Foreign adoptions 'make children commodities', NGO challenges definition of human trafficking

"What is the definition of human trafficking? When there is an exchange of
money for a human body, this is trafficking"

Last year, Germany-based adoption activist Arun Dohle was handed the file of a young Australian woman who wanted to find her birth family in India.

Years of searching had proved fruitless up until then.

Mr Dohle sent the brief to his Indian colleague Anjali Pawar. With scant details, just the name of the village and the birth date, Ms Pawar hit the phones and managed to locate the woman's birth mother in just 10 hours.

Mr Dohle and Ms Pawar, of the Europe-based NGO Against Child Trafficking (ACT), have long been involved with child protection and adoption issues.

They are highly regarded for their abilities to search for and locate Indian birth families.

After working on almost 50 such cases, often with limited information, they have built up a solid network of trusted contacts in government agencies and at the community level.

In a country as bureaucratically dense as India, they regularly manage to do the seemingly impossible: locate women who lost or gave up children decades ago.

At the same time, ACT is a strident voice, aiming to shut down inter-country adoption, arguing it almost always amounts to child trafficking.  (more...)

Foreign adoptions 'make children commodities', NGO challenges definition of human trafficking