Trauma is deeper for adoptees

[7rin]

Lifton, B.J. (1994) Journey of the Adopted Self: A Quest for Wholeness. New York: Basic Books. pp259-260

During a trip to Hawwaii, I met a therapist who had been invited to work with a group of adoptees who were in various stages of search and reunion. The adoption experience was new to him, but he was no stranger to grief and loss and pain. He was an empathic man, and he seemed puzzled. He said that the adoptees in his group, and the ones he has begun to see in his private practice, seemed traumatized. They do not shed their symptoms like his other patients. Their trauma seems deeper, as if it were very early - almost as if it were cellular.

Trauma is earlier for adoptees than for most other people, I told him. It begins at birth, with separation from the mother. And it's more persistent because adoptees have no pre-traumatic self. And then I explained what I meant by this.

We know that when adoptive parents have been traumatized by not being able to conceive a child, they already have adult selves that can absorb and work through the shock. So too, the birth mother may have been young when she was traumatized by her unwanted pregnancy, but she had a self to fall back on as she continued her life. But the adoptee, who experienced separation and loss early in life, usually at birth, has no previous self - no pre-traumatic self - from which to draw strength.

Surveillance and Child Protection: De-mystifying the Trojan Horse

[7rin]

Lynne Wrennall; John Moores University, UK.

Abstract
This paper belongs to an embryonic body of scholarship that documents the camouflaging of political, economic and commercial agendas under the rhetoric of Child Protection. The Trojan Horse theory of Child Protection, as this scholarship may broadly be termed, alleges the misuse of Child Protection powers for ulterior motives. Years of struggle against the Law and Order, Psychiatric and other discourses have won a raft of Civil and Human Rights protections. Bypassing these protections, Child Protection provides a rhetoric that disguises surveillance and disarms opposition, because a justifiable and apparently benign pretext has been found in the ostensible and entirely laudable, aim of protecting children. The paper collates widespread evidence of how the pretext of Child Protection has been used to extend surveillance and disarm populations. Through the discourse of Child Protection, children are propelled through various constructions from ‘child in need’, to ‘child at risk’, to ‘potentially delinquent’, to ‘delinquent’, but in each case, transgressions of ever more restrictive and constantly morphing laws, regulations and expectations are used to infiltrate techniques of information gathering deeper into more intimate parts of the social body. Child Protection is now used to penetrate where orthodox policing can no longer go. Throughout the process of criminalisation, whether children are constructed as victim or transgressor, pretexts for expanding power and increasing profit are developed. Transgression by, or against, children, is used to further the economic, political and commercial interests in surveillance. To fully understand the relationship between surveillance and Child Protection, it is necessary to interrogate the information-sharing model that is built into the major Child Protection frameworks. The paper explores the manner in which Child Protection has been structured by the information- sharing model, to benefit the sectional interests in surveillance and the detrimental consequences that this has for children and young people.