“It turned out to be a very special assignment”

What exactly was your assignment?

"The assignment was to investigate whether there are any irregularities in Swedish international adoption activities, looking at the regulation, organisation and processes of adoption agencies and the role of the various actors, what they knew, what they could have done and what they did when irregularities were discovered.

I was then to also propose adoption-specific support and how it should be organised. I was also to take a position on how adoption activities should be regulated in the future to ensure that the best interests of the child are the benchmark."

How was it to work on this inquiry?

"It has been incredibly interesting. When I was asked to be part of this three and a half years ago, my decision to say yes was pretty much a no-brainer. It then turned out to be a very special assignment. I have had a secretariat, with three secretaries who went through an awful lot of archive material.

We have been to several of these countries of origin: Chile, Colombia, South Korea and Poland. There were three additional countries we were assigned to look into (Sri Lanka, China and Ethiopia), but we did not travel to these countries."

What has been particularly interesting?

"Really delving deep into how international adoption has been regulated. While I know how international adoption is regulated, it has been interesting to gain a better understanding of the underlying reason behind the regulations being formulated the way they are. And how things have worked in practice.

Then, of course, there are the life stories of all these people. We met with adoptees, with adoptive parents and with biological parents. And it was such a moving experience. We all sat – me and the three secretaries – and tried to keep from cry openly and to maintain some kind of professional decorum. Just meeting with people affected by the regulations and processes we have in place has been a completely new experience."

What were the main conclusions you came to?

"That there have been irregularities. In at least ten countries, we found cases of child trafficking where the archive material shows that the officials knew about this. That they knew what was going on. This concerns adoptions dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, mainly private adoptions, i.e. adoptions outside adoption organisations. But there have also been cases where children were adopted without the consent of a parent, where the children had simply been kidnapped or wrongly declared dead, and thus made adoptable. What has perhaps been most prevalent is that in many cases there has been a lack of background information on the children. This has improved a lot in recent years. Children adopted today have proper descriptions of why they have been put up for adoption."

What has been the biggest challenge in your work?

"It is understanding what we are looking at when reading through archive material or adoption documents. In some cases, they are not translated into English, so we have had to bring an interpreter. Another has been to understand the regulations of each country, because things may be handled completely differently in different countries. This has been a study spanning 70 years, from the 1950s onwards. It has not been easy. We tried to interview those who were active. But many of the adoption agency staff from the 1970s are no longer around. And the ones still there do not always have clear memories of what reasoning was applied back then."

Åsa Malmberg