to help him process who he was and how his skin colour was part of that. They also couldn’t lend an ear, or advice, about racist incidents that cropped up.

For those and other reasons, society is increasingly wrestling with when, if ever, children should be adopted by parents of another race.

But Mooney’s opinion on pretty much all adoption was also changed during the writing process.

“When I started writing this book, I wasn’t sure what my stance was going to be on adoption. And when the book ended, I knew that adoption as a practice needed to end.”

For Mooney, the intent of adoption doesn’t make it inherently a good thing. It’s the results that matter. And he sees adoption as generally doing more harm than good.

“I think that if people want to help children in need, help their families to stay together,” he said. “We adopt children and often we’re just stealing the future from people who have very little else.”

Harrison Mooney reconnected with his birth mother Trinika Arthur-Asamoah in his early 20s.

Reconnection

Mooney’s birth mother and father gave him up for adoption when they were just teenagers.

But in his 20s, Mooney reconnected with his birth father and his mother, Trinika Arthur-Asamoah.

From Trinika, Mooney discovered her story and just where—and who—he came from.

Mooney told The Current later that, as a Black kid in a largely white world, “it was hard to know who you are because you look around and no one is like you.”

Today Mooney has reclaimed and rediscovered his own family history. But he has done more than just that. Mooney has a two-year-old son and four-year-old daughter of his own, and they have provided a new window into himself.

“I was a weird kid and until I met my son, who is exactly like me, I’d never met anyone like me,” he said.

They also allowed him to tell his own story.

“I couldn’t have written this book until I had a family of my own because it felt like writing Invisible Boy was going to cost me whatever relationship I still have with my adopted family,” he said.

“But they’re not who I live with anymore.”

https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/cut-from-his-mother-invisible-boy-tells-the-story-of-a-black-boy-growing-up-in-a-white-b-c-household

Cut from his mother: Invisible Boy tells the story of a Black boy growing up in a white B.C. household

I was taken from my mother as a baby. They called it an adoption. They told me that my birth mother was a Black teen in the foster system. That was all I knew for many years.

Author of the article:Harrison Mooney Published Sep 16, 2022  •

 “I was taken from my mother as a baby. They called it an adoption. They told me that my birth mother was a Black teen in the foster system. That was all I knew for many years,” says author Harrison Mooney, who is now writer-in-residence at the Vancouver Public Library. He has written about his mother in a new book, Invisible Boy: A Memoir of Self-Discovery. Photo by NICK PROCAYLO /PNG

Invisible Boy: A Memoir of Self-Discovery is the story of a Black boy growing up in a white, conservative household in Abbotsford. It’s my life story, as well as my life’s work. I first imagined this book as a 20-year-old, not long after speaking to my birth mother, Trinika Arthur-Asamoah, on the phone for the first time.

I was taken from her as a baby. They called it an adoption. They told me that my birth mother was a Black teen in the foster system. That was all I knew for many years.

I had follow up questions, of course, but it was uncomfortable to speak to my adoptive mother about my other mother. It made her insecure.

My adoptive mother was strict and swift to anger. If I crossed or disrespected her, she’d spank me, or be cold to me for hours, days or weeks. In these moments, our connection felt so tenuous, and I found it so painful to wonder if I was still loved that I couldn’t imagine inflicting that same pain on her. I didn’t want to give her the impression that my loyalties were divided.

As I grew up and grew conscious, however, it became clear that our loyalties were divided.

Even my attempts to explore my Black identity seemed to threaten her. As a child, I saw it as fruit of the poisonous tree — it reminded her of the competition, that’s all — but as I came of age I came to see the hatred of self, and of Blackness, that I had internalized just to belong to this woman.

I didn’t belong to her, though, and my Blackness was not something I could leave unexplored. It was central to the conflict from the moment I was born, if not before. This is what I had to face to find my way back to Trinika. This excerpt, from chapter 10, The Boy Who Saw What Wasn’t There, recounts what I learned and what I felt the first time that I heard my mother’s voice.

I met Trinika at Bean Around the World, in downtown Vancouver. Craving something sweet, I ordered chai. Sitting down, first to arrive, I wondered how I’d know that it was her. We hadn’t arranged to wear brooches or hats.

Then I remembered: It’s easy. She’ll be Black.

But she entered, and I saw myself, only older, still uncertain, still encumbered by the thought that I did not belong in any place I wandered, and I could barely believe I’d been anxious about recognition. She sat down, jittery, and I saw my exact face, and both of us burst into laughter at the utterly uncanny doppelgängers sitting before us, staring from across the tiny table, with a fondness we could never quite find in the mirror.

I wanted to look at Trinika forever. You can tell when the eyes that regard you are in love with you. I knew it the moment she walked in the door.

I brought you a few things, she said, reaching into her purse and pulling out a small tub of goop.

Shea butter, she said. Use it when you get out of the shower.

Work it into your hair while it’s wet.

How much is too much?

No such thing, she said, digging back into the bag. Oh, and there’s this.

It was a plastic unicorn skeleton, posed at a trot, with its right leg raised, triumphantly, under an empty rib cage. The unpainted dollar-store toy had a skull that could swivel the whole way around. I found your unicorn, Trinika said. He’s not as soft as he was.

He’s weirder now, and a little gaunt, after so long in the dungeon. Don’t forget to feed him this time.

We laughed again, like two old friends, our bond still unbroken after 20-odd years.

Trinika’s shame was triggered first. We both had it. Hers was just stronger.

I’m sorry if that joke was in poor taste, she said, lowering her head. And I’m sorry for your life. I’m sorry. Please don’t hate me, Harrison. I’m so sorry.

Harrison Mooney on the steps of his Metro Vancouver home with birth mother Trinika Arthur-Asamoah.

Trinika, I get it, I said, ashamed to be the mess that she regretted all her life, the life-wrecking error that triggered such shame in Trinika by being born, then stolen, then away for so long.

But she saw that and said: You don’t have to be ashamed. I knew you’d find your way.

Neither do you, I said. You did what you had to, and here we are now.

She cracked a smile that cracked my outer shell. In my heart, I climbed into her lap, and I said: Tell me again about how I was born.

She started to talk about Cory, my white birth father.

No, no, no, I interrupted her. I don’t want to know what Cory was doing while you were pregnant. What were you doing?

Getting huge, she said. I got expelled from high school because the other kids weren’t allowed to see me pregnant. So I was taken to a home for teen moms.

The Maywood Home for Unwed Mothers was just across the bridge from Richmond, in the Vancouver suburb of Marpole. It was run by the Salvation Army, whose motto, women and children first, appears to allude to the lives they’ll be ruining. The place had been in business since 1906 and would not close until the turn of the century.

The setting was an old Victorian mansion surrounded by thick laurel hedges. From the street, it looked spiffy, but once past the trees, you arrived at an ugly little building with beige walls and brown linoleum floors, and twenty other women ashamed to have been secreted away. Maywood came up in the news quite a bit while Trinika was there. The Salvation Army had plans to open a drug treatment home right next door. This was a major concern to the neighbours, who called up their media contacts to create a controversy, claiming they feared for the mothers. They were fine with the teenage girls, coerced into adoptions behind the bushes, but addicts were a bridge too far: They would fill up the sidewalks, disturbing the peace, and they might even menace the unwed, besides.

Few really knew what went on there. A Vancouver Sun report published that summer called the house a place of refuge. But Anne Petrie, who shared her own experience in Gone to an Aunt’s, called it a big baby farm, and a prison.

I really felt like I was in jail, Petrie wrote. It was the feeling of not being free.

This feeling was more universal. Some thirteen thousand women were processed at Maywood, and roughly ten thousand surrendered their children.

In 2005, a woman named Cassandra Armishaw, who was at Maywood on the day that I was born, became the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against the province of British Columbia. Armishaw alleged that her baby was taken from her against her will. A social worker had testified in court that Armishaw did not eat nutritious food and thought other people were possessed by spirits. This demonstrated parental unfitness. So the baby was given to someone much more like my mother.

The women at Maywood were told they were sinners, Trinika recalled, and that sin was the thing growing larger inside them. It was sin that kicked them in the ribs at all hours, sin that sickened them, and the road to salvation was simple: a private adoption.

Luckily, these babies were in high demand elsewhere, especially in rich white women’s houses. Another 1980s Sun story quotes a social worker blithely describing a relative shortage of healthy, white babies put up for adoption. As a result, Vorna Butler explained, couples had become more aggressive in their search for parenthood.

Money can buy almost anything. But some things are bought with great difficulty.

Transactions at Maywood, the victims allege, were born of a rigorous brainwashing, beginning the moment you got there. Just like the bathhouse in Spirited Away, your name was taken from you at the front door. No allusions could be made to the young women’s former lives. No pining for boyfriends or calling for freedom, no asserting one’s rights or identity, and therefore, no last names.

So Trinika Arthur-Asamoah became Tee, losing two names and a half, and a great deal beyond. From that day on, everyone she spoke to, every piece of mail that came for her, made one thing pretty clear: there is only one way out of the mess you’ve created, and it’s without that baby — hand it over. The burden bearers soon arrived, on cue, preaching salvation, and adoption became a kind of performative self-negation — a sentence imposed by a hypnotized mind.

By agreeing, Anne Petrie explained in her book, unwed mothers were signalling our understanding of the moral order, and our wish to follow it. Having clearly flouted the rules once, we were relieved to be doing something that was so obviously right.

But Trinika believed she was bad to the bone. In her hopelessness, soul beyond saving, she shrugged at the all-out assault on her worth. What else is new? She might as well keep the damn baby, and raise it with Cory, she had reasoned.

She almost succeeded.

I was waiting on both of you, she explained. Cory made all sorts of promises. But in the end, he gave in to the pressure, and left me with nothing instead.

But you didn’t want to leave me, said Trinika. You liked it right where you were. You turned to the side and you held on for dear life. You were a breech baby; did you know that? You’d have stayed in there sideways forever.

Sure sounds like me, I scoffed.

They didn’t notice right away, and when they did, they didn’t tell me anything, she said. I laboured for a whole day, and then, out of nowhere, I felt a prick. I guess the doctor decided on a C-section. But nobody thought to inform me. I woke up and you were gone. They cut you out while I was sleeping.

Invisible Boy: A Memoir of Self-Discovery, by Harrison Mooney (HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.) will be available to order online and in bookstores Sept 20.

 

https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2022/09/21/Where-White-Women-Adopt-Black-Babies/

Where White Women Adopt Black Babies

An excerpt from Harrison Mooney’s ‘Invisible Boy.’

Harrison Mooney 21 Sep 2022TheTyee.ca

Harrison Mooney is a writer and journalist who lives in East Vancouver with his family.

Harrison Mooney was adopted as an infant into a white, devoutly Christian family. His debut memoir Invisible Boy explores the complexities of his upbringing and how he learned to love himself. Photo by Jeff Vinnick.

[Editor’s note: Vancouver journalist and author Harrison Mooney launched his first book this week. ‘Invisible Boy’ is a memoir published in Canada by Patrick Crean Editions, an imprint of HarperCollins. In it, Mooney explores the systemic forces that shaped his upbringing as the only Black adopted child in a white, devoutly Christian family in Abbotsford, B.C. The Tyee ran an interview with the author Tuesday. Today, read an excerpt from ‘Invisible Boy.’ At this moment in the book, Harrison is a young adult arriving at an adoption agency in Metro Vancouver to learn about his birth parents for the first time.]

The golden nameplate on the door read: BURDEN BEARERS INTERNATIONAL. The T was a miniature cross.

I couldn’t see inside — the glass was frosted — and I thought for a moment that the address I’d scribbled in pen on my palm might be wrong. So I turned away, roaming the zigzagging hall in confusion, past a therapist, a dentist and a hearing clinic, all of which were listed on the second-floor directory. The Hope Adoption Agency was not.

I had one foot in the stairwell when the door behind me opened.

Over here, Harry! Lynn Braidwood shouted, waving. The lady was a little teapot, short and stout, with a striking resemblance to Officer Frost, the Sunday School teacher from Gateway. They had the same silver hair, thin and short in supply, showing scalp — the same pale complexion, the same eggy frame. The two women could have been sisters. She ushered me in and I thought of her lookalike, leading the little boy, James, to his doom.

The little plaque confused me, I said, hanging my coat on the back of the door.

I’ve been meaning to change that, she said, grimacing playfully. We used to be Burden Bearers, back when you were born. But we’ve been Hope for nearly 20 years now.

It’s definitely a better name, I said.

I agree. You’re not a burden. Make yourself at home.

The office was set up like a living room, with multiple, floral-print sofas, arranged around an oval table. A dozen white women sat there, sipping coffee out of Styrofoam cups. Each one of them evoked, for me, my mother, and I thought of how close I had come to just leaving.

I’m so glad you chose to stop by, Lynn Braidwood said. I’m just finishing up with my group. I meet every week with some of the mothers I’ve worked with, women who took in Black babies — like you! I hope you don’t mind, Harry. I told them you were coming today. They’re very excited to meet you and, if you’re comfortable with it, they have some questions.

It felt like an ambush. Lynn Braidwood had invited me to come for 1:30, but according to a schedule I spotted on the wall, her group met every Thursday afternoon from one to two. It was hardly a coincidence that everyone was here; she meant for me to crash her little party.

I was the guest of honour all over again.

I wanted to explode. I didn’t come for show and tell. But Lynn Braidwood had information I needed, and my mother’s phone number besides. Anything I said would make it back home before I did. I had no choice but to put up a good performance.

I’m fine with that, I told her, smiling, lying through my teeth, and I know we go way back, but please, try to call me Harrison.

She nodded, stepping aside, as the 12 disciples rose to meet me, wide-eyed, overeager, and the questions started coming, fast and furious. Are you happy? Do you feel loved? Do you feel like your birth mother made the right decision? Do you feel like we made the right decision to adopt? What’s it like being Black with white parents? They crowded me, awaiting my response, desperate to be told that all is well within my soul.

It wasn’t, though — especially surrounded by these women. I saw at once their need to solve their children, to decode them. I saw that not one knew how to bridge the gap of race that kept them from connecting with their kids, that had them flailing at a stranger, seeking clues and validation. They couldn’t see beyond the skin; they couldn’t make it cease to matter; they couldn’t close the ever-growing distance it created. Neither could they shake the sense that, somewhere, they’d gone wrong — that something seemed to undercut the love they claimed to have for their adopted sons and daughters.

It was clear that these people were completely ill-equipped to raise Black babies. They seemed to think that I could fix it for them. I was reminded of that movie, The Truman Show, where the actor Jim Carrey discovers that his world has been constructed to entrap him, to exploit him in his ignorance, and that his reality is false, and designed, above all else, to keep him from seeing himself as a product, consumed by the masses without his consent.

I was so upset, I nearly spoke my mind.

What the Hell are you doing here? I almost said. Why lean on me when you could ask your own children? What stands in your way? What are you afraid to talk about? If Blackness so confounds you, just admit it. Let them know that you are lost. You think you can continue to avoid a touchy subject? You think your child believes that you are colour blind? Oh please. Your silence shouts the truth and drowns you out. The world is already teaching us all sorts of things about race and racism. If you haven’t learned the language, you are losing, you have failed.

You enshrine our inferiority. Even now, your feelings take priority over mine. You allow us to be mocked. We wake up every morning and the sky itself is looking down, disgusted. We look up to you; you look down at your feet. Don’t look down, you cowards, look closer, come closer. Tell me I am worthy of love every day, or in your silence, you have said: you are unworthy. You leave me to be beaten senseless by a world that hates me, and you raise me as though I should hate myself too. It is a vile way to treat a child you were given.

Harrison Mooney as a young boy. As an adoptee, he made contact with his birth parents when he was in his early 20s. Photo supplied.

But I could never say these things to my own mother, let alone 12 of her. I wanted every one of them to like me. I knew that it would happen if I sought to reassure them.

Of course I’m happy, I began, and more than that, I’m grateful — for the opportunities I’ve been given, for being rescued from darkness and placed on the path that God has prepared for me. I received nothing but love from my adopted family, and all the advantages they could afford. My education has been paid in full. I start graduate school in the fall. I’m the boy who made good. Look at me go: diploma in hand, a bright future ahead. The world is my oyster. I’m thriving.

I saw their eyes brighten. Relief washed over the whole group. One by one, they praised me for my eloquence and thanked me for my willingness to speak so candidly. They all left with smiles on their faces, and again I felt like a clown — a classier clown, mind you, like a standup comedian or something. I stood by the sofa, ashamed, as the room emptied out.

Satisfied, Lynn Braidwood led me into her office.

Now there are two ways we can do this, she said. There’s the hard way, where you go through the government and submit some paperwork, and that paperwork is sent to your birth parents, and then it’s sent to me, the intermediary, to give to you, and we go back and forth for months or years until everything is hunky-dory. It takes forever.

Oh, I said.

Or we can do it the easy way: I give you their names, and you can probably find them on Facebook.

Let’s do that, I said.

Excellent, Lynn Braidwood said. Then you can have this now.

She handed me a document. BIRTH FAMILY HISTORY, it said, underlined. Scanning the sheet, I stopped at the second subheading — Racial and Ethnic Origins.

Mother was born in Ghana, Africa and is of Negroid racial background and Afrikkan nationality. The birth father is a Caucasian whose parents were born in the Ukraine and are of German national origin.

Maybe I’ll read this later, I said. Their names aren’t on it anywhere, and that’s really all I’m after today.

Right, she said. Your birth father’s name is Cory Klein. He lives in Langley. And your birth mother, Tee, lives in Seattle, last I checked. She bounces around, though. I never quite know where she is.

What’s her full name?

Hold on, it’s a real mouthful, Lynn Braidwood said, rifling through her papers. Ah, here we go. Her name is Trinika Arthur-Asamoah.

My heart sank. It was the Blackest name I’d ever heard. Again, I wished I hadn’t come. I thought of Prophet K; I thought of Courage; I thought of the girl that I saw, sometimes, at Trinity. I hid from these people, consumed by self-hatred, afraid they would see my discomfort with Blackness. How could I let my own birth mother see it? How could I account for the limits of my language, or my lack of experience with life outside of whiteness? She would be dismayed to find I was not much of a Black man at all.

I logged on to Facebook that night, and I searched for my birth mother, hoping to hit a dead end. I entered two letters — the T and the R — and the rest filled in for me. The internet already knew there was something between us.

Dismantling White Supremacy with Harrison Mooney

I sent her a friend request and a short message:

Hi Trinika, it’s Harrison. By all accounts, I’m your son! It’s taken me a long time to get to the point where I’m ready to meet you, but I think I’m there now, so here I am. At your earliest convenience, I’d love to reconnect and go from there.

Three days passed before my request was accepted. I checked for a new message and saw the chat bubble beside Trinika’s name. She was writing something. I waited, but the icon disappeared, and I was relieved to have to wait a little longer. Why rush?

I clicked around, scanning my birth mother’s Friends list, and that’s when I located Cory. That was easy. ADD FRIEND.

I copied and pasted the very same message.

He messaged me back right away.

I am very happy that you finally made contact with me.

You are right. You are my son. And although we have never met, we have never stopped thinking about you, and how life is for you. I know that you may have a lot of questions, which I would be happy to answer, but know this: You were given up for adoption purely out of love and, to date, it is the hardest thing I ever did. I think that when you hear the circumstances you will understand.

In my youthful careless days, when I decided to ink up my back, your name was the first thing that was permanently placed on my body. You since changed your name. Thanks for that. Now I need to have another baby and name him Jordan, just so the tattoo has some significance. (Joke.)

Your brothers and sisters know all about you and have been patiently waiting for you to come see them. When people ask me how many kids I have, I will occasionally say four. Tarana, my seven-year-old, is always there to correct me by saying: You forgot Jordan again, Dad. You have five kids.

We would love to have you over for a bbq anytime. We are available as early as tomorrow night.

Wait, I thought, did he just call me Jordan?

I reread the message. My birth father used the name twice. But it wasn’t my name. Jordan is the guy I used to work with at the House of James. My name, I seethed, in my rearranged bedroom, is Harrison.

The following night, at his house, I tried to tell him.

Excerpt from ‘Invisible Boy: A Memoir of Self-Discovery’ by Harrison Mooney. © 2022. Published in Canada by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.