Pause to celebrate the wins along the way!

When I last saw one of my amazing therapists, this is what they said to me that I needed to do more often. This is because I am usually busy working to push for much needed change that I often forget to pat myself on the back and celebrate what I achieve.

So .. I celebrate this!

This is the apology letter written to me which I received today by the Australian Department of Home Affairs – responsible for immigration. They accepted responsibility for my sexual abuse given I was legally under their guardianship for the first 17 years of my life under the Immigration (Guardianship of Children) Act of 1946. This is also because my adoptive family, in their negligence, had failed to adopt me properly despite hiring a private lawyer in Vietnam and bringing me into the country as a 5 month old baby, and then abusing me sexually which was pled guilty to, in April last year.

So I am one of the rare few adoptees in Australia who was allowed to participate in our Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and was awarded the maximum amount in compensation, and given the opportunity to have a face to face apology meeting with the institutional representatives that I requested. In November of 2023, I met with and received my apology from the other institution who accepted responsibility, the Lutheran Church who had been the adoption agency to approve my parents to adopt. The adoption of me remains highly illegal and illicit in nature, more so this month after finding out from some of the action items that resulted out of this apology meeting, that my adoptive parents were given approval to adopt by the Lutheran’s who had no authority to do so. The Lutheran’s had been approved only to conduct domestic adoptions in Australia.

Due to my experience in advocacy, I chose to use the face to face apology opportunity to meet with the Australian Home Affairs Department because I wanted them to see the real person, not just pay out some amount to a bank account that is faceless. I wanted them to be impacted by meeting me and hearing what I had to say. I wanted them to hear my experiences and understand their role in my pain that continues to this day. I also wanted to highlight how private, independent and proxy intercountry adoptions can still be done in this manner today with very little safeguards in place because parents can bypass the 1993 Hague Convention standards and get themselves a child by paying lawyers to find an available child in a foreign country and rubber stamp what can appear to be a legal adoption.

I shared my impact statement to the Minister of Immigration, Andrew Giles, on 23 July in Melbourne. He represented the Australian Department of Home Affairs, along with 3 others of the executive staff. In my statement you can read I also raise the other relevant issues which the department is responsible for such as my illegal adoption, their lack of duty of care to protect and investigate my origins and identity, and to check whether their own processes were being followed.

The minister told me I am the first person to receive a personal apology from a commonwealth minister and I certainly experienced that, as our process for getting the apology done took over 14 months with a lot of fighting caused by bureaucracy putting process ahead of treating a survivor with dignity and respect. Apparently the commonwealth does not allow any minister to meet for more than 1 hour?! Minister Giles (and other ministers), was also moved on from his portfolio 3 days after this meeting. Luckily I’m an experienced advocate and didn’t get put off or give up, but I can say it was another lesson of who has power and who doesn’t.

I’ve been proud of myself for getting through the apology process, sharing my impact statement and for holding it together emotionally amongst a group who usually do not get to where they are by being nice. Politics is usually a ruthless, cut-throat arena, full of power players, some winners, some losers. In a small way, I feel I have held the Australian government to account for the sexual abuse component of my traumas. I hope having to listen to my experiences and impacts, paying compensation, and apologising to my face has made them think more deeply about protecting the child’s rights whom they are the only gatekeepers for. When approving visas to allow kids into this country who are not biologically related to the Australian adults who are accompanying them, I hope they remember the lessons learnt from my life.

I have certainly appreciated the lengths they have gone to for honouring my request to create a beautifully memorialised apology letter and I have some inkling that perhaps I touched them in a way their job has never experienced before!

I hope one day to also have an apology process for our illegal and illicit intercountry adoptions where we as victims can have the opportunity to be heard, validated for our suffering, receive compensation, and have reassurance from those in authority – that they will do better to ensure no other child is commodified and traded in the ways many of us have experienced.

Huge thanks to the professional mediators, Anne for the first 12 months, then Jodie. Also to the formal DPR support team, Frances, who were the ones I turned to when the bureaucracy of government just got too much. I couldn’t have done it without Frances – she was an amazing ally and advocate for me! Also, thanks to my support person Sue for being with me on the day. Each of these people did their best to support me and ensure the meeting finally went ahead and smoothly – but it sure had been a bumpy ride with many lessons learnt.

What I learnt was that the process of providing apologies needs to be survivor led and trauma informed, so as not to add more harm to those to whom you are apologising to.

Resources

My day of reckoning with the Lutheran Church

Adopted for 32 years and now free!

National apology to victims and survivors of institutional child sexual abuse