Few TV programs with which I maintained such a love-hate relationship as Trace -free. It was finally taken off the tube last February, because a number of things were known, where the seeking adopted was linked to the wrong, because non-biological family. The case of Marthainès de Vries is now notorious: this woman, now 43, was united with her Colombian family, with whom she maintained very intensive contact for more than twenty years, until after her own search and DNA research it became clear that there was no relationship.
More than fifteen years ago I called on Spoorloos: I was looking for my biological father, I knew he was a South African, who was my Dutch bio-mother in London in 1960, and was called ‘Michael’. By Trace -free I was told that this search was impossible; At that time not yet DNA testing, far too little data. Well, understandable. Moreover, I had also reported the program that I did not want to be in the picture under any circumstances, and that was again because of that love-hate relationship: always reassuring that you are not the only adopted person, with such a strange gap as a birth announcement card. But how humiliating with tears and spouts and strange people to have to appear on TV, after which you are supposed to put a real relationship on stage.
The dream: to see someone, in this case the father who looks physically like you. (In the adoption file I am called a baby with ‘a light brown skin color and dark blond frizzy hair’. My adoptive parents were white, steep hair.) The nightmare: and then those twenty -three brothers and sisters and cousins, in happy expectation of the arrival of the rich, because Dutch lost son.
I looked at the program as an accident that I barely escaped – but I had to keep looking. I myself had the impression that, measured by the chilling laws of the Reality TV – the more drama tarrows, the more viewers – Trace -free was another favorable exception. But I did not happen to what Marthainès de Vries happened, as well as other adopters who were ‘united’ with incorrect parties.
As program makers, but also as an broadcasting management you should pull everything out of the closet – and that apparently did not happen sufficiently.
All those adopted children, wherever they came from, also became Dutch citizens. Even if you maintain a very narrow definition of state affairs, having your civil administration in order is the least.
I don’t have an Instagram, but through NRC-tv reviewer Wilfred Brakken I understood that TV maker Kelly-Qian van Binsbergen, adopted himself, wrote a column on that medium in which she denounced “the government”, “who failed to do so”.
Van Binsbergen still expresses that very nicely. It is strange that Dutch adopted citizens had to market their loss on TV, in order to get information.
A few years ago I wanted to get my adoption files up the table, it was a treasure hunt between authorities such as Fiom, (once: Federation of institutions for the unmarried mother and her child), Altra Amsterdam, Amsterdam City Archives, Haarlem court, GGD Amsterdam, the Child Protection Board and others. By the way, they prefer to refer to each other. Eventually I got some sheets in my hands through the council, in which reference was made to other, untraceable files. It could also be that the Ministry of Justice and Security that had destroyed in 1983 or 1999. “You say?” Yes, destroyed.
Rarely been so shocked. The state that does not hurt but violates. Whatever they had to worry about those adopted beings, those accidents, born in shame. That is going well, we will get away with that.
Stephan Sanders is an essayist.