Manufactured Adoption – Greed, Deceit and Broken Hearts?

Child trafficking has always been a global issue of which high profile, white collared crime under the pretension of adoption is rampant.

Vietnam, Cambodia, India, China etc. are countries fighting hard to tighten the adoption policies due to the macabre possibility. In the US, international adoption is big – hopeful parents pay on an average $30,000 for a child to private international adoption agencies. However, what makes it a scandal is when under the name of international adoption, gruesome crime of child trafficking is practised in counties such as, Brazil, Paraguay, Colombia, Honduras, Sri Lanka, Romania, India, Bangladesh.

The adopted kids are often subjected to abuse and sometime even left alone to go back to their country. This situation sometimes is so severe that countries take strong action – Russia temporarily suspended all child adoptions to the U.S. families in 2010. Ethiopian parliament have banned foreign adoptions citing safety of the Children. Ethiopia was the most popular country after China for adoption by Americans.

World Cinema and Television, from time to time, have tried to showcase this heinous crime through their content. Markuss is the first ever Ukrainian/ Latvian TV series to be produced based on ‘Manufactured Adoption’. The story starts with Polina Klochko, an ordinary teacher, being caught in the middle of events to find his lost son, Markuss, who was kidnapped from the kindergarten. The story unfolds when the mother discovers her child after five years being reported on television from a different country. She accidently meets an ex-police officer Denis Denisov who helps her find her missing child, Markuss.

The plot of the show explores various layers of this crime. Denisov discovers that Markuss’ case is not the only one, but it is a discreet criminal scandal of a certain group. The narrative of the story gets more intense when Denisov finds himself in a situation, where he needs to save many other unreported kids along with Markuss.

Markuss is a gripping story of child trafficking where children are kidnapped and sold to wealthy families – a typical scenario of this kind of a crime. Despite regulations on international adoptions, and with some countries even banning all foreign adoptions, the problem has continued. Kidnappers continue to fuel the trade, and adoption agencies continue to skirt the laws. Though Markuss is a fiction, but it dives deep into this ghastly world of ‘manufactured adoption.