The Swedish Adoption World and the Process of Coming to Terms with Transnational Adoption

Abstract

In October 2021 the Swedish government committee of inquiry, the Adoption Commission, was appointed, which presented its final report in June 2025. The Adoption Commission investigated irregular and unethical adoptions to Sweden from the 1950s until today, and it was a part of an ongoing global process of coming to terms with past concerning transnational adoptions. This qualitative media text study examines how the Adoption Commission was perceived by the Swedish adoption world’s three stakeholders, the adoptive parents, the adoption organizations, and the adoptees, between 2021 and 2024 and in relation to transitional justice theories, with a focus on the issues of retributive and restorative justice.

1. Introduction and Background

Sweden is the country in the world that by far has adopted the most foreign-born children per capita from the Global South and former Communist Eastern Europe, resulting in over 60,000 adoptions from abroad since the 1950s. Sweden and the Swedes have also arguably been the most pro-transnational adoption country and nation in the world, and this is caused by the historical fact that Sweden pioneered the practice itself, together with the US, during its foundational years in the 1950s (Hübinette 2024). The Swedish state had also already entered into bilateral adoption agreements with countries of origin from the mid-1960s, and the state itself organized thousands of adoptions until 1980 when it handed over the full responsibility to arrange adoptions from abroad to private adoption organizations (Lindgren 2010; Van Steen 2019, p. 64). It is therefore no coincidence that the country harbours the second biggest adoption-mediating organization in the world after American Holt in the form of the Adoption Centre (abbreviated as AC and Adoptionscentrum in Swedish), which has been behind almost 30,000 adoptions to Sweden since its founding in 1969.

In addition, the Swedish pro-transnational adoption stance also goes back to the birth of Sweden as the world’s leading adopting country in the 1960s when a radical form of left-liberal antiracism and an urgent desire for a multiracial nation became the ideological underpinnings behind the subsequent phenomenon of mass adoptions of non-white foreign-born children (Hübinette 2023). Richey Wyver argues that “the commitment to international adoption goes beyond quantity and legislative influence: the adoption project has been central to the shaping of the modern Swedish national identity” as “the non-white body of the transracial adoptee could not just produce multi-culturalism in the home, but also shape an anti-racist society, with their body connecting the white family to the Third World, and to histories of racial oppression—without being implicated as an aggressor” (Wyver 2023, p. 3). Recently, however, this positive Swedish attitude towards transnational adoption, which has been hegemonic for decades and has included both official and popular stakeholder groups from across the whole political spectrum, has slowly but steadily come to be challenged by numerous media revelations about corrupt and criminal adoptions.

There have been intermittent media reports about unethical adoptions ever since the 1970s, and individual adoptees have been politically active in demanding a government investigation into the problem of illegal adoptions for over two decades. However, they had little impact on public discourse and within the political domain until February 2021 when the biggest Swedish morning newspaper Dagens Nyheter (hereafter DN) started to publish an ambitious article series about the issue titled “Children at all costs” (Barn till varje pris), which continued throughout the year and was turned into a book in the following year (Lundberg et al. 2022). DN’s highly acclaimed article series sent shock waves throughout the country and sparked an intense debate on criminal and corrupt adoptions from abroad. The journalists who were behind the series were also awarded the most prestigious Swedish journalism prize, the Swedish Grand Prize for Journalism.

In October 2021, the Swedish government committee of inquiry, the Adoption Commission (Adoptionskommissionen), was appointed by the then Social Democratic government after a debate in the Swedish parliament in June of the same year when all opposition parties jointly demanded it (Regeringskansliet 2021). The parliamentary debate was exceptional for uniting all opposition parties from the radical Left Party to the radical right-wing Sweden Democrats. The unified political demand as well as the government’s decision to finally set up the Adoption Commission would never have happened without DN’s article series. The Adoption Commission was led by the respected law professor Anna Singer at Uppsala University and tasked with investigating the existence of irregularities in Swedish transnational adoptions from the first adoptions in the 1950s until today and to what extent the Swedish state and the Swedish adoption-mediating organizations were aware of any unethical adoptions.

In June 2025, the Adoption Commission submitted its final report to the current Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson’s right-wing coalition government after nearly four years of research, filling over 800 pages that document the systemic nature of irregularities and sparked a new debate and a new process, which falls outside the scope of this article (Adoptionskommissionen 2025). The Adoption Commission recommends among others that the government should issue a public apology to all adoptees of Sweden, that the state should take over the responsibility for all future adoptions from abroad, and that a state-run adoption competency, knowledge, and resource centre should be set up. As is the normal procedure in Sweden, after the release of the report, the government announced a referral round (which has a deadline in October 2025) and only after that will the government decide which recommendations from the Adoption Commission it will accept and proceed with in the form of a government bill.

Since the end of the 2010s and during the 2020s, a number of similar inquiries have either already been published or appointed by many governments in the countries of origin such as Chile (one report was released in 2018 and another one will be released in 2025) and South Korea (released in 2025) and in receiving countries such as Switzerland (released in 2020), the Netherlands (released in 2021), Belgium (released in 2021), France (released in 2023 and another one will probably be released in 2027), Norway (to be released in 2026), and Denmark (two reports were released in 2021 and 2024 and another one will probably be released in 2027) (Ankestyrelsen 2021, 2024; Bundesrat 2020; Comisión Especial Investigadora 2018; Commissie Onderzoek Interlandelijke Adoptie 2021; Expertenpanel Interlandelijke Adoptie 2021; Gouvernement 2023). The most well-known among them is the report of the Dutch Joustra Commission, which received worldwide media attention when it was presented to then Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s liberal government in February 2021. What all the inquiries have in common is that they investigate the widespread problem of corruption, criminality, child theft, and human trafficking within the transnational adoption field. In addition, all of them have been preceded by media revelations, and several inquiries have led to an end to transnational adoption or the state taking over the full responsibility for all adoptions from abroad while the private adoption organizations have gone bankrupt or dissolved themselves. The Swedish Adoption Commission is therefore an integrated part of a global process of coming to terms with the past concerning transnational adoption when it comes to illegal and corrupt practices within the field, in the past and present alike.

The existing research on this ongoing process of coming to terms with the past of transnational adoption is limited to only a handful of studies, and almost all of them are either historical studies accounting for the existence of irregularities in the past or legal and philosophical/ethical studies arguing for various reparations (Balk et al. 2022; Deijle 2024; Denéchère and Macedo 2023; Hübinette 2024; Loibl 2021, 2024; Ramsauer et al. 2023; Smolin 2024). The process of coming to terms with the past has occasionally also appeared in previous studies such as the issue of reparation, which was brought up in Van Steen’s (2019, 2024) study of Greek adoptees who were adopted to various Western countries in the 1950s–60s, in Branco’s (2021) study of Colombian adoptees in the US, and in Cawayu’s (2023) study of Bolivian adoptees in nine different receiving countries.

To the author’s knowledge, there is only one existing study which can be compared to this study, namely Withaeckx’s (2024) media text study on how the Dutch and Belgian newspapers covered the Dutch and Belgian adoption inquiries between 2021 and 2022. Withaeckx finds that adoptive parents tend to experience emotions of shock, that the adoption-mediating organizations state their willingness to continue with the adoptions in the future, and that many adoptees complicate the picture by expressing joy—but not surprise—over the fact that the truth is finally acknowledged by society at large:

Emotions of shock and amazement are mostly, though not exclusively, expressed by adoptive parents, adoption agencies, politicians and some journalists. Among adoptees quoted in the articles, however, invocations of shock are remarkably absent. Unlike the actors mentioned earlier, the revelation of abuse does not come at a surprise for adoptees who have themselves been victims of abuse and have been struggling for years to have their stories heard and taken seriously. For them, the surprise lies in the fact that they are finally being heard.

(Withaeckx 2024, p. 271)

This qualitative media text study examines how the process of coming to terms with transnational adoption was perceived by the Swedish adoption world and its three stakeholder groups, the adoptive parents, the adoption-mediating organizations, and the adoptees, within a transitional justice theoretical framework and before the release of the Adoption Commission’s final report. The purpose is to try to understand which truths were asked for or demanded and what was envisioned as justice. Therefore, this study analyzes Swedish-language media texts that have been published between 2021 and 2024 and deal with the process of coming to terms with the past in connection to the work of the Adoption Commission. The three research questions that drive this study are as follows: How did the Swedish adoption world’s three stakeholder groups (adoptive parents, adoption organizations, and adoptees) experience, perceive, and understand the process of coming to terms with the past in relation to the investigation conducted by the Swedish Adoption Commission? Which demands for truth, reconciliation, and justice were expressed by the different groups? And which differences and dividing lines existed between and within the three groups? Specifically, the study examines how the stakeholders responded to the Adoption Commission and all the issues that were associated with its work before its final report was released in June 2025, including Sweden’s adoption history and adoption policy and ethics.

2. Theoretical Framework and Methodological Approach

This study is grounded in theories of transitional justice in relation to truth and reconciliation processes and applied to the context of transnational adoption. The concept of transitional justice emerged from the democratization processes that occurred in Latin America in the 1980s and in relation to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the 1990s. It refers to efforts carried out by a state in order to deal with past violations, among them the creation of truth commissions and different kinds of reparations including court trials (Amstutz 2005; Teitel 2000). According to Engbo Gissel (2022), four aspects are crucial in transitional justice processes: 1, truth-telling by the perpetrators; 2, reparation to the victims; 3, criminal justice for the victims; and 4, institutional reform for the future. Through such mechanisms of transitional justice, previously dominant and distorted images and discourses concerning a certain historical event are challenged and can be rectified, victims obtain a platform to testify, perpetrators can confess and be held accountable, and policies can be changed in order to end further abuses and prevent them from happening again in the future.

Loibl (2021), who has conducted research on irregular transnational adoptions in the Netherlands and Germany from a legal point of view, argues that transitional justice with regard to transnational adoption means to take into consideration both the issues of retributive and restorative justice:

In order to effectively redress human rights violations caused by abuses in the adoption system, a policy on remedies should combine instruments of retributive justice, aimed at holding wrongdoers accountable, with measures of restorative justice that focus on victims needs and interests: for example, acknowledgement of harm, search and reunion assistance, access to counselling and support services, promises of non-repetition.

(Loibl 2021, p. 118)

Retributive justice applied to the context of coming to terms with transnational adoption is about the accountability and punishment of the wrongdoers and their abusive activities while restorative justice is about seeking to repair harm by providing victims and offenders a chance to bear witness to the harmful practices as well as to address the victims’ needs. This study makes use of Loibl’s division between and understanding of retributive justice and restorative justice in relation to transnational adoption when categorizing the selected and examined material. This means that all texts that take up the responsibility, accountability, and punishment of the offenders as well as moral judgments are connected to the issue of retributive justice while all texts that take up the acknowledgement of harm, the desire for dialogue, healing, and reconciliation as well as the needs and demands of the stakeholder groups are connected to the issue of restorative justice.

The empirical material for this study in the form of Swedish language media texts has been found by searching for all published texts containing the combined search words “adoption” (adoption) and “inquiry” (utredning), including their various inflexions such as their definite and indefinite form or singular and plural forms, in the main and biggest Swedish media text database, the Swedish Media Database (Mediearkivet, see https://www.retrievergroup.com/sv/product-mediearkivet (accessed on 5 June 2025). The Swedish Media Database includes all Swedish media venues including both analogue and digital media and text-based and broadcast media as well as established so-called mainstream media and new so-called alternative media belonging to the radical Right or the radical Left.

The texts that I have found and selected for this study are derived from printed newspapers and magazines or from the homepages of newspapers and magazines and radio and television companies. They have all been published and released from 8 February 2021, to 31 December 2024. The reason for choosing the first date is that the Dutch Joustra Commission published its report on that day, which also drew a lot of attention in Sweden, and 11 days later, DN started to publish its previously mentioned article series. The reason for choosing 31 December 2024 as the final date is due to practical reasons as the study was conducted at the beginning of 2025 and as there were hardly any media texts at all from January 2025 and before the release of the Adoption Commission’s final report in June of the same year.

A total search resulted in 1717 hits in the Swedish Media Database, and the vast majority of the texts were news articles in which no particular stakeholder group was heard. After having read through all the texts looking specifically for explicit voices of adoptive parents, adoption organizations, and adoptees, I found 27 containing the voices of adoptive parents as well as 42 containing the voices of adoption organizations and 95 containing the voices of adoptees. In total, 83 of the texts were published in 2021, 19 in 2022 and 2023, respectively, and 43 in 2024, and many of them included more than one voice as well as voices from more than one stakeholder group, meaning that well over 200 individual voices were heard in the examined material. The voices of the first parents in the countries of origin have been excluded from the study as they are too few in the Swedish media material. The voices that do exist are mostly mediated by the adoptees or others who can overcome the language barriers, which means that they are often difficult to validate.

In the next three sections, the voices of the three stakeholder groups will be accounted for one by one, starting with the adoptive parents who are then followed by the adoption organizations and thereafter, the adoptees. The issue of retributive justice will be taken up first and thereafter, the issue of restorative justice. The final section sums up the results and implications of the study while the three stakeholder groups are related to each other in the context of the issues of retributive and restorative justice. All translations from Swedish and English have been performed by me, and the accounting of the material is not chronological but instead based on common themes. Finally, for ethical reasons and in order to respect the integrity of the persons involved, the names that appear in the media material are not written out if they are not public figures, even though the names can be found in the published texts themselves.

3. Results: The Voices of the Adoptive Parents

Sweden’s adoptive parents have always been dominated by the more highly educated, the more salaried, and the wealthier ever since the 1950s when the first children were adopted from abroad. For example, about 90 percent of Sweden’s adoptive parents belonged to the middle- or upper-class while only about 10 percent belonged to the working-class in the 1970s. In 2001, 10.9 percent of the adoptive parents were categorized as working-class while 49.8 percent were classified as upper middle-class or upper-class and the rest as average middle-class (Lindgren 2010; Reuterberg and Hansen 2001).

The statistical fact that it is, in practice, principally the white Swedish elite that has adopted children from abroad means that adoptive parents are heavily overrepresented among professions and within spheres that are the most status-filled, influential, and privileged, including lawyers, priests, and medical doctors as well as journalists and the media and researchers and the academia. It is therefore no coincidence that many party leaders, top politicians, and ministers have been adoptive parents throughout the years including the party leader of the biggest centre-right party, the Moderate Party, and Prime Minister of Sweden since 2022, Ulf Kristersson, who has adopted three children from China and served as the Adoption Centre’s chairman in the 2000s (Hübinette 2021). This is also the reason why Kristersson’s name appears both here and in the following section accounting for the voices of the organizations.

In a lengthy interview in DN from 2021 and at the time when he was still the opposition leader, Kristersson mentioned that he wanted to see a “white paper” on the irregularities within the Swedish transnational adoption field and, if needed, also an apology of some kind (Sköld and Mahmoud 2021). He also said that he wanted the state to “administer justice” and identify the culprits “so that innocent actors can feel confident that they have not participated in irregularities” while adding that “they should not bear any collective guilt for things that are not a collective guilt” (Sköld and Mahmoud 2021). Kristersson is unique for being the only adoptive parent in the examined material who explicitly mentions the question of justice, which is so central for the issue of retributive justice, but at the same time, he apparently wants to protect people who were involved in arranging transnational adoptions from becoming stigmatized and feeling guilty, possibly also himself given his former chairmanship of the Adoption Centre.

There are a few adoptive parents in the texts who express guilt and a moral judgement by saying that “I have a responsibility” “to question how it really is” and in this way express feelings of guilt (Månzén 2021b). One of them is an adoptive mother who has a daughter from Chile named Jenny, who was stolen from her first mother, and says the following:

Now, in retrospect, she feels angry that the money, which was supposed to cover the adoption cost, actually financed a child trafficking operation. Above all, it is difficult to imagine what Jenny’s biological mother must have gone through.

–My happiness when becoming a mother led to her sadness, not having a child anymore. It must have been really hard for her.

(Pan and Sjölin 2021)

This adoptive mother stands out as she also mentions the first mother, which is otherwise rare. Yet another adoptive parent who does the same writes that DN’s revelations “turn us into simple colonizers who stole other people’s children” but at the same time she underlines that “our trauma is small compared to that of the mothers who were separated from their children” (Eriksson 2021). Thus, this parent acknowledges that the suffering of the first mother is greater than her own feelings of guilt.

However, contrary to these few examples, most parents are instead highly critical of and even angry at DN’s article series by saying, for example, that “one should not just search for scapegoats” and that the article series is “very focused on revenge” (Stawreberg 2023a). Even if no parent voice is openly against the Adoption Commission as such, there seems to be a strong need to state that they “feel a strong trust in the Adoption Centre,” as an adoptive mother who has adopted three children from China states, and that they “felt a great sense of confidence for the Adoption Centre,” as a couple who adopted from Serbia says (Lindfors 2024; Stawreberg 2023b). Two other adoptive parents who adopted from South Africa and India claim in a similar way that “[they] feel very confident that everything went well” and that “it felt safe considering the rigorous process,” as if assuring themselves that their own adoptions from abroad were not unethical, thereby avoiding any feelings of guilt for having contributed to a possible crime in the form of child trade and human trafficking (Garzon 2024; Ottestig 2021).

In the light of restorative justice, one common reaction to the media revelations is for several parents to feel attacked, “to feel unfairly accused, which causes great sadness and pain”, to feel “accused of stealing her child”, and “that it is an attack on my family” (Månzén 2021b; Stawreberg 2023c). In connection to this seemingly common feeling, many parents, such as an adoptive mother who has adopted from South Africa, also express that they want transnational adoption to continue in the future as a final stop bears the potential to stigmatize the parents and the adoptive families as well as their children:

She also wonders what the debate signals for adopted children and adult adoptees.

–What will this mean for my girl in the future? That the way she got her parents is forbidden. It will be very strange.

(Rydhagen 2024)

One couple, who adopted from South Korea, was even more dramatic, posing the questions “Would my child and I be banned from the country where we grew up and are growing up? How will society view us?” should adoptions from abroad cease completely (Pinjefors 2024). Another adoptive mother states that “there is already a lot of ignorance and outdated prejudices about adoption in our society” and that “I am now concerned that our children will encounter even more of these prejudices”, regarding her concerns should transnational adoption end (Arundel 2024). Here, it is probably the parents wanting to defend their method of reproduction and their type of family composition, which, according to statements like these, might be questioned if transnational adoption stops and might also make adoptees become stigmatized in society at large due to a possible future image of them as having been trafficked.

It is perhaps not surprising that no parent voice is explicitly demanding a stop to future adoptions from abroad. Instead, parents want a continuation, and one way of accomplishing that is “to clearly show what is good about adoption and what should possibly be developed”, according to one parent voice. Meanwhile, a couple who adopted from Vietnam exclaimed that “we in Sweden should be proud that there are many adoptees in our country!”, given that the Swedes have proportionally adopted the most children in the world (Jovanovic Hansen 2024; Lundström Hämälä 2024).

Finally, two adoptive parents differ sharply from the others in the examined material as they fully embrace the Adoption Commission without any reluctance at all and even if they do not take up the question of a possible stop, they would probably accept a final end to adoptions from abroad. One of them, in relation to the DN article series and the debate that it sparked, argues that “the discussions about the conditions of adoptees are in any case the most positive thing about this year” and also hopes that it may “help adoptees with their search for identity” (Eriksson 2021). Finally, the other one, an adoptive mother who adopted from China, also hails that the truth behind all too many irregular and corrupt adoptions is finally revealed. At the same time, she highlights that many adoptees are suffering from racism and mental health problems while also acknowledging that the political activism coming from the side of individual adoptees has played a crucial role in bringing about the Adoption Commission:

For a very long time, many of us have not understood anything. And it is probably only now that the realization of the consequences of what were originally good intentions has seriously taken hold. Internationally adopted children have not always been orphans as they were portrayed as. And growing up in Sweden has also not always been as nice for the adoptees as the pioneers imagined it would be. Racialization has been commonplace, and transnational adoptees have been overrepresented among people affected by serious mental illness. In the shift in what we see, the adoptees’ own experiences and testimonies have been important. Likewise, the growing group of biological parents who, not least through the adoptees, have begun to speak out.

(Bosseldal 2024, p. 4)

In this way, the adoptive mother expresses a commitment to both acknowledging and repairing harm while simultaneously including both herself as an adoptive parent and the adoptees as well as the first parents in the countries of origin. This attitude of hers points to a wish for reconciliation between these three groups and, in the end, the accomplishment of restorative justice. As will soon be evident in the next section, such a will is, however, rarely expressed by representatives of the adoption-mediating organizations.

4. Results: The Voices of the Adoption Organizations

The Adoption Centre was founded in 1969 and rapidly developed into the world’s second biggest adoption organization, after American Holt, due to the huge numbers of adoptions to Sweden from the 1970s through the turn of the century. The AC has stood behind around half of all adoptions from abroad to Sweden (Lindgren 2010). Throughout the decades, the Swedish state has also arranged thousands of adoptions, and not the least from the biggest country of origin South Korea until 1980, when the AC and the other private organizations took over the responsibility of all adoptions from abroad. Apart from the AC, there have been many other Swedish adoption-mediating organizations such as Children’s Friends (abbreviated as BV for Barnens vänner) and Children Above All (abbreviated as BFA for Barnen framför allt). Together with the AC, they were the three existing organizations during the examined period of 2021–2024.

Apart from the adoption organizations, there have also been thousands of private adoptions, and several Swedish churches, Christian organizations, and NGOs of various kinds have also arranged adoptions of foreign-born children. One example is the Swedish Pentecostal Movement and its Pentecostal Alliance of Independent Churches or simply Pingst in Swedish, which is the only example in the examined material to address the issue of retributive justice in an open and comprehensive manner. At the end of 2021, Pingst released a report in the form of an internal inquiry, which examined the existence of irregular adoptions that Pingst had underwritten/handled/arranged since the 1970s from various countries in Latin America and Asia (Ottestig 2022).

Daniel Alm, the then leader of Pingst, had himself commissioned the report as soon as DN’s articles started to be published in February 2021—without being asked to, so neither by the state nor any other actor. The report concluded that members and missionaries of Pingst had most probably arranged unethical adoptions. At the release event, Alm told the audience that Pingst would do its outmost to try to help the adoptees to find their first parents, and he also stated the following when asked what to do next:

Another example is to deepen the existing inquiry by highlighting the biological parents’ perspective.

“We must try to be helpful as much as we can,” says Daniel Alm, continuing:

“If we are guilty of this, we must dig into it.”

(Lundberg et al. 2021, p. 7)

Pingst’s willingness to take on both guilt and responsibility and to be held accountable as well as its wish to address and repair the harm by supporting the victims, including both the adoptees and the first parents, is unique among the voices of the organizations.

The question of retributive justice has otherwise been especially present with regard to the AC’s Chilean adoptions as a crime investigation has been ongoing in Chile ever since 2019, which has concerned 600 of the 2200 adoptions from Chile to Sweden. When the current Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson was the chairman of the AC in the 2000s and was informed of these illegal adoptions, he ordered an internal investigation, which concluded that all the adoptions were correctly conducted. In an interview, Kristersson still defends this conclusion while saying, at the same time, that it is necessary for a Swedish inquiry to “get to the bottom of” the Chilean adoptions (Sköld and Mahmoud 2021).

The AC itself reiterates that “nothing has emerged to indicate that any criminal activity has occurred”. Moreover, it claims that if the Chilean police concludes that the AC and its employees “acted inappropriately or illegally based on the laws and regulations of the time” then “it was the courts in Chile that were responsible for ensuring that a sufficient investigation of the children was carried out” thereby blaming the country of origin (Lindahl 2021). On other occasions, various official representatives of the AC likewise blame the values and practices of the time while always refusing to admit that the AC has been responsible for any criminal adoptions. In 2021, the organization’s then chairman Johan Högberg wrote the following in an editorial published in the AC’s magazine A. Tidskrift om adoption:

There is no reason why adoption activities, of all activities that affect children, family, life, health, care, should be required to have a zero tolerance in practice. The important thing is to learn from mistakes and constantly strive for improvement. Should it turn out that something went wrong in history, we support those affected. If values have changed over time, we adopt the values that are considered right. We do not need to be ashamed that the world looked different 50 years ago.

(Högberg 2021a, p. 2)

The AC’s chairman questions why the field of transnational adoption should be scrutinized and controlled more than other fields and forced to have a zero tolerance when it comes to avoiding irregular and unethical adoptions. In the same editorial, Högberg even asks himself if the government expenses behind adoption inquiries are necessary as the same amount of money could have been spent on supporting adoptive families and in this way, he indirectly criticizes the appointment of the Adoption Commission. Furthermore, in another editorial Högberg writes that the AC “cannot take responsibility today for the standards that applied 50 years ago”, thereby arguing that if the Chilean police as well as the Swedish Adoption Commission would come to the conclusion that the AC has been behind corrupt and criminal adoptions, it is to be blamed on the different values of the time (Högberg 2021b).

The same refusal to take on any accountability and to blame the values of the time or the country of origin comes back over and over again when illegal adoptions from, for example, Colombia and China are at stake, which the AC has carried out as well. In another interview, Kristersson says that “my definite impression is that those who have worked with transnational adoptions in Sweden for many years have been driven by a legal certainty” (Sköld 2022). In 2004, the Chinese Embassy of Sweden contacted the AC and informed it that Chinese children had been adopted to Sweden through criminal means. The AC’s immediate reaction to this information was to assure the Swedish adoptive parents with Chinese children and prospective parents who were about to adopt from China that “the adoptions followed all the rules and that most Chinese children who came to Sweden were ‘foundlings’”; again, this happened when Kristersson was the AC’s chairman (Sköld and Lundberg 2022).

When it comes to the issue of restorative justice, which, in this case, means that the organizations express a willingness to seek to repair harm by addressing the victims’ needs, the case of Pingst has already been accounted for. It is the only example in the material addressing the issues of retributive and restorative justice together, in a well-thought manner and for the sake of the victims. Otherwise, the opposite occurs: voices from the organizations question the testimonies of the victim groups when they talk about illegal adoptions in the media or elsewhere. For example, the AC describes the testimonies of both the adoptees and the first parents as “largely individuals’ own experiences, memories, and feelings that can never be questioned”, thereby implying that they are human interest stories that sell and become clickbait for the media while they cannot be questioned as they express the individuals’ own subjective opinions (Sköld et al. 2021).

There is also a strongly expressed desire among the organizations to continue with adoptions to Sweden in the future, without any promise that the wrongdoings will not be repeated. One example of that is when Norway and Denmark decided to immediately stop all adoptions from the Philippines due to verified reports on corruption. Instead of being self-critical, the AC questioned the decisions taken by the governments of the two neighbouring countries by stating that “we believe that adoptions from the Philippines to Sweden are carried out in a legally secure manner in accordance with applicable laws and conventions” (Gudmundsson 2024).

Also, when a country of origin like Serbia decided to stop adoptions to other countries, the AC similarly protested vehemently and accused the media of “taking on the role of a court” by unfairly and falsely portraying both the AC and the responsible Serbian authorities “as the perpetrators” (Jovanovic Hansen 2023). In 2024, an AC representative wrote that “I would rather encourage action than thought from those of us who believe in adoption”, thereby asking for the initiation of a campaign aiming at the continuation of transnational adoption (Nilsson 2024). This happened after it was leaked to the media that the Adoption Commission had written, in a working document, that adoptions from abroad might end as there was no guarantee that today’s adoptions were ethical and not irregular.

Lastly, all organizations display a seemingly sincere willingness to help adoptees searching for their first parents and families (Barnens Vänner 2021; Sköld and Lundberg 2021). This support is also something that the Swedish state should embrace and support financially, according to the chairman of the AC Wilhelm Kaldo, who has proposed the following:

Why not a grant for adoptees’ opportunities to search for their roots? A grant that could be used to pay for part of the costs of travel, help with interpreting documents and provide support to both the adoptee and her or his family. A natural development of root-searching is to use new technology. In this context, the Adoption Centre believes that the establishment of an adoption-specific DNA bank could be a good idea. Both adoptees and the biological family should be able to enter their DNA there, thereby increasing the chance of finding each other. Here, Sweden can be a leading country and show the way, as it is required that someone can pay for the establishment and maintenance of such a system even in countries that lack such resources.

(Kaldo 2021, p. 2)

Through this suggestion to the Adoption Commission and by extension to the Swedish state, the AC shows that it is committed to developing Sweden’s post-adoption support and services and that the organization considers Swedish society to be responsible for economically supporting the adoptees when it comes to search and reunion assistance. On the other hand, this position can at the same time be interpreted as wanting to get rid of this responsibility as adoptees contact the organizations when they want to initiate a search and, even if they are charged, it is far from the core activity of the organizations, which is arranging adoptions. Regardless of the motive, there is, from the side of the organizations, at least an acknowledgment of the adoptees’ need to search for their first parents.

5. Results: The Voices of the Adoptees

The vast majority of Sweden’s over 60,000 adoptees have not joined any adoptee organization, but there are a few associations which do appear the text material. The most active associations are Chileadoption.se, which was founded in 2018 in the wake of media revelations about the AC’s illegal adoptions from Chile; the Transnational Adoptees’ National Association (abbreviated as TAR for Transnationellt adopterades riksorganisation), which organizes everyone regardless of country of origin; and the world’s oldest association for transnational adoptees, the Adopted Koreans’ Association (abbreviated as AKF for Adopterade koreaners förening), which was founded in 1986. Adoptees in Sweden naturally differ enormously when it comes to feelings, attitudes, and opinions about the issue of transnational adoption, but when it comes to expressing a wish for retributive justice, it appears that there are many common recommendations to the Adoption Commission.

Several adoptee voices express that they want the AC to be dismantled and go bankrupt. “Abolish the Adoption Centre!”, exclaims one adoptee from India. An adoptee from Chile says, when asked by the journalist when the reconciliation process will finally be over, that “I don’t think it will end until the Adoption Centre in Sweden is properly investigated, has ended its active operations and belongs to a museum” (Borg 2021; Stjernkvist 2022). Also, the adoptees voice strong criticisms of the Social Democratic government, which set up the Adoption Commission, because it appointed the AC to be a part of its expert panel, meaning that “the perpetrator investigates itself” as Chileadoption.se’s chairman Carlos Queupán Huenchumil calls out (Amini 2022).

The adoptees further wish “that responsibility is demanded and justice is administered” by initiating a Swedish crime investigation, which could run parallel to the Adoption Commission, and demand “redress and compensation” rather than an apology and “the white paper”, which Ulf Kristersson had proposed (Klockljung 2021). One adoptee from Chile even suggests that “he can adorn the cover of that white paper himself, because he didn’t exactly tackle the problem when he had the chance as chairman of the organization”, as he chose to bury knowledge about the AC’s illegal adoptions from Chile after having concluded that they were unproblematic (Ohlsson 2021).

Furthermore, several adoptees from South Korea, India, Chile, and other countries of origin ask for reparations including economic compensation and concrete changes when it comes to “laws, rights and redress” (Holmqvist 2021). They demand to be seen and treated as “crime victims”, use descriptions like “outright kidnappings and thefts of children”, “organized human trafficking”, and “child trade”, and talk about “human rights violations” and “crimes against humanity” as well as “violations of international law”, thereby using terms that are directly related to the issue of retributive justice (Hagman 2021; Hedlund 2021; Israelsson 2021; Lund 2021; Sandblom 2021; Wennerberg 2021).

The association for adoptees from Chile Chileadoption.se and its chairwoman Anna Bohrn have also presented the Adoption Commission with a list of demands, which covers both the issues of retributive and restorative justice as they are sometimes difficult to separate:

• That there will be consequences for those responsible behind the unregulated adoption process.
• That those responsible are punished for the crimes committed.
• That our first families who have been looking for us for over 40 years will receive answers and redress as well as help and support for reunion.
• That we adoptees who have been victims of crime have the same right to support and help as other victims of crime.
• That adoptees from Chile receive information from Swedish authorities about the crimes committed in connection with the adoption.
• That our rights to our origins are taken seriously and that the authorities do their utmost to work for reunion on a practical, economic and psychological level before, during and after a reunion.
• That our documents regarding the adoption should be kept by an authority and that we adoptees should own the right to access these documents.
• That our children have the right to their history according to the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
• That the law on the statute of limitations is rewritten in these cases.
• That the law will be reviewed with a view on future adoptions. Adoptions should take place under state supervision and be legally secure. Neither organizations, religious communities, nor private individuals should organize any adoptions. (Bohrn 2021)

This comprehensive list of demands has a strong focus on identifying and punishing the wrongdoers and offenders and on being seen as victims of crime. One example is the proposal to remove the statute of limitations when it comes to the Swedish law against human trafficking, which is set at 25 years. Throughout the years, adoptees from Thailand, for example, have filed police reports concerning human trafficking once they learned that their adoptions were criminal and corrupt, but so far, they have all been decommissioned by the Swedish police due to the statute of limitations.

Similarly, representatives from the associations TAR and AKF have also addressed the issue of retributive justice. They have done so by criticizing that the government’s directive to the Adoption Commission uses the expression “possible irregularities” instead of child theft and that the inquiry shall “take into consideration the attitudes and norms that existed in society at the time” as if preemptively blaming the values of the time (Dexborg et al. 2021; Sköld 2024). Further, they have expressed concern that the question of financial compensation will not be addressed as well as by saying that “if the inquiry concludes that there have been irregularities, responsibility must be claimed” (Dexborg et al. 2021; Sköld 2024). Finally, there are also many individual adoptees who express radical opinions and strong demands such as an adoptee from South Korea who exclaims the following, concerning both the Swedish and South Korean governments and states:

They can never replace a life with money. What I want is for them to kneel before me and apologize for what they have done to me. The Swedish Prime Minister and the Korean President should apologize to me personally for what the Korean and Swedish states have done.

(Egerhag 2024)

On the issue of restorative justice, many adoptees want to see an end to transnational adoption or the “child trade”, as an adoptee from India calls the practice (Arpi 2021, 2022; Svahn 2021). While some want to see a final stop, others advocate for a temporary one, like Madeleine In Hwa Björk from South Korea who has been a vocal critic of corrupt adoptions and argues that “a total stop is necessary for a period of time” in order to investigate “which countries we should continue to adopt from” (Månzén 2021a). At the same time, there are also adoptees who do not want a stop at all. One example is an adoptee from Romania who instead wants to see a continuation and that the “organizations should be regulated and controlled to avoid grey area adoptions” and that he thinks the Adoption Commission “paints us all as victims of trafficking” (Öfwerman 2024).

Continuing with the reconciliatory aspect of restorative justice, adoptees stand out as they regularly mention themselves, the first parents in the countries of origin and the adoptive parents in Sweden at the very same time when asking for reparation and reconciliation. For example, an adoptee from Chile hopes that both the Chilean crime investigation and the Swedish Adoption Commission “lead to both her biological mother and her adoptive mother receiving proper redress for all the suffering” (Alvarado 2021). Yet another adoptee from Chile says that “it’s about redress for my mother in Chile and for me and my adoptive parents” (Lundberg et al. 2021). The chronicler of Tidningen Syre Jiang Millington from South Korea writes the following (Lundberg et al. 2021):

This outrageousness must be examined. Biological families and adoptees must be redressed, and adoptive families need support in coming to terms with what they were tricked into. To those decision-makers who believe that what has happened has happened and that there is nothing to worry about, I want to shout: It is not over! Our lives go on. We still live in uncertainty about whether our lives are a big lie.

(Millington 2021)

In her chronicle, Millington is begging the Swedish lawmakers to push and vote for a thorough examination of the problem of illegal adoptions as all partners involved are suffering from them. Similarly, the Swedish Korean Adoptees Network (SKAN) writes that “it is never too late to search for truth and reconciliation” (Borstam et al. 2022).

To continue, the vast majority of demands coming from adoptees circle around the question of support from the Swedish state, given the current lack thereof. This lack persists in spite of the fact that foreign-born adoptees are proportionally the most affected by suicide attempts and accomplished suicides in addition to suffering from staggering levels of mental illness and social problems in general, according to population register studies (Hjern and Vinnerljung 2022). The proposals for post-adoption support and services are numerous in the text material and include, among others, help with interpretation and translation when reuniting with the first parents and birth families; full access to all adoption documents, which today legally belong to the private organizations and are therefore not accessible; economic support to be able to visit the country of origin and search for the first parents; free therapy sessions and psychological counselling; free DNA tests and the setting up of a DNA database for adoptees and their first parents; and the legal possibility to take back one’s original name (Amini 2022; Månzén 2021a; Melin Segerpalm 2022; Molina 2021; Palmqvist 2023; Pollnow 2023; Rodriguez et al. 2021; Sandblom 2021; Sköld 2024).

In 2021, five psychologists, namely Anna Birath Amazeen, Marit Arnbom, Anna Elmund, Natte Hillerberg, and Hanna Wallensteen, out of whom all but one are adoptees and who all have adoptees as clients, co-wrote an op-ed article in DN (Birath Amazeen et al. 2021). Their article deplored the fact that Swedish society, as a whole, had neglected the suffering of the adoptees including the staggering suicide rates, instead prioritizing that the Swedes could adopt as many children from abroad as possible:

The fact that Sweden as a nation has for more than half a century abandoned transnational adoptees to their fate, while pursuing a policy aimed at increasing the number of adoptions from other countries, is very serious. The lives that have been lost and the suffering it has caused for even more can never be made up for. Politicians and authorities should listen to the profession and do everything in their power to compensate for this historical neglect. As professionals, we face the reality that has been ignored: transnational adoptees and their loved ones who suffer and struggle with the complex challenges that adoption often entails. This is a fate that the adoptees themselves have not chosen but are forced to deal with, without support from the society that has both facilitated and enabled the adoption—sometimes at any cost.

(Birath Amazeen et al. 2021, p. 5)

The psychologists’ compelling condemnation of Sweden’s betrayal of the adoptees and urgent pledge to the politicians and the government to at least try to make up for decades of neglect also entailed a demand to set up a state-run adoption competency, knowledge, and resource centre. The creation of such a centre was already proposed in 2003 by another government inquiry, but it has never been realized because the AC and its then chairman Kristersson were against the inquiry as such. The reason for them being against that inquiry was that it wanted to put an end to the donation system which required parents to donate money to the agencies in the countries of origin apart from the fixed adoption fees, which in its turn became the impetus for corrupt adoption practices. Such a centre would “offer legal, social and psychological support” and “offer victims support in searching for identity documents and families of origin” as well as “conduct its own research” on adoption and “the operations should arrange regular training for care units and care programmes as well as consultancy for care and social services” (Birath Amazeen et al. 2021). This future vision that the Swedish society, as a whole, must take into consideration the adoptees’ needs is also what the poet Susanna Johansson from Sri Lanka wants to see:

It is time for our specific needs and the trauma of adoption to be put on the political agenda and for political changes and investments to be made, as well as the implementation of initiatives aimed at adoptees in society. A whole societal structure needs to be built to meet our needs—from the National Board of Health and Welfare’s guidelines to social services and the municipalities, and healthcare and psychiatry sectors.

(Johansson 2024)

At the same time, Johansson acknowledges that Sweden is finally waking up to the suffering of the adoptees, although it is far too late. She also acknowledges that this awakening is due to the political activism of individual adoptees who have been fighting for this cause ever since the 1990s but who have not been heard until DN started to publish its article series.

6. Discussion and Conclusions

This study is the first of its kind to examine the ongoing global process of coming to terms with transnational adoption within a Swedish context. Specifically, the study examines how the three stakeholder groups, the adoptive parents, the adoption-mediating organizations, and the adoptees, relate to this process as reflected in the media and concretely to the Adoption Commission and its work, which went on between 2021 and 2025. By theoretically framing the study in relation to transitional justice processes and by following Loibl’s (2021) proposal to focus on both the issues of retributive and restorative justice, the study reveals that there are substantial differences between the three groups and also within them when it comes to the opinions, attitudes, feelings, and demands they are voicing and how they envision what truth, reconciliation, and justice mean for them. Here, there are clear parallels to Withaeckx’s (2024) study on how the Dutch and Belgian media have covered the Dutch and Belgian inquiries. Withaeckx concludes that adoptive parents express emotions of shock and adoption-mediating organizations a desire to continue to arrange adoptions, while many adoptees welcome the revelations, which some of them have fought to expose for many years. Thus, Withaeckx’s results are largely confirmed by the results of this study pertaining to the Swedish context.

Among the voices of the adoptive parents, Ulf Kristersson, the Prime Minister of Sweden since 2022, stands out by at least mentioning the question of punishment and thus, the issue of retributive justice. At the same time, he underlines that those who have arranged adoptions and who are innocent must be cleared from guilt and he probably refers to himself as the former chairman of the AC. Apart from a few other parents expressing guilt, also towards the first parents, most adoptive parents instead feel that they are under attack for having chosen transnational adoption as their method for family formation. They also express that they firmly trust in the AC and believe that their own adoptions were correctly performed; they further want adoptions from abroad to continue in the future because they fear that they, as adoptive parents, and their adopted children will otherwise become stigmatized. However, a few parents want to see a reconciliatory dialogue between themselves and the first parents and also express strong support for the adoptees in their search for their origins.

The organizations also want the adoptions to continue. However, with the exception of Pingst and its exemplary internal inquiry into unethical adoptions that the Swedish Pentecostal Movement has handled, no organization has taken up the issue of retributive justice. Moreover, the AC refuses to take on any responsibility for illegal adoptions from neither Chile, China, the Philippines, Colombia, nor any other country of origin. Its chairman Johan Högberg questions why the field of transnational adoption should be forced to live up to a zero-tolerance policy and to higher ethical standards compared with other fields, and he also indirectly questions why public money is spent on the Adoption Commission. Regarding the issue of restorative justice again, apart from Pingst, the organizations do not express any willingness to seek to repair harm. The AC even questions the testimonies of both adoptees and first parents telling how the adoptions were carried out in an unethical manner. There is, however, an acknowledgment among the organizations that adoptees have a need to search for their first parents and that this is something that the Swedish state should support financially.

The adoptees are clearly the most outspoken group when it comes to calling for retributive justice through both criminal justice for the victims and reparation to the victims including economic compensation as well as the punishment of the wrongdoers. In the case of the AC, many wish for the organization to simply perish forever. The most elaborated demands for both retributive and restorative justice derive from adoptee associations like Chileadoption.se, which wants to abolish the statute of limitations to make it possible for adoptees to report to the police that they have been trafficked and to allow for the prosecution of former and current employees of the Swedish adoption organizations. While many adoptees want to see a total end to transnational adoption, others argue for a temporary stop, while yet others want adoptions from abroad to continue in the future. Furthermore, given that it previously has been difficult to publicly criticize transnational adoption and especially so for adoptees, the new critical voices coming from the group also bear the potential to challenge and finally do away with the former, dominant pro-adoption discourse of Sweden.

Adoptees also stand out as they include both the adoptive parents and the first parents in their vision of which groups a transitional justice approach and truth and reconciliation processes must encompass. When it comes to restorative justice, there is a long list of demands which can be summed up as an urgent call to the Swedish government and state to make up for decades of neglect, given that adoptees suffer from staggering suicide rates and high levels of mental and social problems and that nothing has been done to counter and curb their catastrophic overrepresentation. All in all, there is a widespread feeling among many adoptees, including those who are psychologists and public figures, that the Swedish society as a whole has betrayed them and woken up too late to their needs and suffering, and that individual adoptees who have relentlessly fought to draw attention to the adoptees’ suffering have not been heard.

Significantly, the Swedish adoption world’s three stakeholder groups are not homogenous: there are dissenting voices within all three groups. There are parents who fully support the Adoption Commission and the whole process of coming to terms with transnational adoption; there is Pingst among the adoption-mediating entities, which wants to be fully accountable for past abuses and responsible towards the victims; and there are adoptees who express that the Adoption Commission unfairly portrays all adoptees as victims of trafficking and above all strongly oppose a future stop on adoptions from abroad and even want to engage in a political fight for these adoptions to continue.

Finally, the Swedish version of coming to terms with transnational adoption appears to be permeated with high levels of antagonism as well as strong and passionate wordings and politically radical positions. This is probably explained by the fact that Sweden is, proportionally, the leading adopting country in the world as well as the country that has up until recently harboured the most positive pro-transnational adoption attitude. Historically, the practice of transnational adoption has been glorified in Sweden by an ideology of antiracism that celebrated adoption from abroad as a progressive act, both on a state level and on a popular level. Therefore, it is understandable that the media revelations about criminal and corrupt adoptions are met with something that can be likened to outright national trauma. Currently, the previously consensus-like view is being challenged and perhaps even falling apart—a process that started with DN’s article series and the setting-up of the Adoption Commission in 2021. Not surprisingly then, antagonistic and even aggressive conflicts arise. Lastly, the results of this study show that there is no common ground and vision to move further into the future with adoptions from abroad, whether among the adoptive parents, the adoption organizations, or the adoptees. It is therefore difficult to foresee if the Swedish adoption world and its three stakeholder groups will ever be able to meet each other’s needs and demands and finally enter into a reconciling dialogue with each other as their opinions and positions are miles apart.