Every year 300,000 children are taken from all around the world and sold by human traffickers as slaves. 28% of the 17,000 people brought to the United States are children—about 13 children per day. 

In 2014, research conducted by the anti-human trafficking organization Thorn reported that internet sites like Craigslist are often used as tools for conducting business within the industry and that 70 percent of child sex trafficking survivors surveyed were at some point sold online.

 

The Shameful Practice of Buying and Selling Babies Doesn’t Only Happen Overseas, but Here in the US, too.

by Janet Golden

A BBC report about a raid on a Nigeria “baby factory,”selling infants for adoption, trafficked for prostitution, and worse, probably shocked and horrified listeners. How many of them, I wondered, knew the history of American baby selling.

In the post World War II baby boom years families wanting babies to adopt quickly learned there weren’t enough to go around and those with the means turned to baby brokers operating outside or on the edges of the law.

 

 

Periodic media attention to infant sellers began in the 1950s with a New York Times article about a notorious branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society that raked in approximately one million dollars arranging adoptions. The paper reported on local sales as well, including a front-page story in 1951 headlined “4 Doctors among 9 Indicted Here in $500,000 Baby Black Market.”

Sustained attention to the problem came in 1955 when the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency held four days of hearings on what it called “the adoption racket.” The subcommittee chair, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver (himself an adoptive father), explained the rationale for a juvenile delinquency committee to investigate the problem.

He observed that “improperly placed children” could become maladjusted and delinquent. Over two days of hearings in Miami and another two days in Chicago, the committee learned all about the economics of the baby trade.

Babies were not cheap and baby selling proved to be such a lucrative business that New York City authorities uncovered a million-dollar adoption racket in 1959 that included loan sharking and gambling. The price of babies discussed during the Kefauver hearings ranged from $1,500 to $5,000 or more.

The median family income in 1956 was $4,800; clearly the trade involved a wealthy clientele.

The expense reflected the many middlemen and women involved. Birth mothers received stipends, maternity home operators were reimbursed for room and board for the women waiting to give birth, doctors received money for the deliveries, lawyers got paid for arranging the adoptions, and sometimes judges received payoffs for approving the adoptions.

 

In 1956 Kraft Television Theater, possibly inspired by the Kefauver hearings, aired the melodrama “Babies for Sale.” 

A broken-hearted woman who lost her child at birth desperately wants another child. She and her husband turn to the black market to adopt an infant because the legal route is so cumbersome and slow. They become attached to a particular child, but its nurse tries to convince the couple to do things properly.

One scene involved a bit of haggling between the prospective father and the baby broker, who says, “I understand you want our merchandise, but you don’t want to pay our price,” and a few moments later, “I’m doing business in a seller’s market.” It was an accurate account.

Of course, not all babies brought high prices. Buyers wanted healthy, white infants and they returned the ones discovered to be “defective” or of mixed-race.

Families turned to the black or grey market to acquire babies after being rejected by adoption agencies or because they were unwilling to wait for a licensed agency to investigate them and then, if accepted, join a long waiting list. In turning to baby brokers, they signaled a refusal to accept the judgments of experts, even though they shared with the psychologists and social workers whose judgment they eschewed the same faith in environmentalism.

A loving home, they believed, would overcome any presumed deficits that resulted from being born to a poor, unwed mother—the typical case for an infant adoptee.

At the conclusion of the hearings Kefauver proposed a bill to outlaw the commercial sale of children. At the time, thirty-four of the forty-eight states had no laws regarding the sale of babies.

The legislation did not pass, despite the strong support of the U.S. Children’s Bureau and many social welfare organizations. An amended version of the bill introduced in 1965 after another round of hearings also failed to become law.

States maintained control over adoption, although federal measures regarding inter-country adoption, adoption support, and prevention of child pornography and child trafficking would be enacted.

Despite the laws and the efforts to halt illegal sales, the baby trade continues in the United States and elsewhere, as a quick online search will reveal. The information uncovered in the Kefauver hearings seems dated only in its prices, and in the method for finding pregnant women willing to enter maternity homes and give up their babies. Now people don’t turn to newspapers.

The Shameful Practice of Buying and Selling Babies Doesn’t Only Happen Overseas, but Here in the US, too | History News Network

Baby Scoop Era 

The Baby Scoop Era was a period in anglosphere history starting after the end of World War II and ending in the early 1970s,characterized by an increasing rate of pre-marital pregnancies over the preceding period, along with a higher rate of newborn adoption. 

History In the United States 

From 1945 to 1973, it is estimated that up to 4 million parents in the United States had children placed for adoption, with 2 million during the 1960s alone. 

Annual numbers for non-relative adoptions increased from an estimated 33,800 in 1951 to a peak of 89,200 in 1970, then quickly declined to an estimated 47,700 in 1975. (This does not include the number of infants adopted and raised by relatives. In contrast, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that only 14,000 infants were placed for adoption in 2003. 

This period of history has been documented in scholarly books such as Wake Up Little Susie and Beggars and Choosers, both by historian Rickie Solinger, and social histories such as the book The Girls Who Went Away and the documentary, A Girl Like Her, based on the book by Ann Fessler. Fessler is a professor of photography at the Rhode Island School of Design who exhibited an art installation titled The Girls Who Went Away. It is also the theme of the documentary “Gone To A Good Home” by Film Australia. 

Beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, illegitimacy began to be defined in terms of psychological deficits on the part of the mother.[6] At the same time, a liberalization of sexual morals combined with restrictions on access to birth control led to an increase in premarital pregnancies. The dominant psychological and social work view was that the large majority of unmarried mothers were better off being separated by adoption from their newborn babies. According to Mandell (2007), “In most cases, adoption was presented to the mothers as the only option and little or no effort was made to help the mothers keep and raise the children”. 

Solinger describes the social pressures that led to this unusual trend, explaining that women who had no control over their reproductive lives were defined by psychological theory as “not-mothers”, and that because they had no control over their reproductive lives, they were subject to the ideology of those who watched over them. As such, for unmarried pregnant girls and women in the pre-Roe era, the main chance for attaining home and marriage rested on their acknowledging their alleged shame and guilt, and this required relinquishing their children, with more than 80% of unwed mothers in maternity homes acting in essence as “breeders” for adoptive parents.[10] According to Ellison, from 1960 to 1970, 27% of all births to married women between the ages of 15 and 29 were conceived premaritally. This problem was thought to be caused by female neurosis, and those who could not procure an abortion, legally or otherwise, were encouraged to put up their children for adoption. 

In popular usage, singer Celeste Billhartz uses the term “baby scoop era” on her website to refer to the era covered by her work “The Mothers Project. “A letter on Senator Bill Finch‘s website uses the term as well. Writer Betty Mandell references the term in her article “Adoption”. The term was also used in a 2004 edition of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. 

Infant adoptions began declining in the early 1970s, a decline often attributed to the decreasing birth rate, but which also partially resulted from social and legal changes that enabled middle-class mothers to have an alternative: single motherhood. 

The decline in the fertility rate is associated with the introduction of the pill in 1960, the completion of legalization of artificial birth control methods, the introduction of federal funding to make family planning services more available to the young and low income, and the legalization of abortion. 

Brozinsky (1994) speaks of the decline in newborn adoptions as reflecting a freedom of choice embraced by youth and the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, resulting in an increase in the number of unmarried mothers who parented their babies as opposed to having them taken for adoption purposes. “In 1970, approximately 80% of the infants born to single mothers were […] [taken for adoption purposes], whereas by 1983 that figure had dropped to only 4%.” 

In contrast to numbers in the 1960s and 1970s, from 1989 to 1995 fewer than 1% of children born to never-married women were surrendered for adoption.

In the Commonwealth 

A similar social development took place in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. 

In Canada 

Canada’s “Baby Scoop Era” refers to the postwar period from 1945 to 1988, when over 400,000 unmarried pregnant girls, mostly aged 15–19, were targeted for their yet-to-be-born infants, because they were unmarried with a child. A large number of these young women were housed in maternity group homes, which were managed by religious orders, such as the Salvation Army, the Catholic Church, the United Church and the Anglican Church etc. These maternity “homes” were heavily funded by the Canadian government. There were over 70 maternity homes in Canada which housed between 20 and 200 pregnant women at a time. In Canadian maternity “homes” and hospitals, up to 100% of newborns were removed from their legal mothers after birth and placed for adoption. These newborns were taken under a Health and Welfare protocol. 

Some professionals of the era considered that the punishment of the mother for her transgression was an important part of the process. Dr. Marion Hilliard of Women’s College Hospital was quoted in 1956 saying: 

The father plays absolutely no part in this. That is part of her rehabilitation. When she renounces her child for its own good, the unwed mother has learned a lot. She has learned an important human value. She has learned to pay the price of her misdemeanor, and this alone, if punishment is needed, is punishment enough…We must go back to a primary set of values and the discipline that starts with the very small child. 

The term Baby Scoop Era parallels the term Sixties Scoop, which was coined by Patrick Johnston, author of Native Children and the Child Welfare System. “Sixties Scoop” refers to the Canadian practice, beginning in the 1950s and continuing until the late 1980s, of apprehending unusually high numbers of Native children over the age of 5 years old from their families and fostering or adopting them out. 

In Australia 

A similar event happened in Australia where Aboriginal children, sometimes referred to as the Stolen Generation, were removed from their families and placed into internment camps, orphanages and other institutions. Similar policies of forced adoption towards the children of unmarried mothers of European descent (known as the “White Stolen Generations” to distinguish them from the Aboriginal children), occurred as well. It is generally understood that a decline of adoption during the 1970s was linked to a 1973 law providing for financial assistance to single parents. 

 

 

The issue of foreign adoption was involved in the sphere of political struggle at the behest of the deputies of the State Duma of the Russian Federation. Then it became the subject of various speculations from the other side of the political barricades. It is hardly possible to consider worthy the positions of both sides, using the “children’s issue” in the confrontation.

But as soon as the problem is pulled into the political arena, it is imperative to clear it of myths, clichés and elementary illiteracy. In addition, upon closer examination, it turns out that the problem of child protection is really connected with the discussion about Russia’s domestic policy and the direction of its historical development.

The “children’s question”, which suddenly excited the Russian press, has several aspects. The first of these is the problem of foreign adoption. It exists, is being studied, has its own statistics, history, precedents and international norms. Some facts can help the reader get a general idea of it.

The United States of America has been the leader in international adoption for many years, including the present, followed by Spain and Italy. According to the U.S. government website Intercountry Adoption, over the past 10 years, U.S. citizens have adopted 180,000 children from abroad. However, the number of foreign children adopted in the U.S. has been steadily declining since 2005, having fallen by almost half to date:

Adoption in the U.S. from abroad

From which countries do U.S citizens adopt children? The question is not idle. If 32,000 children were sent from Russia to the United States in 10 years, then only 400 of all the other countries of the Group of Eight (excluding the United States).

Indeed, the countries of the “first world” for some reason are in no hurry to send their orphans overseas: France allowed the adoption of three children in ten years, and Germany – only thirteen.

Export of children to the United States country Number of children transferred to the United States in the last 10 years.
United Kingdom 0

Germany 13

Italy 0
Canada 31
France 3
Japan 356
Russia 32153

The list of the top 6 adoption donor countries in the United States is as follows: China, Russia, Guatemala, South Korea, Ethiopia, Ukraine.

These countries have accounted for 79% of U.S. children’s foreign arrivals over the past 10 years. It can be seen that the export of children from Russia to the United States was not only orders of magnitude superior to colleagues in the G8, but in general was the largest after the Chinese. The number of adoptions from a donor country is by no means proportional to its population. So, over the past decade, out of 14 million Guatemala, Americans have adopted 26 thousand children. Russia, with a population of 140 million, handed over only 1.3 times as many children to the United States. And China, with a population a hundred times larger than Guatemala’s, allowed only twice as many of its children (mostly girls) to be adopted in the United States.

The dynamics of adoption in the United States by donor country over the past decade provides a more detailed picture. “Dima Yakovlev’s Laws” in Russia… and in the United States. (politforums.net)

 

What Was the Baby Scoop Era? 

For the adoption community, this was an era of great concern (and for those directly or indirectly affected by it, it still is a concern today). This time period marked the start of an alarming increase in premarital pregnancies, which then led to an increased rate of newborns being placed for adoption.  

For the record, it was not necessarily adoption itself that was the problem—adoption in and of itself is a wonderful way to start a family. The problem stems from the psychological and emotional issues that surrounded women and motherhood during the 1900s due to societal pressure. It was a vicious cycle that began with a combination of a more relaxed societal view on sexual morality (in general) and a higher restriction on birth control access. Those two things were the main reasons for the increase in premarital pregnancies.  

Ironically, even though sexual morality views had lessened slightly, the most prevalent pressure was still that unmarried women were unfit to be mothers and that they would be “better off” by placing their newborns for adoption as soon as possible. Oftentimes, unmarried birth mothers were taught that adoption was their only option and would be pressured into it. If they decided to raise the child, they were still met with opposition, as most people would put little to no effort into helping them.  

The Impact 

As you can imagine, the psychological effects on birth mothers, adoptees, and families overall lasted for years. There were birth mothers who wanted to raise their children but faced oppression, there were birth mothers who were simply too young and scared, and there were birth mothers who tried to raise the child as well as they could on their own.  

Due to the societal shame associated with these situations, closed adoptions were preferred over open adoptions back then, and there was also a higher rate of adoptive parents simply not telling their child that they were adopted at all. If and when the children discovered the truth, the process of coming to terms with it and searching for answers was an even longer, more difficult road than it is now.  

With today’s genetic technology, social media platforms, and openness towards adoption, adoptees who want to pursue their biological parents can often do so. That is not to say the process is easy nowadays but imagine how much harder it is for those who were affected by these pressures. It left too many parents feeling broken and too many adoptees feeling lost.  

The Baby Scoop Era is part of the reason why openness in adoption has become more accepted and even encouraged. Just look at some of the statistics from the era:  

• Overall, approximately 4 million birth mothers placed their newborn children for adoption (this is just for the United States).  
• 2 million of those adoption placements were just within the 1960s.  
• In 1951, non-relative adoptions had a yearly average of 33,800 (estimated). By 1970, that number increased to 89,200.  
• Research done shortly after the era indicated a significant increase in depression and grief that was specific to the Baby Scoop Era birth mothers.  

The double standard of “unmarried women cannot be mothers but we will make birth control methods and resources extremely difficult to access” crippled the adoption community for over three decades, and it continues to do so—however inadvertently—today. Not only that, but the issues that were caused by the era are very rarely, if ever, addressed by those who were not directly impacted. Even those who probably find themselves without a proper name for these issues, and thus go without proper support.  

The Decline of the Baby Scoop Era 

This rather dark age in adoption history began to decline in the 1970s and significantly dropped in the 1980s. In the year 1970, it was estimated that about 80% of the children born to single moms were placed for adoption. By the time 1983 rolled around, that percentage had plummeted to a mere 4%. How did this number drop so dramatically?  

There were a couple of different factors. Firstly, the birth rate had since decreased, so there were fewer children being born overall. Secondly, birth control and abortion laws were undergoing major changes that were making it easier for people to be safe and prepared (this also included the availability of family planning services to those who had low income or were young). Thirdly, a societal shift had begun, allowing for more acceptance towards single mothers. They began to experience a sense of freedom and choice in being able to keep their babies instead of feeling like they had to relinquish them.  

There were also many new laws enacted in order to protect mothers and their children. Here is a quick timeline for some of the most significant ones:  

• 1972: The Supreme Court states that unmarried people have a right to contraception in the Eisenstadt v. Baird case.  
• 1973: Roe v. Wade case convinces the Supreme Court that safe and legal abortion is needed and a human right.  
• 1974: The Social Security Amendments provide more protection and enforcement around child support payments. Congress also passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. The act made it illegal to discriminate against credit users based on their age, marital status, national origin, race, receipt of public assistance, or religion. This allowed women to have credit cards and use loans without a spouse. Also in 1974, Congress amended their Fair Housing Act from 1968. Originally, women were allowed to be excluded when trying to buy or rent properties, but then “sex” was added under the protected classes.  
• 1975: After reevaluating women’s due process rights in the Cleveland Board of Education v. LeFleur case, the Supreme Court decides that pregnant women cannot be coerced or forced into unpaid maternity leave if it is after the first trimester of the pregnancy.  
• 1978: Per the Pregnancy Discrimination Act passed by Congress, employers cannot discriminate against pregnant women. This includes firing them for being pregnant, denying them a job or promotion because they are pregnant, and forcing them to take pregnancy leaves (assuming she is able to work).  

With so many new legal changes for women in America, in came a new era of women’s economic, social, and educational independence. These changes provided them greater personal confidence and power, which led to a wave of societal change. The social norms for women were beginning to change, and soon the things that had seemed normal during the Baby Scoop Era were regarded as taboo and unfathomable.  

However, just because the overall views on adoption and marriage had been remade, that did not mean that the effects went away. Luckily, there are people dedicating their time and resources to helping others who are still feeling those effects.  

The BSERI 

The BSERI (Baby Scoop Era Research Initiative) was founded by Karen Wilson-Buterbaugh in 2007.  Its sole purpose is researching the Baby Scoop Era and educating people about it in order to help people seeking healing from that time. The group is also adamant about spreading recognition and awareness for what happened to the adoption community overall, since (as I mentioned) it is rarely talked about by people outside of this community, or even within it to a degree.  

The Baby Scoop Era Research Initiative website holds a collection of scholarly articles, books, and research developed by the team, should anyone want to explore deeper into this topic. People can also contact them and join the group to find support and join their cause, if they want to. More details, research sources, and information on the Baby Scoop Era can be found on the BSERI website.  

The American Maternity Home Movement experienced radical change after 1945. Karen Wilson-Buterbaugh’s research into the textbooks, papers, and conference presentations of social workers and sociologists of the Baby Scoop Era has revealed a movement in flux. Once the province of altruistic Christian women, the movement rapidly moved from a supportive model to a psychoanalytic model after WW II.

Homes that had sheltered unmarried pregnant women, and trained them in the life skills they needed to successfully raise their children, began instead to promote closed, stranger adoption to married couples as the best social solution to the challenges presented by single motherhood.

The change occurred as social workers began to practice within Maternity Homes, eventually pushing the Christian women out. The social work profession brought with it a psychoanalytic bias that informed their practice and radically altered the outcome of single pregnancy during this period. These practices persisted until 1972, a period of great social and technological change in the United States. After 1972, the number of domestic adoptions dropped dramatically.

 

Beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, illegitimacy began to be defined in terms of psychological deficits on the part of the mother (Solinger, 2000, p. 88). At the same time, a liberalization of sexual mores combined with restrictions on access to birth control led to an increase in premarital pregnancies.  The dominant psychological and social work view was that the large majority of unmarried mothers were better off being separated by adoption from their newborn babies (O’Shaughnassy, 1994, p. 115) According to Mandell (2007), “In most cases, adoption was presented to the mothers as the only option and little or no effort was made to help the mothers keep and raise the children.” 

Solinger (2000, p. 149) defines the change that occurred during this period that differentiated it from preceding times: 

“Black single mothers were expected to keep their babies as most unwed mothers, black and white, had done throughout American history. Unmarried white mothers, for the first time in American history, were expected to put their babies up for adoption.” 

Solinger (p. 95) also describes the social pressures that led to this unusual trend: 

“For white girls and women illegitimately pregnant in the pre-Roe era, the main chance for attaining home and marriage… rested on the aspect of their rehabilitation that required relinquishment… More than 80 percent of white unwed mothers in maternity homes came to this decision… acting in effect as breeders for white, adoptive parents, for whom they supplied up to nearly 90 percent of all nonrelative infants by the mid-1960s… Unwed mothers were defined by psychological theory as not-mothers… As long as these females had no control over their reproductive lives, they were subject to the will and the ideology of those who watched over them. And the will, veiled though it often was, called for unwed mothers to acknowledge their shame and guilt, repent, and rededicate themselves.” 

According to Ellison (2003, p. 326): 

From 1960-70, 27 percent of all births to married women between the ages of 15 and 29 were conceived premaritally. Yet the etiology of single, white, middle-class women’s conceptions had shifted again and were now perceived as symptoms of female neurosis … the majority (85-95 percent) of single, white, middle-class women, who either could not or would not procure an illegal or therapeutic abortion, were encouraged, and at times coerced, to adopt-away their child (Edwards, 1993; McAdoo, 1992; Pannor et al., 1979; Solinger, 1992, 1993). 

In popular usage, Singer Celeste Billhartz uses the term on her website to refer to the era covered by her work “The Mothers Project.” A letter on Senator Bill Finch’s website uses the term as well. Writer Betty Mandell references the term in her article “Adoption”. The term was also used in a 2004 edition of the Richmond Times-Dispatch: 

“She and many others opposed to adoption gave birth to children who were later adopted in what some call the “baby scoop era” – a period generally after World War II and before Roe versus Wade in 1973 – when unmarried mothers were shunned by society and maternity homes were in vogue …” (Lohmann, p. G1) 

The Adoption Experience 

In the United States, adoptees make up about 5 million people, or 2-4% of the general population. This figure has remained pretty consistent since my own adoption, but the demographics have changed considerably in the last 50 years. I was born in what is affectionately termed the “Baby Scoop Era”.  

This was the period spanning from 1945 until Roe v. Wade in 1973. During this period, approximately 4 million children were placed in adoption, 2 million of those in the 1960’s alone. At its peak in 1970, over 89,000 children were placed in adoption. By contrast, in 2003 that number was only 14,000. 

The Baby Scoop Era was borne out of the post war boom and the changing social norms for young people. As society shifted away from the traditional courtship rituals that took place in the protective view of elder relatives, young men and women were in a bold new world of freedom away from the prying eyes of their parents/grandparents. Add to this the fact that there was virtually ZERO comprehensive sex education, it was a perfect storm to create this environment. An unplanned, illegitimate pregnancy began to be defined as some sort of psychological defect of the mother. For a young woman in those times, psychologists and social workers stressed that the only option to save these women was to relinquish their children.  

There was little to no effort made to help these mothers keep or raise their children. Rather, it was stressed to them that their only hope to attain a future home and marriage was to relinquish their child and pretend the whole incident never happened. More than 80% of unwed mothers during this period were shuffled off to “homes” for unwed mothers to have their babies in secrecy and shame, for adoptive parents eagerly waiting their perfect, healthy white babies. I would later learn that I was one of these cases. 

What is it like being adopted? From a very early age, I was acutely aware of my “otherness”. I did not look remotely like anyone in my family. My personality and likes/dislikes were very different than my family. It is hard enough living with that daily reminder in your face, but we are a society that places an incredibly high value on familial connections. Knowing you have Grandpa Joe’s nose or your mom’s sense of humor are things we weave into the stories we pass along to our own children. Except I was a child who had no connection whatsoever to the stories I grew up hearing. I felt like an outsider listening to stories of strangers. 

In school, I felt like a curiosity, and I didn’t really care to talk much about the fact I was adopted. There’s so few of us in the population and kids are curious and unabashed about asking questions. When my classmates would ask me the same questions, I was asking my mother, I felt embarrassed and uncomfortable being unable to give the answers I was seeking myself. 

At home, adoption was rarely discussed. Once my brother and I knew the basics, that was supposed to be enough. The older I got, the more I realized my probing questions made my mother feel very uncomfortable and threatened. I learned to stop asking when her responses grew increasingly negative. “Why do you care about this? SHE didn’t want you. We CHOSE you.” 

In the community and among my extended family, adoption was framed as some great noble thing my parents did. What wonderful people they were to give me a home after my birth mother, obviously a troubled woman of loose morals, discarded me like trash. Gosh, you must be SO GRATEFUL. Asking about my biological family ran counter to that narrative of gratitude adoptees are supposed to embrace. We are not allowed to talk about our feelings of loss and rejection. We’re just supposed to smile and gush about what a wonderful thing it is to be adopted and instead of being some poor kid languishing in an orphanage. 

Blending in becomes priority. If my “otherness” was on full display, it was invariably met with disapproval from my parents, particularly from my mother. I think some of that was the pressure of being the only girl and thus expected to inherit her domestic skills. With 3 brothers and a neighborhood dominated by boys my age, I was a bit of a tomboy and expressed little interest in my mother’s desire to teach me her baking secrets. When I failed to perform, her irritation and disapproval were expressed. “Some things are just genetic.” I was defective as I was. After all, my own mother rejected me immediately after birth. It left me with the message that if I wanted to survive in the world, I had to blend in. I’ve always been very adaptable in any situation, a skill I am learning is common among adoptees. 

Looking back, I don’t think anyone I have ever met really knows ME. Because in all that time, I didn’t know who I was. I always had a serious aversion to my own name, an instinctual feeling that it wasn’t my name. I didn’t know what my name was, but I sure as hell knew it wasn’t Sharon and at age 51, it STILL feels foreign on my tongue. This wasn’t anything I felt free to discuss to anyone: certainly not my parents. Who was going to understand? None of my friends were adoptees. I adapted. I presented the face of the “grateful adoptee” and went about living. I was a square peg living in a world of round holes.

 

 “In 1970, approximately 80% of the infants born to single mothers were taken for adoption purposes, whereas by 1983 that figure had dropped to only 4%.” 

Setting the Record Straight 

by Karen Wilson Buterbaugh 

More than six million American mothers surrendered children for adoption. In the wake of Oregon’s decision to open records, society has a renewed interest in these heretofore invisible women. America has been unwilling to look behind the scenes at adoption practices. After all, adoption is so sacred that it was enshrined on a postage stamp. Myths surround these mothers, who are either cast as sacrificial heroines or vilified as unnatural women who abandoned babies. Society believes that these mothers willingly gave up their babies and that they want privacy from their adult children. Fact is, these women long for contact and were never promised privacy. 

It is important to hear this story, so you understand that these women were pressured on all sides into surrendering their children and that in many cases their human rights were violated. I know this story because it is my story, and the story of many others like me. 

When a mother loses her child to closed adoption, it feels as if her child has died, yet there is no wake, no funeral, no sympathy cards, no public acknowledgment. There are no friends or relatives to offer comfort and support. There is no obituary, no grave to visit, no flowers to bring, no grieving permitted and no closure. 

Closed Adoption Era 

During the era of closed adoption (1950s – 1970s), this was the experience for hundreds of thousands of young women who were unmarried and pregnant. They disappeared into shame-filled prisons called maternity homes. The babies’ fathers went forward with lives uninterrupted, their part not criticized, not punished. 

It was the era of rock n’ roll, the assassinations of both Kennedys and Martin Luther King, civil unrest, hypocrisy and enormous social change. The media played up the swinging 60s, while “unwed mothers” paid a heavy social price. Once their “problem” became known, they were at the mercy of their parents, society and the adoption industry. 

The largest residential facility for unwed mothers, Florence Crittenton, had “homes” throughout America. The evangelical women there offered help to “unfortunate girls” by providing food, clothing and shelter. They taught job and parenting skills and provided childcare while mothers worked. When mothers left, they visited frequently bringing food, clothing and money until the mother could fend for herself and her baby. 

After the 1940s, things changed. Adoption history indicates that social workers specialized in unwed motherhood. They felt that this would elevate their professional status. Viewing themselves as authorities in adoption and unwed motherhood, they insinuated themselves into maternity homes. 

The social workers at the Washington, D.C. Crittenton appeared to agree with the evangelical women’s position of helping unwed mothers keep their babies. Their 1950s brochure states: 

“Would it be better for mother and child if the baby were given away (adopted)?” 

“Not in most cases . . . social workers have learned that no material advantage can make up for the loss of its own mother. Better a poor home, with mother love, they say, than an adopted home in luxury . . .” 

As social workers recognized the market for white babies for infertile couples, they decided girls were not worthy to parent. These attitudes freed white babies for adoption by two-parent families. Social Work and Social Problems (1964), published by the National Association of Social Workers, insinuates half-jokingly that unwed mothers served as “breeders”: 

“. . . babies born out of wedlock [are] no longer considered a social problem . . . white, physically healthy babies are considered by many to be a social boon . . . 

Because there are many more married couples wanting to adopt newborn white babies than there are babies, it may almost be said that they, rather than out of wedlock babies, are a social problem. (Sometimes social workers in adoption agencies have facetiously suggested setting up social provisions for more ‘baby breeding.’)” 

In Unmarried Mothers (1961), sociologist Clark Vincent commented on an “emerging pattern”: 

“We predict that-if the demand for adoptable infants continues to exceed the supply . . . unwed mothers will be ‘punished’ by having their children taken from them right after birth. A policy like this would not be . . . labeled explicitly as ‘punishment’ . . . it would be implemented through such labels . . . as ‘scientific findings’, ‘the best interests of the child’, ‘rehabilitation of the unwed mother’ . . .” 

Rights Were Violated 

Many of these mothers were never told about government programs nor were they advised about child support. They did not receive psychological counseling or legal advice. They were not directed to read surrender documents nor asked if they understood them. These mothers never spoke to a lawyer. Instead, they signed legal papers drafted by adoption agency attorneys. Many mothers now question the ethics of this arrangement and raise issues of signing under duress, lack of informed consent, and conflicts of interest. 

Marriage was discouraged by maternity homes. Maternity home “inmates” were forbidden communication with the fathers. Most homes censored mail according to “approved lists.” Were these restrictions designed to ensure that fathers could not propose a marriage that would allow them to keep their babies? 

Many mothers were forbidden to see their newborns. Some were told to sign surrender papers before giving birth. Others were told to sign while heavily drugged or still recuperating. Some were drugged to unconsciousness during the birth while others were given no medications at all. These mothers now raise issues of coercion, pressure tactics, and abuse. 

Questions Remain 

While living in “wage homes” contracted by the maternity homes, mothers were entrusted with the care of other people’s children as unpaid nannies. Yet they were deemed incapable of parenting their own babies. 

How strange that the state paid foster parents – complete strangers – to care for babies rather than allowing their own mothers to care for them for free. Why weren’t they told that they could see their baby in foster care or of the waiting period during which they could reclaim their babies? Were agencies afraid that they would bond even more and not sign surrender papers? We hear stories from mothers who wanted to keep their babies only to be warned severely by social workers that, if they did so, they must pay all costs: hospital, doctor, lawyer and foster care. 

Why are surrender documents the only legal contracts in America that can be signed by a minor? Because these babies were wanted by the adoption industry, a tremendous market with high demand for “the product.” According to Marketdata Enterprises of Tampa, the adoption industry earns $1.4 billion annually in the U.S. The company estimates gross income for even small agencies at $400,000 a year and at $10 million or more for larger agencies. It states that “stories of unscrupulous operators abound in this loosely regulated field.” 

Invisible Mothers Return 

These invisible, non-mothers have been ignored when requesting information that pertains to their experience. Requests are met with refusal even when some policy manuals state that they could be provided with access to their files. 

Today, the stigma of unwed motherhood may be gone but the perception that these mothers willingly gave away their babies is not. Mothers who lost their children to adoption are now coming forward in record numbers. Having walked out of the fog of enforced silence, we are angry and we will be heard. We are here to set the record straight. 

Argentina ‘stolen baby’ cases legacy of Dirty War 

Francisco Madariaga says he always doubted his origins. 

By Vladimir Hernandez 

Francisco Madariaga is blunt about how most of his life has been until now. 

“I spent 32 years living a lie,” he says. 

Mr. Madariaga, 33, used to be called Alejandro Ramiro Gallo, the name given to him by his adoptive parents. 

Last year he came face-to-face for the first time with his real father and confirmed his fears. 

 He is the son of one of thousands of left-wing activists who were tortured and killed during military rule in Argentina between 1976 and 1983, a period known as the Dirty War. 

‘Systematic plan’ 

“For decades my captors [as he describes his adoptive parents] told me I was their biological son. But lies can’t last forever,” says Mr Madariaga. 

The fate of Argentina’s “stolen babies” has been back in the headlines this past week, with the start of the trial of key members of the former military junta on charges of operating a systematic plan to take babies from pregnant detainees. 

 

Eight people are on trial, including former leaders Jorge Videla and Reynaldo Bignone. 

The accusation against them relates to 34 children who were allegedly stolen. But it is estimated that hundreds of children were given away to members of the security forces, and in some cases to the same captors of the jailed activists. 

 Mr Madariaga’s supposed “father” was Victor Gallo, an intelligence officer at the clandestine detention centre at the Campo de Mayo military base. 

He was handed over to his new “mother” only a few days after his real mother was forced to have a caesarean at the military base. 

Route to discovery 

The lack of resemblance to his new family made Mr Madariaga suspicious of his origins over the years. 

“It is something difficult to explain. It’s like I always knew something was not right,” Mr. Madariaga says. 

Mr. Madariaga says he was regularly beaten by his adoptive father, abuse that reinforced his doubts.  

“I think I was like a prize of war,” Mr Madariaga says. 

It was only last year that he confronted his “mother”, who is now separated from her husband, about his real origin. 

When she revealed what had happened, Mr Madariaga approached the human rights group, Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, who helped him have a DNA test that confirmed his true identity. 

But the group’s biggest help was to arrange a meeting between Francisco and his biological father, Abel, who had fled the country during the military rule. 

“It was the best moment in my life. I couldn’t believe how much I looked like him,” says Mr Madariaga. 

Francisco was labelled “Grandson 101”. The number represents the number of adults with similar stories who have now, after many years, regained their identities. 

Human rights groups believe there could be some 400 people in the same situation. 

Contact severed 

But not everyone wants to know the truth. 

Finding out that your parents colluded in the atrocities committed by the military government is something some choose to ignore. 

One well-known case is that of Marcela and Felipe Noble, whose adoptive mother is the owner of the newspaper Clarin, one of the biggest media groups in Argentina. 

They were adopted in 1976, the first year of the military government, and now two separate families are seeking through court to prove that they were taken from their imprisoned relatives. 

However, Marcela and Felipe have publicly expressed their trust in their adoptive mother, saying there is no evidence against her. 

“I can understand those who don’t want to know,” says Mr. Madariaga. 

“For some, it takes more time than for others. Every case is different”, says Rosa Roisinbit, a member of the Grandmothers.  

In 2001, after years of investigation, she finally found her missing grandson who lived under a different name. 

“However, the truth has to be above everything,” she says. 

“Some of the people who regain their identities don’t want to know anymore from their adoptive parents. Others keep in touch”, says Ms Roisinbit. 

In Mr. Madariaga’s case, he severed all contact with his “father” and says he looks forward to seeing him in court. 

His adoptive father, Victor Gallo, the former intelligence officer, was arrested last year. He is expected to testify, as part of the trial that is currently focusing on Videla and Bignone but which is expected to include many more people accused of kidnapping babies. 

Mr. Gallo’s side of the story is that he was a training officer, and that baby Francisco was given to him by chance by a superior officer. 

“It is all lies”, says Mr. Madariaga. 

“And lies cannot last forever.” 

Almost exactly nine months after World War II ended, “the cry of the baby was heard across the land,” as historian Landon Jones later described the trend. More babies were born in 1946 than ever before: 3.4 million, 20 percent more than in 1945.

This was the beginning of the so-called “baby boom.” In 1947, another 3.8 million babies were born; 3.9 million were born in 1952; and more than 4 million were born every year from 1954 until 1964, when the boom finally tapered off. By then, there were 76.4 million “baby boomers” in the United States. They made up almost 40 percent of the nation’s population.

ROME — Faith communities, including the Catholic Church, “will be the catalyst that decides whether (Ukrainian children) are returned” home after they were illegally taken into Russia during the war, said a U.S. scholar tracking the illegal deportation of Ukrainian children into Russia.

“When faith communities act together, governments listen. Both governments that have done things wrong and governments that can help do things right,” Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Yale Humanitarian Lab, told Catholic News Service after a roundtable discussion with reporters in Rome Sept. 26.

The Yale Humanitarian Lab’s landmark February 2023 report exposed the scale of Russia’s systemic deportation of Ukrainian children, principally by using satellite data, and it conservatively estimated that 6,000 children had been taken to camps to undergo involuntary “russification” in the first year since Russia’s full-scale invasion. It expects to publish an updated report in September. Current figures published by the Ukrainian government estimate just under 20,000 children have been illegally taken into Russia.

While in Rome, Raymond said he had “long and productive” meetings with Vatican officials and with Cardinal Matteo Zuppi of Bologna, Pope Francis’ envoy for peace in Ukraine.

The cardinal had discussed the repatriation of Ukrainian children with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv, U.S. President Joe Biden in Washington and government officials in Moscow including Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, Russia’s presidential commissioner for children’s rights, who has an arrest warrant issued against her by the International Criminal Court for her alleged involvement in unlawfully transferring Ukrainian children into Russia. Cardinal Zuppi also traveled to Beijing Sept. 13-15 to meet with a senior Chinese official, but the subject of Ukrainian children was not mentioned in the Vatican’s statement released after the meeting.

Raymond said he stressed to Vatican officials the importance of obtaining accurate information on the identities, location and number of Ukrainian children taken by Russia.

“Right now, our biggest need is for those children to be registered by Russia as is required by international law,” he said. “If we don’t have that, we can’t do any of those four things” that are essential: first, return the children to Ukraine; but also identify them, hold perpetrators accountable and support families whose children have been taken.

“Call the Russians and ask for registration,” he said was his message to the Vatican.

The human rights investigator cited the Catholic Church’s role in finding children who had been separated from their families during the Latin American “dirty wars” in the 1980’s to underscore the value of the Catholic network in repatriating Ukrainian children. Returning children taken from their family “requires documents, it requires DNA, it requires a lot of time to do for one kid,” he said. “Now, multiply it by thousands for a country that’s in the middle of war.”

Raymond explained that the situation of Ukraine’s stolen children is in its “golden hour,” referring to the time in which a patient can still be saved immediately following a traumatic accident. “The sooner we return the children, the easier it’s going to be,” he said. “But if we don’t, this is going to take decades.”

“If faith communities are not active, then there is little chance of success,” he added.

In May, President Zelenskyy met with Pope Francis at the Vatican and said he raised the issue of Ukraine’s deported children with the pope.

The United States of America: A History of Stealing Babies? 

Published on March 28, 2023, 10:56 p.m. by Mohamed Ali Fayoumi 

Abduction of children is one of the alleged crimes that the West, headed by the United States, has accused Russia and its president Vladimir Putin of. The accusations came that Putin ordered those Ukrainian children living in areas directly under Russian occupation like the Donbas be deported to Russia and adopted by Russian families.
Russia from its side has not denied taking children away from Ukraine, portraying itself as a hero that is saving orphan children from death in the war zone.

The international community accuses them of wanting to strip these kids of their Ukrainian nationality and identity and attempting to make them Russian. Although public opinion agrees majorly that this is a bad and abhorrent action, others have also called on the United States to not dare criticize Russia since it has done the same thing more than 40 years ago in its own swamp, Vietnam.

In this article, we will launch a wide investigation to determine and prove that the United States is guilty of half if not all the crimes it’s accusing Russia of, without defending the latter and focusing solely on “Operation Babylift “.

In 1955, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered the deployment of a US Army advisory team of personnel to an already divided Vietnam, supporting the Southern Republic against communist northern part. Over the years, from the sixties up till much later, the US presence and role grew significantly stronger after the Gulf of Tonkin incident where the North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked two American destroyers.

This attack resonated heavily in mainland US, which led to President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered airstrikes against the attacker’s naval bases and managed to get Congress to pass a law that would allow him to take any measures he deemed necessary in the region without consulting them.

After that decision, the US officially entered the war, beginning from 100,000 troops (about the seating capacity of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum) to the war developments we now learn about in the history classes.

The Vietnam War was near its end; the communist forces were clearly about to take full control of the south. The United States had to take a multitude of emergency actions, one of them was to save children whose fathers are serving in the military along with other fatherless children (sounds familiar, doesn’t it?).

3300 children were taken out of Vietnam during that operation in the span of a single day on April 3rd, 1975. The US government even admitted to this operation. The then President, Gerald Ford even personally welcomed an airplane at the airport.

This operation was greatly controversial amongst the American people. Some, such as certain senators, questioned the ethics of these actions. While others, like the Americans in Vietnam, have celebrated this move because they were on the ground of seeing the difficulties these children were facing, according to them they would die first because of the lack of essentials before getting killed in the war.

But historical facts and events will tell us that all of this didn’t exactly happen. Not all kids were orphans, some had living relatives, who were unable to reach them back in their country, and some even received regular visits from their parents. They had put them in orphanages because at least there they would be fed.

 

The kids were transported in not so comfortable planes. Since the latter were officially unauthorized, they did not receive clearance by the allied governments of the US and South Vietnam. So, instead of seated planes, the children were airlifted in cargo planes, like objects along with their card boxes and blankets.

The sick amongst them would be put in hospitals in the Philippines. It is also important to note that the South Vietnamese military and officers would sometimes ban young men from traveling because they would see them old enough to fight.

This situation forced some volunteers and activists to file a class action lawsuit against the official authorities and Henry Kissinger, responsible for this lift. This lawsuit was manipulated and defeated
Today, almost 50 years later, the children are still searching for their birth parents, still searching for their identities. During the time of the lawsuit, only a few dozen kids were reunited with their parents.

And today, it is found to be hypocritical that a country, who had committed such crimes and illegal acts, would go after another, equally responsible country, giving them a lecture on morals and ethics.

TheSocialTalks – The United States of America: A History of Stealing Babies?

How the US stole thousands of Native American children

 

 

• The long and brutal history of the US trying to “kill the Indian and save the man.” 
  For decades, the US took thousands of Native American children and enrolled them in off-reservation boarding schools. Students were systematically stripped of their languages, customs, and culture.
• And even though there were accounts of neglect, abuse, and death at these schools, they became a blueprint for how the US government could forcibly assimilate native people into white America.
• At the peak of this era, there were more than 350 government-funded, and often church-run, Native American boarding schools across the US.

 

A rough map of 357 Native American boarding schools. Alvin Chang/Ranjani Chakraborty

 

The schools weren’t just a tool for cultural genocide. They were also a way to separate native children from their land. During the same era in which thousands of children were sent away, the US encroached on tribal lands through war, broken treaties, and new policies.

As years of indigenous activism led the US to begin phasing out the schools, the government found a new way to assimilate Native American children: adoption. Native children were funneled into the child welfare system. And programs, like the little-known government “Indian Adoption Project” intentionally placed them with white adoptive families.

“Many were forcibly taken from their families and communities and stripped of all signs of ‘Indianness,’ even forbidden to speak their own language amongst themselves. “Up until the 1930s, students were trained for domestic work and trade in a highly regimented environment. Many children went years without familial contact, and these events had a lasting, generational impact.”

Little Orphan at the Train’ by Norman Rockwell, 1950. Norman Rockwell/Jeremy Keith/Flickr/Creative Commons

By Robert Longley   Published on April 24, 2020 

The Orphan Train movement in the United States was an ambitious, sometimes controversial, social welfare effort to relocate orphaned, abandoned, or otherwise homeless children from crowded cities on the East Coast to foster homes in the rural Midwest.  

Between 1854 and 1929, some 250,000 children were transported to their new homes aboard special trains. As a forerunner of the modern U.S. adoption system, the Orphan Train movement preceded the passage of most federal child protection laws. While many orphan train children were placed with loving and supportive foster parents, some were abused and mistreated. 

The Orphan Train movement in the United States was an ambitious, sometimes controversial, social welfare effort to relocate orphaned, abandoned, or otherwise homeless children from crowded cities on the East Coast to foster homes in the rural Midwest. Between 1854 and 1929, some 250,000 children were transported to their new homes aboard special trains.  

As a forerunner of the modern U.S. adoption system, the Orphan Train movement preceded the passage of most federal child protection laws. While many orphan train children were placed with loving and supportive foster parents, some were abused and mistreated. 

Key Takeaways: The Orphan Train Movement 

• The Orphan Train movement was an effort to transport orphaned or abandoned children from cities on the United States East Coast to homes in the newly settled Midwest. 
• The movement was created in 1853 by Protestant minister Charles Loring Brace, founder of the Children’s Aid Society of New York City. 
• The orphan trains ran from 1854 to 1929, delivering an estimated 250,000 orphaned or abandoned children to new homes. 
• The Orphan Train movement was the forerunner of the modern American foster care system and led to the passage of child protection and health and welfare laws. 

Background: The Need for Orphan Trains 

The 1850s were literally “the worst of times” for many children in crowded cities of the American East Coast. Driven by a still-unregulated influx of immigration, epidemics of infectious diseases, and unsafe working conditions, the number of homeless children in New York City alone soared to as many as 30,000, or about 6% of the city’s 500,000 residents.  

Many orphaned and abandoned children survived on the streets by selling rags and matches while joining gangs as a source of protection. Street-dwelling children, some as young as five years old, were often arrested and placed in jails with hardened adult criminals. 

While there were orphanages at the time, most children who had lost their parents were raised by relatives or neighbors. Taking in and caring for orphaned children was typically done through informal agreements rather than through court-approved and supervised adoptions.  

Orphaned children as young as six years old were often forced to go to work to help support the families that had agreed to take them in. With no child labor or workplace safety laws yet in place, many were maimed or killed in accidents. 

 

Charles Loring Brace and the Orphan Trains 

In 1853, Protestant minister Charles Loring Brace founded the Children’s Aid Society of New York City for the purpose of easing the plight of abandoned children. Brace viewed the orphanages of the day as little more than human warehouses that lacked the resources, expertise, and incentive needed to turn orphaned children into self-sufficient adults. 

Along with providing the children basic academic and religious training, the society attempted to find them stable and safe jobs. 

Faced with a rapidly growing number of children cared for by his Children’s Aid Society, Brace came up with the idea of sending groups of children to areas of the recently settled American West for adoption.  

Brace reasoned that the pioneers settling in the West, always grateful for more help on their farms, would welcome the homeless children, treating them as family members.  

“The best of all asylums for the outcast child is the farmer’s home,” wrote Brace. 

“The great duty is to get these children of unhappy fortune utterly out of their surroundings and to send them away to kind Christian homes in the country.”

After sending individual children to nearby farms in Connecticut, Pennsylvania and rural New York in 1853, Brace’s Children’s Aid Society arranged its first “orphan train” delivery of large groups of orphaned and abandoned children to Midwestern towns in September 1854. 

On October 1, 1854, the first orphan train carrying 45 children arrived in the small town of Dowagiac in southwestern Michigan. By the end of the first week, 37 of the children had been placed with local families. The remaining eight were sent by train to families in Iowa City, Iowa. Two more groups of homeless children were sent to Pennsylvania in January 1855. 

 

Between 1855 and 1875, Children’s Aid Society orphan trains delivered an average of 3,000 children a year to homes in 45 states. As a strict abolitionist, however, Brace refused to send children to Southern states. During its peak year of 1875, a reported 4,026 children rode the orphan trains. 

Once placed in homes, orphan train children were expected to help with farm tasks. While the children were placed free of charge, the adoptive families were obligated to raise them as they would their own children, providing them with healthy food, decent clothing, a basic education, and $100 when they turned 21. Older children who worked in family businesses were to be paid wages. 

The intent of the orphan train program was not a form of adoption as it is known today, but an early form of foster care through a process then known as “placing out.” Families were never required to legally adopt the children they took in. While Children’s Aid Society officials tried to screen host families, the system was not foolproof and not all children ended up in happy homes.  

Rather than being accepted as family members, some children were abused or treated as little more than itinerant farmworkers. Despite these problems, the orphan trains offered many abandoned children their best chance at a happy life. 

 

The Orphan Train Experience 

A typical orphan train car carried 30 to 40 children ranging in age from infants to teenagers, accompanied by two to five adults from the Children’s Aid Society. Having been told little more than that they were “going out West,” many of the children had no idea what was happening to them. Among those who did, some looked forward to finding new families while others objected to being removed from their “homes” in the city—even as dismal and dangerous as they may have been. 

When the trains arrived, the adults dressed the children in new clothing and gave each of them a Bible. Some of the children had already been paired with new families who had “ordered” them based on their gender, age, and physical characteristics. Others were taken to local meeting places where they stood on a raised platform or stage for inspection. This process was the source of the term “put up for adoption.” 

In bizarre scenes considered unimaginable today, these orphan train adoption inspections often resembled livestock auctions. Children had their muscles poked and their teeth counted.  

Some children sang or danced to attract new mothers and fathers. Infants were most easily placed, while children over 14 and those with visible illnesses or disabilities had more difficulty in finding new homes. 

Newspaper accounts of an orphan train’s arrival described the auction-like atmosphere. “Some ordered boys, others girls, some preferred light babies, others dark,” reported The Daily Independent of Grand Island, Nebraska, in May 1912. 

 “They were very healthy tots and as pretty as anyone ever laid eyes on.” 

Newspapers also published glowing accounts of the “distribution day” when adopted orphan train children went home with their new parents.  

An article in the Bonham (Texas) News from November 19, 1898, stated, “There were good looking boys, handsome boys, and smart boys, all waiting for homes. Willing and anxious hearts and hands were there to take them and share their all with them through life.” 

Perhaps one of the saddest aspects of the orphan train process was its potential for separating brothers and sisters. Though many siblings were sent out for adoption together, new parents were often financially able to take only one child.  

If the separated siblings were lucky, they were all taken in by families in the same town. Otherwise, the passed-over siblings were returned to the train and taken to its next destination, often far away. In many cases, brothers and sisters completely lost track of each other. 

 

The End of the Orphan Trains 

By the 1920s, the number of orphan trains began to decline dramatically. As the American West became better settled and shops and factories started to outnumber farms, the demand for adoptable children decreased.  

Once mere frontier settlements like Chicago, St. Louis, and Cleveland grew into sprawling cities, they began to suffer the same problems of abandoned children that had plagued New York in the 1850s.  

With their economies now booming, these cities were soon able to develop their own charitable resources for taking care of orphaned children. 

However, the most significant factor leading to the final runs of the orphan trains came as states began enacting laws strictly regulating or banning the interstate transportation of children for the purpose of adoption. In 1887 and 1895, Michigan passed the first laws in the United States regulating the placement of children within the state.  

The 1895 law required all out-of-state child placement agencies like the Children’s Aid Society to post a costly bond for each child brought into the state of Michigan. 

In 1899, Indiana, Illinois, and Minnesota enacted similar laws that also prohibited the placement of “incorrigible, diseased, insane, or criminal” children within their borders. 

By 1904, the states of Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, and South Dakota had passed similar laws. 

 

Legacy of the Orphan Trains 

Today, orphan train creator Charles Loring Brace’s visionary belief that all children should be cared for by families rather than by institutions lives on as the foundation of the modern American foster care system.  

The Orphan Train movement similarly paved the way for federal child protection and welfare laws, school lunch programs, and child health care programs. 

The Children’s Aid Society, though chronically understaffed, attempted to monitor the condition of the children it sent to new families via its orphan trains. Society representatives attempted to visit each family once a year, and the children were expected to send the society two letters a year describing their experience. Under society criteria, an orphan train child was considered to have “done well,” if they grew up to be “creditable members of society.” 

According to a 1910 survey, the society determined that 87% of orphan train children had indeed “done well,” while the other 13% had either returned to New York, died, or been arrested.  

Two orphan train boys transported to Noblesville, Indiana, from the Randall’s Island orphanage in New York City, grew up to become governors, one of North Dakota and the other of the Alaskan territory.  

Statistics also indicate that during the first 25 years of the orphan train program, the number of children arrested for petty theft and vagrancy in New York City decreased dramatically just as Charles Loring Brace had hoped. 

The Orphan Train Movement in the United States (thoughtco.com)

 

Official position: During the 1850s there were thousands of children living on the streets of several major cities. The children were in search of food, shelter, and money and sold rags, matches, and newspapers just to survive.  

The children formed gangs for protection because life on the street was dangerous and they were regularly victimized. The police often arrested the children, some as young as five years old, and put them in lock up facilities with adult criminals.  

Determined to remedy the situation, the Children’s Aid Society and the New York Foundling Hospital devised a program to take children off of the streets of New York and Boston and place them in homes in the American West rather than allow them to continue to be arrested and taken advantage of on the streets.  

Because the children were transported by train to their new homes, the term “orphan trains” began being used

The Orphan Train Movement was a supervised welfare program that transported orphaned and homeless children from crowded Eastern cities of the United States to foster homes located largely in rural areas of the Midwest. The orphan trains operated between 1854 and 1929, relocating about 200,000 orphaned, abandoned, abused, or homeless children. 

 While the official narrative is talking about 200,000 for the US, it is highly probable that there were many more.  

 

Their parents were either killed in our famous “no victim” urban fires (were those a part of one big war?) I think there are reasons to doubt the official narrative. Especially the part where mothers were forced to give up their babies. Could such an atrocity be possible?  

I assume it could, but such numbers of orphaned children suggest that it was hardly probable. A few maybe, but hundreds of thousands? For that we are missing historical accounts mentioning hundreds of thousands of pissed off, armed mothers defending their right to raise their children. It appears that those children simply had no parents left… as in… they were dead. 

The issue was not limited to the United States. Multiple other countries were in the same boat. 

Orphans were deliberately relocated (including overseas), separated from siblings to break ties with whatever emotional attachments they might have had left. 

And this: child labor is the employment of children in any work that deprives children of their childhood, interferes with their ability to attend regular school, and that is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful. 

At this age how much did they understand what was going on? 

1850-1930: when they grew up, there was always some war to attend. 

 

 

The Last Generation 

The last orphan train left New York City on May 31, 1929, bound for Sulphur Springs, Texas. The Dust Bowl and the Great Depression left Midwestern families unable to feed another mouth.  

And attitudes toward homeless children and poor families had changed. People thought it better to keep families intact, and states passed laws that barred agencies from sending children out of state for placement. 

Today, an estimated one in 25 Americans has a connection to an orphan train rider. 

In 1986, Mary Ellen Johnson, a publisher’s assistant, discovered an orphan train had delivered children to her home in Springdale, Ark. She founded the Orphan Train Heritage Society of America, which hosts orphan train reunions in Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, and Oklahoma.  

The National Orphan Train Complex in Concordia, Kans., allows surviving orphan train riders to keep in touch with each other. 

 

 

The Orphan Train Movement was a supervised welfare program that transported children from crowded Eastern cities of the United States to foster homes located largely in rural areas of the Midwest. The orphan trains operated between 1854 and 1929, relocating from about 200,000 children. 

 

 

Charles Loring Brace (June 19, 1826 – August 11, 1890) was an American philanthropist who contributed to the field of social reform.  

He is considered the father of the modern foster care movement and was most renowned for starting the Orphan Train movement of the mid-19th century, and for founding Children’s Aid Society. 

 

 

 

 

Some believe that the Orphan Train Movement helped the children while others believe that, in reality, it hurt the children more than it benefited them.

The Dark Secret of Israel’s Stolen Babies’.

 

This is about the emerging scandal that in the years following Israel’s founding in 1948, the hospitals and other institutions had stolen hundreds of Arab Jewish babies away from their mothers. It’s been a secret for decades, but last month the head of national security, Tzachi Hanegbi, finally admitted it had occurred.

In actual fact, the numbers of children stolen from their parents is likely to be an underestimate. The real figure is probably in the thousands. Campaigners in Israel believe that as many as 8,000 children were taken in this way. The children were given to childless Jewish couples. The parents were told that their babies had died. In some cases, the nurses simply snatched them away, telling the mothers that they were wrong for having more children than they could look after. 

It is Israel’s darkest secret – or so argues one Israeli journalist – in a country whose short history is replete with dark episodes. 

Last month Tzachi Hanegbi, minister for national security, became the first government official to admit that hundreds of babies had been stolen from their mothers in the years immediately following Israel’s creation in 1948. In truth, the number is more likely to be in the thousands. 

For nearly seven decades, successive governments – and three public inquiries – denied there had been any wrongdoing. They concluded that almost all the missing babies had died, victims of a chaotic time when Israel was absorbing tens of thousands of new Jewish immigrants. 

But as more and more families came forward – lately aided by social media – to reveal their suffering, the official story sounded increasingly implausible. 

Although many mothers were told their babies had died during or shortly after delivery, they were never shown a body or grave, and no death certificate was ever issued. Others had their babies snatched from their arms by nurses who berated them for having more children than they could properly care for. 

According to campaigners, as many as 8,000 babies were seized from their families in the state’s first years and either sold or handed over to childless Jewish couples in Israel and abroad. To many, it sounds suspiciously like child trafficking. 

A few of the children have been reunited with their biological families, but the vast majority are simply unaware they were ever taken. Strict Israeli privacy laws mean it is near-impossible for them to see official files that might reveal their clandestine adoption. 

Did Israeli hospitals and welfare organisations act on their own or connive with state bodies? It is unclear. But it is hard to imagine such mass abductions could have occurred without officials at the very least turning a blind eye. 

Testimonies indicate that lawmakers, health ministry staff, and senior judges knew of these practices at the time. And the decision to place all documents relating to the children under lock untl 2071 hints at a cover-up. 

Hanegbi, who was given the task of re-examining the classified material by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been evasive on the question of official involvement. “We may never know,” he has said. 

By now, Israel’s critics are mostly inured to the well-known litany of atrocities associated with the state’s founding. Not least, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homeland in 1948 to make way for Israel and its new Jewish immigrants. 

The story of the stolen babies, however, offers the shock of the unexpected. These crimes were committed not against Palestinians but other Jews. The parents whose babies were abducted had arrived in the new state lured by promises that they would find in Israel a permanent sanctuary from persecution. 

But the kidnapping of the children and the mass expulsion of Palestinians at much the same time are not unrelated events. In fact, the babies scandal sheds light not only on Israel’s past but on its present. 

The stolen babies were not randomly seized. A very specific group was targeted: Jews who had just immigrated from the Middle East. Most were from Yemen, with others from Iraq, Morocco and Tunisia. 

The Arabness of these Jews was viewed as a direct threat to the Jewish state’s survival, and one almost as serious as the presence of Palestinians. Israel set about “de-Arabising” these Middle Eastern Jews with the same steely determination with which it had just driven out most of the area’s Palestinians. 

Like most of Israel’s founding generation, David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister, was from Eastern Europe. He accepted the racist, colonial notions dominant in Europe. He regarded European Jews as a civilised people coming to a primitive, barbarous region. 

 

But the early European Zionists were not simply colonists. They were unlike the British in India, for example, who were interested chiefly in subduing the natives and exploiting their resources. If Britain found “taming” the Indians too onerous, as it eventually did, it could pack up and leave. 

That was never a possibility for Ben Gurion and his followers. They were coming not only to defeat the indigenous people, but to replace them. They were going to build their Jewish state on the ruins of Arab society in Palestine. 

Scholars label such enterprises – those intending to create a permanent homeland on another people’s land – as “settler colonialism”. Famously, European settlers took over the lands of North America, Australia and South Africa. 

The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has observed that settler colonial movements are distinguished from ordinary colonialism by what he terms the “logic of elimination” that propels them. 

“Until the day she died, my mother didn’t forget this boy. She always said, ‘They took a child from me, they took a child from me.’”

— Bracha Nadav

Such groups have to adopt strategies of extreme violence towards the indigenous population. They may commit genocide, as happened to the Native American peoples and to the Australian Aborigines. If genocide is not possible, they may instead forcefully impose segregation based on racial criteria, as happened in apartheid South Africa. Or they may commit large-scale ethnic cleansing, as Israel did in 1948. They may adopt more than one strategy. 

Ben Gurion needed not only to destroy Palestinian society, but to ensure that “Arabness” did not creep into his new Jewish state through the back door. 

“Everything is covered up still. And time is running out, our parents are dying.”

— Gil Grunbaum

The large numbers of Arab Jews who arrived in the first decade were needed in his demographic war against the Palestinians and as a labour force, but they posed a danger too. Ben Gurion feared that, whatever their religion, they might “corrupt” his Jewish state culturally by importing what he called the “spirit of the Levant”. 

Adult Jews from the region, he believed, could not be schooled out of their “primitiveness”. But the Zionist leadership hoped the next generation – their offspring – could. They would be reformed through education and the cultivation of a loathing for everything Arab. The task would be made easier still if they were first detached from their biological families. 

Israeli campaigners seeking justice for the families of the stolen babies point out that the forcible transfer of children from one ethnic group to another satisfies the United Nation’s definition of genocide. 

Certainly, the theft of the Arab Jewish children and their reallocation to European Jews chimed neatly with settler colonialism’s logic of elimination. Such abductions were not unique to Israel. Australia and Canada, for example, seized babies from their surviving native populations in a bid to “civilise” them. 

The “re-education” of Israel’s Arab Jews has been largely a success. Netanyahu’s virulently anti-Palestinian Likud party draws heavily on this group’s backing. In fact, it was only because he dares not alienate such supporters that Netanyahu agreed to a fresh examination of the evidence concerning the stolen babies. 

But if there is a lesson to be drawn from the government’s partial admission about the abductions, it is not that Netanyahu and Israel’s European elite are now ready to change their ways. 

Rather, it should alert Israel’s Arab Jews to the fact that they face the same enemy as the Palestinians: a European Jewish establishment that remains resolutely resistant to the idea of living in peace and respect with either Arabs or the region. 

 

Lies and child trafficking.

Although many mothers were told their babies had died during or shortly after delivery, they were never shown a body or grave, and no death certificate was ever issued. Others had their babies snatched from their arms by nurses who berated them for having more children than they could properly care for.

According to campaigners, as many as 8,000 babies were seized from their families in the state’s first years and either sold or handed over to childless Jewish couples in Israel and abroad. To many, it sounds suspiciously like child trafficking.

A few of the children have been reunited with their biological families, but the vast majority are simply unaware they were ever taken. Strict Israeli privacy laws mean it is near-impossible for them to see official files that might reveal their clandestine adoption.

Did Israeli hospitals and welfare organizations act on their own or connive with state bodies? It is unclear. But it is hard to imagine such mass abductions could have occurred without officials at the very least turning a blind eye.

Testimonies indicate that lawmakers, Health Ministry staff and senior judges knew of these practices at the time. And the decision to place all documents relating to the children under lock untl 2071 hints at a cover-up.

Hanegbi, who was given the task of re-examining the classified material by Prime Minister Binyamn Netanyahu, has been evasive on the question of official involvement. “We may never know,” he has said.

By now, Israel’s critics are mostly inured to the well-known litany of atrocities associated with the state’s founding. Not least, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homeland in 1948 to make way for Israel and its new Jewish immigrants.

The story of the stolen babies, however, offers the shock of the unexpected. These crimes were committed not against Palestinians but other Jews. The parents whose babies were abducted had arrived in the new state lured by promises that they would find in Israel a permanent sanctuary from persecution.

Targeting Arab Jews

But the kidnapping of the children and the mass expulsion of Palestinians at much the same time are not unrelated events. In fact, the babies scandal sheds light not only on Israel’s past but on its present.

The stolen babies were not randomly seized. A very specific group was targeted: Jews who had just immigrated from the Middle East. Most were from Yemen, with others from Iraq, Morocco and Tunisia.

The Arabness of these Jews was viewed as a direct threat to the Jewish state’s survival, and one almost as serious as the presence of Palestinians. Israel set about “de-Arabising” these Middle Eastern Jews with the same steely determination with which it had just driven out most of the area’s Palestinians.

Like most of Israel’s founding generation, David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister, was from Eastern Europe. He accepted the racist, colonial notions dominant in Europe. He regarded European Jews as a civilised people coming to a primitive, barbarous region.

But the early European Zionists were not simply colonists. They were unlike the British in India, for example, who were interested chiefly in subduing the natives and exploiting their resources. If Britain found “taming” the Indians too onerous, as it eventually did, it could pack up and leave.

Settler colonialism

That was never a possibility for Ben Gurion and his followers. They were coming not only to defeat the indigenous people, but to replace them. They were going to build their Jewish state on the ruins of Arab society in Palestine.

Scholars label such enterprises – those intending to create a permanent homeland on another people’s land – as “settler colonialism”. Famously, European settlers took over the lands of North America, Australia and South Africa.

The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has observed that settler colonial movements are distinguished from ordinary colonialism by what he terms the “logic of elimination” that propels them.

Such groups have to adopt strategies of extreme violence towards the indigenous population. They may commit genocide, as happened to the Native American peoples and to the Australian Aborigines. If genocide is not possible, they may instead forcefully impose segregation based on racial criteria, as happened in apartheid South Africa. Or they may commit large-scale ethnic cleansing, as Israel did in 1948. They may adopt more than one strategy.

Ben Gurion needed not only to destroy Palestinian society, but to ensure that “Arabness” did not creep into his new Jewish state through the back door.

The large numbers of Arab Jews who arrived in the first decade were needed in his demographic war against the Palestinians and as a labour force, but they posed a danger too. Ben Gurion feared that, whatever their religion, they might “corrupt” his Jewish state culturally by importing what he called the “spirit of the Levant”.

Adult Jews from the region, he believed, could not be schooled out of their “primitiveness”. But the Zionist leadership hoped the next generation – their offspring – could. They would be reformed through education and the cultivation of a loathing for everything Arab. The task would be made easier still if they were first detached from their biological families.

Jew on Jew genocide

Israeli campaigners seeking justice for the families of the stolen babies point out that the forcible transfer of children from one ethnic group to another satisfies the United Nation’s definition of genocide.

Certainly, the theft of the Arab Jewish children and their reallocation to European Jews chimed neatly with settler colonialism’s logic of elimination. Such abductions were not unique to Israel. Australia and Canada, for example, seized babies from their surviving native populations in a bid to “civilise” them.

The “re-education” of Israel’s Arab Jews has been largely a success. Netanyahu’s virulently anti-Palestinian Likud party draws heavily on this group’s backing. In fact, it was only because he dares not alienate such supporters that Netanyahu agreed to a fresh examination of the evidence concerning the stolen babies.

But if there is a lesson to be drawn from the government’s partial admission about the abductions, it is not that Netanyahu and Israel’s European elite are now ready to change their ways.

Rather, it should alert Israel’s Arab Jews to the fact that they face the same enemy as the Palestinians: a European Jewish establishment that remains resolutely resistant to the idea of living in peace and respect with either Arabs or the region.

As many as 5,000 Mizrahim Jewish babies, mostly Yemenis, were reported missing in Israel between 1948 and 1954. Families say they were given away.

But the kidnapping of the children and the mass expulsion of Palestinians at much the same time are not unrelated events.

In fact, the babies scandal sheds light not only on Israel’s past but on its present.

The stolen babies were not randomly seized. A very specific group was targeted: Jews who had just immigrated from the Middle East. Most were from Yemen, with others from Iraq, Morocco and Tunisia.

 

 

The shocking story of Israel’s disappeared babies 

New information has come to light about thousands of mostly Yemeni children believed to have been abducted in the 1950s. 

 

 

‘No one wanted me to know the truth,’ said Gil Grunbaum, pictured in the late 1950s with his adoptive parents [Courtesy of Gil Grunbaum] 

By Jonathan Cook 

Published On 5 Aug 20165 Aug 2016 

Tel Aviv – For nearly 40 years, everything about Gil Grunbaum’s life was a lie, including his name.  

He was not, as he had always assumed, the only son of wealthy Holocaust survivors who owned a baby garments factory near Tel Aviv. Grunbaum had been stolen from his mother by doctors at a hospital in northern Israel in 1956, moments after she gave birth. 

His biological parents – recent immigrants to Israel from Tunisia – were told their child had died during delivery. They were sent home without a death certificate and denied the chance to see their baby’s body or a grave. 

Despite his darker looks, it never occurred to Grunbaum that the parents who raised him were not biologically related to him. Now aged 60, he says the discovery was “the most shocking moment imaginable. Everyone I loved – my parents, aunts, uncles and cousins – had been deceiving me for decades.” 

And so had government officials.

“Even when I discovered by chance that I was adopted, the welfare services did everything they could to try to stop me finding my biological family,” Grunbaum told Al Jazeera. “No one wanted me to know the truth.” 

After a three-year search in the late 1990s, he finally learned his family’s name – Maimon – and tracked down his birth mother to the suburbs of Haifa in northern Israel. Some 41 years after they were separated, the two met for the first time, in an emotional reunion. 

Grunbaum’s story would be deeply disturbing if it was unique. But growing evidence suggests that there could be thousands of other children who were abducted in Israel’s first decade. 

Despite his darker looks, it never occurred to Grunbaum that the parents who raised him were not biologically related to him [Courtesy of Gil Grunbaum] 

Last weekend, Tzachi Hanegbi, a government minister tasked with studying the disappearances, conceded that at least “hundreds” of children had been taken without their parents’ consent. It is the first time a government official has ever made such a public admission. 

After weeks of re-examining evidence presented to a commission of inquiry in the late 1990s, Hanegbi told Israeli TV: “They took the children and gave them away. I don’t know where.”  

The Kedmi inquiry, which had issued its findings in 2001, found that as many as 5,000 children may have disappeared in the state’s first six years alone, although it examined only 1,000 of those cases. Jacob Kedmi, a former Supreme Court judge who died last month, concluded that in most cases, the children had died and been hurriedly buried. 

Hanegbi’s admission appears to confirm allegations long made by the families – and supported by scholars and journalists – that the inquiry was little more than a whitewash by the Israeli establishment. Kedmi placed the hundreds of thousands of documents relating to testimonies and evidence under lock for 70 years. They will not be made publicly available until 2071. 

This was a crime perpetrated against thousands of parents, who still don’t know the truth about their children’s fate. 

BY SHOSHANA MADMONI-GERBER, AUTHOR OF ISRAELI MEDIA AND THE FRAMING OF INTERNAL CONFLICT: THE YEMENITE BABIES AFFAIR 

The first consequence is likely to be mounting pressure on the government to open the state’s adoption files so that the true extent of the disappearances can be gauged and families reunited. 

But Hanegbi’s otherwise evasive comments will do little to end suspicions that officials are still actively trying to avoid confronting the most contentious questions: Why were the infants taken from their families? Did hospitals and welfare organisations traffic children in Israel’s early years? And were state bodies complicit in the mass abductions? 

When asked by Israeli TV programme Meet the Press whether government officials were involved, Hanegbi would say only: “We may never know.” 

His reluctance to be more forthcoming may be understandable. Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber, an Israel academic who has written a book on the disappearances titled Israeli Media and the Framing of Internal Conflict: The Yemenite Babies Affair, noted that the “forcible transfer” of children from one ethnic group to another satisfied the United Nations definition of “genocide”. The 1951 convention includes the crime of “complicity”. 

“Ultimately, I don’t think it matters whether government officials actively planned what happened or they simply looked the other way while others carried out the kidnappings,” she told Al Jazeera. “Either way, this was a crime perpetrated against thousands of parents who still don’t know the truth about their children’s fate.”  

Almost all of the missing children were from Jewish families that had arrived from Arab countries shortly after Israel’s creation during the Nakba of 1948, when hundreds of thousands of native Palestinians were expelled from their homes. 

The mystery has been dubbed the Yemenite Children Affair, because most of the children who disappeared were from Yemen. But there were also significant numbers from Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia and the Balkans. 

Grunbaum learned of his own place in this scandalous affair in 1994, the year before the Kedmi inquiry was launched. His wife had become suspicious that there were no photos of his birth or a birth certificate, and that he was much darker than his parents. 

When she phoned state childcare services, a clerk broke Israel’s strict privacy laws by mistakenly revealing to her that Grunbaum had indeed been adopted. The couple was then hastily called to a meeting at the Tel Aviv office, where they were briefly allowed to view two pages from his file. No details of his biological family were provided. 

Grunbaum said his wife became suspicious that there were no photos of his birth or a birth certificate [Courtesy of Gil Grunbaum]  

“Even in my confused state, I could see there was something fishy. There was no signature on the adoption papers, either from my biological mother or from a judge,” Grunbaum said. 

“I was in a state of shock for a long time afterwards. I stared at the TV all day long for four months, running my life through my head, looking for the clues I should have seen. I resigned from my job. I couldn’t concentrate on anything else.” 

Although childcare services had details of his biological family, they refused to help. It took three years of intensive searching – initiated by the recollections of neighbours of his parents at the time of his adoption – before he was sure he had identified the family.  

“I went straight to the head of child services and told her their surname. I asked her if I was right – I didn’t need a reply,” Grunbaum said, noting the colour drained from the woman’s face as she realised he had found his biological family. 

Grunbaum’s biological father had died a few years earlier, but he met his biological mother in a supervised visit in Haifa. It had taken her a month to recover sufficiently from hearing the news that her son was alive to agree to a meeting. 

“She hugged me and we cried. I gave her an album of photos of my three children. She said with surprise, ‘I have a blond grandson!’” 

Grunbaum then started a double life, visiting his biological mother and his five siblings while hiding the truth from his adoptive parents until their deaths a few years later. “I was afraid to confront them. They were elderly and in poor health. I think it would have destroyed them to realise I knew the truth.” 

The irregularities in the adoption papers indicate that his parents were likely to have known their adopted child was procured without the biological mother’s consent. Grunbaum admits he was filled with confusion and anger at his parents for a long time. Shortly after he found out about the circumstances of his adoption, his parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. 

Grunbaum found himself living a double life, visiting his biological mother and his five siblings while hiding the truth from his adoptive parents [Oren Ziv/Al Jazeera] 

“They asked me to make a speech at the party, but I couldn’t. I was too frightened of what might come out of my mouth,” he said. 

Pressure on the Israeli government to provide answers in cases like Grunbaum’s has intensified in recent years, as social media has helped the affected families to understand how widespread the disappearances were. 

In late June, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded by announcing a fresh examination of the evidence. In a video posted to his Facebook page, he promised to get to the bottom of the affair: “The subject of the Yemenite children is an open wound that continues to bleed for many families who don’t know what happened to the infants, to the children who disappeared.” 

He appointed Hanegbi to re-examine the documents from three previous inquiries. 

Grunbaum holds a picture of an advertisement featuring him as an infant to promote his parents’ baby clothes business [Jonathan Cook/Al Jazeera]  

Yael Tzadok, an Israeli journalist who has spent 20 years investigating cases of children who disappeared, told Al Jazeera: “This is Israel’s darkest secret. Jews kidnapped other Jews, Jews who were coming to a state that had been created as a refuge in the immediate wake of the Holocaust. Bringing the truth into the daylight risks causing an earthquake.” 

The families and their supporters believe the majority of the children are still alive, but only a minuscule number, like Grunbaum, know that they were stolen from their parents. 

Even among those few, said Madmoni-Gerber, most are reluctant to go public, fearing that the truth will tear apart their families, who may have conspired in their abduction. 

Israeli Jews who originate from Arab countries are known in Israel as Mizrahim, in contrast to those of European heritage, who are called Ashkenazim. Tzadok said the evidence suggested that most of the missing children – from Mizrahi families – were taken by hospital staff and sold or given away to European Jews, both in Israel and abroad. 

“The evidence from that time, the 1950s, clearly shows government officials, judges, lawmakers and hospital staff speaking openly about the fact that the children were being abducted. The public may not have known, but the authorities certainly did,” Tzadok said. 

Tzadok, who is active with Achim Vekayamim, a forum for the families of missing children, said deep prejudices among European Jews against the Mizrahim – and especially the Yemenites – had made the kidnappings possible. 

“Mizrahi parents were seen as bad, primitive people who were a lost cause. The dominant view then was that, by placing the children with Ashkenazi families, they could be saved – unlike their parents. They would be re-educated and made into suitable material for the new Zionist state,” Tzadok said. 

“The hospital staff and officials probably didn’t think they were doing something wrong. They thought it was their patriotic duty.”  

Israeli media coverage shows Tzila Levine being reunited with her biological mother, Margalit Umaysi, in 1997 [Courtesy of Amram] 

Racism among European Jews towards Jews from Arab countries reached the very top of the government. Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, described the Mizrahim as “rabble” and a “generation of the desert”, concluding that they lacked “a trace of Jewish or human education”.  

In the early 1950s, he warned: “We do not want the Israelis to become Arabs. It is incumbent upon us to struggle against the spirit of the Levant, which corrupts individuals and societies.”  

Recently unearthed documents also show vigorous debates within the Israeli army in the early 1950s about whether Mizrahi conscripts were mentally retarded, making them a hopeless cause, or simply primitive, a condition that could be changed. 

In his book The Idea of Israel, historian Ilan Pappe observed that Israel’s Ashkenazi elite worked strenuously at “de-Arabising … Jews upon arrival” in Israel. 

The establishment’s open disdain for the Mizrahim eventually led to political backlash, noted Pappe. In the late 1970s, after decades in opposition, the right-wing Likud party won power from Ben Gurion’s Labour party. Today, Likud is led by Netanyahu. 

Grunbaum said Israel’s European elite were also sympathetic to the plight of Holocaust survivors, like his adoptive parents, who had lost most or all of their family and struggled to have children of their own. 

The nurse said, ‘You have lots of children, why not let us take one of them?’ My grandmother refused. A couple of days later, the nurse told her her baby girl had died. She did not receive a death certificate and was not shown a grave. 

BY SHLOMI HATUKA, WHO HELPED FOUND AMRAM, AN ORGANISATION CAMPAIGNING ON BEHALF OF THE FAMILIES 

“My father had been in Auschwitz and my mother in Dachau. The survivors suffered from psychological and physical traumas that meant it was difficult or impossible for them to have children,” he said. “The view at that time was that the Yemenites had large families and could afford to lose one or two.” 

The Kedmi inquiry heard such views expressed by medical staff who worked in hospitals suspected of abducting children. Sonia Milshtein, a former senior nurse, testified that Yemenite parents “were not interested in their children” and that they should have been happy that their “child got a good education”. 

Sarah Pearl, head nurse at the Women’s International Zionist Organisation (WIZO), a charity that ran care homes from which children are alleged to have disappeared, told Israeli media that when she asked why the children’s parents never visited, she was told by the head administrator that they “have lots of kids, and lots of problems, so they don’t want their children”. 

Like many of those who have been campaigning for greater transparency, Madmoni-Gerber, an Israeli professor of communications now based in the United States, said her own family had been scarred by the Yemenite Children Affair. 

Her father and aunt were among 50,000 Yemenite Jews airlifted to Israel in 1949 and 1950 in a series of secret US and British flights known as Operation Magic Carpet. Like many other Mizrahim, they were temporarily sheltered in one of dozens of “absorption camps” across Israel. 

Madmoni-Gerber’s aunt gave birth in an Israeli hospital in 1949. “When it was time to go home, staff on the delivery ward asked her to leave her baby behind with them. She refused. When she arrived back at the camp, the child was snatched [by staff] out of her hands. She never saw her baby again.” 

Hanegbi’s admission is certain to rock an Ashkenazi establishment that has long been in denial about the Yemenite Children Affair. 

For instance, Yaron London, one of Israel’s best-known commentators, has called suggestions of kidnappings a “conspiracy theory“.  

And Dov Levitan, a professor at Bar Ilan University, near Tel Aviv, who is a leading expert on Yemenite immigration to Israel, recently stated: “I can’t put even one finger on a case in which I can say that there was an act of abduction or a criminal act.”  

Shlomi Hatuka, a 38-year-old Yemenite poet and teacher who three years ago helped found Amram, an organisation campaigning on behalf of the families, said that continuing racism towards the Mizrahim had made possible a “conspiracy of silence” lasting more than six decades. 

His activism began after his grandmother revealed to him 22 years ago that she had been asked by a nurse in the early 1950s to give up for adoption one of the twins she had just given birth to. 

“The nurse said, ‘You have lots of children, why not let us take one of them?’” Hatuka told Al Jazeera. “My grandmother refused. A couple of days later, the nurse told her her baby girl had died. She did not receive a death certificate and was not shown a grave. 

“My mother told me my grandmother talked about her kidnapped child until the day she died,” he added. “She never got over it. At the time, none of us could really grasp what had happened to [the baby]. It was just too strange. It was impossible to believe.” 

‘We have used social media and new technology to help bring more attention to the kidnappings,’ said Shlomi Hatuka [Jonathan Cook/Al Jazeera] 

Hatuka said the official re-examination of the files had been prompted by growing pressure from the Mizrahi community: “We are the third generation, and we are better able to organise. We have used social media and new technology to help bring more attention to the kidnappings.” 

Amram is demanding that the Israeli authorities open up adoption papers so that the children who were abducted can try to find their parents. “If Netanyahu really wants to help clarify what happened, this would be the easiest and quickest way to do it,” Hatuka said. 

Currently, a 1960 Adoption Law makes it a criminal offence for an adopted child or their adoptive parents to publicly reveal that an adoption took place. Officials have claimed the restriction is needed to protect privacy, but there is mounting pressure to scrap it. 

Amram has also established a database of missing children on its website. Hundreds more families have come forward with information of children who disappeared, including cases that have never been investigated. Hatuka believes that the total number of children who are missing could be as high as 8,000. 

Even based on the official figures, one in eight Yemenite infants under the age of four may have disappeared in the state’s first six years. Boaz Sangero, a law professor at a college near Tel Aviv, wrote in the Haaretz newspaper this month that the figure was “astonishing”, and demanded an urgent re-examination of the evidence.  

The extent of the problem was further underscored last month when four legislators in the 120-seat Israeli parliament came forward to reveal that their own relatives had disappeared in the 1950s. Two were from Netanyahu’s Likud party. 

Nurit Koren, whose cousin went missing, told The Jerusalem Post newspaper: “Everybody is coming and telling me it happened in their families too. The phone doesn’t stop ringing.”  

Nava Boker said that her sister and brother were taken. “I am afraid that the same people who planned and executed these crimes of ripping babies away from their mothers’ arms ensured their own safety and hid the documents.” Boker and other activists have been infuriated by the Kedmi inquiry’s decision to place under lock hundreds of thousands of documents relating to its investigations until 2071. 

There has also been widespread criticism of the way the inquiry was conducted. Tzadok called the panel’s report “shameful”, and accused it of ignoring the evidence of wrongdoing it unearthed. 

Sangero noted that the commission employed only two investigators to look into the case files of some 1,000 missing children. In 69 cases, it said it could not determine the children’s fate. 

 

Tziona Heiman, shown with her biological mother, was taken from a Jerusalem hospital as a baby [Courtesy of Amram]  

The panel avoided using its subpoena powers, thereby allowing officials to refuse to testify, or agreed to let them give evidence behind closed doors. The inquiry also did not carry out DNA tests. 

On many occasions, birth and burial records requested by the Kedmi inquiry either disappeared or were reported to have been destroyed by fires or floods. The inquiry, Sangero observed, did not investigate how so many files could have been lost. 

The panel was equally trusting of a 1960 census that listed many of the supposedly dead children as having “left the country”. In addition, the inquiry failed to examine why many of the biological parents received military draft notices for their children on what would have been their 18th birthdays. 

Heiman as a child [Courtesy of Amram]  

Tzadok noted that, in one of the most disturbing oversights, the inquiry failed to probe the disappearance of 40 infants after they were supposedly sent from an absorption camp to Jerusalem for immunisations. 

On its website, Amram has compiled damning testimonies presented to the three inquiries that suggest abductions of Mizrahi children were widespread and systematic, and might have amounted to trafficking. Such evidence appears to have swayed Hanegbi too. He told Meet the Press: “I’m reading testimony of nurses, social workers and people who admitted the children to hospitals and a variety of people, each of whom saw a small piece of the puzzle.” 

Ahuva Goldfarb, national supervisor of social services at that time, admitted to the Kedmi inquiry that children had been “unregistered” when sent out of the absorption camps, away from their parents. 

He added: “It was systematic as could be.” The parents were told their child was “no longer alive”.  

In a letter dated April 1950, a senior health ministry official, Dr M Lichtig, expressed concern to state hospitals that children were not being returned to their parents. 

“There have been instances in which children were released from hospital and did not return to their parents. Apparently, they were found by people seeking to adopt,” he wrote in the letter. “The bereaved parents searched for their children … We must make every effort to ensure that such incidents do not repeat themselves.”  

Hanna Gibori, head of adoption services in the country’s north at that time, testified: “Hospital physicians handed over babies for adoption straight out of the hospital, without the official adoption agencies being involved.” 

As late as 1959, a Knesset member, Ben-Zion Harel, said a significant number of children were being placed for adoption at Israeli hospitals in “unacceptable ways”, bordering on “trafficking”. 

All of this appears to have occurred with minimal or non-existent judicial oversight. In 1955, a high court judge, Shneur Cheshin, wrote in a decision: “To our embarrassment, fictitious adoption orders and custodial orders are issued weekly, indeed daily.” 

Hospitals and government officials were able to take advantage of the absence throughout the 1950s of any adoption laws. Oversight was only tightened up in 1960, with the passage of the Adoption Law. 

A nurse who had once worked at the Batar hospital in Haifa, where Grunbaum was born in 1956, admitted on an Israeli TV show that prospective parents would “place an order” for children with the hospital. Batar closed in 1976, but requests by the Kedmi inquiry to see its archives were met with claims that the documents were either lost or destroyed by fire. 

Grunbaum’s story, though rare, is not unique. Investigations over the past two decades have unearthed a handful of similar cases. 

After Amram launched its website, a friend of the family revealed to Hatuka that she had been in an institution where she believed Yemenite children like herself were trafficked.  

Hatuka has been able to piece together the early life of the woman, who agreed to be identified by the pseudonym Shoshana. She and her twin brother were taken from their mother at birth and placed in a care home in Jerusalem run by WIZO. 

WIZO, which still runs childcare services in Israel, is mentioned in several cases of missing children who were later found. In a statement to Al Jazeera, WIZO said that the process of admitting and releasing children from the institutions it ran was managed by authorised government authorities, noting: “WIZO’s sole responsibility was to care for the health and wellbeing of the children. Throughout the years, WIZO has provided authorities, upon request, with all of the records and materials relevant to the children in its institutions. WIZO fully supports any investigation that could shed light on issues subject to public debate.” 

Yemenite Jews are shown en route from Aden to Israel during Operation Magic Carpet, circa 1950 [File photo] 

At seven, Shoshana and her brother were moved to an ultra-Orthodox institution for parentless Yemenite children called Gur Aryeh, in Bnei Brak, near Tel Aviv. Shoshana told Hatuka that intermittently they would be gathered in a room and visitors, called “American aunts”, would inspect them. Children would regularly disappear. 

During her stay in Gur Aryeh, Shoshana was told that her biological mother had died five years after giving birth to her. 

In the late 1990s, when the Kedmi inquiry was under way, a few Israeli journalists intensified their search for such children. 

In the most famous case, widely reported in 1997, Tzila Levine was reunited with her biological mother after a 20-year search. DNA testing confirmed her blood ties to Margalit Umaysi, an immigrant from Yemen. 

It is time for the country to be more open about its past. We need to drag these issues into the sunlight and see what really happened. 

BY GIL GRUNBAUM, ADOPTED AS A BABY 

A doctor in Haifa had taken Levine from Umaysi shortly after her birth in 1949 and handed her to adoptive parents using forged papers. The adoption was approved by Moshe Landau, a judge who went on to serve in Israel’s Supreme Court. 

”I feel that I’ve won a war – a lifelong war,” Levine told reporters at the time. 

The case of Tziona Heiman was exposed five years later by the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper. After she confronted her Ashkenazi parents with suspicions that she was adopted, they admitted that she had been selected from a Jerusalem hospital. 

Their neighbour, Yigal Allon, a famous Israeli general, had – in their words – given them the girl as a “birthday present”. Heiman later found her biological parents. 

Madmoni-Gerber also located an abducted child in 1994, when she was an Israeli journalist. Moshe Becher was taken from his Yemenite family in 1953 and placed in the care of WIZO. A Turkish couple were issued a forged birth certificate for him in 1956. 

Like most, Becher was never shown his adoption file, and was unable to track down his biological parents. A letter from the welfare services stated simply: “We have no clue as to your mother’s identity or whereabouts.”  

Hatuka said Amram was now working to create a private DNA database abroad. It would allow both those who suspected they were kidnapped – including those now living in Europe or the US – and the parents of missing children to submit their DNA to see if matches could be made. 

Grunbaum said the families’ campaign was not a quest for revenge against those behind the kidnappings. 

“It is time for the country to be more open about its past,” he said. “We need to drag these issues into the sunlight and see what really happened.”

 

 

Referred to as the Stolen Children, more than 7,000 British orphans and foster children were spirited away to Commonwealth countries between the Second World War and 1967. It was only on the boat that Ray and Alec were told that they were brothers, and that Ray’s last name was not Holmes, but Phillips.

England’s Stolen Children – Controversial New Documentary On Forced Adoption

Nigeria ‘baby factory’ raided in Lagos 

26 April 2018 

     

More than 160 children have been rescued from a “baby factory” and two unregistered orphanages in Nigeria’s main city, Lagos, an official has said.                                                                           

Some of the babies and children had been sexually abused, Agboola Dabiri added.
It is not uncommon for Nigerian authorities to raid “baby factories”.                            

• In some cases, unmarried pregnant women are promised healthcare, only for their children to be taken away. In others, women are raped and made pregnant.
• The babies can be sold for adoption, used for child labour, trafficked to Europe for prostitution or killed for ritual purposes.
• In February, Lagos police told local media they had uncovered a case where a pregnant woman went to a private home to have her baby delivered – only for the baby to be taken away and sold.                
• Speaking after the latest raids, Mr Dabiri, the Commissioner for Youths and Social Development in Lagos State, said 100 girls and 62 boys had been rescued.
• “The children and teenagers rescued from the ‘baby factory’ and homes were placed at government-approved homes for care and protection,” he added.
• In 2013, 17 pregnant teenagers and 11 babies were rescued from a house in south-eastern Imo state. The girls said they had been raped by one man.
• In 2012, a UK judge raised concerns about “desperate childless parents” being caught up in baby-selling scams in Nigeria.

There was evidence that women were going to Nigeria seeking fertility treatment, then being sold unwanted babies, the judge said.

Nigeria ‘baby factory’ raided in Lagos – BBC News

The Nazi child snatchers

 

Finally, the Nazis took Aryan-looking children directly away from their Polish parents. Maria Komsyk later testified: “I had two children: a boy aged six … and a girl…. In 1940 I was arrested by the German gendarmerie because a German neighbour had informed against me.

With two small children, I could not agree to do the washing for her.… One of the gendarmes took the children away from me, while the other one led me to the Arbeitsamt.… I was deported to Lubeck for forced labour.… I stayed there until 1942…. Till this day I do not know what happened to my children.”

 

In other cases, parents received a notice from the SS telling them to bring their children to the local train station at a certain time to go on a holiday. This is what happened to young Alojzy. He was sent to Germany, where he was adopted by a member of the Nazi Party. He was taught to speak German, and his name was even changed to the more German sounding Alfred Binderberger.

Young and impressionable, Alojzy soon became such a follower of Adolf Hitler that when his adoptive father took down the picture of Hitler over his bed when the war was over Alojzy called him a “traitor.”

 

Brown Sisters 

Sometimes the Nazis employed the notorious Brown Sisters to find suitable children for them. The Brown Sisters were female nurses who were dedicated to the Nazi cause. They worked for the Nazi Welfare Organization and searched through villages and towns for Aryan looking children. According to Lukas, they used “candy and even slices of bread as lures to attract boys and girls.”

Striking up conversations with children, the Brown Sisters inquired where they lived and if there were any similar looking brothers or sisters at home. The Sisters would then relate their information to the local SS authorities. The children would then disappear from their homes, usually at night and never to be heard from again.

 

Stealing from Foreign Workers 

Sometimes children were assigned for Germanization even before they were born. During the war, thousands of women from occupied countries, especially Poland, were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to Germany to support the war effort. These women labored on farms, were employed as servants, or worked in factories.

In July 1943, Himmler issued a decree concerning pregnant foreign workers and their potential offspring. The decree stated that if the parents were “racially valuable” the child should be taken away from the mother and either placed with proper SS foster families, becoming one of the Lebensborn children, or raised in “suitable” homes. Children of foreign workers that were not “racially valuable” were to be eliminated.

A Nazi document from the German city of Wurzburg referred to this process: “Polish woman NN (no name), born on … is expecting a baby (… month of pregnancy), whose father is Pole NN…. The mother’s request for an abortion was rejected, since there is a likelihood of racially good offspring. The NSV is kindly asked to take charge of the baby following its birth.”

It is estimated that chosen homes took in over 90,000 Lebensborn children, the majority of whom were “racially valuable” and had been born to foreign workers in Germany.

 

Operation for the Revindication of Lebensborn Children

 

Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler looks closely at a young Polish boy who has been judged as a potential candidate for a Nazi program to raise “Lebensborn children” from other countries as German, kidnapping them from their parents and placing them in the homes of loyal Nazis.

 

Malgorzata Twardecki was one of the lucky parents. She was reunited with her stolen child —albeit 10 years after he was taken. Many Polish parents never saw their children again.
After the war, the Polish government created the Operation for the Revindication of Children headed by Dr. Roman Hrabar. Its mission was to reunite stolen children with their rightful parents, a formidable task.

Researchers had to first determine what the children’s names had been changed to and then where they were living in the West. Once found, many German parents refused to believe that their “children” were Polish and refused to give them up to the authorities. The task was made doubly hard when children did not speak Polish anymore and had no memory of their original life or family.

 

Lastly, the Polish Mission could expect little help from British and American authorities to send children behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. By the end of 1950, the Polish government had only been able to repatriate 3,404 children back to Poland.

 

It is estimated that only 40,000, or 20 percent, of the estimated 200,000 children who were stolen from Poland by the Nazis were ever reunited with their families.

Thousands of others and their descendants still live in Germany today unaware of their identity and heritage.

The Magdala Asylum, also known as Magdala’s Laundry

The Magdala Asylum, also known as Magdala’s Laundry, was originally Protestant, but later became a predominantly Roman Catholic institution, operating from the 18th century to the late 20th century, ostensibly housing “fallen women.” was the term referred to female sexual promiscuity and prostitution work, young women who became pregnant out of wedlock, and girls and teens without family support.

They were required to work without pay except to provide meager food, while the establishment operated a large commercial laundromat and served customers off-site. Many of these “laundries” were effectively operated as prisons. The strict regime in institutions was often tougher than in prison.

This contradicted the popular view that the purpose was to help women rather than punish them. “It was unbelievably hot,” one survivor said of the working environment. 

Laundry shops like this operated in England, Ireland, Sweden, Canada, the United States and Australia for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, but the last time they closed was in 1996. 

These facilities are named after biblical figures. Mary Magdalene was characterized as a reformed prostitute several centuries ago. The first Church of Magdala was founded in Whitechapel, England, in late 1758. Similar facilities were established in Ireland by 1767.

The first Magdalen Asylum facility in the United States was the Magdalene Society of Philadelphia, founded in 1800. These were all Protestant establishments. Other cities followed suit, especially from around 1800 when Catholic institutions were established.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, Magdala asylums were common in several countries. By 1900 there were over 300 asylum centers in England and over 20 in Scotland.

 

 

The first Magdalene institution, the Magdalen Hospital for Repentant Prostitutes, was founded in Whitechapel, London, in late 1758 by silk merchants Robert Dingley, Jonas Hanway and John Fielding.

Women helped support the household financially by doing service and craft work. They were also given a small amount of money for their work. Additional income was generated by promoting the house as an upper-class tourist attraction.

 

Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, claims to have staged one such entertainment. This coincided with visits to the Bethlem Royal Hospital and the Foundling Hospital. It then moved to Streatham and eventually accommodated about 140 women between the ages of 15 and 40. Bristol (40 women) followed in 1800, Bath (79 women) in 1805, and many other cities in the following years. Names almost no longer contain “Magdalene”.

Historians estimate that by the late 1800s there were over 300 Magdala institutions in England alone, and in 1797 the Royal Magdala Institute in Edinburgh was established at Canongate in Old Town, a popular spot for street prostitutes. Some of the women came to the city because of industrialization, some were pregnant, others were forced into prostitution.

Mary Patterson (also known as Mary Mitchell) was murdered by William Burke shortly after leaving the facility on April 8, 1828. Edinburgh’s psychiatric hospital moved to Dally around 1842.

Part of the program was supported by resident laundry and sewing work. In Glasgow, the Magdala Psychiatric Hospital became the Magdala Institute, which operated until 1958. Writer Charles Dickens and philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts thought Magdalene Hospital was too harsh and established an alternative plan in 1846.

These were considered commercial workshops and factories and were therefore subject to labor regulations and inspections. The Factories Act (1901) limited working hours for girls between the ages of 13 and 18 to 12 hours a day. Magdala’s laundries, in one form or another, can be found in many of the major industrial centers of England and Wales, examples of which include the Abbey of the Good Shepherd at Pennirane in Cardiff. This was the popular name for such institutions.

 

The Magdalene Laundries were institutions that operated in Ireland from the 18th to the late 20th centuries. They were primarily run by Roman Catholic orders and were ostensibly established to house “fallen women” 

These institutions confined an estimated 30,000 women in Ireland. The laundries were also known as Magdalene asylums.

It took very little time to raise the funds required and secure appropriate premises.  Staff were duly appointed.

 

 

The first admission was Ann Blore, a native of Ashbourne, Derbyshire. Two other women were promised admission as soon as they were cured of disease. One was admitted as servant to the matron and Mary Truman was rejected as she wasn’t a prostitute.  Admissions day was the first Thursday of the month at 5pm and women were not permitted to be either pregnant or suffering from any disease.

 

 

The house was divided into parts to make total and distinct divisions of the objects, and the rooms were distinguished by being numbered.

The women were classed in each ward. A proper number of women were appointed to perform all the domestic business of their respective wards and the household and to keep the chapel clean.

Each woman lay in a separate bed and had a box for her clothes and linen, under lock and key which was kept by herself. Strict regard was had by the matron and her assistants to ensure that the wards were kept completely ventilated and the air pure – they visited the chambers and working rooms frequently each day to ensure this. Friends or relations of the women could apply to visit and visits were held under the supervision of the matron.

Upon admission their clothes are taken from them and returned to them when they leave. They are issued with grey shalloon gowns, all women worn the same ‘uniform’. Their diet/meals were agreed by the overseeing committee with a copy of the meals being hung on a board in each ward.

 

 

All women are actively employed in tasks suiting their ability predominantly sewing, any occupation that will aid employment when they leave. 

 

From Lady-day to Michaelmas they rise at six and go to bed at ten; and from Michaelmas to Lady-day rise at seven and in bed at nine; and after that time no fire of candle is allowed, except in the sick ward. 

 

Breakfast was taken at 9 o’clock and they were allowed half an hour, they dined at one o’clock and were allowed one hour and left off work at six in the winter and seven in the summer.

 

 

Magdalen by Thomas Rowlandson 

The hospital had opened on 10th August 1758 and by its 10th anniversary, some 1,036 women had been admitted. 

The Dublin Magdalen Asylum, founded in 1765 by Lady Arabella Denny, was the first such institution in Ireland. It was a Church of Ireland-run facility that only accepted Protestant women 
The Catholic-run Magdalene asylums in Ireland survived the longest and were supported by the state. They operated for more than two hundred years.

The inmates of these laundries were required to work, primarily in laundries, as these facilities were self-supporting. The conditions in these institutions subjected the women to physical, spiritual, and emotional suffering.

In 1993, unmarked graves of 155 women were discovered in the convent grounds of one of the laundries, leading to media revelations about the operations of these secretive institutions.

In 2013, a formal state apology was issued, and a compensation scheme for survivors was set up by the Irish Government. By 2022, this scheme had paid out €32.8 million to 814 survivors.

 

WHAT WERE THE MAGDALENE LAUNDRIES?

From the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 until 1996, at least 10,000 (see below) girls and women were imprisoned, forced to carry out unpaid labour and subjected to severe psychological and physical maltreatment in Ireland’s Magdalene Institutions.

These were carceral, punitive institutions that ran, commercial and for-profit businesses primarily laundries and needlework. After 1922, the Magdalene Laundries were operated by four religious orders (The Sisters of Mercy, The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, the Sisters of Charity, and the Good Shepherd Sisters) in ten different locations around Ireland (click here for a map).

 

The last Magdalene Laundry ceased operating on 25th October 1996. The women and girls who suffered in the Magdalene Laundries included those who were perceived to be ‘promiscuous’, unmarried mothers, the daughters of unmarried mothers, those who were considered a burden on their families or the State, those who had been sexually abused, or had grown up in the care of the Church and State.

Confined for decades on end – and isolated from their families and society at large – many of these women became institutionalized over time and therefore became utterly dependent on the relevant convents and unfit to re-enter society unaided.

 

HOW MANY WOMEN AND GIRLS WERE CONFINED IN THE LAUNDRIES?

The ‘official’ figure of 10,000 women and girls who were confined in the laundries is is a significant under-estimate by the Report of the Inter–Departmental Committee to establish the facts of State involvement with the Magdalen Laundries (also known as the McAleese Report, after Senator Martin McAleese who chaired the committee).

The Sisters of Mercy could not produce records for the Dun Laoghaire or Galway institutions and the Committee excluded girls and women who entered before 1922 and remained thereafter referring to such women as ‘legacy’ cases.

 

JFM brought numerous examples to the  IDC’s attention of women listed on the 1901 and 1911 censuses who died in Magdalene Laundries post-1922, some as late as 1961, 1967 and even 1985 (in the care of the nuns after the closure of the Limerick institution). Justice for Magdalenes Research – A resource for people affected by and interested in Ireland’s Magdalene institutions (jfmresearch.com)

It has also emerged that many girls detained in ‘voluntary’ (unregulated but funded by the State) residential children’s and teenage institutions known as ‘Training Centres’, sometimes on the same grounds as Magdalene Laundries, were forced by the nuns to enter and work in the Laundries for some or all their days.

HOW WERE WOMEN AND GIRLS CONFINED IN THE LAUNDRIES?

Women and girls were confined in the Magdalene Laundries through a variety of channels, including: women and girls sent by the judicial system (including those committed informally or as a condition of probation, those held on remand, sent to the Laundries after release from Prison sentences and those sent to the Laundries instead of Reformatory Schools), transfers from Industrial Schools and transfers from Mother and Baby Homes.

JFM also discovered evidence of girls who were sent to the laundries by social workers, members of the clergy, the Gardaí (police), hospitals, local authorities, County Councils, psychiatric hospitals. Most worrying of all, a whole group of girls appear to have been sent to the Laundries because they were the victims of abuse.

 

It is true that some women and girls were committed to the laundries by non-State actors, including their families, or church groups, such as the Legion of Mary. This happened for an array of reasons – they feared scandal related to unmarried motherhood and illegitimacy, sexual abuse, incest, domestic abuse, disability and mental illness.

Although the State was not directly involved in incarcerating these women and girls, it failed to protect and defend their individual liberty and human rights, as they had a right to expect in a democratic State governed by the rule of law. Whatever the reasons why women and girls were sent to the Magdalene Laundries, the State had duties to all of the women and girls in the Laundries (a) to prevent them from being held against their will, (b) not to exploit or benefit from their forced labour or servitude and (c) to care for these women and girls in terms of their rights to a safe workplace, to social welfare and (in terms of school-age girls) an education.

 

What were the conditions like inside.

Once inside the convents, girls and women were imprisoned behind locked doors, barred or unreachable windows and high walls (oftentimes with broken glass cemented at the apex).

They were usually given no information as to when or whether they would be released. Upon entry, their names were often changed, and they were given an identification number.

Many women recall being instructed not to speak about their home-place or family. Their hair was cut, and their clothes were taken away and replaced with a drab uniform. A rule of silence was imposed at almost all times in Magdalene Laundries and, in many women’s experiences, friendships were forbidden.

Correspondence with the outside was often intercepted or forbidden. Visits by friends or family were not encouraged and were monitored by nuns when they did occur.

The girls and women were forced to work from morning until evening – washing, ironing or packing laundry, and sewing, embroidering or doing other manual labour.

These Laundries were run on a commercial, for-profit basis, but the girls and women received no pay. No contributions (‘stamps’) were paid on their behalf to statutory pension schemes.

The laundry they washed came not only from members of the public, local businesses and religious institutions, but also from numerous government Departments, the defence forces, public hospitals, public schools, prisons and other State entities such as the parliament, the Chief State Solicitor’s Office, the Office of Public Works, the Land Commission, CIE and Áras an Uachtaráin (the President’s Residence)(to name but a few).

Punishments for refusal to work included deprivation of meals, solitary confinement, physical abuse, forced kneeling for long periods or humiliation rituals, including shaving of hair.

Survivors speak of constantly being under surveillance, being verbally insulted, feeling cold, having a poor diet and enduring humiliating and inadequate hygiene conditions. None of the girls received an education, and survivors dwell on this fact as determining their ‘loss of opportunity’ in later life.

It was common for the girls and women to believe that they would die inside. Many did: comparison of electoral registers against grave records at the Donnybrook location shows that over half of the women on electoral registers between 1954 and 1964 died in that institution.

If girls or women escaped – perhaps in the back of a laundry van, out an open door at delivery or collection time, or by scaling the wall – they were often captured and returned by the local Gardaí.

The nuns punished escapees, in many cases, by transferring them to a different Magdalene Laundry. When a girl or women was released, it was invariably without warning, without money and with only the clothes she was wearing. Some girls and women were given jobs in other institutions run by nuns; many fled abroad as soon as they could.

The State never regulated the Magdalene Laundries, despite its use of the institutions both as places of detention and care, its commercial dealings with them, its knowledge of the detention of young girls of school-going age, and its awareness that the girls and women were working for no pay.

The IDC noted that the commercial laundry premises were subject to the Factories Acts, and that Factories Inspectors visited the Laundries from 1957 onwards.

According to the IDC’s report, however, the inspectors were concerned with machinery and factory premises only.  They did not question the age of the girls or the conditions under which the girls and women were forced to work and lived.

 

WHERE ARE THE SURVIVORS TODAY?

In JFMR’s experience, Magdalene survivors (and their family members) fall into five main categories: firstly, those who have spoken out and demanded justice; secondly, those who continue to live in silence; thirdly, women who are still living in institutional settings under the control of religious orders; fourthly, those who died both inside and outside the laundry; and finally, the family members of women incarcerated in the laundries, including adopted people.  About the Magdalene Laundries – Justice for Magdalenes Research (jfmresearch.com)

 

Magdalene asylums, also known as Magdalene laundries, were initially Protestant but later mostly Roman Catholic institutions that operated from the 18th to the late 20th centuries, ostensibly to house “fallen women“. The term referred to female sexual promiscuity or work in prostitution, young women who became pregnant outside of marriage, or young girls and teenagers who did not have familial support.[They were required to work without pay apart from meagre food provisions, while the institutions operated large commercial laundries, serving customers outside their bases. 

Many of these “laundries” were effectively operated as penitentiary workhouses. The strict regimes in the institutions were often more severe than those found in prisons. This contradicted the perceived outlook that they were meant to help women as opposed to punishing them. A survivor said of the working conditions: “The heat was unbelievable. You couldn’t leave your station unless a bell went.” Laundries such as this operated in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden, Canada, the United States, and Australia, for much of the 19th and well into the 20th century, the last one closing in 1996.[4] The institutions were named after the Biblical figure Mary Magdalene, in earlier centuries characterized as a reformed prostitute. 

The first Magdalene institution was founded in late 1758 in Whitechapel, England.[5] A similar institution was established in Ireland by 1767. The first Magdalene asylum in the United States was the Magdalen Society of Philadelphia, founded in 1800. All these were Protestant institutions. Other cities followed, especially from around 1800, with Catholic institutions also being opened. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Magdalene asylums were common in several countries. By 1900, there were more than 300 asylums in England and more than 20 in Scotland. 

Magdalene laundries by country 

England, Scotland, and Wales (1758) 

The first Magdalen institution, Magdalen Hospital for the Reception of Penitent Prostitutes, was founded in late 1758 in Whitechapel, London by Robert Dingley, a silk merchant, Jonas Hanway and John Fielding. The women worked at services and crafts to help provide financial support for the house. They were also given a small sum of money for their work. Additional income was generated by promoting the house as a tourist attraction for the upper classes. Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford, described staging one of these entertainments. This was in keeping with visits to Bethlem Royal Hospital and the Foundling Hospital. It later moved to Streatham, and could eventually house about 140 women, admitted between the ages of 15 and 40. Bristol (40 women) followed in 1800, Bath (79) in 1805, and many other cities in the years following, though their names mostly no longer included “Magdalene”. Historians estimate that by the late 1800s, there were more than 300 Magdalene Institutions in England alone. 

In 1797, the Edinburgh Royal Magdalene Asylum was founded in the Canongate in Old Town, a popular location for street prostitutes. Some of the women were drawn to the city by industrialisation, some were pregnant and some had been forced into prostitution. Mary Paterson, (also known as Mary Mitchell) was murdered by William Burke shortly after leaving the institution on April 8, 1828. The Edinburgh asylum moved to Dalry around 1842. The programme was supported in part by laundry and sewing work done by the residents. In Glasgow, the Magdalene Asylum became the Magdalene Institute and functioned until 1958. 

Writer Charles Dickens and philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts established an alternative in 1846, thinking the Magdalen Hospitals too harsh. At Urania Cottage the young women were prepared for re-entry into mainstream society, or for emigration to the colonies. 

By the late 1800s, many of the institutions had departed from the original model and resembled penitentiary work-houses. The question of whether they should become subject to labour regulations and inspections as commercial laundries were became particularly controversial around the turn of the century, with sides often drawn on Irish/English and Catholic/Protestant lines. The Factory Act (1901) limited working hours for girls of thirteen to eighteen years of age to twelve hours a day, but exempted religious institutions.  

However work by female factory inspectors during the 1900s managed to convince religious institutions to submit to voluntary inspections, and by the end of the 1900s inspections were interdenominationally accepted in England. The normalisation of inspections and other regulations of institutions in England is considered to have softened their regime and improved conditions compared to Ireland. 

Ireland (1765–1998) 

The first Magdalene laundry or asylum in Ireland, an Anglican or Church of Ireland-run institution, Magdalen Asylum for Penitent Females, opened on Leeson Street in Dublin in 1767, after two years of preparation. It was founded by Lady Arabella Denny, admitted only Protestant women,[14] and had an episcopal chapel. Around 1805, John England of Cork established a female reformatory together with male and female poor schools. Pending the opening of the Church of Ireland-run Magdalen Asylum in Cork, he maintained and ministered to many applicants.[15] The Magdalene Asylum in Cork (Sawmill Street) opened in 1810. The last Magdalene laundry closed on 25 September 1996 in Waterford.[16] This building has been adapted for use as the Waterford Institute of Technology. 

In Belfast, Northern Ireland, the Church of Ireland-run Ulster Magdalene Asylum and episcopal chapel, was founded in 1839. The asylum closed in 1916 and the St Mary Magdalene chapel became a parish church.[17] Parallel institutions were run by Roman Catholics and Presbyterians (the Ulster Female Penitentiary and Laundry).[18][19] Ferriter described the laundries as “a mechanism that society, religious orders and the state came up with to try to get rid of people deemed not to conforming to the so-called… Irish identity.”[20] The Irish government claimed that the State was not legally responsible for the abuse suffered by women and girls in the Magdalene laundries, as these were religious institutions.[21] 

The discovery in 1993 of a mass grave on the grounds of a former convent in Dublin led to media articles about the operations of the institutions.[22] Ultimately the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child called for a government inquiry into the Magdalene laundries.[23] A formal state apology was issued in 2013, and a €60 million compensation scheme for survivors was established. By 2011, the four religious institutes that ran the Irish asylums had not yet contributed to compensate survivors of abuse, despite demands from the Irish government, and the UN Committee Against Torture.[24] The religious sisters continue to care for more than 100 elderly Magdalene women who remain in their care.[25] An estimated 600 survivors were still alive in March 2014.[26] 

Senator Martin McAleese chaired an Inter-Departmental Committee to establish the facts of State involvement with the Magdalen laundries. An Interim Report was released in October 2011.[27] In 2013 the BBC did a special investigation, Sue Lloyd-Roberts‘ “Demanding justice for women and children abused by Irish nuns.”[28] 

The Magdalene Sisters, a 2002 film by Peter Mullan, is based on historical facts about four young women incarcerated in a Magdalene laundry in Ireland from 1964 to 1968. 

In 2011, a monument was erected in Ennis, County Clare, dedicated to the Sisters of Mercy, who had an industrial school and a Magdalene Laundry in the town. In 2015, Ennis municipal council decided to honour the same order by renaming a road in recognition of their compassionate service to vulnerable women and children. The road runs through the site of the former industrial school and laundry. People are divided about these honours.[29] 

United States (1800) 

See also: Magdalen Society of Philadelphia 

The first Magdalene asylum in the United States was the Magdalen Society of Philadelphia, founded in 1800. Other North American cities, including New York, Boston, Chicago, and Toronto, quickly followed suit.[6][30] 

Asylum records show that in the early history of the Magdalene movement, many women entered and left the institutions of their own accord, sometimes repeatedly. Lu Ann De Cunzo wrote in her book, Reform, Respite, Ritual: An Archaeology of Institutions; The Magdalene Society of Philadelphia, 1800–1850,[31] that the women in Philadelphia’s asylum “sought a refuge and a respite from disease, the prison or almshouse, unhappy family situations, abusive men, and dire economic circumstances.” In its early years, the Magdalen Society Asylum functioned as a refuge for prostitutes. Most of these stayed a few days or a few weeks, just long enough to get reclothed and recuperated. Attempts at rehabilitation met with little success. In 1877, the asylum was changed into a home for “wayward girls”, with a rule requiring a stay for twelve months. As the Magdalen Society Asylum became more selective, relaxed its emphasis on personal guilt and salvation, and standardized the treatment of inmates, its rate of failure diminished.[32] 

The Penitent Females’ Refuge Society of Boston was incorporated in 1823.[33] 

New York’s Magdalen Society was established in 1830 with the purpose of rescuing women from lives of prostitution and vice. Advocates of women sometimes kidnapped them from brothels. In 1907 a new home was established in the Inwood section of upper Manhattan. The Society had twice moved to a larger facility. Many of the young women who were temporary residents at the Inwood institution had worked in the taverns, brothels, and alleyways of lower Manhattan before being “rescued” by the Society. Girls were generally committed for a period of three years. Through the years, several girls died or were injured climbing out of windows in failed escape attempts. In 1917, the Magdalen Benevolent Society changed its name to Inwood House. In the early 1920s, bichloride of mercury was commonly used to treat new arrivals for venereal disease, as penicillin was not yet available. Some women suffered mercury poisoning, as happened with patients on the outside. The property was later sold and the agency relocated. Inwood House continues to operate, with its main focus on teen pregnancy. 

Canada (1848) 

The Congregation of the Sisters of Misericorde was founded in Montreal in 1848 by Marie-Rosalie Cadron-Jetté, a widow skilled as a midwife. Their network of asylums developed from their care of unmarried pregnant women until after they gave birth. In this period, unmarried women were encouraged to give their illegitimate children up for adoption. The Misericordia Sisters endeavoured to carry out their ministry discreetly, for the public was neither supportive of their cause nor charitable to the young women they aided. The sisters were accused of “encouraging vice”. The order was particularly sensitive to the social stigma attached to a woman who had borne an illegitimate child. The sisters perceived that, by precluding other employment, this stigma often tended to force a woman into prostitution, and in some cases infanticide.[35] According to Sulpician Father Éric Sylvestre, “When food was scarce, Rosalie would fast so that the moms could eat. She was fond of saying that ‘Single mothers are the treasure of the house.'”[36] 

“In receiving patients no discrimination is made in regard to religion, colour, or nationality. After their convalescence, those who desire to remain in the home are placed under a special sister and are known as ‘Daughters of St. Margaret’. They follow a certain rule of life but contract no religious obligations. Should they desire to remain in the convent, after a period of probation, they are allowed to become Magdalens and eventually make the vows of the Magdalen institute.”[37] 

In 1858, Elizabeth Dunlop and others founded the Toronto Magdalene Laundries, with the stated goal of “eliminating prostitution by rehabilitating prostitutes”.[38] 

Sweden (1852) 

In Sweden, the first Magdalene asylum (Magdalenahem) was founded in Stockholm in 1852 by the philanthropist Emilie Elmblad. By 1900, there were eight asylums in Sweden, of which half were managed by the Salvation Army.[39][page needed] 

The asylums’ purpose was to educate or train former female prostitutes in a different occupation, to make it possible for them to support themselves when they left the asylum. In practice, they were trained in domestic occupations in the asylums. The asylums tried to place former residents as domestic servants in private homes, preferably with religious employers.[39][page needed] In this period, many people still worked as domestic servants, and women especially had limited work opportunities. 

As the asylums were normally managed by religious women philanthropists such as Elsa Borg, the goal was not only to provide them with employment but to encourage their religious practice, which was thought to help them avoid returning to prostitution. The asylums provided the clients with factory work only if the first choice of being a domestic in a private religious home failed. Employment in a public establishment, such as a hotel or a restaurant, was considered the least desirable choice, as such work was considered to be a great risk for women in terms of reentering prostitution.

This was in line with several other common private charitable establishments especially in Stockholm, which provided poor women in the cities with shelter and employment (normally as domestics), to prevent them from becoming prostitutes.

The asylums were charity institutions and founded in great part by the work of the women in domestic training there. Initially, women were paid for their work. This practice was abandoned when overseers concluded that it made women less inclined to follow rules. In Sweden, the majority of the inmates of the Magdalena asylums had voluntarily committed themselves, seeking help. There were known cases of women being committed by her family or by authorities. The Magdalena Asylum in Stockholm was closed in 1895. 

Australia (1890) 

From the early 1890s to the 1960s, most Australian state capitals had a large Roman Catholic convent that contained a commercial laundry where the work was done by the mostly teenage girls who were placed in the convent. They were committed, voluntarily or involuntarily, for reasons such as being destitute, “uncontrollable” as judged by family members or picked up by the police.[41] According to James Franklin, the girls came from a variety of very disturbed and deprived backgrounds and were individually hard to deal with in many cases.[42] 

Laundry work was regarded as suitable as part of the work program for the girls, as it did not require much training nor substantial capital expense. Former inmates consistently have reported negative memories of conditions in the convent laundries, detailing verbal abuse by nuns and other supervisors, and very hard physical work under difficult conditions. In accordance with the traditions of the nuns, much of the day proceeded in silence. Like orphanages, these institutions received almost no government funds. As in any underfunded institution, the food was described as bland. The nuns shared the conditions of the women inmates, such as bad food, hard work, confinement, and long periods of silence. Education for residents was either of poor quality or lacking altogether. The sisters had no physical contact with the girls, nor emotional contact in the sense of listening to the girls’ concerns. 

Dangers included the infectious diseases of the time and workplace accidents. In 1889, one of the sisters of the Abbotsford Convent in Victoria lost her hand in an accident involving laundry machinery. In 1942 14-year-old Doris Dyer lost her arm from the shoulder when she was caught in the laundry mangle at the Home of the Good Shepherd laundry in West Leederville, Western Australia (now the Catherine McAuley Centre).

The asylums were initially established as refuges, with the residents free to leave. In the early 1900s, they reluctantly began to accept court referrals. “They took in girls whom no-one else wanted and who were forcibly confined, contrary to the wishes of both the girls and the nuns.”[ A 1954 report of the Sun Herald of a visit to the Ashfield laundry found 55 girls there involuntarily, 124 voluntary inmates, including 65 mentally challenged adult women, and about 30 who were originally there involuntarily but had stayed on. The dormitories were described as seriously overcrowded.

 

The Stolen Generations (also known as Stolen Children) were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian federal and state government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments.

 

 

 

The removals of those referred to as “half-caste“ children were conducted in the period between approximately 1905 and 1967, although in some places mixed-race children were still being taken into the 1970s.
Official government estimates are that in certain regions between one in ten and one in three Indigenous Australian children were forcibly taken from their families and communities between 1910 and 1970.

 

Emergence of the child-removal policy

Numerous 19th- and early-20th-century contemporaneous documents indicate that the policy of removing mixed-race Aboriginal children from their mothers related to an assumption that the Aboriginal peoples were dying off. Given their catastrophic population decline after white contact, whites assumed that the full-blood tribal Aboriginal population would be unable to sustain itself and was doomed to extinction.

The idea expressed by A. O. Neville, the Chief Protector of Aborigines for Western Australia, and others as late as 1930 was that mixed-race children could be trained to work in white society, and over generations would marry white and be assimilated into the society.

Some European Australians considered any proliferation of mixed-descent children (labelled “half-castes”, “crossbreeds”, “quadroons“, and “octoroons“, terms now considered derogatory to Indigenous Australians) to be a threat to the stability of the prevailing culture, or to a perceived racial or cultural “heritage”.[11]: 160  The Northern Territory Chief Protector of Aborigines, Dr. Cecil Cook, argued that “everything necessary [must be done] to convert the half-caste into a white citizen”. 

Spain’s stolen babies and the families who lived a lie.

 

Following the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) General Francisco Franco became the head of the rebel Nationalist government and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Under his rule Spain became a hermit nation similar to that of modern-day North Korea.

Anyone who fought against the Nationalists during the war or who held opposing viewpoints was punished – this includes anyone who wanted to have a child.

These people were known as “undesirables” and Franco believed that anyone with an opposing viewpoint or who lived beneath a specific wage line wasn’t fit to raise a child. The task of taking babies away from single mothers and families who didn’t fit into Franco’s idea of ideal citizens was given to a network of Catholic priests and nuns who did their jobs efficiently and without asking any questions.

When you think of the Catholic church stealing children and selling them to the highest bidder, you might imagine a nun running down a hallway with a baby, freshly ripped from its mother, and handing it off to the highest bidder.

Well, that happened a few times, but in many cases the church prepped parents for their child and helped them fake a pregnancy to keep friends and family from asking questions.

Speaking to the BBC, an 89-year-old woman named Ines Perez admitted that a priest helped her work out a fake pregnancy before she received a baby girl in 1969. She said, “The priest gave me padding to wear on my stomach.” 

 

How To Sneak a Baby Out of a Maternity Ward 

 

Even though the Catholic church was working in tandem with Spain’s government it still shouldn’t have been so easy to steal a bunch of babies. Many priests and nuns who carried out the thefts went through a ridiculous series of steps to ensure that they weren’t caught.

 

Priests and nuns would first falsify a birth certificate stating that the child had been born to the family who was paying for the baby, and then they would usually concoct a lie about why they were handing off such a small child before pushing the family out of the hospital – thus decreasing the risk of anyone being caught.

 

One woman who received a baby from the Catholic church claims that she was told her adopted child was born premature, but that it had probably just been born moments before. She claims that the doctor told her to put the baby in her car “between two hot water bottles.” 

 

The Payment Plan

In many cases even when a family could afford to buy a child, they couldn’t pay for it all up front, so a payment plan was established. When Juan Luis Moreno’s father confessed on his deathbed that Moreno had been purchased from a priest, he realized that his annual family trips to Zaragoza weren’t vacations – they were a contractual obligation.

Moreno told the BBC that his adoptive father knew exactly what he was doing and that the church didn’t even try to hide its scam. “My dad was given a choice: boy or girl. They put it bluntly: This was a market for babies.” Moreno said that his adoptive father claims that the going price for a child at the time was twice the price of their family home

 

No One Is Going to Get in Trouble for This

Despite believing that what they were doing was for the greater good of the Spanish people, General Franco and his regime knew it was wrong. After Franco’s death a series of amnesty laws were passed so that any crimes that took place while he was in power would never be examined in a court of law.

Some prosecutors have decided to investigate the thefts on a case-by-case basis, but that’s easier said than done. While there are some cases to go through, many children who were kidnapped and sold to families have decided not to come forward for fear their adoptive parents are seen as criminals. One person, a nun named Sister Maria Gomez, was brought to court for kidnapping but she refused to speak in court.

 

It’s Almost Impossible to Prosecute This Insane Crime

Aside from the lack of political will to prosecute for the crime, it is incredibly hard to prove in court the illegality of the case. A prosecutor in Madrid pointed out a few of the biggest issues with trying to prove wrongdoing in a case of systemic kidnapping.

First, you can’t pursue a criminal case over a false birth certificate because the crime has passed the statute of limitations.

And as far as the Spanish criminal justice system goes a false birth certificate doesn’t legally prove that a baby has been kidnapped. As it stands the Spanish Catholic church’s history of child kidnapping will go unpunished. The only thing that can be done is to remain vigilant against those in power.

 

When the regulated system for child theft was put into place in 1939 it likely wasn’t designed to have an end game. Franco’s regime either felt like they were doing the right thing, or they were just being malicious.
Either way, when an oligarchy comes into power, they don’t have a backup plan. When Franco died in 1975 the church didn’t rethink their position of rampant child theft, and they didn’t rework the system that had caused so much pain. Instead, they dug in deeper into the social services system of Spain to keep a stranglehold on the Spanish people.

 

It wasn’t until the late ’80s that the scandal was blown open when Juan Luis Moreno discovered that he was one Spain’s stolen babies. According to Moreno, the man who he knew as his father confessed on his deathbed that Moreno had been purchased from a priest in Northern Spain for 200,000 pesetas.

 

It may seem like it would be tough to carry out a country-wide, state-sanctioned, web of church backed kidnapping; but that’s where you’re wrong. These kidnappings started directly after the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939, continued through World War II, and didn’t end until the early ’90s.

 

Spain may be a relatively small country, but it must have been noticeable to someone that children were disappearing at an alarming rate. Maybe people who brought up the numbers were squashed by the local government, or it’s possible that Franco’s regime simply didn’t care if they were called out for their horrible crimes.

Whatever the case many people believe that this web of Catholic kidnapping accounted for 15% of the total adoptions that took place in Spain between 1960 and 1989.

Catholicism steals a generation of Spanish children

• Another Catholic scandal? Yeah, it’s another one, this time in Spain. Mother Church knew best who should raise children.
• Several mothers say they were told their first-born children had died during or soon after they gave birth.
  But the women, often young and unmarried, were told they could not see the body of the infant or attend their burial.
• The babies were sold to childless couples whose devout beliefs and financial security meant that they were seen as more appropriate parents.
• Official documents were forged so the adoptive parents’ names were on the infants’ birth certificates.

300,000 children. 300,000 heartbroken mothers. 300,000 lies.

Many mothers who gave birth there claim that when they asked to see their child after being told it had died, they were shown a baby’s corpse that appeared to be freezing cold.

CUBA: OPERATION “Peter Pan”, the Largest Exodus in Western Hemisphere. 

 

 

14,000 unaccompanied children brought to the United States from Cuba during Operation Peter Pan, a covert program that helped school-age kids escape repression in Cuba. The program was designed to protect Cuban children whose parents were being targeted by Fidel Castro’s new regime—and to shield them from the Communist ideologies feared by the U.S. at the height of the Cold War.

From 1960 to 1962, Cuban parents who had heard of the program took advantage of visa waivers to put their kids on flights to the United States. Some never saw their children again.

Unlike this century’s unaccompanied minors, thousands of whom have entered the foster care system or been detained in camps after seeking asylum in the United States, Eire and the other children of Operación Pedro Pan, as it was known in Cuba, were welcomed by the United States government.

The program was a U.S.-sanctioned one—and the Eisenhower administration and private citizens who helped make it happen were motivated not just by the human rights of children who faced repression and political retaliation in Cuba, but by ideology.

“Operation Babylift” Was A Controversial Mission to Fly Thousands of Orphans Out of The Vietnam War

 

 

Over two intense weeks in April 1975, some 2,000 children were airlifted out of Vietnam for their safety at the end of the Vietnam War. It was called “Operation Babylift,” and it came about as a directive from President Ford after the North Vietnamese Army captured Saigon.

Ford designated a chunk of a “special foreign aid children’s fund” to fly these babies out of Saigon – at great risk to the babies and the crew.

“Operation Babylift” was an amazing effort to get these children to safety, but it came with its own perils. Crash-landings, murky legal statuses, controversy, and unsafe conditions enveloped the operation.

 

The First Flight in The Operation Crash-Landed, Killing Nearly 100 Children

 

 

The first plane out of Saigon, a U.S. C-5 cargo plane, had to crash-land, killing many on board, including the babies flown from Saigon that were on it. Luckily, at the end of the day, it can be said that a few thousand children were saved, and that, if anything, makes the operation a success. 

 

Sadly, the very first flight of the operation ended in tragedy, when the pilot was forced to crash-land the C-5 after the cargo doors malfunctioned. On April 4, 1975, Bud Traynor maneuvered the malfunctioning plane into a rice paddy field in a “fierce impact.”

Chief medical officer Regina Aune recalled that the cargo doors blew out, and she “could see the South China Sea through the hole in the back.” 

The crash was fatal for 78 children and 50 adults, most of whom perished because they were in the cargo area – because there wasn’t enough room for them in the passenger section of the plane. When the plane crashed, it split apart, and the cargo area holding the children and adults “was crushed.”   

The Planes Were Filled with Over Twice the Number of Babies They Could Reasonably Carry

One of the reasons that the first flight was so fatal was because there were children in the cargo area. This was because American operatives were stuffing the planes full of South Vietnamese babies – more than the aircrafts could reasonably hold.

To make Operation Babylift work, the children had to be secured with cargo straps, and a flight attendant remembered putting bassinets underneath seats. Jim Trullinger, a man doing research in Vietnam, was forced to evacuate the country on one of these overcrowded flights, and recalled:

• “There were no baby carriers, so we just had to use seat belts tightened around the babies. There were so many babies that there was no place for me to sit.” 

 

The Flights Were Perilous for the Children, Who Often Did Not Have Enough Food or Blankets

According to History Net, the number of children on board was so high that “milk, food and medicine were always in short supply.” The exact number of children on a given flight was up to each pilot, and they sometimes crammed so many children on the planes that they just lined the floors with blankets and secured the babies to these with cargo straps. The children were so crowded in, they filled “every available space.” 

 

There Were Older Children, Too, Who Weren’t So Keen on Leaving Their Home Country 

Despite the best of intentions, Operation Babylift did end up taking some older children away from their homes. According to Kathy Manney, writing for History Net:

“As for the older children, Babylift was the crucible that shaped their lives. Already they had seen more adversity in their short lives than most adults, and they seemed to be feeling a cloak of desolation settling around their shoulders.  
Some of the older children wanted to know when they could go back to Vietnam, possibly to grandmothers or foster parents who had been caring for them. Those who wanted these children to have a better future had taken them from the only life they had ever known.” 

 

It’s Possible That Not All These Children Were Orphans 

 

Part of the controversy surrounding Operation Babylift was that it wasn’t exactly clear how many of these children were orphans. As the operation continued, volunteers began questioning how many of them had families back in Vietnam. Jane Barton, a translator, recalled that she spoke to a few of those rescued “who said they were not orphans.” 

This led to the still-lingering question: did the United States “steal” these children? A few lawsuits were filed after 1975 that tried to reunite those adopted in the US with their families in Vietnam. Some adoptees have formed relationships with their biological parents, while others are still searching, returning to Vietnam as adults to “connect with their roots.”    
 

 

The Chaos Continued Even After the Planes Landed in America 

 

Many of the flights out of Tan Son Nhut airport in Vietnam landed in San Francisco, CA, and the conditions at the Presidio (then an army base) were far from ideal. Many of the children were sick with pneumonia and dehydration, and there was no real leadership. Michael Howe, who was the president of the volunteer organization that helped these children, remembered:

“There was really no one in charge and in some way it’s kind of a misnomer to call me or anybody else a leader—we were there doing what we possibly could do in an environment where we really weren’t quite sure what to do, bottom line.”  
There often weren’t enough mattresses for all the children, and some slept on blankets stacked on the floor. Some people even tried to steal babies from the area, feeling they were “promised” an adoptee.

 

The Legality of It All Was “Murky” At Best 

 

Besides the fact that not all the children may have been orphans, there were also legal issues with their statuses as American citizens.

Not all of those who came to America under Operation Babylift had proper documentation, and some of the parents who adopted the evacuees still aren’t sure if the children “are really theirs to keep.” 

A great number of the children flown out of Vietnam were Amerasians, a term used to describe the children of “American servicemen and Vietnamese women.” 

Some of these children’s mothers were desperate to get their offspring, who were at least partially American, out of Vietnam before it fell to the North Vietnamese Army. They sometimes even tried to get their children on the Operation Babylift planes as the doors were closing, trusting that their kids would be safer on the other side.

Is This a World War II Photograph of Unwanted Babies for Sale in France?

The “Babies For Sale” postcards from France in the early 20th century were a form of humorous and whimsical art. These vintage postcards from 1904-1905 showed staged photographs of “children for sale” in France12. The offer of a “Baby for Sale” was not meant seriously3. They circulated in France at the beginning of the 20th century as a joke3. These postcards are a fascinating glimpse into the humor and social commentary of that era.

 

 

 

 

 

10 Dirty Secrets Of The Catholic Church 

by Nathan Wold 

Throughout its long history, the Catholic Church has been rocked by scandals ranging from the dissolution of the Knights Templar to Galileo’s trial to Mother Theresa’s questionable donors.

Over the course of the 20th century, many more scandals have come to light—no matter how much the Church would like to keep them secret.

The Duplessis Orphans

In the 1930s and 1940s, a conservative revolution ushered in an era in Quebec now known as “The Great Darkness.” Led by Premier Maurice Duplessis, the period was characterized by unprecedented corruption and repression, much of which involved the Catholic Church. After Duplessis received the provincial Church’s support during his rise to power, he sought to repay the favor with a bizarre moneymaking scheme revolving around institutionalizing children.

At the time, federal subsidies for mental hospitals were much larger than those given to orphanages, which were largely the responsibility of the provincial government. Beginning in the 1940s, the Duplessis government, in collaboration with the Catholic Church (which ran the majority of the province’s orphanages and mental hospitals) began to systematically diagnose orphaned children with mental diagnoses they did not have.

 

As a result of these false diagnoses, the orphans were sent to psychiatric institutions, where they qualified for the higher federal subsidy.

In some cases, orphanages were emptied after their children were declared mentally incompetent, then the orphanage was converted into an insane asylum so the Catholic Church could make more money from the subsidies. Around 20,000 children were wrongly diagnosed and imprisoned in this way.

To make matters worse, many of the orphans weren’t exactly orphaned. Instead, some of them were simply the children of unwed mothers forcibly taken into the custody of the Church, who frowned upon the very existence of childbirth out of wedlock.

After being institutionalized, the children were subject to a nightmarish life that included sexual abuse, electroshock therapy, and even forced lobotomies. Some children were used in drug testing and other medical experiments. Many died as a result of their treatment.

By the 1990s, about 3,000 surviving Duplessis Orphans organized to bring their stories to light and pressure the Canadian government for justice. Though they were eventually granted a monetary settlement from the Quebec government, the Catholic Church has yet to apologize for its role in the scandal.

 

Home Children

During the 19th and 20th centuries, around 150,000 British “Home Children” were sent to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Rhodesia. The scheme arguably dated back as far as the 17th century, but what’s surprising is how long it lasted—between 1947 and 1967 as many as 10,000 children were shipped from the United Kingdom to Australia.

Those behind the scheme had clear ideological intentions—they wanted to ensure that the colonies in question would have white majorities. The British children chosen to be shipped across the world were often referred to as “good white stock.” 

Competing religious groups, including the Catholic Christian Brothers, sought to use the scheme to increase their followers in the colonies. Between the late ’30s and early ’60s, the Catholic Church shipped at least 1,000 British and 310 Maltese children to Catholic schools in Australia, where many were forced to do construction work or other hard labor.

In addition to forced labor, subsequent inquiries have found that many of the migrant children in the Church’s care were brutally beaten, raped, and starved—some children were made to “scramble for food thrown on the floor” to survive.

Many of the children were stripped of their birth name. Decades later, in 2001, the Catholic Church in Australia confirmed the crimes committed and issued an apology.

 

Spain’s Stolen Children 

Starting in the 1930s, the fascist regime of Francisco Franco sought to purify Spain by stealing the babies of “undesirable” parents and having them raised in more politically acceptable surroundings.

The scheme originally targeted the children of leftists, who the Spanish government saw as having “a form of mental illness that was polluting the Hispanic race,” but eventually came to target unmarried mothers and otherwise “unfit” parents. As many as 300,000 babies were eventually stolen from their parents.

 

The baby-stealing scheme was carried out with the close cooperation of the Catholic Church in Spain. After Franco rose to power calling himself the defender of Catholic Spain, the Church controlled most of Spain’s social services—from schools to hospitals to children’s homes. This allowed thousands of children to be stolen or otherwise removed from their parents by Catholic doctors, priests, and nuns.

In many cases, nurses in Catholic hospitals would take a newborn baby from its mother to be examined. The nurse would then return with a dead baby kept on ice for the purpose of persuading the mother that her baby had suddenly died. After the babies were stolen from their mothers, they were often sold in illegal profit-making adoptions.

After Franco died in 1975, the Church retained its grasp on Spanish social services and largely continued the scheme.

The child kidnappings didn’t fully come to an end until 1987, when the Spanish government began tightening adoption regulations. It has been estimated that around 15 percent of adoptions in Spain between 1960 and 1989 were part of the kidnapping scheme.

 

The Return of Baptized Jewish Children

While Pope Pius XII has been condemned for remaining largely silent on the Holocaust and politics of World War II, under his leadership the Catholic Church did take steps to save several thousand Jews from the Nazis.

Some Italian and Hungarian Jews were issued false baptism certificates and other documents identifying them as Catholics. In France, many Jewish children were baptized and placed in Catholic schools and orphanages, effectively hiding them from the Nazis.

The problem is what happened next. When the war ended, the Catholic Church in France issued a directive forbidding its representatives from returning Jewish children who had been baptized to their families. The document, which claimed to have been “approved by the Holy Father,” firmly stated that “children who have been baptized must not be entrusted to institutions that would not be in a position to guarantee their Christian upbringing.” 

Many of the children concerned had lost their parents in the Holocaust, and some were deliberately never told of their Jewish background.

The issue first came to public attention in France with the case of Robert and Gerald Finaly, who became the subject of a lengthy legal battle after their surviving Jewish relatives attempted to regain custody from the French Catholics who had baptized them.

Other French Catholics apparently ignored the Church’s order and agreed to return the Jewish children in their care, including the future Pope John XXIII, who was the Vatican’s representative in Paris at the time. To this day it is not clear how many Jewish children the Church saved—or how many it gave back afterward.

 

Nazi Gold in The Vatican Bank

In 1947, a US Treasury agent named Emerson Bigelow apparently penned a highly classified report which alleged that the Catholic Church had smuggled Nazi gold through the Vatican bank.

Although the report itself has been lost, a letter written by Bigelow explained that it contained information from a reliable source revealing that the Nazi’s puppet Utashe regime in Croatia had smuggled around 350 million Swiss francs in gold out of the country at the end of the war. According to Bigelow, perhaps 200 million francs of this was briefly held in the Vatican bank for safekeeping.

Bigelow’s letter also referenced information that the gold had subsequently been funneled through the “Vatican pipeline” to Spain and South America, where it was used to help Nazi and Utashe officials escape punishment for their crimes. The letter only came to light in 1997, after being declassified by the US government the year before. A spokesperson for the Vatican bank denied the claims, but the Catholic Church remains embroiled in lawsuits over its alleged laundering of Nazi gold.

In 2000, a class action lawsuit was brought by around 2,000 Holocaust survivors and relatives who sought restitution from the Vatican up to $200 million, using the Bigelow letter and other recently declassified documents to allege that the Vatican had improperly harbored gold stolen from Europe’s Jews. The suit has since stalled, with American courts split on whether the case can be tried in the US.

 

The Alliance with Fascism

Today, the Vatican is famously the smallest country in the world, but it hasn’t always been that way. Rome was the capital of the Papal States for hundreds of years. But after Italy was united in the 19th century, the Pope lost his temporal territories, causing a tense standoff between Church and state. The Vatican only officially became its own country again in 1929—and it did so because the Catholic Church got into bed with fascism.

In 1922, Benito Mussolini and his National Fascist Party came to power, eventually abolishing democracy and forming a brutal dictatorship.

In 1929, Mussolini and the Catholic Church signed the Lateran Treaty, resolving the crisis by granting the Church the status of a sovereign state within Italy. To sweeten the deal, Mussolini gave the Church a hefty cash settlement. The Church in turn used the money to create a lucrative international investment portfolio, which is now valued at around £500 million (USD $781 million).

The Church was also given a generous tax exemption and Catholic priests were given a guaranteed salary by the Italian government. The treaty also officially made Catholicism Italy’s state religion, making religion classes compulsory for all Italian schoolchildren unless a special exemption was granted.

The treaty also included a clause protecting the “dignity” of the Pope, effectively meaning that those who criticized the Church could be prosecuted. In 2008, an overzealous Roman prosecutor launched an investigation into an Italian comic who made a joke criticizing Pope Benedict. Fortunately, the attempt was blocked by the Italian Justice Ministry, a decision officially supported by the Vatican.

In return for signing the treaty, Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship received the public support of the Catholic Church and was recognized as the legitimate government of Italy, even though Mussolini had abolished democracy four years prior. After the treaty was signed, the Vatican’s official newspaper praised Mussolini, stating: “Italy has been given back to God and God to Italy.” 

 

Hiding Child Abuse and Protecting Pedophiles

Widespread child abuse within the Catholic Church has been a problem for a long time, but the issue didn’t truly come to public attention until the late 1980s. The abuse is a huge scandal in and of itself, but the fact that it took so long to come to light speaks to an even larger crime: The Catholic Church as an institution deliberately sought to cover up child abuse and systematically protected pedophile priests.

The issue was fully brought to light in 2002, when five Catholic priests were tried in Boston for their horrifying abuse of children. One of the convicted priests, Father John Geoghan, had allegedly molested as many as 130 boys before he was caught. But Father Geoghan’s superiors had learned of his crimes long before he was charged in a court of law.

Not only did the Church not turn him over the authorities, they didn’t even expel him from the priesthood. Instead, they simply reassigned him to other parishes, where he continued to abuse children with impunity.

In Wisconsin, a Catholic priest named Lawrence Murphy raped as many as 200 deaf and disabled boys at a Church-run school between 1950 and 1974. When Murphy’s superiors became aware of the abuse, they didn’t even fire him from his teaching job. Instead, they gave him a leave of absence.

It wasn’t until 1996 that the Church internally investigated the abuse. However, the Church decided not to punish the child rapist because he was elderly and in poor health. Murphy died a few months later and was buried with “the full dignity and honors of a Holy Roman Catholic Priest in good standing.” 

In February 2014, a special United Nations committee on child rights found that the Catholic Church had “systematically” protected priests who raped children, and is consequently responsible for allowing “tens of thousands” of children to be abused.

The committee claimed that the Church has “consistently placed the preservation of the reputation of the Church and the protection of the perpetrators above children’s best interests.” 

The current Pope, Pope Francis, recently claimed that he had reliable data indicating that around 2 percent of Catholic clergymen are pedophiles. There are currently around 414,000 Catholic priests around the world. So according to the Pope himself, there are an estimated 8,000 pedophile priests currently working for the Catholic Church.

 

Magdalene Asylums

Based on their ultraconservative notions about sexuality, the Catholic Church imprisoned women suspected of prostitution or promiscuity in Church-run institutions known as the Magdalene asylums. Initially, women were committed to the asylums to receive pseudo-psychiatric “treatment” for alleged sinfulness or promiscuity.

Many women were sent to the asylums by their own families.

Occurring mainly in Ireland, the imprisoned women were forced to do slave labor, mostly related to washing clothes, for seven days a week. Of course, the Church was getting paid for the work, since the laundries were operated for a profit.

The imprisoned women endured horrific beatings, poor food, and sexual abuse. It has been estimated that as many as 30,000 women were forced into the Irish laundries.

The asylums operated in Ireland from the 18th to the late 20th century, but they didn’t become a matter of public debate until 1993, when 155 bodies were uncovered in a mass grave in North Dublin. The asylum authorities had buried the women in secret, without telling their families or even the authorities that they had died—none of the 155 women had a death certificate.

In 2013, the Irish authorities agreed to pay at least $45 million in compensation to the survivors after the United Nations Committee Against Torture urged the government to make the situation right. The Catholic Church has yet to apologize.

 

Nazi Ratlines

At the end of World War II, many Nazi war criminals attempted to flee Europe to avoid prosecution. In at least some cases, they received help from senior Catholic clergymen. In December 1944, the Church allowed a bishop named Alois Hudal to visit Nazi prisoners held in Allied internment camps, presumably for religious purposes. However, Bishop Hudal instead used his position to help a number of Nazi war criminals flee to safety.

Hudal helped to set up escape routes known as “ratlines,” allowing wanted Nazis to flee to relative safety in South America. He used his position in the Church hierarchy to obtain travel documents from the Vatican Refugee Organization. A number of senior Nazis were given Vatican state passports, which allowed them to disguise themselves as priests.

One of the Nazis who Bishop Hudal helped escape was Franz Stangl, who would remain at large until 1967, when he was arrested in Brazil. Stangl was then extradited to West Germany and convicted of overseeing the mass murder of 900,000 Jews.

Meanwhile, a group of Croatian priests operating out of a Catholic seminary college in Rome would set up an escape route now known as the San Girolamo ratline. Led by Father Krunoslav Draganovic, the organization was initially founded to help members of the Utashe escape Europe, but its operations soon expanded to include German Nazis like Klaus Barbie.

At least 9,000 Nazis escaped to South America after the war. The extent to which the Church as an institution helped them to do so remains controversial. The historical consensus is that Hudal and Draganovic acted without the Vatican’s knowledge or approval, but historians have also argued that the Church could have done more to ensure its refugee program wasn’t exploited by fleeing war criminals.

 

The Croatian Holocaust

While the concentration camps run by the Nazis during World War II are probably best known today, there were many similar concentration camps in other countries, including some in Yugoslavia run by Catholic priests.
After the Axis Powers occupied Yugoslavia in 1941, a new fascist government was formed called the Independent State of Croatia, which is considered to have been a “Nazi puppet state.” The new government was run by the Utashe, Croatia’s version of the Nazis, headed by a dictator named Ante Pavelic. The Utashe were defined by ultraconservative Catholicism and racism.

 

After Pavelic took power, the Catholic archbishop Aloysius Stepinac held a banquet for the dictator, proclaiming him “God’s hand at work.” Pavelic was also received by Pope Pius XII himself.

Four days before Pavelic met the Pope, the Utashe had locked hundreds of Serbians inside an Orthodox church and burned it to the ground. Yugoslav diplomats warned the Pope of the atrocities and asked him not to meet with the fascist dictator, but Pope Pius XII refused their request.

Months later, an Utashe leader suggested destroying Croatia’s Serbian population by “killing one third, expelling the other third, and assimilating the remaining third.” 

Such genocidal ambitions soon became a horrifying reality. Concentration camps were set up across the country, including one of the largest camps in Europe at Jasenovac, where as many as 800,000 Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and political dissidents were killed.

Croatian Catholic clergymen served as guards and even executioners in the camps. At Jasenovac camp, a former student priest named Petar Vrzica won a contest by slitting 1,350 throats in a single night.

The slaughter wasn’t included in the camps either. The Ustashe would descend on villages with hatchets and knives. One attack in 1942 was led by a priest and may have killed as many as 2,300 Serbs. A survivor of the attack described how the Utashe beheaded young children then threw the decapitated heads at their horrified mothers, cut open the stomachs of pregnant woman, and raped young girls as their horrified families watched.

As all of this went on, Pavelic continued to exchange “cordial telegrams” with Pius XXI. The Catholic press in Croatia published propaganda for the fascist regime. The Vatican never once spoke out against the massacres.
After the war ended and Yugoslavia was liberated by communist partisans, Archbishop Stephinac was convicted of war crimes and sent to Lepoglava prison. However, the new Yugoslavian state later released him after pressure from the Vatican. Stephinac was later appointed a cardinal by Pius XII. In 1998, he was beatified by Pope John  Paul.

Trafficking of children is a form of human trafficking and is defined by the United Nations as the “recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, and/or receipt” kidnapping of a child for the purpose of slavery, forced labour, and exploitation.^{[1]: Article 3(c)} This definition is substantially wider than the same document’s definition of “trafficking in persons”.^{[1]: Article 3(a)} Children may also be trafficked for adoption.

Though statistics regarding the magnitude of child trafficking are difficult to obtain, the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that 10,000 children are trafficked each year. In 2012, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reported the percentage of child victims had risen in 3 years from 20 percent to 27 percent.

Every year 300,000 children are taken from all around the world and sold by human traffickers as slaves. 28% of the 17,000 people brought to the United States are children—about 13 children per day. 

In 2014, research conducted by the anti-human trafficking organization Thorn reported that internet sites like Craigslist are often used as tools for conducting business within the industry and that 70 percent of child sex trafficking survivors surveyed were at some point sold online. 

The trafficking of children has been internationally recognized as a serious crime that exists in every region of the world and which often has human rights implications. Yet, it is only within the past decade that the prevalence and ramifications of this practice have risen to international prominence, due to a dramatic increase in research and public action. Limited research has not yet identified all causes of child trafficking, however, it appears that poverty, humanitarian crisis, and lack of education contribute to high rates. A variety of potential solutions have accordingly been suggested and implemented, which can be categorized into four types of action: broad protection, prevention, law enforcement, and victim assistance.

The main international documents dealing with the trafficking of children are the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the 1999 ILO Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, and the 2000 UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children.

Definition

The first major international instrument dealing with the trafficking of children is part of the 2000 UN Palermo protocols, titled the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children. Article 3(a) of this document defines child trafficking as the “recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring and/or receipt” of a child for the purpose of exploitation.^[1] The definition for child trafficking given here applies only to cases of trafficking that are transnational and/or involve organized criminal groups; in spite of this, child trafficking is now typically recognized well outside these parameters.^[8] The ILO expands upon this definition by asserting that movement and exploitation are key aspects of child trafficking.^[8] The definition of “child” used here is that listed in the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child which states, “a child means every human being below the age of 18 years, unless, under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier.”

 

Types of child trafficking

The intended or actual after-sale use of the child is not always known.

Forced labour

The objective of child trafficking is often forced child labour.^[8] UNICEF estimates that, in 2011, 150 million children aged 5–14 in developing countries were involved in child labour.

Additionally, UNICEF states that current rates indicate that at least 100 million children will still be forced to work by 2020.^[19] Within this number, the ILO reports that 60% of child workers work in agriculture. A comparative study between domestic child labour rates in urban and rural regions in sub-Saharan Africa reveals that 84.3% of child labourers are working in the rural sector. 99.8% of children age five to fourteen are engaged in child labour for some form of economic activity in these regions. The ILO also estimates that 115 million children are engaged in hazardous work, such as the sex or drug trade. Overall, child labour can take many forms, including domestic servitude, work in agriculture, service, and manufacturing industries. Also, according to several researchers, most children are forced into cheap and controllable labour, and work in homes, farms, factories, restaurants, and much more. Children are cheap labour and additionally are able to complete jobs that adults cannot due to their size. One example for this is within the fishing industry in Ghana. Children can release fish easier from nets due to their small hands. Thereby their services are highly demanded and child labour remains a present consequence of child trafficking.

Trafficked children may be sexually exploited, used in the armed forces and drug trades, and in child begging. In terms of global trends, the ILO estimates that in 2004–2008, there was a 3% reduction in the incidence of child labour; this stands in contrast to a previous ILO report which found that in 2000–2004, there was a 10% reduction in child labour. The ILO contends that, globally, child labour is slowly declining, except in sub-Saharan Africa, where the number of child workers has remained relatively constant: 1 in 4 children aged 5–17 work in this region.^[20] In 2018 UNICEF reported that 31% of total child labour is located in West Africa. In this region, one in six children between the ages of six and fourteen is working. The report additionally finds that 43% of child labour in Sub-Saharan Africa is due to child migration and trafficking.^[23] Another major global trend concerns the number of child labourers in the 15–17 age group: in the past five years, a 20% increase in the number of these child workers has been reported.

A surprising example occurred in the United States as McCabe indicates that in the 1990s, huge companies such as Gap and Nike were using industry “sweatshops” that used trafficked children to make their desired products. After further investigation of the child labour scandal the hazardous work conditions of the GAP company factories were exposed. Children were working in poorly maintained and dangerous factories, were victims of abuse and were paid far below minimum wage. In the years that followed similar scandals were revealed in other parts of Asia and Africa.

Responding to these cases members of the Secretary-General of the United Nations attempted to reduce the number of violations within corporate systems in 2011 by implementing the United Nations “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework, a report stating the guiding principles on transnational corporations and other business enterprises and human rights. Endorsed in Resolution 17/4 by the Human Rights Council on June 16, 2011, the report outlines three main principles.

1) The state’s existing obligation to respect, protect and fulfill human rights and fundamental freedoms,

2) the role of business enterprises as specialized organs of society performing specialized functions, required to comply with all applicable laws and to respect human rights, and

3) the need for rights and obligations to be matched to appropriate and effective remedies when breached. The resolution attempted to establish a universal understanding of appropriate employment conditions and stated punishments for those firms who violate the guiding principles. In addition, research regarding the lasting consequences for labour whose rights were violated were revealed. Yet in 2018 it was found that still, 218million children are working full-time, many of which are employed by factory owners to lower production costs.

Sexual exploitation

• “The use of girls and boys in sexual activities remunerated in cash or in kind (commonly known as child prostitution) in the streets or indoors, in such places as brothels, discotheques, massage parlours, bars, hotels, restaurants, etc.”
• “The trafficking of girls and boys and adolescents for the sex trade”
• “Child sex tourism”
• “The production, promotion and distribution of pornography involving children”
• “The use of children in sex shows (public or private)”

Though measuring the extent of this practice is difficult due to its criminal and covert nature, the ILO estimates that there are as many as 1.8 million children sexually trafficked worldwide, while UNICEF’s 2006 State of the World’s Children Report reports this number to be 2 million. The ILO has found that girls involved in other forms of child labour—such as domestic service or street vending—are at the highest risk of being pulled into commercial child sex trafficking. Likewise, Kendall and Funk justifies how “young girls aged 12 and under are malleable and more easily trained into their prospective roles as prostitutes, and because virginity is highly prized by certain consumers willing to pay a premium”. A variety of sources, including the ILO and scholars Erin Kunze and D.M. Hughes, also contend that the increased use and availability of the Internet has served as a major resource for traffickers, ultimately increasing the incidence of child sex trafficking. In fact, in 2009, Illinois Sheriff Thomas J. Dart sued the owners of Craigslist, a popular online classifieds website, for its “allowance” and “facilitation” of prostitution, particularly in children. In response to public and legal pressure, Craigslist has since blocked all access to its “Adult Services” section.

Children in armed forces

The Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict is a protocol of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, formally adopted by the UN in 2000.^[36] Essentially, the protocol states that while volunteers below the age of 18 can voluntarily join the armed forces, they cannot be conscripted. As the protocol reads, “State parties shall take all feasible measures to ensure that member of their armed forces who have not attained the age of 18 years do not take a direct part in hostilities.” Despite this, the ILO estimates that “tens of thousands” of girls and boys are currently forcibly enlisted in the armed forces in at least 17 countries around the world. Children conscripted into the armed forces can then be used in three distinct ways:

• Direct roles in hostilities (combat roles)
• Supporting roles (such as messengers or spies)
• For political advantage (such as for propaganda purposes)

Recent research conducted by the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers has also noted that girl soldiers must be uniquely recognized, in that they are especially vulnerable to acts of sexual violence.^[39] The incidence of child soldiers was the focus of the Kony 2012 movement, that aimed to arrest Joseph Kony, a Ugandan war criminal who is responsible for the trafficking of thousands of child soldiers and sex slaves.^[40]

Children in drug trades

Children are also used in drug trades in all regions of the world. Specifically, children are often trafficked into exploitation as either drug couriers or dealers, and then ‘paid’ in drugs, such that they become addicted and further entrapped. Due to the illicit nature of drug trafficking, children who are apprehended are often treated as criminals, when in reality they are often the ones in need of legal assistance. While comprehensive worldwide statistics regarding the prevalence of this practice are unknown, several useful regional studies have been conducted. For example, the ILO has investigated the use of Afghan children in the heroin trade and child involvement in the drug trades of Brazil.  Scholar Luke Dowdney specifically studied children in the drug trade in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; he found that children involved in the drug trades are at significantly higher risk of engaging in violence, particularly murder.

Adoption

Children may be trafficked for the purposes of adoption, particularly international adoption. Children are sourced from orphanages or kidnapped, or parents may be tricked, cajoled or coerced into relinquishing custody.

Medical research

It is often difficult to recruit pediatric cases for phase 1 toxicity trials of experimental drugs. Because international adoptees are vulnerable and because medical personnel have authority over legal guardians, facilitation of international adoption to effectively traffic children for enrollment in pharmaceutical clinical trials is a practice by many medical research universities.

Disreputable international adoption agencies then arrange international adoptions, charging high fees to prospective adoptive parents. The Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Cooperation in regard to Intercountry Adoption is an international agreement designed to protect children from such exploitation and to assist in preventing such illegal intercountry adoptions.

Child begging

Forced child begging is a type of begging in which boys and girls under the age of eighteen are forced to beg through psychological and physical coercion. Begging is defined by the Buffalo Human Rights Law Review as “the activity of asking for money as charity on the street”. There is evidence to suggest that forced begging is one industry that children are trafficked into, with a recent UNICEF study reporting that 13% of trafficking victims in South Eastern Europe have been trafficked for the purpose of forced begging.

The UN protocol affirms that “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of a child for the purpose of exploitation shall be considered ‘trafficking in persons’ even if this does not involve any of the means set forth in subparagraph (a) of this article.” With this definition the transportation of a child to an urban center for the purposes of begging constitutes trafficking regardless of whether this process was enforced by a third party or family member. The severity of this form of trafficking is starting to gain global recognition, with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the European Union, the ILO, and the UN, among others, beginning to emphasize its pertinence.

The European Union’s Brussels Declaration on Preventing and Combating Trafficking includes child begging as one form of trafficking, stating “trafficking in human beings is an abhorrent and worrying phenomenon involving coercive sexual exploitation, labour exploitation in conditions akin to slavery, exploitation in begging and juvenile delinquency as well as domestic servitude.

“This issue is especially difficult to regulate given that forced begging is often imposed by family members, with parental power leveraged over a child to ensure that begging is carried out.

Demographics

By definition child begging occurs in persons younger than eighteen, though forced begging has been found by UNICEF to exist among children as young as the age of two. Incidences of this practice have been recorded by the World Bank in South and Central Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and West Africa.

Most research, such as studies done by UNICEF, suggests that boys are much more likely than girls to be trafficked for the purposes of begging; experts presume this is because there is a greater female presence in trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation. In Albania, where forced begging is a common practice, seventy percent of victims are male.

While concrete figures are difficult to determine, the ILO recently reported that there are at least 600,000 children involved in forced begging. The problem may be much more extensive, however, with China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs reporting that as many as 1.5 million children are forced into begging. Additionally, a recent study done in Senegal by Human Rights Watch projected that a minimum of 50,000 children within the country and neighboring nations have been trafficked for the purposes of begging. Begging is often the primary source of income for street children in a number of countries, with a current study conducted by UNICEF finding that 45.7% of children who work on the streets of Zimbabwe engaged in begging, though there is no way of knowing whether it was through forced means.

Gang networks involving forced begging have been found to occur in populations of 500 or greater.

Motivations

Economic factors

Forced begging is a profitable practice in which exploiters are motivated by economic incentives. The business structures of major rings of children trafficked for the purpose of begging have been examined as comparable to a medium-size business enterprise. In the most severe cases networks of children forced to beg may generate $30–40,000 USD for the profiteer. Though family networks are not nearly as extensive, a study conducted in Albania showed that a family with multiple children begging can earn up to fifteen euros a day, an amount greater than the average national teacher salary. Anti-Slavery International asserts that because this income is relatively high many families believe it is the best option available given the lack of existing capabilities. Capability deprivation, meaning the routine absence of adequate resources that serve in facilitating opportunities, may account for cross-generational begging practices within families. UNICEF studies have found that begging is especially prevalent among families in which parents are incapacitated in some way, leading children to be the sole providers.

Political factors

According to the World Bank forced begging is most commonly found in the Middle East and countries of West Africa, where laws prohibiting begging are scarce and heavy regulation of trafficking absent. In Zimbabwe, where child begging is especially prominent, the United Nations has indicated many contradictions between the Labour Act of Zimbabwe and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Many nations, such as Indonesia, have laws against begging on the books, but the repercussions for such entail temporary detainment and eventual release back onto the streets, which does little to combat the issue.

Cultural factors

There are several cultural factors that support begging. In Europe begging is found in a number of minority cultures, especially popular within Roma and nomadic communities. In Turkey familial networks of beggars have been documented across three generations, making it deeply ingrained within their survival schemas. It is important to note that while these may be culturally rooted practices, juvenile begging by way of familial pressure still falls under the realm of forced begging. The transport of children, even one’s own, for the purposes of exploitation through begging is a form of trafficking outlined by the United Nations.

Another cultural practice is the resolution of familial debts through the kidnapping and exploitation of one of their children.

General abuses

UNICEF has found that children who are forced to beg by third parties are often removed from their families, surrender the majority of their income to their exploiter, endure unsafe work and living conditions, and are at times maimed to increase profits.^[49][53] The process of maiming, popularized by the film Slumdog Millionaire, is common given that according to the Buffalo Human Rights Law Review children with apparent special needs often make upwards of three times as much as other children who beg.^[50] In addition to inflictions such as blindness and loss of limbs, other physical abuses for the purposes of heightening profits include pouring chili pepper on a child’s tongue to give the appearance of impeded speech, the use of opium to elicit cries, and administering forced injections of drugs that will increase a child’s energy and alertness. Testimonies against trafficking ring gang leaders have discussed the detainment of individuals in small cells devoid of food, water, and light to make victims weak and feeble, and thus more likely to elicit donations.

The conditions in which begging takes place commonly expose children to further physical and verbal abuse, including sexual victimization and police brutality. Research completed by Human Rights Watch revealed that when begging hours are completed for the day children often do not have proper shelter, adequate food, or access to healthcare where they reside. Furthermore, many of the gangs which run networks of forced begging have heavy drug involvement, thus the children under their control are often turned into drug addicts in order for them to become further reliant on their exploiters.

Long-term implications

Studies have shown that children forced into begging primarily receive little to no education, with upwards of sixteen hours a day dedicated to time on the streets. With education being a leading method in escaping poverty child beggars have been shown to engage in a cyclical process of continuing this practice cross-generationally. Interviews conducted by UNICEF show that children who beg have little hope for the future and do not believe their circumstances will improve. Children who work on the streets typically have little or no knowledge of their rights, leaving them especially susceptible to exploitation both as juveniles and later as adults. Children who beg have also been found by UNICEF to have much higher instances of HIV infection due to lack of awareness and supervision on the streets.

Solutions

International action

A victim-centered human rights approach to combating trafficking has been internationally renowned as the best possible strategy when addressing this issue, with recourse focusing on punishing the exploiter and rehabilitating the child. Some countries who emphasize this method include the United States, with the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000 affirming “victims of severe forms of trafficking should not be inappropriately incarcerated, fined, or otherwise penalized solely for unlawful acts committed as a direct result of being trafficked.”

Other supported methods, such as those outlined by the Buffalo Human Rights Center, include relying on three Ps: protection, prosecution, and prevention. Protection starts with enforcing strict measures on the matters of both trafficking and begging. For many nations the first step is the criminalization of begging and trafficking. Prosecution should be instituted in the form of greater legal ramifications for traffickers, with punishment focused on the exploiter rather than the exploited. This becomes difficult with respect to victims of familial trafficking, considering this would require changes in care placement and strict monitoring of each displaced child’s welfare. Many organizations affirm that prevention begins with discouraging donations and improving services so that children, and families as a whole, have greater capabilities. Though well-intentioned, by giving child beggars money, individuals only make this practice more profitable, and soon these funds find their way into the hands of the child’s abuser.

Government response

In Senegal, where the abuses against talibes are extensive, there have been several initiatives with the help of the World Bank to put an end this exploitation. First, there is intervention on a community level with education on the validity of some of these Quranic institutions provided to rural villages that typically send their children there. This is supplemented by improved regulation of schools within the nation to ensure that they remain places of education, followed by a greater enforcement of preexisting laws banning trafficking and exploitative begging. Finally, rehabilitation services have been provided with the help of CSOs to recovered children to provide them with the capabilities they have been denied.

In Zimbabwe policy has adapted to ensure the safety of all persons under the age of sixteen with the Children’s Protection and Adoption Act, however, the government admits that a lack of resources and capital play a critical role in inadequate enforcement.

In Bangladesh, where there are an estimated 700,000 beggars, a law passed in 2009 banning the practice, though officials report some trouble with enforcement.

In China, the Ministry of Public Security has established a department that solely focuses on child trafficking. The department has a hotline where the public dials 110 to report suspected incidences of forced begging, which law enforcement officials are expected to investigate further. The police are trained to take the children into custody if a blood relationship with their guardian cannot be established, and educate parents on the illegality and dangers of begging if they are those responsible for the child’s action. This policy instituted in April 2009 has since led to the recovery of 9,300 children.

NGO initiatives

Many NGOs have initiated movements focusing on informing the public on the dangers of donations. As UNICEF reported in 2006, “certain behaviors, such as giving money to child beggars can also indirectly motivate traffickers and controller to demand children.” The Mirror Foundation’s Stop Child Begging Project of Thailand is one such organization that emphasizes eliminating the demand. Their initiatives are focused on educating passersby on the forced begging of trafficked Cambodians within their country to decrease the likelihood of donations.

Other methods

In China, where the kidnapping and forced begging of children has been routinely documented, a multi-media movement has begun.^[55] Here, blogs are utilized to publicize over 3,000 photos of children whose families believe have been abducted for the purpose of begging, with hundreds of thousands of followers who remain on the look out for these children in major urban centers. This campaign has enabled at least six children to be recovered and reunited with their families.

In instances where begging is religiously sanctioned it has been suggested by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) that religious leaders should outwardly condemn this practice. For talibes religious leaders have been asked to take a stance against begging using passages cited from the Quran, such as, “Except paradise, you should not beg anything for the sake of Allah” (8:23), which would help strip the practice of its religious foundation. In addition, former US President Clinton took the responsibility of providing protection against child abuse through Internet Service Providers (ISP) that can help law enforcement track any suspicious activities including child pornography.

Sales motivated by cash

In ancient Rome, according to Keith Bradley, Augustine wrote that “there were indigent parents selling their children because they needed the cash.”

In contemporary Nepal, parents of poor families sell their children to orphanages (or sometimes simply hand them over without any payment). The orphanage then misrepresent them as “orphans”, ensuring an income for the orphanages.

Mechanisms

In general, child trafficking takes place in three stages: recruitment, movement, and exploitation. Recruitment occurs when a child is approached by a recruiter, or in some cases, directly approaches a recruiter themselves. Recruitment is initiated in many different ways: adolescents may be under pressure to contribute to their families, children may be kidnapped or abducted into trafficking, or families may be trafficked together. Then, movement will occur—locally, regionally, and/or internationally—through a variety of transportation types, including by car, train, boat, or foot. Ultimately, the final goal of child trafficking is exploitation, whereby traffickers use the services of children to garner illegal profit. Exploitation can take place in a variety of forms, including forced labour, sexual exploitation, and child begging, among other practices.

Supply and demand framework

Child trafficking is often conceptualized using the economic model of supply and demand. Specifically, those who are trafficked constitute the “supply”, while the traffickers, and all those who profit from the exploitation, provide the “demand”. Two types of demand are defined: consumer demand and derived demand. Consumer demand is generated by people who actively or passively buy the products or services of trafficked labour.

An example of this would be a tourist purchasing a T-shirt that has been made by a trafficked child. Derived demand, on the other hand, is generated by people who directly profit from the practice of trafficking, such as pimps or corrupt factory owners. Scholar Kevin Bales has extensively studied the application of this economic framework to instances of human trafficking; he contends that it is central to an accurate understanding of how trafficking is initiated and sustained. Bales, along with scholars Elizabeth M. Wheaton, Edward J. Schauer, and Thomas V. Galli, have asserted that national governments should more actively implement policies that reduce both types of demand, thus working towards the elimination of trafficking.

Social mechanisms

Various international organizations, including the ILO and UN.GIFT, have linked child trafficking to poverty, reporting that living in poverty has been found to increase children’s vulnerability to trafficking.^[8][77][78] However, poverty is only one of many social “risk factors” that can lead to trafficking. As UNICEF and the World Bank note, “Often children experience several risk factors at the same time, and one of them may act as a trigger that sets the trafficking event in motion.

This is sometimes called ‘poverty plus,’ a situation in which poverty does not by itself lead to a person being trafficked, but where a ‘plus’ factor such as illness combines with poverty to increase vulnerability.”^[8][79] UNICEF, UN.GIFT, and several scholars, including Una Murray and Mike Dottridge, also contend that an accurate understanding of child trafficking must incorporate an analysis of gender inequality. Specifically, in many countries, girls are at a higher risk of being trafficked, particularly into sexual exploitation. In addition, these international agencies and scholars contend that giving women and men an equal voice in anti-trafficking policy is critical to reducing the incidence of child trafficking.

Studies throughout Europe have identified risks that make children vulnerable to exploitation that are also causes and contributing factors of child trafficking. These include social and economic marginalisation, dysfunctional family backgrounds, experiences of neglect, abuse or violence within the family or in institutions, exploitative relationships, gender-based violence and discrimination, experiences of living or working on the streets, precarious and irregular migration situations, aspirations to work and to earn money and limited opportunities to enter or remain in school, vocational training or regular employment. As the efforts of national governments to improve social safety nets can lessen many of these risks, child trafficking is considered not only a result of criminal activities but also as indicating weaknesses in the national government’s ability to effectively safeguard children’s rights to a safe and healthy development.

Identification

Child harvesting or baby harvesting refers to the systematic sale of human children, typically for adoption by families in the developed world, but sometimes for other purposes, including trafficking. The term covers a wide variety of situations and degrees of economic, social, and physical coercion. Child harvesting programs or the locations at which they take place are sometimes referred to as baby factories or baby farms.

Markets

Child harvesting typically refers to situations where children are sold for adoption but may also refer to situations in which children are trafficked to provide slave labor. It is particularly associated with and prevalent in some international adoption markets.

Infants who are trafficked are often eventually forced to work in plantations, mines, factories, as domestic workers, or as sex workers. There have been a very few allegations of some child harvesting programs that provide infants to be tortured or sacrificed in black magic or witchcraft rituals. Nigerian security agents have uncovered a series of alleged baby factories in recent years, notably in the southeastern part of the country populated by the Igbos.

Human trafficking is widespread in west Africa, where children are bought from their families to work in plantations, mines, and factories or as domestic help.

Others are sold into prostitution and less commonly they are tortured or sacrificed in black magic rituals. Human trafficking, including selling children, is prohibited under Nigerian law, but almost 10 years ago a UNESCO report on human trafficking in Nigeria identified the business as the country’s third-most common crime behind financial fraud and drug trafficking, and the situation certainly has not improved. At least 10 children are reportedly sold every day across the country.

US adoptees stolen as babies from Chile find families, each other in growing support network 

One USA TODAY story alone reached six people who’ve confirmed they were stolen from their families in Chile and adopted out to families in foreign countries, including the U.S. 

Rachel Smolka’s adoption paperwork said she was the result of a rape and that her single mother didn’t want to raise a baby alone. Other forms said she had no father or mother at all and had been abandoned. 

Matt Molokie’s papers said his mother got pregnant at 18 and had decided to give her son a better life by putting him up for adoption. 

It was all a lie. 

Both Smolka and Molokie recently confirmed that they were stolen from their single, low-income mothers in Chile in the 1980s. 

Smolka and Molokie were strangers until two months ago when they learned of their similar pasts and remarkably, that they grew up just 20 minutes from each other on Staten Island, New York. 

They’ve not only formed a unique friendship out of their tragic pasts, but they are also part of a growing community of people who’ve learned the truth about their adoptions in Chile and reconnected with their birth families. 

In the U.S., more than 40 of the adoptees have formed a support network where they can share their pasts and their pain, and find comfort in knowing they’re not alone. 

40 birthdays apart 

 For 40 years, Rachel Smolka believed she had a typical adoption story: Her birth mother, Karina del Carmen Valdes Lara, simply couldn’t take care of her and decided she’d be better off with another family. 

In reality, Valdes told USA TODAY that she had been looking forward to having a baby; she wasn’t raped like the paperwork said. She was unmarried but she was going to figure it out, she was going to be a good mom. 

After giving birth on Nov. 28, 1981, Valdes said she got to hold her newborn daughter only once before the midwife took her away, later telling her the baby had asphyxiated and died. While Valdes grieved, Smolka was being raised in New York by adoptive parents who had no idea their baby had been stolen from her mother. 

Although Valdes eventually learned the truth that her baby was alive, she had no way to find out where she was or why she’d been stolen. But she never gave up hope. 

“For me, every Nov. 28 marked the year because it was my daughter’s birthday,” Valdes told USA TODAY from her home in Chile. “On her birthday, I would silently tell her, ‘Happy birthday.’ I never missed a birthday.” 

 

One day in early 2021, Valdes came across a USA TODAY story about international adoptees who had mistakenly believed they were U.S. citizens. 

Although Smolka had a wonderful childhood, she said the story sparked questions about her past. As she began researching she learned that more than 20,000 children were stolen from their families in Chile and adopted out to foreigners mostly in the U.S. and northern Europe. Eventually she would learn that she was one of them and she found Valdes on Facebook. They were on a video call the next day. 

“I was in shock,” Smolka said. 

‘Changing lives’ 

Like Smolka, Matt Molokie was going about his daily routine when he came across a story that would change his life. He read a report by USA TODAY about a California man who got to meet his sister in Chile after finding out he had had been stolen from his mother in the 1980s. 

How adoptions originate 

Josephine Baker adopted 10 children in the 1960s. In this photo they are on a tour. 

The New York Foundling Home is among North America’s oldest adoption agencies. 

Adoptions can occur between related or unrelated individuals. Historically, most adoptions occurred within a family. The most recent data from the U.S. indicates that about half of adoptions are currently between related individuals. A common example of this is a “step-parent adoption”, where the new partner of a parent legally adopts a child from the parent’s previous relationship. Intra-family adoption can also occur through surrender, as a result of parental death, or when the child cannot otherwise be cared for and a family member agrees to take over. 

Adoption is not always a voluntary process. In some countries, for example in the U.K., one of the main origins of children being placed for adoption is that they have been removed from the birth home, often by a government body such as the local authority. There are a number of reasons why children are removed including abuse and neglect, which can have a lasting impact on the adoptee. Social workers in many cases will be notified of a safeguarding concern in relation to a child and will make enquiries into the child’s well-being. Social workers will often seek means of keeping a child together with the birth family, for example, by providing additional support to the family before considering removal of a child. A court of law will often then make decisions regarding the child’s future, for example, whether they can return to the birth family, enter into foster care or be adopted. 

Infertility is the main reason parents seek to adopt children they are not related to. One study shows this accounted for 80% of unrelated infant adoptions and half of adoptions through foster care. Estimates suggest that 11–24% of Americans who cannot conceive or carry to term attempt to build a family through adoption, and that the overall rate of never-married American women who adopt is about 1.4%.

Other reasons people adopt are numerous although not well documented. These may include wanting to cement a new family following divorce or death of one parent, compassion motivated by religious or philosophical conviction, to avoid contributing to overpopulation out of the belief that it is more responsible to care for otherwise parent-less children than to reproduce, to ensure that inheritable diseases (e.g., Tay–Sachs disease) are not passed on, and health concerns relating to pregnancy and childbirth. Although there are a range of reasons, the most recent study of experiences of women who adopt suggests they are most likely to be 40–44 years of age, to be currently married, to have impaired fertility, and to be childless. 

Unrelated adoptions may occur through the following mechanisms: 

• Private domestic adoptions: under this arrangement, charities and for-profit organizations act as intermediaries, bringing together prospective adoptive parents with families who want to place a child, all parties being residents of the same country. Alternatively, prospective adoptive parents sometimes avoid intermediaries and connect with women directly, often with a written contract; this is not permitted in some jurisdictions. Private domestic adoption accounts for a significant portion of all adoptions; in the United States, for example, nearly 45% of adoptions are estimated to have been arranged privately. 

Children associated with’Hope and Homes for Children, a foster care program in Ukraine 

• Foster care adoption: this is a type of domestic adoption where a child is initially placed in public care. Many times the foster parents take on the adoption when the children become legally free. Its importance as an avenue for adoption varies by country. Of the 127,500 adoptions in the U.S. in 2000,[81] about 51,000 or 40% were through the foster care system. 
• International adoption: this involves the placing of a child for adoption outside that child’s country of birth. This can occur through public or private agencies. In some countries, such as Sweden, these adoptions account for the majority of cases (see above table). The U.S. example, however, indicates there is wide variation by country since adoptions from abroad account for less than 15% of its cases.[81] More than 60,000 Russian children have been adopted in the United States since 1992,[83] and a similar number of Chinese children were adopted from 1995 to 2005. The laws of different countries vary in their willingness to allow international adoptions. Recognizing the difficulties and challenges associated with international adoption, and in an effort to protect those involved from the corruption and exploitation which sometimes accompanies it, the Hague Conference on Private International Law developed the Hague Adoption Convention, which came into force on 1 May 1995 and has been ratified by 85 countries as of November 2011. 
• Embryo adoption: based on the donation of embryos remaining after one couple’s in vitro fertilization treatments have been completed; embryos are given to another individual or couple, followed by the placement of those embryos into the recipient woman’s uterus, to facilitate pregnancy and childbirth. In the United States, embryo adoption is governed by property law rather than by the court systems, in contrast to traditional adoption. 
• Common law adoption: this is an adoption that has not been recognized beforehand by the courts, but where a parent, without resorting to any formal legal process, leaves his or her children with a friend or relative for an extended period of time. At the end of a designated term of (voluntary) co-habitation, as witnessed by the public, the adoption is then considered binding, in some courts of law, even though not initially sanctioned by the court. The particular terms of a common-law adoption are defined by each legal jurisdiction. For example, the U.S. state of California recognizes common law relationships after co-habitation of 2 years. The practice is called “private fostering” in Britain. 

Disruption and dissolution 

Although adoption is often described as forming a “forever” family, the relationship can be ended at any time. The legal termination of an adoption is called disruption. In U.S. terminology, adoptions are disrupted if they are ended before being finalized, and they are dissolved if the relationship is ended afterwards. It may also be called a failed adoption. After legal finalization, the disruption process is usually initiated by adoptive parents via a court petition and is analogous to divorce proceedings. It is a legal avenue unique to adoptive parents as disruption/dissolution does not apply to biological kin, although biological family members are sometimes disowned or abandoned.[89] 

Ad hoc studies performed in the U.S., however, suggest that between 10 and 25 percent of adoptions through the child welfare system (e.g., excluding babies adopted from other countries or step-parents adopting their stepchildren) disrupt before they are legally finalized and from 1 to 10 percent are dissolved after legal finalization. The wide range of values reflects the paucity of information on the subject and demographic factors such as age; it is known that teenagers are more prone to having their adoptions disrupted than young children.[89] 

List of international adoption scandal

The Stolen Children Project

www.psychopathinyourlife.com

 

 

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