Pain of mother put behind bars as infant given out for adoption

[Photo: Courtesy]

A seven-day-old baby was forcefully abducted from its mother and later placed for adoption in what experts have called a cruel contemplated and organised child theft.

In the case that is one of the highlights of a report presented to President Uhuru Kenyatta, the mother was forcefully arrested and falsely accused of neglecting her child. The child was placed in a children’s home on grounds that he had been abandoned in Kibera on May 17, 2014 from where he was rescued by a Good Samaritan.

At the home, the child was given a different name from his own. According to the report, the mother was then separately put in remand for six months without her child. “This was against the remand regulations for mothers with young children, who are never separated with their young ones,” the report says.

The team termed the case an “abduction, kidnap, forceful and fraudulent”. 
“This mother was still having precious colostrum breast milk, probably still bleeding from child birth when her baby was forcefully taken away from her, causing serious health trauma to child and mother, which may take many years for her (mother) to heal,” says the report. 

During the period the mother was in remand, the child was labelled an abandoned child at the children’s home for six months. The experts said the six months were meant to provide the legal window for children to qualify for adoption.

Police letter

After the six months were over, police at Killimani Police Station wrote a letter indicating that efforts to trace the parents had proved fruitless and that no claims had been made to that date. “By the time the mother was released from remand, the child had already been branded as abandoned and declared free for adoption,” the report says.

This happened despite the fact that the the home where the child was placed knew about the whereabouts of the mother, a matter that later ended in the courts. The experts’ investigation found that contrary to police reports, the baby was forcefully taken away from the mother.

The mother was frog-matched to the chief’s camp and reported the alleged neglect of the baby who was only seven days old. It was from the chief’s camp that they were taken to the Kilimani Police Station for a night before the baby was forcefully taken away from the mother and into the home.

The report says police letters on the case were all false, indicating that the whereabouts of the mother were unknown when, in fact, she was in their custody. “They (police) also stated that the child was abandoned while they forcefully abducted the child from the mother’s hands and handed over the child to the home,” said the report.

Six months

On further follow-up, the experts discovered that the mother was charged with child neglect, taken to court and thereafter taken to Langata Women’s Prison for six months.

“The mother kept asking for the child but she was denied access and also the police declined to give her any information on the whereabouts of her baby,” the report says. The mother later followed up the adoption matter in court with a view to stopping it.

The court ordered for DNA tests to establish maternity, which confirmed that indeed the child belonged to the mother in question. The ruling was yet to be made by the time the report was handed over to the authorities. In another case, a foreign citizen approached his embassy seeking to travel with a child outside the country during the period of the moratorium based on a custody order. 

The foreigner approached the Australian High Commission applying to be allowed to travel with the child. The investigators, however, found that the director of the orphanage, where the child was committed to for care and protection, chose to have the child under his personal custody without following the due process, only to come later and seek leave from the court for travel with the child outside of Kenya.

The child was admitted to the orphanage on October 27, 2013 having allegedly been abandoned. But the experts established that the applicants had irregularly acquired a birth certificate and a passport for the child, giving the child their last name against the law. They concluded that the custody order was unprocedurally obtained and contrary to the law, which only allows change of name after the adoption order is given.