Blood binds: Confronting the moral and political economies of orphanhood and adoption in Uganda (original) (raw)
Related papers
2013
The study examined alternative family and community care options and how they can be strengthened; cultural attitudes and perceptions of the communities and experiences of prospective foster and adoptive parents as regards reunification, kinship care, fostering and adoption; the study examined Government’s position and policies in place to support family reunification with institutionalized children, and sought views about how hindrances to family care can be dealt with. Children as young as one day continue to be abandoned due to problems facing Ugandan households and affecting children such as, HIV/AIDS, food insecurity (JLICA 2009), exclusion of girls and women thereby little access by to health services resulting into unwanted pregnancies; conflict as shown by (MGLSD 2006). The result is teenage births combined with fear to look after babies; young parents on streets of Kampala; mother’s anger due to abandon-ment by the responsible fathers (Rowbottom (2007); fear of looking afte...
Orphan care: the role of the extended family in northern Uganda
1999
This paper examines the traditional role of the extended family in orphan care in northern Uganda. The extended family provides much support in looking after orphans, but has been overburdened by the AIDS epidemic with the result that some care is being provided by the older orphans, who are too young for the responsibility. The main problems of orphans are lack of money, inadequate parental care and some mistreatment by the caregivers.
Experiences of orphan care in Amach, Uganda: assessing policy implications
SAHARA-J: Journal of Social Aspects of HIV/AIDS, 2007
Uganda is estimated to have around two million orphans constituting approximately 19% of all the children in the country.This paper presents findings from a study on the experiences of orphan care among Langi people of Amach sub-county in Lira District, northern Uganda, and discusses their policy implications.The study utilised the following methods in data collection: eight months of ethnographic fieldwork; 21 in-depth interviews with community leaders; 45 with heads of households caring for orphans; 35 with orphans; and five focus group discussions.The findings revealed that the Langi people have an inherently problematic orphan concept, which contribute toward discriminatory attitudes and practices against orphans.The clan based decision-making to care for orphans, the category of kin a particular orphan ends up living with, the sex and age of the orphan, as well as the cessation of the 'widow-inheritance' custom emerged as prominent factors which impact on orphan care. Thus there is the need to draw upon such local knowledge in policy making and intervention planning for orphans.The paper concludes with a discussion of potential approaches to alleviating the current orphan challenges among the Langi people.
Conflict, Violence, and Peace: Geographies of Children and Young People Vol. 11, 2015
While many scholars and activists from various disciplines have reported on various aspects of orphan policy and the international adoption industry, there has been little synthesis of this information and its implications for global child protection. This chapter therefore puts the pieces together to argue that the misidentification of ‘orphans’ as a category for development and humanitarian intervention has subsequently been misappropriated by many Western individuals and charitable organizations. Promoting a discourse of orphan rescue, they foster the growth of an ‘orphan industrial complex.’ In developing countries like Guatemala and Uganda whose children are targeted for ‘rescue,’ the discourse and practice of ‘orphan rescue’ is subsequently jeopardizing child protection and even driving the ‘production’ of orphans as objects for particular kinds of intervention counter to established international standards of child protection.
BMC Public Health, 2009
This article is based on information collected about the situation of double orphans who are heading households in Rakai District, Uganda. The information will be used as justification and guidance for planning actions to improve the situation of these and similar children. This research is thus the first step in an Action Research approach leading to specific interventions. The aim of this article is to describe the situation of these orphaned children, with an emphasis on the psychosocial challenges they face.
The Drama of De-orphaning: Botswana's Old Orphans and the Rewriting of Kinship Relations
Botswana has the world's highest rate of orphans, primarily as a result of HIV and AIDS. National response policies include a range of material resources given to relatives caring for parentless children. The insertion of financial incentive into kinship obligations has transformed younger orphans into valuable assets, leading some relatives (at least allegedly) to compete for the " right " to house them, and causing moral ambivalence among the public. Yet as orphans reach legal adulthood, the cessation of social services and poor opportunities for wage labour alter relations with relatives in unexpected ways. In this article, I explore how the ranks of meaningful kin appear to both swell and shrink around youth ageing out of their " orphan " status. Based on four years of ethnographic fieldwork in Botswana between 2003 and 2013, these case studies expose significant labour expended among families in policing categories of personhood like greedy relatives, needy orphans, and economically stagnant youth. I show how kinship relations become affectively populated through moral discourses – and how these discourses in turn provide pathways for new forms of claims-making, even for the supplanting of " verifiable " kin by less " traditionally " legitimate forms of relatedness – ultimately reshaping the very practice of kinship in rural Botswana.
Saving Africa’s Children: Transnational Adoption and The New Humanitarian Order
2017
My dissertation explores transnational adoptions of black African children by white Western parents as a site through which to think about global affective relationality and transnational histories within intimate proximities. The image of an interracial, transnational family can seem to be a fulfillment of the potential for transcendent love symbolized by humanitarian fundraisers such as Live Aid-a love that collapses borders and brings together races in multicultural bliss. Furthermore, adoptions of African children can potentially challenge discursive systems of categorization that frame the black body as existing outside the body politic. At the same time, however, we cannot understand transnational adoption without taking into account the histories of power that make possible and potentially limit the contours of these affective orientations. Indeed, representations of a transnational family consisting particularly of black African children and white Western parents not only invoke the logic of white moral motherhood within the context of contemporary globalization; they also point to European philosophical traditions that presuppose the colonizer's right to the black body. In this project, thus, I ask: what are the sociopolitical and cultural motivations behind the desire to express humanitarian love towards African children through the act of adoption? How might these motivations create avenues for exclusion and exploitation even as they create new geographies of belonging? To answer these questions, this project brings the affective domain of contemporary transnational adoption between African children and white American parents into conversation with histories of colonial transnational intimacies and the precarious lived experiences of classed and racialized individuals in the African postcolony. In challenging popular celebratory fictions of the transnational family, it critically examines not only the utopian aspirations and social costs of transnational adoption as a humanitarian project, but also the very affect produced and channeled through adoption as a humanitarian act.