Irregularities in transnational adoptions and child appropriations: Challenges for reparation practices

Transnational adoption is a global movement of children across borders to new permanent and irreversible legal relationships. It is a circulation that involves social, economic, cultural and political relations marked by geographies of inequalities of power on a global scale. Many of these circulations have been shrouded by illicit practices which mean the violation of child rights. This special issue of the journal Childhood examines individual, social and political narratives on illicit processes surrounding this practice. Drawing from social and political sciences research, the contributors of this collection show the contradiction between ‘silences’ around certain practices in some societies, while in others ‘truth recovery’ has been central to the transition towards democracy. The authors raise concerns about policies and practices that complicate the interests and rights of individual actors.

‘I prefer not to know’: Spain’s management of transnational adoption demand and signs of corruption

The safeguards and measures to prevent child trafficking mentioned in the 1993 Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption have proven insufficient in curbing the so-called irregular adoptions. An analysis of how Spanish central authorities and intermediary agencies managed the flow of adoption dossiers between 2003 and 2013 presents their inability to react swiftly to the imbalance between adoption demand and supply. The 2015 reforms in the Spanish law introduced measures to bring demand in line with real needs. However, imaginaries that portray adopters and children from the Global South as victims of meaningless bureaucracy continue to hold true even today.

THE PORTRAYAL OF A KOREAN ADOPTEE’S EXPERIENCE IN NICOLE CHUNG’S ALL YOU CAN EVER KNOW: A MEMOIR OF ADOPTION

Transnational adoption has become one of the factors of transnational migration to Western countries, including America. Transnational adoption can be viewed from at least two perspectives, South Korea as the origin country and America as the targeted country. From the birth country, transnational adoption becomes a way to help the children from poverty, have a better future, and contribute to the birth country when they return. From the adoption-targeted country, this adoption is a humanitarian way to save the children from poverty, primitive way of life, and God’s blessing. One of the countries which regularly “send” the children to Western countries is South Korea. The children become Korean adoptees and mostly living in white American neighborhoods. Living with white Americans has shaped the Korean adoptees’ behavior and way of thinking same as Americans. Korean adoptees face various problems, starting from adjusting themselves in new environment, finding their cultural roots and identity, and struggling to find their biological parents. This study employed Phinnes’ ethnic identity development to make sense of the experience of a Korean adoptee called Nicole Chung in her memoir, All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir of Adoption. Through the discussion, it can be understood how transnational adoption programs become national agenda and big business field since it is not expensive to have children from other countries. There is also an assumption that the children will have better and happier life when they are taken to America and other western countries. However, throughout their life as adopted children in America, the children also find difficulties, especially in finding their identity.

Reproductive Politics and Grand Strategy

This chapter highlights the ways that transnational adoption and reproductive politics more broadly have been quite important to US foreign policy, and are, in fact part of US grand strategy. They do much more political work than is generally acknowledged, and do so in ways that merit scholarly attention. Too often, scholars of grand strategy have relied on the same gendered logic that Donald Trump has, in which reproductive politics belong to a feminized, private world of children and families rather than the robust, masculine world of politics, militaries, and foreign policy. That logic has made the signal importance of things like transnational adoption, overpopulation, and birth control invisible in studies of grand strategy. The chapter seeks to rectify that oversight, restoring reproductive politics to its rightful place as a real and important element in grand strand strategy.

Someone Else’s Child: A Co-Constructed, Performance Autoethnography of Adoption from Three Perspectives

Through a framework of reconciling the other, this collaborative autoethnographic performance co-constructs the adoption experience from three perspectives in three different families: a mother struggling with the ethical and emotional implications of the transnational adoption of her daughter; an adult reflecting on her childhood as an adoptee feeling loved, but different; and a woman who met her biological sister at age 28 after her parents revealed a lifelong secret. To develop individual adoption narratives, we applied autoethnographic tools of interactive interviews with family members, reflective writing, and document review (Ellis, 2004) of photos, letters, emails, and calendars. During one school year, we met monthly to discuss relevant literature, share and critique each other’s methods and writing, and identify the common themes in our three, diverse experiences. The result of the iteration of the individual and group processes is a script that weaves together our adoption stories, the discoveries of ourselves, and how, after negotiating feelings and identities, we reconciled the other through positive, loving relationships.

“Unspoken Understanding”: The Evolution of Chinese American Adoption Communities

While scholarly work on adoption, transnational adoption, and specifically international adoption from China has been robust, it has tended to focus on studying parents and parenting. This paper analyzes the resources used by both parents and children to discuss race, culture, and adoption, and seeks to understand the effects of these parenting strategies on Chinese American adoptees, who have begun to reach young adulthood in the last ten years. Examination of the recent growth of adoptee communities reveals that a shared and complex adoptee identity is a more powerful nexus than shared Chineseness.