In early 2022, I was contacted by an adoptive parent in Australia asking for support to an intercountry adoptee incarcerated for a very serious crime. They had heard about ICAV via the adoptee network and reached out hoping to find some sort of peer support. It took me around 13 months to finally wade through the justice system bureaucracy in order to gain permission and obtain access to meet regularly online, but finally it happened in early 2023.

During my time of getting to know that adoptee, the prison chaplain Fran also engaged with me and we’ve been closely connected ever since. I am impressed by how committed staff at the prison are to helping surround adoptees with support, such as this prison chaplain! I now regularly meet with 2 intercountry adoptees and it has really opened my eyes to how invisible intercountry adoptees are, both within the prison system and externally outside amongst the general public, but especially within our adoption community.

Intercountry adoptees are rarely followed up on once they arrive in their adoptive country. For some birth countries there is a requirement for the adoptive family to provide the adoption agency or the central authority with a (subjective) report on how they view their adopted child is going. This is required for a maximum of the first 5 years of our adoption but only for the occassional birth country, and is filed with the agency or government body – so do not assume these reports get sent to the birth family. Nobody from a psychological perspective, independently checks how the family and the adoptee are coping. Adoption is assumed to be a “win-win” for everyone.

We all know, and if you’ve read some of the material on ICAVs website, that this journey of intercountry and transracial adoption is incredibly complex and lifelong. Adoption doesn’t stop when a child enters the adoptive family and country. What I often see, is that the long term outcomes of adoption become much more visible once the adoptee hits their later adult years. This is often when we visibly see the struggle because the adoptee is now old enough to begin processing what they’ve lived and start to consider it from a perspective that can differ to what they’ve been told by their adoptive family. From my own experience as an adoptee and as a peer supporter, I can see we often struggle to understand what our experience is. If adoptees are not surrounded by people who understand this complexity well, who have the vocabulary to verbalise it, putting words to what we feel but often cannot describe, we are left alone and isolated, not connecting the dots with why we are struggling or how to cope.

Sadly, with no long term followup on adoptees, we don’t know how many of our community are in prison. The justice systems certainly do not capture “adoptee” status either and from the research I’ve looked at, there is barely any to recognise the trauma of relinquishment and displacement in adoption and connect the dots as to why adoptees might struggle and hence be overrepresented in prisons, just as they are in suicide. Most of the research looks at the biological markers of crime and whether we are susceptible due to our genetics or environment.

In providing support to only two inmates, I can see how little the justice system (which rightly focuses on rehabilitation) acknowledges the trauma of being an adopted and displaced person and fails to address the underlying factors that impact a person emotionally and how they find themselves in these dire situations. There is currently no funding within the jail systems that provides adoption specific rehabilitation to adoptees. I hope the lack of funding for adoptees incarcerated can change over time with awareness building. There needs to be the inclusion of identifying if an inmate is an adopted person so that appropriate supports can be provided to help them gently explore their adoption, if and when they are ready.

For adoptees, not knowing who we are, struggling most of our lives to live in-between worlds, wanting to desperately fit in but yet often being treated differently to our white adoptive family by others in the wider world, these are core challenges the family and adoptee must be equipped to deal with. We are often left completely unsupported with little help to understand the importance of educating and surrounding ourselves in adoption communities for the lifelong duration, to better understand how adoptees can struggle and where the best supports and resources are for the whole family, not just the adoptee.

Too often adoptive families are left to figure it out and be proactive to reach out whereas we know that many of the historic, private, proxy and unregulated adoptions were done without in-depth education or adoption professionals involved to help adoptive parents know any better. In 2025, this is still currently an unaddressed and high risk reality with the rise in non-Hague adoptions. It is the expatriate, private, and independent adoptions that are growing in number now, like the era of the 70s to 90s, whereas the Hague adoptions are shrinking in numbers as country after country closes down.

We have to do better to ensure more positive outcomes of adoption for everyone and try to reach families whose adoptions were done in the early eras without support.

Our next ICAV post will feature our first adoptee globally to give voice to their experience as an intercountry transracial adoptee who is currently incarcerated.

By sharing his voice, I hope we can find individual ways to reach out to adoptive families and adoptees who might be struggling like this and do what we can to help connect them to the post adoption resources now available. Things have definitely gotten better for the adoption community in that aspect, mostly because the adoption community creates so much of these resources. Australia is also lucky that due to our advocacy and a government who has now investigated the impacts of past adoptions and understood the connections between adoption, separation, displacement and trauma, we now have access to federally funded post adoption services such as ICAFSS for intercountry adoptees. But some families in Australia and around the world, still don’t know where to turn for post adoption services, both professionally and informally provided.

I hope our community can listen and seek to hear the voices of those most invisible, facing social stigma and surround these families and adoptees with empathy, compassion and support.

Resources

Blue Bayou (Netflix) based on the true life stories of some of the intercountry adoptees in the USA who have been deported. This is because the USA has failed to close their legal loopholes that fail to give automatic citizenship to any adoptee adopted prior to 1983, they get deported for having committed a crime and because their adoptive families failed to obtain their citizenship.

Citizenship for American intercountry adoptees (ICAV Perspective Paper)

Deported, but not Forgotten (webinar by AKA with intercountry adoptee panelists who have been deported from the USA)

Unerased: The deportation of Adoptees in America (podcast series)