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| Edited By: Anuja Bansal |Source: DNA |Updated: Jul 15, 2018, 07:10 AM IST
India is home to 20 million parentless and abandoned children who have lost the care and support of their parents at a very young age. Even though there is no specific data available, it is believed that finding prospective adoptive parents (PAPs) willing to adopt all siblings, who have lost parental care in India, is tough. Therefore, I wish to highlight the need to keep siblings together while placing them under adoption or any other alternative care.
There are numerous studies that show how biological siblings can positively influence each other. In one of the recent studies, it was suggested that those who have siblings understand people better and are better adept to handle social situations. Therefore, upon losing their parents, siblings develop a certain kind of emotional dependence on each other.
Siblings become their only source of solace and basis of trust. When these children are adopted together, the transition becomes smoother and quicker. On the other hand, losing a sibling during this transition phase makes it difficult and often traumatic for the separated child to trust the new environment.
Keeping siblings together is in their best interest. However, there are times when tough decisions are made during adoption to separate them. For adoption of siblings, the current procedure mandates that when declaring these children as legally free to adopt, the Child Welfare Committee (CWC) must specify the status of the children as siblings or twins, in a single order. Similarly, when an adoption agency or a childcare institution files an application in the court concerned, they, too, shall file a single application in the court, for siblings. This way, when Central Adoption Resource Authority (CARA), governed by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, receives the application, they make all efforts to find suitable PAPs, willing to adopt the siblings together.
Parents seeking adoption are usually only looking to adopt a single child. It is very rare that parents opt for siblings. It has also been observed that it is the placement of older siblings (children who have completed five years of age), and those with special needs, that find it difficult to find adoptive parents.
It is an internationally accepted norm that all organisations working with children should never separate siblings. The society must also look at adoptions with a positive lens and plug awareness gaps. Our government has been playing an active role, so far, to place siblings together, as even the amended Juvenile Justice Act, 2015 recommends that ‘all efforts must be made to keep siblings together unless it is in the best interest of the child’. Separating siblings, indeed, is a very tough decision for any government to make, but if all stakeholders come together to find alternate solutions, I am certain the problem can be solved.
The author is Secretary General, SOS Children’s Villages of India
