On The Road Blog
The Magnitude of Need, and the Need for Structures to Address It
- By Vineeta Gupta on January 5th, 2011
- Category: Blog, South Asia
Kathmandu, Nepal – In August 2010, the US government suspended the adoption of children from Nepal. Nepal is in the midst of changing its adoption laws to address the United States’ concerns regarding unreliable and fabricated documents establishing the status of orphaned and abandoned children. Until the new laws and policies are firmly in place, adoption by foreigners is on hold. Abuse of adoption to traffic children has led to demand for stricter laws. International adoption is further complicated by the diversity of laws in the country of the adoptive parents and in the child’s country of birth. There are over 990,000 orphaned and abandoned children in Nepal, a country of 29 million.
In the last few days, I have visited many programs for abandoned children, ranging in age from infants to teenagers. I don’t want to get into the technicalities of adoption laws and policies or the hardcore data on adoption—in Nepal or anywhere else—but I would like to share my thoughts as a person who loves children and is overwhelmed by the need for these children to find a safe and loving home. The most disturbing part for me is that there are countless families on waiting lists to adopt children and build a loving home together, and yet on the other side the children are subjected to a life that no child should have. Legal structures are proving to be more of a barrier than a facilitator in bridging this gap.
In my more than two decades as a human rights advocate, I have not come across any law that has not been abused by someone at some point. The solution is to reform the laws with high potential of abuse in a way that benefits the people for whom the laws were created and to implement the laws in a way that mitigates the abuse. It is frustrating to see that often the changes made in laws make solutions more inaccessible for the people who need them most.
That said, there is hope in the organizations and individuals working tirelessly to find solutions on behalf of children—little by little, step by step.
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