From a story in The Guardian – LINK>‘My mother spent her life trying to find me’: the children who say they were wrongly taken for adoption by Rosie Swash and Thaslima Begum. It begins – For years, Bibi Hasenaar felt rejected because she was adopted aged four. Then she saw a photo that described her as missing – and began to uncover an astonishing dark history. Hasenaar says: “No one explained anything to me; I didn’t know what was happening.” She became hysterical during the airplane flight from Bangladesh to The Netherlands were she and her brother were adopted. “They tied me to the seat with a rope because I could not be calmed. I wasn’t allowed to go to my brother in the rows ahead; I just felt so alone.”
Sometime in 1993 – when she was in her early 20s, had two young children, and was working in a bar and studying part-time – Hasenaar began receiving letters from a person in Bangladesh claiming to represent her birth mother. The letters claimed that she had never intended to give her children up for adoption. Then, in the summer of 2017, a friend sent her a link to a documentary. It was about children who had been adopted in the Netherlands, and a man who had discovered he had been taken from Bangladesh without his mother’s consent. “He talked about missing children,” Hasenaar says. “I immediately got goosebumps.” An elderly woman appeared on screen, holding an old newspaper. Hasenaar could barely take in what she was seeing. “There were at least four children described as ‘missing persons’ in that newspaper. I looked at the pictures and said to myself: ‘That’s my brother.’ And then: ‘That’s me!’ I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
Dozens of mothers claim they handed over their children believing it to be for temporary care, only to discover that they had vanished abroad to be adopted by strangers. The “boarding school scam”, as it is often referred to, is well known to those who work in international child protection. It is a simple, brutal trick played on families in desperate circumstances. “Generally, the scam works best in locations where poor parents commonly send children to a ‘boarding school’, ‘orphanage’ or similar for food, shelter and education, often where the majority of children are there temporarily – a kind of safety net for poor families,” says David M Smolin, an expert on illegal international adoption practices, who lives in Alabama. He knows this because he and his wife decided to adopt two girls from India in 1998. “The most shocking thing was that no one seemed to care that our adoptive daughters might have been, in effect, kidnapped,” he says. “It shocked us that you could have stolen children in your home and no one would think that was a problem.” Not the agency, the governments, other adoptive parents nor the psychologist they consulted.
“What happened to us and our daughters profoundly changed our understanding not just of adoption, but the world,” Smolin says. “We realised for the first time the depth of injustice in which some people count, and others simply do not.” The couple helped the girls reunite with their mother, and Smolin has since dedicated much of his career to exposing enforced adoption.
More about this at the link in the first paragraph above.
Missing Mom 