State-Sponsored Child Separation as Cultural Genocide: Implications for Children’s Rights and Child Adoption

Abstract

State-sponsored child separation as a method of cultural genocide and parental control has a long history around the world. While some may view this only as a historical occurrence, Russian actions in Ukraine and the previous U.S. policy of child separation at its southern border as a deterrent to seeking asylum are contemporary occurrences. Lessons from other countries in the Americas, Africa, and Asia are presented to illustrate the inherent human rights violations of these actions. The implications of cultural genocide are viewed through the lens of applicable United Nations conventions. Ethical implications are presented with actions to ensure the fulfillment of these human rights.

Keywords

adoption children’s rights cultural genocide refugees Ukraine

Stretching back through the centuries, children have been used as a method to control their parents, including their socialization into dominant cultures being used as a method of cultural genocide to erase the child’s birth identity. This was seen historically through the educational institutionalization of Indigenous children in countries such as Australia, Canada, and the United States. In more recent years, in countries such as Argentina, El Salvador, and Guatemala, children were taken from their families and placed with members of the ruling class for the same purpose. Current headlines have highlighted this practice during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as the migration crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. Children have been purposefully separated from their families in both of these crises as a method of parental control and cultural genocide, resulting in a violation of their rights.

According to the United Nations (UN, 2009), removing a child from the care of their family must be a last resort and be for the shortest possible timeframe. It specifically states in the Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children Article B20 that, “provision of alternative care should never be undertaken with a prime purpose of furthering the political, religious or economic goals of the providers.” These occurrences thus violate rights detailed in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Children (UN, 1989), especially Articles 5, 7, 8, and 9. Article 5 requires state parties to respect the rights of parents, 7 states that children should be cared for by their parents whenever possible, 8 requires state parties to “respect the right of the child to preserve his or her identity, including nationality, name and family relations as recognized by law without unlawful interference,” while 9 provides the child the right to not be separated from their parents without judicial review by competent authorities. These apply to child welfare systems and child adoption and the idea of “competent authority” includes social service oversight of policy and processes that safeguard children and their families.

Child separation during war and conflict has received considerable attention from the United Nations, with the abduction of children designated as one of the Six Grave Violations (Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary General for Children and Armed Conflict, n.d.). The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article IIe, recognizes “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” as a form of genocide (UN, 1948a). This convention, coming at the end of World War II, was informed by the removal of children from their communities, including as a form of rescue. For example, some Jewish children were raised by Catholic individuals to protect them from the Nazi regime, but this also resulted in the loss of the children’s cultural identity. In other instances, children were relocated from conflict zones; Polish children were moved to Canada (Taylor, 2009), Finnish children were relocated to Sweden (Nelson, 2015), and U.K. children were relocated to the countryside as well as sent to the United States (Rotabi & Bromfield, 2017). While again, this was to protect the children, the detrimental mental health outcomes of these separations have been documented (Rusby & Tasker, 2009).

Given that social work is a human rights profession (Mapp et al., 2019), and allied professions pursue the same ideals for individual, family, and community well-being, it is incumbent upon us to take action to stop the violations. While it is not possible to stop wars themselves, we can refuse to conduct home studies for such cases and raise their profile as human rights violations within society, such as was done after the earthquake in Haiti when such acts were attempted (Bromfield & Rotabi, 2012). Whether occurring in Russia, the United States, or elsewhere, practitioners have a responsibility to advocate for human rights. To do so effectively, they must have an understanding of the situation.

Historical Perspective

The re-socialization of children to imprint a different culture has a deep history (Briggs, 2020). Even in times that have not been characterized by conflict, children have been removed from their families, such as was done to Indigenous children in Australia, Canada, and the United States in the latter half of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th century. Each of these nations made it a practice to remove many of these children from their families and place them in educational institutions (boarding/residential schools) to re-socialize them into white culture, where the children were forced to stop speaking their languages, practicing their spiritual traditions, and dressing according to their own culture. Thousands of children died at these institutions and most of those who did not have forever lost their culture (Chavez & Joseph, 2021; Haskins & Jacobs, 2002).

Even after the schools were closed, authorities weaponized the child welfare system and the social workers within it to continue removing these children from their families at rates far above their white peers and placing them in white foster families (Porter & Isai, 2022). In Canada, Indigenous children are fewer than 8% of the population but are 52% of those in foster care (Porter & Isai, 2022). Canada has recently recognized the harm caused to Indigenous families and will be paying $2 billion as the result of a lawsuit to compensate the families and fix the system (Austen, 2023). The atrocities were further underscored recently when Pope Francis made a public apology for the separation and re-socialization practices during a recent trip to Canada (Horowitz & Austin, 2022). In contrast to this step forward, the U.S. Supreme Court recently heard a case seeking to dismantle the protections for Indigenous families afforded to them through the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act which gives tribal governments jurisdiction over Native children living on a reservation who are removed from their parents and that for children living off the reservation, state courts must prioritize placing them with relatives, fellow tribal members, or in other Native homes (Brulliard, 2022). Fortunately, the law was upheld (Sherman, 2023), but the fact it progressed that far is concerning.

Conflict as a Driver of Child Removal

Reflecting back to the Korean War, and the beginning of intercountry adoption in earnest, the exploitation of conflict—with the availability of orphaned and vulnerable children for adoption—has raised many social justice and human rights questions (Bergquist et al., 2007) and the realities have been explored by the adoptees themselves (Bergquist et al., 2007; Hübinette, 2006; McGinnis, 2006). In conflicts since Korea, particularly the Vietnam War, there have been questions about child abduction into adoption (Maskew, 2004; Roby & Maskew, 2012; Rotabi, 2012) and Bergquist (2009) explores if there was a “Babylift or Babyabduction” as the Vietnam War ended and children were airlifted (some by military aircraft) and placed with new families in the United States, Australia, and elsewhere as adoptees (Fronek, 2012). Even the international press, specifically The Economist (2010), has questioned whether these acts were those of “saviours or kidnappers?” and Save the Children has called the removal of children from their home countries during a disaster to be “misguided kindness” (Doyle, 2010).

There have been times when people sought to take advantage of the chaos caused by conflicts or natural disasters to re-home children through international adoption. For example, in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, a U.S. mission group attempted to take 33 Haitian children to the Dominican Republic for the purpose of having them adopted by U.S. families despite knowing that the majority of the children had parents (Bromfield & Rotabi, 2012; Joyce, 2013). Other institutionalized children were airlifted out of Haiti, to the United States for adoption even after calls for children to remain given impossible engagement of the Haitian government and social services (competent authority) to ensure an ethical process and procedures (Rotabi et al., 2015).

In Africa, specifically in Chad, a French group, Zoe’s Ark, attempted to abduct children who they claimed were in harm’s way (Handcock, 2007). Mezmur (2010) discusses the “sins of the saviors” where he examines the risks of removal of children from African nations for intercountry adoption such as supporting child trafficking with dramatic case examples. The problems of removal of children from their home countries in Africa is such that the Fifth International Policy Conference on the African Child (2012) developed guidelines to protect children from forcible removal from their family and community life. War and conflict on the African continent are some of the environmental conditions that put children at risk of unethical removal from their family and community life; the protection guidelines set forth by the policy conference included this particular aspect of removal risk among other conditions.

While the previous examples focus on international adoption and removal of the child from their home countries, child separation has also been used by domestic oppressors during civil wars to re-socialize children into the dominant culture. In Argentina, while their parents disappeared, many young children and infants were forcibly taken and these so-called “adoptees” often went to live with the oppressor where they experienced the erasure of identity. Avery (2004) calls these children—now adults—the “living disappeared.” Methods included the killing of pregnant women and placing the newborn infants for adoption, with some placed with the very military officials responsible for the torture and murder of their parents (Brysk, 1994; Tondo et al., 2023). This would have been a violation of Article 25 of the current International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which explicitly forbids the taking of children and concealing their identity (UN, 2010). As noted by a Spanish judge,

The appropriation of children, as well as rape, has always been aimed at humiliating and subduing the enemy. Taking away the enemy’s child was a bargaining chip. They change a person’s life by taking them out of their environment and biological family (Tondo et al., 2023, para. 15).

Argentina is now using DNA tests to try to identify these individuals—many of whom are unaware of their status—and reunite them with their birth families. However, the impact of the re-socialization is clear as many refuse to blame their adoptive family, even knowing they were responsible for the torture and death of their birthparents, and refuse to assist in their prosecution for their crimes (Tondo et al., 2023).

After the Guatemalan civil war when at least 200,000 perished as a result of genocide, testimonials during the truth and reconciliation process included confessions of abducting the Mayan children from the countryside of Guatemala and placing them with Ladino (majority population) families, some of whom were military families (Recuperacion de la Memoria Historica, 1999). An unknown number of these children entered intercountry adoption networks, being sold into a system of private adoptions that moved the children out of Guatemala to the United States, Canada, and other nations (Bunkers et al., 2009; Dubinsky, 2010; Rotabi & Bromfield, 2017). El Salvador also shares this history; thousands of children were abducted from their families and communities and came to live with the oppressor and/or were sent abroad as intercountry adoptees (Mónico & Rotabi, 2012; Pro-Búsqueda, 2009, 2011a, 2011b).

While not a civil war, the civil rights movements in the United States saw concern raised about the adoption of Black children by white families, including concerns about cultural genocide (Chestang, 1972). The National Association of Black Social Workers (NABSW) released a statement in 1972 that the care of and adoption of Black children by white families did not meet cultural socialization needs stating that “Black children in White homes are cut off from healthy development of themselves as Black people. . .” (NABSW, 1972, p. 1). The statement goes on to point out that Black children have unique socialization needs related to growing up in a racist society. While ABSW no longer stands by this position, its sentiment is not to be dismissed as a significant number of foster care placements and adoptions today are transracial with inherent issues of cultural socialization.

Contemporary Examples

Despite the recognition of these historical wrongs, children continue to be separated from their families as a method of parental control and cultural genocide, resulting in violations of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the Convention of the Rights of the Child. Two examples will be highlighted—the U.S. separation of children from their families at its southern border and the Russian abduction of Ukrainian children.

Migrant Families in the United States

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN, 1948b) grants the right to seek asylum from persecution in Article 14. Despite this, countries have tended to poorly treat those seeking to exercise this right. Awareness of this poor treatment increased during the Trump administration in the United States when the number of families migrating from the Northern Triangle countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) increased exponentially. In an effort to deter families, the administration implemented a policy of separating children from their families, resulting in over 5,000 children being detained by the government apart from their families, including hundreds who were U.S. citizens (Barros, 2022; Jordan, 2023). The then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions openly admitted that the purpose of the policy was to deter parents from migrating and seeking asylum by raising the threat of losing their children (Mónico, Rotabi, & Lee, 2019; Mónico, Rotabi, Vissing, & Lee, 2019). Many of these children were held in a tent city in southern Texas, as well as in other institutions where abuse and neglect were documented (Mapp, 2021). Some were placed into foster care; alarmingly some of this care was organized by adoption agencies (Mónico, Rotabi, & Lee, 2019).

Once these separations were uncovered, it proved difficult to reunite these children with their families for a number of reasons. In many cases, records had not been kept or were missing, and younger children were unable to inform authorities of who their families were or how to contact them. In other cases, parents had been deported back to their home countries. While in some cases, parents had agreed to be deported without their children, believing they would be better off in the United States with friends or other family members, in other cases, they were coerced into agreeing or were promised their children would accompany them (Dickerson, 2020; Mónico, Rotabi, & Lee, 2019; Mónico, Rotabi, Vissing, & Lee, 2019).

As of 2023, about 1,000 children were known to be awaiting reunification with their families (Dickerson, 2020; Jordan, 2023). Parents who have been deported without their children from the U.S. previously have found the courts will terminate their parental rights and place their children for adoption, often without even notifying them or their lawyers (Associated Press, 2018), raising concerns that this could happen again if families cannot be reunited. Given the children have been separated for as long as five years, re-socialization of children has occurred with many of the remaining children losing their Spanish language abilities and other aspects of their culture. Most alarmingly, Texas has independently of the federal government resumed the practice of family separation, waving families across the border to then arrest them and take the men away to a state prison while their families are placed in immigration detention, according to allegations (Flores & Weisfeldt, 2023), illustrating that these rights violations continue.

Russian Invasion of Ukraine

The Russian war on Ukraine, beginning in February 2022, has been condemned globally as a human rights disaster. Among the crimes against humanity are Ukrainian children being abducted and taken into Russia as spoils of war (Bubola, 2022; Reuters, 2022). According to Reuters (2022), Ukraine has “accused Moscow of wanting to make them [the abducted children] Russian citizens” (p. 1). These acts have been categorized as war crimes, with the International Criminal Court (2023) issuing arrest warrants in March 2023 for the Russian president and children’s rights commissioner. As noted, such a dynamic is history repeating itself; globally children have been abducted from their families and communities during the chaos of disaster and war many times before (Fronek & Cuthbert, 2012).

Approximately 20,000 children have been reported as being sent from Ukraine to Russia without their parents (Wolfe, 2023), though Russia claims the number to be 700,000 (“Moscow Says,” 2023). In May 2022, President Putin issued a decree making it “quick and easy” for Russians to adopt Ukrainian children since previous law made it illegal for Russians to adopt foreign children; those who adopt Ukrainian children can receive a payment for doing so (Dixon & Abbakumova, 2022; El Deeb et al., 2022).

The Russian children’s rights commissioner has advocated for stripping Ukrainian children of their identities; she herself has adopted a Ukrainian child (Dixon & Abbakumova, 2022, para. 5). One analysis stated that “Russian authorities have gone so far as to make what appears to be an official, concerted effort to cover the tracks that may lead to the Ukrainian children’s eventual recovery” by changing the child’s name and religion and not allowing them to communicate with their families and listing them in a public database as available for adoption without noting they were Ukrainian (Wolfe, 2023, para. 8). Some children were told that their parents did not want them, or that they would be punished for accepting food from Russian forces, and promised material goods for accepting relocation to Russia. Russia has touted these “adoptions” through documentary blogs (Beaumont, 2023; Institute for the Study of War, 2022). In some cases, children have been placed in Russian military training programs (Cole, 2023).

Russians have separated children from their families at checkpoints and taken children from institutions such as those for children with disabilities, orphanages, and health care facilities (Bubola, 2022; Dixon & Abbakumova, 2022; Human Rights Watch, 2022). Ukraine’s comparatively high use of institutionalization of children has been a risk factor. Ukraine has the highest rate of usage of institutions in Europe; 1% of its children (100,000) reside in one due to their parents being unable to care for them due to poverty, working abroad, the child’s disability, or another reason. After the invasion, these children were moved to another institution, displaced abroad, or returned to their families, but Ukraine is still working to track almost a quarter of them (Slobin & Plucinska, 2022).

These abductions started immediately after Russia’s invasion, with Ukrainian hospital staff reporting how they falsified children’s records to make it appear the children were too ill to transport and institutional directors placing children with staff members to hide them (Mednick, 2022). The director of one orphanage stated that they returned children with families to their homes but had to falsify documents for children without one so that they could get through Russian checkpoints without being taken. Other institutional staff were unable to protect all their children, and the Russians took them to “camps” for “rest,” but never returned them (Vulliamy, 2023). The majority of these camps have been found to engage in pro-Russia re-education efforts and some camps have provided military training to children or suspended the children’s return to their parents in Ukraine (Khoshnood et al., 2023).

Ukrainian Children in Care of Families in Europe

In June 2023, 6.5 million Ukrainians had been displaced into other nations as they fled the war (UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 2023). Though it is unknown how many of these are children, the vast majority of Ukrainian children are displaced. Another unknown is how many are displaced with their family, and how many were sent abroad for safety without them (Ducke, 2022). In the case of those children who have evacuated to European countries, being hosted by families across the continent as unaccompanied refugee minors, the long-term future is also concerning as one considers the need to eventually reintegrate children with their Ukrainian families back home. As the conflict drags on, one concern is that intercountry adoptions will commence—including some of the children being permanently adopted by those families currently fostering them outside of Ukraine. Children may also lose their cultural identity due to the length of the separation.

While Ukraine has officially shut down the practice of intercountry adoption (United States Department of State, 2022), there is the chance that in the years to come, some of the displaced children could enter into adoption agency channels regardless of policy. Many agencies have been struggling to secure children in recent years with dramatic declines in available children and the practice of intercountry adoption in general (Neville & Rotabi, 2020). In a worst-case scenario, these adoption agencies would welcome Ukrainian children—under the guise of humanitarian aid (Young, 2012)—as available for the many prospective families who are currently on wait lists.

Again, it should be noted that Ukraine has ceased its intercountry adoptions of children at this time and is limiting “child hosting” of children who are orphans or otherwise without parental care (United States Department of State, 2022) and the long-term future of such an approach to the care of war “orphans”—with the Ukrainian government taking the lead or collaborating—is unknown at this juncture. In the midst of a crisis, it is impossible to predict the child protection policies and implementation for alternative care of children that will come in the years ahead. Whatever they may be, they must follow the guidelines available from the UN (2009) Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children as well as the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and the Cooperation in Relation to Intercountry Adoption (Bergquist, 2009; Mezmur, 2010; Rotabi & Gibbons, 2012; Smolin, 2010).

Implications for Practice

While it can seem that these occurrences are outside of the realm of the everyday work of practitioners, there are steps that must be taken to maintain professional ethics. As noted at the beginning of this paper, we must work to address the many human rights violations outlined here. The number of children affected means we must work on all system levels—micro, mezzo, and macro—to effect change. As noted in Section 3.4 of the Global Social Work Statement of Ethical Principles (International Federation of Social Workers, 2018), social workers must challenge unjust policies and practices.

We must refuse to conduct home studies for adoption resulting from these situations. The United Nations Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children (2009) and the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption require that when a child is separated from their family, the first priority must be to attempt to reunify the child with their birth family. If that is not possible, then the next priority is to find them a placement in their home country whenever possible, ideally with a family member or a member of their kinship group. Domestic adoption is prioritized over long-term institutional care and it is only appropriate after such a continuum of care has failed that international adoption should be considered as a viable and ethical option (Mapp, 2021). To fulfill their ethical responsibilities, practitioners should ensure that this policy is being followed by any agency for which they are conducting a home study or other child placement practices. To preserve the best interests of the child, each child’s situation must be individually assessed to determine the most appropriate manner to preserve their familial and cultural connections.

Given that U.S. citizen children of deported parents have been placed for adoption without the consent of their parents (Zayas, 2015), it is not unreasonable to think that the same could occur for children separated at the U.S. border, and social workers and allied disciplines must refuse to participate. Similarly, children from war zones have been approved for international adoption by U.S. families even when they are living with their relatives (Ali, 2022), and we must similarly refuse to support such adoptions. In this line of logic, child welfare workers should also refuse to participate in setting up foster care placements for these children; we should also hold social service organizations accountable as they engage in contracts for foster care services as has been the case for some children separated on the U.S. border (Mónico, Rotabi, & Lee, 2019).

Practitioners must not only refuse to support such actions, but they must also proactively advocate against them to ensure they do not simply proceed with others leading them. Zayas (2022) discusses how social workers can advocate against inhumane immigration policies and decisions in court through utilizing their knowledge of child development, the impact of trauma, and best practices in child welfare. He details three different scenarios in which social work advocacy led to a favorable decision preventing the separation of families and prevention of detention.

Practitioners can also advocate at the international level through the United Nations through venues such as the High-level Political Forum and the Third Committee, which focus on social, humanitarian, and cultural issues (Gatenio Gabel & Yang, 2022). The International Federation of Social Workers holds consultative status at the United Nations and provides a vehicle for social work advocacy.

Conclusion

While state-sponsored child separation has a long history as a method of parental control (Briggs, 2020), it sadly has not been relegated to the past but continues in countries including the United States and Russia. As part of their ethical responsibilities, social workers and those in allied disciplines must be aware of these actions and both refuse to support them and actively advocate against them—locally, nationally, and internationally. Moving forward with this ethical imperative will continue to require concerted and well-coordinated efforts with NGOs and other allied organizations, especially in war-struck Ukraine where there are ongoing abductions of children and organizations are stretched thin as bombing and other war crimes continue. Improved efforts are necessary in the United States as a surge of migration at the southern borders continues to result in unaccompanied children and children separated from their parents being held in detention and deportation proceedings. Through this advocacy, we can help to ensure these children’s rights and fulfill our responsibilities as human rights professionals.

Footnotes

Disposition editor: Cristina Mogro-Wilson

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Susan C. Mapp

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