Indian babies 'bought and sold' for foreign adoption
Updated
The number of international adoptions has boomed in recent years as the amount of children available to adopt in Western countries has fallen but international adoption has seen its reputation spiral into a mire of bad news, especially through its association with baby traffickers.
An expose by TIME Magazine has discovered babies in India are being stolen from parents who are very much alive and keen to keep their children.
Presenter: Corinne Podger
Speaker: Rory Callinan, TIME journalist
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CALLINAN: Yes India was quite interesting because what had happened in India was that there appeared to be quite a lot of checks in place that created very appropriate looking paperwork, but there was a couple of loopholes that were sort of extremely well exploited. But when the Australian authorities saw the paperwork they were quite happy to accept these children, which suggests that the paperwork was sort of the convincing factor. And this is part of the problem, I mean you can have really sort of good looking paperwork but at the end of the day if you sort of don't do the checks behind who's generating the paperwork you can end up in this situation.
PODGER: You've been following one particular child, a girl called Zabeen who was apparently taken from her parents in a Chennai slum, and it seems adopted by Australian parents who believed she was an orphan. And it seems extensive steps were taken by traffickers to disguise the identity of children like her?
CALLINAN: Yes that's right, in her case it appears they created a sort of fake mother who then signed or signed a sort of forgery document, a surrender document they called it over there, which is what all parents or guardians were required to sign when they put their child up for adoption. And basically they just got some, well the allegation is that they just got somebody who either worked for them or was associated with them to sort of sign these documents. And the way the situation operated over there was that this mother or parent or guardian that was signing this for privacy reasons was not required to present herself to a court, she just had to sign this document before two witnesses. And this is where the problems all started because you could get any two witnesses and pay them some money and they would agree to signing or witnessing a fraudulent document. And that appears to be what's happened in this case.
PODGER: It seems that the problem starts perhaps even further back than that, that there's not as much priority given to chasing after children that go missing in slums as perhaps other activities that involve police?
CALLINAN: Absolutely yeah, I mean missing children over there are the lowest of the low priority, and of course there's a huge sort of I guess business in children being drafted into the workforce over there and I think India's the age as to what they classify child labour is 14 and below. So you even have kids sort of teenagers who are working in some pretty horrible jobs that we would consider children as well.
PODGER: Given all of that then Rory what are some of the checks and balances that are missing here. You've talked about some alarming flaws in procedures, what are you referring to there?
CALLINAN: Well I think the problem is that there's a lot of scrutiny at this end on the parents that are receiving the children, which is good, and there's a lot of scrutiny on the paperwork. They're saying look it's come through the courts, a judge has signed it or various officials have signed on it. But the trouble is when you dealing with some of these countries I mean documents can be forged, courts can be corrupt, people can be bought, this is the big problem I think. I think a lot of scrutiny has to be paid to the countries where they're actually receiving children from.
PODGER: Is that being addressed now by the Australian government given the allegations that have come up as a result of this coverage?
CALLINAN: Look I understand there are things in place at the moment, there's various proposals being considered that I know that they've backed off from India, I understand that they've been aware for a couple of years that there are problems in India, and they've moved away from India. But they're still dealing with other countries where these things can quite easily occur, and I would hope that after this, or as a result of this publicity that they take a really close look at the way some of those countries are processing the adoptions over there.
PODGER: It's been suggested Rory that if this was happening to a child in a western country there would be little effort spared in reuniting the family. Now that Zabeen's allegedly been found and identified, what are the chances of a child like her being handed back to her biological parents?
CALLINAN: Well we spoke to a retired Family Court judge who suggested to us that it would be a pretty tough judge who would send a child who'd lived in a sort of a western setting in fairly good conditions back to very sort of dire poverty stricken sort of lifestyle. At the end of the day the judge would favour the child's rights or the best interests of the child I think is the term he used. So we think it is unlikely. We understand that there are various legal opinions being sought now by the family involved and they'll be given a sort of a fairly definitive opinion very soon, and we understand that opinion would be almost impossible for those children to be returned back to their parents. But I think what will be accepted is that that child does have a right to have contact with her Indian parents.
