Lynelle’s Keynote Speech at the EurAdopt Malta Conference – 16 April 2026
Photos courtesy of Malta’s Foundation for Social Welfare Services (FSWS), by David Mizzi
I want to begin not with policy but with a moment.
I was a 5 month old infant when I was flown out of Vietnam and taken for adoption to Australia. I have no memory of that journey but my body does because when I try to imagine it now, I don’t imagine the plane. I know and feel separation. A mother whose arms are suddenly empty. A child, me, who cannot understand what is happening. A system that records the movement but not the rupture.
I arrived in Australia with almost nothing. No clear history. No verified identity. Only later did I come to understand that my lack of paperwork told an incomplete story and for many years, that was the story I lived inside.
I grew up in a white Australian family. I was loved in a way they only knew how. I was provided for materially and I was given opportunity.
On paper, the system appeared to work but as I moved into adolescence, something began to fracture.
A kind of unnameable difference.
I didn’t have the language for it then. But I felt it in moments like:
• Standing in school photos – the only non-white face
• Being asked, “Where are you really from?”
• Hearing jokes or comments about Asians and not knowing were they referring to me
• Looking at my parents and knowing, without anyone saying it, that I did not come from them.
And perhaps most profoundly, looking in the mirror and seeing a face that told a story that no one around me could help me understand.
I had no Vietnamese culture. No Vietnamese family. No access to my original history beyond a few guesstimates.
I carried two realities at once. Externally, I appeared to be a successful adoption story but internally, I lived a quiet, persistent sense of dislocation and displacement.
That dislocation didn’t erupt dramatically in childhood. It simmered and surfaced in small moments:
• When strangers asked why my Australian name didn’t match my looks.
• When history lessons mentioned the Vietnam War and I felt my body tense.
• When I realised I had no medical history to understand why I was blind in one eye.
But the deeper reckoning didn’t come until adulthood.
It came when I began connecting with other adoptees. When I heard stories that mirrored my own: confusion about identity, incomplete records, search complexities, grief that had never been named.
It came when I returned to Vietnam for the first time in my late 20s. Standing in the country of my birth, I realised something profound: adoption had not ended when I arrived in Australia. It had simply changed form. It followed me into adulthood, into relationships, into parenthood, and into advocacy. And I began to understand that what I had experienced was not just personal – it was structural. And this is where my story shifts from personal experience to systemic responsibility.
The system that moved me across borders had been designed around the idea of a child needing a family. But no-one had designed it around the adult that I would become.
No-one had planned for the questions that would emerge decades later. No-one had imagined that 1.2m of us would one day grow up, connect globally, and begin asking for truth, accountability, and restoration.
When I founded my network InterCountry Adoptee Voices (ICAV), it was because I realised something else: we are not isolated stories, we are generations.
Now, five decades after my own flight out of Vietnam, I am not speaking as a child of the system. I am speaking as an adult shaped by it. And what I know, from my own life and from thousands of adoptees worldwide who I speak to – is this: adoption does not end at placement. It changes form and follows us across a lifetime. And if we truly believe adoption is permanent, then our policies must be mature enough to accompany us across that lifetime. That is what I want to explore with you today.
Adoption Across a Lifetime: Why Reform Must Move Beyond the Child-Centric Lens
Thank you Satwinder for inviting me to speak to you all today.
Good morning to you all! My name is Lynelle Long. I am a Vietnamese Australian intercountry adoptee and the founder of InterCountry Adoptee Voices (ICAV) — a global network connecting intercountry adoptees across sending and receiving countries.
For more than 28 years, I have witnessed the evolution of our voices: from invisible, to storytelling, to rights-based advocacy, to formal engagement with governments and international bodies. My website remains a living testament to our journey of growth.
Today, I want to speak about something simple, yet deeply overlooked: Adoption policy is designed for a child. But adoption happens to a person. People like me – and we grow up.
We are the Child Who Never Stops Growing
Intercountry adoption has largely been framed as a child protection intervention. The guiding principle under the 1998 Hague Intercountry Adoption Convention is “the best interests of the child.” But I want to gently challenge us: what happens when that child becomes an adolescent? An adult? A parent? A grandparent? An ageing person navigating dementia, loss, or mortality? Where in our systems do we account for that?
If adoption is permanent (legally, socially, psychologically) then responsibility must also be permanent. Yet most adoption systems are structured around placement. Once the child is placed, oversight diminishes, support fades and evaluation stops. But the lived experience does not.
Adolescence: The Identity Fault Line
For many intercountry adoptees, adolescence is the first rupture. I name it the Identity Fault Line. This is when racial identity sharpens. When belonging becomes fragile. When the question, “Where are you really from?” lands differently. It’s a question that sounds simple, but is a reminder that you don’t fully belong.
It is also often when we begin to understand that our histories may be incomplete, altered, or inaccessible. It is something we don’t talk about enough. Adoptees are often expected to process identity but without information, history or mirrors.
Policy frameworks rarely anticipate this stage. There is no automatic provision of identity counselling. No standardised access to original records. No structural preparation for the reality that identity development for adoptees is uniquely complex.
The system assumes stability because legal permanence has been achieved. But permanence on paper does not equal integration in the psyche. For many adoptees like myself, what looks on the outside as success can often be a growing sense of internal dislocation.
Adulthood
The deepest reckoning doesn’t happen in childhood. It happens in adulthood and this is where policy and practice is least prepared. In our 30s to 40s, when we become parents ourselves. When our adoptive parents age or pass away. When DNA technology reveals truths our paperwork concealed. Adulthood is where the questions become unavoidable.
Across Europe and beyond, we are witnessing investigations into historical intercountry adoptions. Files that were falsified. Consents that were coerced. Identities altered. These discoveries are not happening to children. They are happening to adults like me – decades after our placement. And yet, most systems have no clear pathway for redress. No guaranteed access to original identity. No streamlined dual citizenship protections. No funded psychological support for the trauma of displacement and loss. No ombudsman independent of agencies or states. Adoption is treated as a completed transaction. But for us adoptees, it is ongoing.
Mental Health Across Decades
We must also speak honestly about mental health across the decades. Adoption-related trauma is not linear. It does not resolve because a child appears to adjust well at age ten.
It resurfaces at life transitions:
• Becoming a parent without medical history.
• Losing an adoptive parent and confronting unresolved identity.
• Returning to a birth country and experiencing cultural dislocation.
• Facing secondary rejection in reunion.
• Navigating fertility questions.
• Ageing without extended kin networks.
Many adoptees describe a layered grief – ambiguous loss that has no ritual, no collective acknowledgment. This grief is real, but barely recognised by the systems that created it. Post-adoption support, where it exists, is often short-term and child-focused. If we know adoption is lifelong, why are services not?
Citizenship Insecurity and Legal Vulnerability
In some receiving countries, such as the United States, adoptees have discovered in adulthood that their adoptive citizenship was never properly secured. Some have been deported. Others live with the ongoing threat of deportation. Some have experienced statelessness. Others only discover their vulnerability decades later when applying for a passport, a job, or trying to vote.
But insecurity does not exist only in receiving countries. In some birth countries, adoptees like myself struggle to reclaim our original citizenship. I would like dual citizenship. I would like to return to my country of birth as a citizen – not on an Australian visitor visa. And yet, for many intercountry adoptees, reclaiming that legal identity is almost impossible.
If states authorise adoption – how can citizenship ever be conditional?
A lifetime lens demands that we guarantee the most basic legal foundation for those whose identities were restructured by state systems because citizenship is not just a legal status. It is belonging.
Return to Birth Country: Not Tourism — but Identity Negotiation
Many adoptees choose to return to their birth country as adults. When I returned to Vietnam in my late 20s, I thought I was going back to a place but what I encountered was something much deeper. I encountered absence.
I stood in the country where I was born and realised something I had never fully understood before: I did not fully belong there but I did not fully belong in Australia either. That is the complexity of intercountry adoption. We are often told we are given a “new life” but no-one tells us we live that life between worlds.
For us, return to our birth country is not a holiday. It is not heritage tourism. It is identity negotiation. We encounter:
• Language barriers.
• Economic disparity.
• Emotional overwhelm.
• Birth family expectations.
• Our own internalised narratives.
And sometimes, we encounter truths that destabilise the foundation of our adoptive identity.
Few systems prepare adoptees for this. Few provide structured support before and after return, or for reunion. Yet return is increasingly common, especially in an era of accessible DNA testing.
Ageing Adoptees: The Emerging Frontier
There is another dimension we rarely discuss: ageing adoptees – this is the emerging frontier.
Intercountry adoption expanded significantly in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Many of us are now entering midlife. But there are also adoptees from the first wave – particularly from European countries: Greece, Italy, and Germany who are already elderly.
What happens when an adoptee with disability loses their adoptive parents and the health insurance they provided? What happens when adoptees pass away and original documents remain inaccessible for their children seeking genealogical information? What happens when an adoptee without extended family enters aged care? How does an adoptee support themselves financially if their adoption broke down and they’ve struggled their whole life with little resources?
Adoption policy has not planned for this but it must because adoption is not a childhood intervention. It is a lifetime restructuring of identity and kinship.
Multi-Generational Impacts
Adoption does not affect just one person. It reshapes multiple generations.
Adoptees become parents. We raise children without full medical histories. We navigate how to explain erased origins. We manage generational trauma.
When I became a parent, everything changed because suddenly questions I could once avoid became impossible to ignore. How do you parent a child when you don’t know your own beginnings? How do you answer questions about heritage when your own story is incomplete? How do you explain identity when yours was rewritten?
And this is where adoption becomes multi-generational because the gaps do not end with us. They extend forward.
Families of origin also carry lifelong grief. Many receive no counselling, no recognition, no structured support.
Adoptive families often receive preparation mostly for infancy and childhood but little education for adult adoptee complexities.
If we intervene in one generation, we influence the next. A future-oriented adoption policy must account for that.
Where We Are Now: What Progress and Limitations?
It is important to acknowledge progress. Adoptee voices are no longer marginal. Governments have initiated investigations. Public apologies have been issued in some countries. DNA technology has empowered truth-seeking for adoptees and families of origin. Adoptee-led research and peer networks continue to grow.
But we must also be honest.
Apologies without reparations are incomplete and possibly compound upon existing harms. Access to records remains inconsistent. Adult support services are limited. Prevention and family preservation remain underfunded.
Adoption continues while unresolved harms from past decades remain. We are in a transitional era.
A Lifetime Model
What would adoption policy look like if it were redesigned with a lifetime lens?
It would include:
Lifelong Post-Adoption Support
This means State-funded, trauma-informed services that are accessible at any stage of life – recognising that needs evolve over time, particularly at key life transitions.
Guaranteed Access to Original Identity
This means a consistent, rights-based approach to accessing original records – not discretionary, and not dependent on agency goodwill or existence, acknowledging that identity is fundamental, not optional.
Legal Restoration Pathways
This means flexible legal frameworks that allow for restoration of original identity where needed, including models that recognise connections to both adoptive families and families of origin. In some cases, this may also include avenues to review or undo adoptions where serious irregularities or harms have occurred, or because the adoptee wishes.
Citizenship Security
Clear, automatic, and enduring citizenship protections for all intercountry adoptees, ensuring that no individual faces legal uncertainty nor has to question their belonging in either country as a result of processes they did not control.
Independent International Oversight
Mechanisms informed by lived experience to ensure transparency, accountability, and consistency across jurisdictions.
Longitudinal Outcome Tracking
Data collection across 30, 50, and even 70 years to better understand the full impact of adoption across the lifespan, rather than relying on short-term post-placement reporting.
Investment in Prevention and Family Preservation
A continued and strengthened commitment to supporting families and communities in countries of origin, so that intercountry adoption is truly rare, not a response to preventable vulnerability.
Most importantly, a lifetime model would require a shift in how success is measured.
Rather than focusing primarily on how efficiently children are placed, we would begin to ask: How are adoptees faring decades later? How are families across all sides experiencing the outcomes? What are the long-term social, psychological, and legal impacts?
And perhaps, as we reflect on the lessons learned over the past decades, there is also space to ask a broader question: Whether the current frameworks are sufficient in their existing form – or whether future models of care and protection might need to be reimagined more collaboratively, with equal consideration given to the voices and experiences of adoptees, families of origin, and adoptive families.
A Shift in Framing
This is not about rejecting child protection. It is about expanding it.
Child-centred must become human-centred. Temporary oversight must become structural responsibility. If adoption is permanent, accountability must be permanent. If identity is altered, restoration pathways must exist. If families are restructured, generational impacts must be anticipated.
Success should no longer be about placement, paperwork or early adjustment. Success is how a person lives across their lifetime.
In Closing
We are no longer the children in the system. We are adults living its consequences and asking the system to grow up with us. Many of us are parents raising the next generation. We are ageing into a future no-one designed for us. What we are advocating for is not radical.
Adoption across a lifetime requires courage from policymakers, from agencies, from governments and professionals to admit that permanency is not the same as wholeness.
We have an opportunity to design systems that are more honest, more transparent, more humane, and more prepared for complexity. The question is not whether adoption changes lives because it does. The question is: will our systems evolve enough to take responsibility for that change across lifetimes?
A future oriented adoption policy must account for this because we are not temporary subjects of this system. We are its lifelong outcome.
Thank you.
Resources
The importance of engaging adoptees in the design and ownership of post adoption support services
The demand for adoptee peer support is strong
Restoring identity for intercountry adoptees
Children’s rights to access justice and effective remedies
What rights should intercountry adoptees have?
The trauma inherent in relinquishment and adoption
What’s the future of intercountry adoption?
Adoptees as experts influencing international standards through advocacy