Operation Identity

Linh Song, the Executive Director of Ethica, has informed the larger adoption community of a very important initiative started by Ethica to protect the identities of Vietnamese children being adopted abroad, Operation Identity: Cooperating to Protect the Identity of Vietnamese Orphans.

This initiative is in response to a disturbing trend reported by the U.S. Embassy in Vietnam: “…approximately 85% of the children being placed for adoption are now reportedly abandoned. 85%! The Embassy strongly believes that most of these “abandonments” are in fact staged abandonments.” This fact is especially troubling when one realizes that before the US government signed the Memorandum of Understanding with the Vietnamese government in 2005, the percentage of children who were classified as “abandoned” was relatively low in comparison to the percentage who were classified as being “relinquished”.

Ethica admits that it doesn’t know the true reasons why there has been such a big uptick in the number of “abandoned” Vietnamese children being referred for international adoption. However, based on Ethica’s fact-finding and research efforts, it is taking an educated guess as to the possible reasons:

It could be happening at the direction of orphanages, at the provincial level (one agency reported that some provinces are making rules that only abandoned children can be placed), or in some cases, at the direction of agencies or overseas facilitators. It could be happening because people haven’t thought about the long-term ramifications. There likely will be a mix of opinions about why this phenomenon is occurring. Equally likely is that there probably are several different reasons.

Ethica is calling on adoption agencies that have programs in Vietnam to check its statistics on those “abandoned” and “relinquished” children in order to recognize any noticeable pattern as reported by the U.S. Embassy. Regardless of whether these agencies find irregularities or disturbing trends, Ethica is encouraging them to verify and double-check with the facilitators they contract with and/or the orphanages they deal with in order to make sure the children they are adopting out of Vietnam have all their personal information available to them. Ethica is also encouraging prospective adoptive parents and adoptive parents to hold the agencies with which they are working accountable for conducting ethical adoptions, which includes full disclosure of their adopted children’s personal history.

However, already some PAPs and APs are balking at Ethica’s effort to protect adopted Vietnamese children’s identity. They appear to be more worried about ensuring the outflow of children than the rights of the children. To me, as an adult Vietnamese adoptee, their position is completely unacceptable and appears callous.

Like I’ve written, time and again, children do not stay children forever. And, one way or another, these children, when they grow older and become adults themselves, will hold their adoptive parents, agencies and foreign governments accountable for those decisions that ultimately affected their lives.

Operation Identity – Help spread the word!
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Postscript

The following adult adoptee bloggers chime in on Operation Identity:

Harlow's Monkey
Land of The-Not-So-Calm
Ethnically Incorrect Daughter