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Forced adoption is the practice of forcefully taking children from their parents and placing them for adoption.

Forced assimilation

Removing children of ethnic minorities from their families to be adopted by those of the dominant ethnic group has been used as a method of forced assimilation. "Forcibly transferring children of group to another group" is genocide according to the Genocide Convention. While this usually revolves around ethnicity, assimilating children of political minorities has also occurred.

Australia

The Stolen Generations in Australia involved Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, where over 60 years from 1910, it is estimated that as many as a third of Aboriginal children were taken from their families.

Canada

In Canada, the Canadian Indian residential school system involved First Nations, Métis and Inuit children, who often suffered severe abuse. The Sixties Scoop is a period when Canadian child welfare agents had the authority to take indigenous children from their families for placement in foster homes so they could be adopted by white families.

China

As part of the persecution of Uyghurs in China, in 2017 alone at least half a million children were forcefully separated from their families, and placed in pre-school camps with prison-style surveillance systems and 10,000 volt electric fences.

Poland

In German-occupied Poland, it is estimated that 200,000 Polish children with purportedly Aryan traits were removed from their families and given to German or Austrian couples, and only 25,000 returned to their families after the war.

South Sudan

Among nomadic groups, particularly the Murle people, children are abducted in raids against other tribes to be raised as their own. The practice is thought to be intended to increase the tribe's numbers. This includes the 2016 Gambela raid and 2017 Gambela raid.

Spain

Hispanic eugenics was pioneered by psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo-Nájera who proposed a link between Marxism and intellectual disability, leading to the thefts of many Spanish newborns and young children from their left-wing parents.

Ukraine

In April 2023, the Council of Europe voted overwhelmingly, with 87 in favor, 1 opposed, and 1 abstention, to deem the "deportations and forcible transfers of Ukrainian children and other civilians to Russian Federation or to Ukrainian territories temporarily occupied" as an act of genocide.

Child welfare

Child welfare is often the rationale given for separating children from their parents. Family preservation is the perspective that it is better to help keep children at home with their families rather than in foster homes or institutions. How that should be balanced with the potential of harm to children is a matter of debate.

Abusive parents

Separating children from parents is most commonly used today for parental abuse of children.

Single mothers

From the 1950s to the 1970s in the anglosphere, babies were frequently taken away from unmarried mothers without any other reason simply because unmarried mothers were considered unsuitable parents, in what was known as the baby scoop era. In 2013, the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard apologized for the forced adoption in Australia of babies born to unwed mothers that occurred mostly in the twentieth century.

In Belgium from the end of the Second World War to the 1980s, the Catholic Church took in pregnant unmarried women and, during childbirth, some women were given general anesthetia while others had to wear a mask to prevent them from seeing their children. Some women were sterilized. About 30,000 such children were sold to adoptive parents for between 10,000 and 30,000 Belgian francs (roughly between €250 and €750) and sometimes much more.

Parents in poverty

In Switzerland, between the 1850s and the mid-20th century, hundreds of thousands of children mostly from poor families, as well as single parents, were removed from their parents by the authorities, and sent to work on farms, living with new families. They were known as contract children or Verdingkinder.

In South Korea, during the military dictatorship, the government pursued a "social purification" program that forced thousands of people off the streets into government-funded, privately run welfare centres. If they gave birth, the children were taken away to be adopted.

Parents belonging to minorities

A 2023 report from the South Australian Commissioner for Aboriginal Children and Young People warned of a new "stolen generation" finding Aboriginal children were increasingly being removed from their families with every other Aboriginal child in South Australia being subject to a one child protection notification in 2020-21 compared to one in 12 for non-Aboriginal children.

Norwegian Child Welfare Services are accused of disproportionately removing children of immigrant parents.

Parents with criminal records

In the United Kingdom, former judge Alan Goldsack called for the UK Government to forcibly remove children from 'criminal families' at birth and to place them for adoption. His remarks have been criticized and he has been accused of "criminalising babies".

See also

• Adoption fraud
• Human trafficking
• International adoption
• International child abduction
• Interracial adoption
• Transculturation

References

1. "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide". www.ohchr.org. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. 9 December 1948. Archived from the original on 13 April 2022. Retrieved 24 October 2023.
2. "The Stolen Generations". Australians Together. Archived from the original on 19 November 2015.
3. "The agony of Australia's Stolen Generation". BBC News. 9 August 2007. Archived from the original on 4 December 2007.
4. ^ "Australian Aboriginal child separation at 'devastating rates': Commissioner". Al Jazeera. 5 October 2023.
5. Griffiths, Sian (13 June 2015). "The schools that had cemeteries instead of playgrounds". BBC News. Archived from the original on 19 October 2015.
6. "Survivor of Canada's residential schools talks about abuse". BBC News. 5 June 2015. Archived from the original on 18 October 2015.
7. Paquin, Mali Ilse (6 June 2015). "Canada confronts its dark history of abuse in residential schools". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 21 January 2017.
8. Luxen, Micah (4 June 2015). "Survivors of Canada's 'cultural genocide' still healing". BBC News. Archived from the original on 25 July 2016.
9. "Canada apology for native schools". BBC News. 11 June 2008. Archived from the original on 18 November 2015.
10. Dart, Christopher. "The Sixties Scoop Explained". CBC Docs POV. CBC. Archived from the original on 11 May 2021. Retrieved 24 October 2023.
11. Sudworth, John (4 July 2019). "China separating Muslim children from families". BBC News. Archived from the original on 5 July 2019. Retrieved 5 July 2019.
12. "Searching for missing relatives in Poland". Financial Times. 30 October 2009.
13. Gitta Sereny, "Stolen Children", rpt. in Jewish Virtual Library (American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise). Accessed 15 September 2008.
14. "Why hundreds of people are dying over cattle in East Africa". Los Angeles Times. 21 April 2016. Archived from the original on 22 November 2016. Retrieved 23 November 2016.
15. Morcillo, Aurora G. (2010). The Seduction of Modern Spain: The Female Body and the Francoist Body Politic. Bucknell University Press. ISBN 9780838757536.
16. Taylor, Harry; Henley, Jon; Sullivan, Helen (27 April 2023). "Council of Europe says Russian-forced deportation of children from Ukraine is 'genocide'". www.theguardian.com. The Guardian. Retrieved 24 October 2023.
17. "MP claims 1,000 children 'wrongly' adopted every year". BBC News. 13 December 2011.
18. ‘We were human beings’: UK families seek apology over historic forced adoptions Archived 20 March 2022 at the Wayback Machine The Guardian
19. The UK's forced adoption scandal was state-sanctioned abuse Archived 20 March 2022 at the Wayback Machine
20. Calligeros, Marissa (2010-12-23). "'Your son is gone. He's with his adoptive parents'". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 2024-06-07.
21. "Catholic Church put up 30,000 children for adoption without mothers' consent". Brussels Times. 14 December 2023.
22. "Historian reveals tragedy of Swiss child trade". Swissinfo.ch. 29 February 2004. Archived from the original on 18 November 2015.
23. Puri, Kavita (29 October 2014). "Switzerland's shame: The children used as cheap farm labour". BBC News. Archived from the original on 20 July 2016. Retrieved 28 June 2016.
24. Jordans, Frank (24 November 2011). "Swiss grapple with history of forced child labor". Boston.com. Archived from the original on 18 November 2015.
25. Foulkes, Imogen (19 January 2012). "Swiss 'contract children' speak out". BBC News. Archived from the original on 13 January 2016.
26. Hannah Cho and Asta Kongsted (10 September 2024). "South Korea finds mothers were forced to give up babies for adoption abroad". The Guardian.
27. "Forced Adoption Case Against Norway Hits European Rights Court". courthousenews. 27 January 2021.
28. Whewell, Tim (3 August 2018). "Norway's hidden scandal". BBC News. Retrieved 2 March 2023.
29. Adams, Stephen (2013-05-27). "Alan Goldsack QC wants children removed from criminals at birth". News.com.au. Archived from the original on 25 August 2013.

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