I stopped calling it adoption, now what?
“I’ve Stopped Calling It Adoption, Now What?”
As a therapist, I’ve been asked how do I help deprogram a victim of the child supply market from the propaganda of adoption? While the process is personal for everyone, there are steps necessary for all of us to take to liberate ourselves from the false narratives. Since the release of my article, The Illusion of Adoption is Over in 2024, I’ve received a range of responses to this paradigm shift that aims to put an end to this criminal scheme.
As I’ve developed my training, it begins with establishing a common understanding through language. I’ve observed widespread confusion among victims which often leads to missed opportunities as connection and growth are replaced with retraumatization and reinforcement of the false narratives. A barrier that appears repeatedly is the assumption that victims know the truth of what happened to them. Adding to this barrier is the expectation that people should believe them, even when their story changes, often due to gaining more information. Few admit they didn’t know the truth after all, however this admission is the essential first step in the deprogramming process.
Working towards a common, universal language presents the question “what is the point of using one word to cover up another?” A basic assumption is that one word is right and the other is wrong. No one likes to be told they are wrong, but how we apply meaning to those words leads a person to different conclusions. These conclusions shape our sense of reality. Telling someone “I’m adopted” has a different effect than saying “I was trafficked.” The question victims are faced with at this stage is: which one is the truth?
Let’s break it down:
1. The human trafficking industry uses the word “adoption” as propaganda to run a global child supply market.
To ensure we have a common understanding of this statement we need to address each of its components. What is human trafficking? What is adoption? What is the child supply market?
“Telling someone, I’m adopted, has a different effect than saying, I was trafficked.”
According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, human trafficking is “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of people through force, fraud or deception, with the aim of exploiting them for profit.” It’s often argued that such practices aren’t present in each “adoption” and that not all adoptions are bad. Some victims are quick to point out “but that didn’t happen to me.” Since every case does not present the same, it’s important to learn and identify how the industry operates.
Adoption is defined as “the act or fact of legally taking someone else’s child to raise it as one’s own.” Contrary to advocates saying that “adoption is child trafficking” this definition clearly indicates the two terms are not the same. Taking a child as one’s own aligns more with child slavery. The word “taking” is conveniently vague, but involves a commodification process that turns the child into a product that can be legally bought and sold, ultimately to be owned. The industry has collaborated with governments to legalize this process so it can run an open marketplace for trafficking children without facing prosecution. In return, governments take a cut of the profits.
The global child supply market is primarily made up of private and state agencies (child placement markets), as well as IVF, surrogacy, and egg / sperm donation (fertility markets). Anti-trafficking organizations such as the Polaris Project and A21 state that the human traffickers operate in plain sight. This is true as buying and selling mothers, fathers, and their children has been legalized and openly celebrated and promoted through this global child supply market. As an industry, it is constantly seeking ways to broaden the marketplace to keep growing its profits.
“Victims are made to feel disconnected, isolated, and misunderstood.”
A victim’s support team is vital in their deprogramming process. To help them take this first step in deprogramming, professionals as well as loved ones, friends and those in their community need to have a firm grasp of the truth as well as the evidence to back it up. It takes time, patience, and compassion moving victims from a place of “I was adopted, I know it’s true because there are adoption papers, because everyone calls it adoption, and they told me I was adopted, because adoption is real” to a place of admitting “maybe I don’t know if it is true or real.” For many victims, what they were told to believe becomes their reality, especially when the false narratives are left unchallenged. Who is brainwashing them and why? The truth is the human trafficking industry has committed crimes against humanity under the guise of adoption across the world for centuries.
Victims are made to feel disconnected, isolated, and misunderstood. The industry does everything possible to protect its profits and the fantasy. The biggest threat to the industry are the millions of victims who may come after it one day seeking justice and accountability for its crimes. This means the industry invests a great deal to ensure that everyone in their lives keep the victims brainwashed and directs their anger towards each other. Once a common, universal language is agreed on and a mutual understanding is established, this part of the industry’s scheme will be rendered ineffective. Confusion will be replaced with clarity. With clarity comes truth and the opportunity for victims to connect around a common goal.
2. The human trafficking industry continues to commit crimes against humanity under the guise of child welfare.
These crimes have been mentioned in the previous section. The industry has been telling victims what to believe about what was done to them, what has caused their issues, who to blame, and even how they should “heal.” First Nations have faced genocide, cultural eradication, and religious cleansing. They have been outspoken about such crimes. Second and third generation victims of the industry are primarily focused on the issues of human rights, search and reunion, and the trauma from being relinquished and abandoned by their parents. Despite the evidence of genocide, slavery and mass murder, the industry has effectively brainwashed, desensitized, and normalized the acceptance of these crimes among its victims at this point.
Let’s address these crimes against humanity in the hopes to replace denial with acceptance of the truth. These next paragraphs may be difficult to read and ingest. However, this is a reality we cannot keep ignoring. The industry as we know it today originated from the British Child Migration Schemes in the 1600’s. During that time, traffickers built a child labor force from impoverished homes in Britain. They told parents “adoption is in the best interest of your child” and that “adoption will give your child a better life.” These phrases are still spoken today and are prominent in policies, namely the Hague Adoption Convention.
Traffickers promised thousands of parents that their children would receive the medical care and education they weren’t able to provide. Instead, the children were transported overseas to British colonies where they were relabeled “orphans” and put to work. Today, traffickers continue to target struggling families using the same phrases and transport children all over the world to buyers who then exploit the children for profit. You only need to look at the well-established online family content creators who monetize their videos, gain sponsors, and then too often “rehome” the child once issues start surfacing. This is just one of the many examples of child exploitation and child labor that is celebrated and promoted today.
“Child trafficking has been weaponized against developing countries, minority groups, and vulnerable populations.”
If that isn’t clear enough, let’s look at the parents themselves who are victims of sex trafficking and sex slavery. It isn’t a coincidence that these victims are overlooked in the dominant narratives of adoption. It isn’t a coincidence that no one asks “how was that child sourced?” The truth of what happens to mothers is horrifying. Reports of kidnapping pregnant young women and removing the babies from their murdered corpses often don’t make it into mainstream debates over ethical practices in adoption. What is equally nefarious is that buyers have gone to all lengths to get a child. They disregard how the child is sourced. They know these sex slave rings exist. They know the mothers are raped and killed.
Genocide is another crime against humanity that has been widely reported on among indigenous peoples across the world. From assimilation campaigns to war crimes, child trafficking has been weaponized against developing countries, minority groups, and vulnerable populations. Today, Russia has been reported to have taken Ukrainian children and placed them in Russian homes promising them medical care and education. This is considered a war crime. Notice the same tactics of promising them a better life, specifically medical care and education that was used over 400 years ago in the British Child Migration Schemes.
In September 2024, Scotland’s Traveller community shed light on the history of assimilation campaigns and successfully identified them as cultural genocide. A government-sanctioned investigation concluded that children from the Traveller community were removed from their families and placed in care throughout the last century. The investigation revealed that churches, charities, local authorities, the police, and the UK government’s Scottish Office were involved in this act of cultural eradication.
“The human trafficking industry uses adoption propaganda to run a global child supply market in which they are taken, trafficked, and killed for profit.”
Another crime against humanity is mass murder that doesn’t target just one population or country. Examples have emerged from reports of mass unmarked graves of infants and children. News broke about the mass grave found at a mother-and-baby institution in Tuam, Ireland. Local historian, Catherine Corless, raised concern about death certificates for 796 children that didn’t have corresponding burial records. International media covered the story that led to the discovery of a septic tank at the Tuam location filled with children’s remains. The excavation of this mass grave is underway.
Mass murder continues to show up today in local child placement programs in the US, Canada, and in countries across the world. However, with inaccurate reporting, missing data, and widespread corruption in child welfare systems, the industry keeps murder cases isolated and the agencies out of the spotlight. The media helps by focusing the attention on the murderers. When state and private agencies come under public scrutiny, they direct the outrage to fixing their “broken” systems. By doing so, they receive increases to their funding and budgets often without implementing any of their reform policies.
Every year, children continue to be taken from their families wrongfully and forcibly, trafficked and exploited through state and private agencies that place them with people who abuse and torture them to death. This is a longstanding pattern of mass murder committed by the industry for decades. Countless children are mis-identified, many have siblings who are put back in the system, and others remain missing.
The human trafficking industry uses adoption propaganda to run a global child supply market in which they are taken, trafficked, and killed for profit. The reality is that those who survive are victims of a industry responsible for crimes against humanity. How are we supposed to reconcile what has happened to us if these crimes are not acknowledged?
3. Deprogramming from the propaganda and brainwashing is a necessary step to learning and accepting the truth.
The truth is we live in a global culture of coercion run by the human trafficking industry that has effectively hidden its crimes with a more comfortable euphemism: adoption. Victims grow up with people who knowingly or unknowingly keep them brainwashed, believing the false narratives. These narratives are based on the language of adoption and not human trafficking.
Throughout history up through today, victims are challenging what they have been told and investigations of large-scale crimes continue to expose the industry. However, as profits have risen well into the hundreds of billions of dollars, churches, charities, local authorities, law enforcement, justice systems, and lawmakers continue to promote and endorse the industry. A step towards establishing a universal language is shifting the debates that get stuck on individual experiences towards more objective truths about the industry itself. Regardless of outcomes, the human trafficking industry is the common denominator for all of us.
It’s time to recognize that we live in a global culture of coercion that has celebrated, promoted, and funded human trafficking. It continues to be considered the fastest-growing criminal industry in the world. Replacing the lies and false narratives with the truth puts our experiences, our pains, our feelings into perspective. Acceptance of the truth about the industry and crimes liberates us. As victims, as disposable commodities, as slaves, nothing compares to the freedom from oppression. We are not disposable people, we are human beings. Our freedom is worth fighting for. We can achieve it when we all speak truth to power. From personal truth to collective truth to objective fact, we can speak as one.