“With the voices of adopted adults being heard across the world, and the messaging being conveyed, it is imperative that adoption as we know and understand it, evolves. Coram IAC will continue to drive understanding and best practice, as highlighted in the EurAdopt conference, Coram IAC hosted in April 2024 attended by delegates from all over the world.”
Coram IAC accounts to 31st March 2025, page 9 via Companies House
Many aspects of the report concern me but I will focus on this one paragraph. I first came into contact with the International Adoption Centre (IAC) before their merger with Coram, over ten years ago now. I was invited to attend a group meeting of adults with an international element to their adoption. Ironically the group was named ‘international searchers.’ During those quarterly Saturday workshops many of us spoke about the challenges of trying to trace and locate birth families abroad, along with the psychological difficulties we encountered being raised by our colourblind and culturally incompetent adopters. Not once did the IAC offer to help any one of us in our searches. Not once were we told that there was any counselling service available to us through the IAC to help us process the lifelong trauma of being raised as white in a racist society. All we encountered were head-nodding and platitudes. Those workshops eventually stopped with promises of more that never materialised, perhaps because two of the people who initiated them, employees who were themselves intercountry adoptees, were coincidentally let go from their employment.
Years later, in 2023 there was a takeover of the IAC by Coram, an organisation whose CEO Carol Homden proudly displays wretched-looking children on her Twitter header. Coram harks back to the nostalgic days of empire and colonialism, when wealthy donors congratulated themselves on their efforts and memorialised themselves in a museum, while the anonymous children they ‘saved’ were severed from family and identity. Coram, and particularly Carol, are too busy expanding their child-rescue business, sanitising their own history, and collecting colonial honours to ever listen to the voices of intercountry adult adoptees.
Coram IAC didn’t give us a better life, they gave us a different life. One in which feelings of loss and disconnect from our countries, languages and cultures of origin are silenced. I would like to make it known that this organisation continues to ignore our voices in favour of younger adults who proudly share how their adoptions gave them privilege. They have not consulted with the very individuals who now struggle with mental health issues as a direct consequence of being white-washed by our adoptions. They still refuse to engage with anything that does not fit their narrative: that adoption saved us all from a life of poverty and institutional oppression in orphanages; that we were somehow civilised and given a better quality of life. For more than 25 years now they have brought children into this country and yet refused to support them as adults, in spite of their stated aims. Where are the intermediary services and tracing services for adult adoptees who wish to search? Why are we left alone to navigate boundaries and bureaucracies in our countries of origin? They should have a duty of care towards the adults who were adopted internationally. Where is the support that they advertise for us on their website? It doesn’t exist.
Coram IAC refuses to confront this uncomfortable truth or have an open dialogue on the lifelong mental health impact for adult intercountry adoptees. They host the EurAdopt conference but do not invite adult adoptees unless they are willing to endorse their message. They have funding to visit India, Sri Lanka and the Philippines to organise adoptions of babies and young children but no funding available to counsel or support those individuals as adults. There are lifelong consequences to those children of their actions as an active intercountry adoption agency. We have rich cultures and birth relationships that should be preserved, not stripped away and falsified, nor should we be taken thousands of miles away with no hope of ever finding our genetic roots or of integration.
So next time you see the proud CEO of Coram remarking on her wonderful achievements and her honours please remember the adult intercountry adoptees whose ‘messaging’ is so concerning, that she so casually and proudly dismisses behind the scenes.