I feel the impact deeply every time a legal case involving a fellow intercountry adoptee is decided. My heart breaks knowing the immense courage and persisitence it takes to try to hold systems and States accountable. I first felt this with my friend Patrick Noordoven, and just last week again, with Dilani Butink. In both cases, despite courts acknowledging that wrongdoing occurred, the Dutch State appealed and the final outcome denied compensation and any meaningful sense of justice.

These repeated outcomes have reinforced a difficult truth for me: attempting to hold States accountable for human rights violations in intercountry adoption is incredibly, almost impossibly, hard.

With a background in psychology, I’ve always been drawn to understand the emotional and psychological impacts of these experiences. I’m particularly attuned to how truama unfolds and is lived over time for intercountry adoptees. So when I came across fellow adoptee Bindhu Van Diest, born in India and taken for adoption to Belgium — and learned she is one of the few psychoanalysts researching the harms of illicit and abusive adoptions, I reached out. I asked if she would share her insights following Dilani’s legal outcome.

What she offers is a way to understand the emotional impact of living in a reality where wrongdoing is acknowledged, yet justice remains out of reach. In her paper below, Bindhu explores why this occurs and what it does to us psychologically.

Using the recent outcome of Dilani’s case, Bindhu shows a troubling pattern: governments and institutions may admit that harm occurred—such as falsified records or unethical practices—but courts often fail to hold anyone legally accountable. This is not because harm didn’t happen, but because legal systems are not designed to deal with the kind of harm adoptees experience.

Bindhu introduces the concept of “filiatory disappearance” to describe what many adoptees live with: the loss or erasure of original family ties that are real, but not fully recognised in law or society. Even when adoptees gain access to information about their origins, this does not necessarily restore their legal or social recognition as part of their first family.

This gap between acknowledgment and accountability has deep psychological impacts. It can leave adoptees feeling fragmented, unable to fully make sense of their identity, history, or belonging. Importantly, the harm is not just in the past—it continues over time, especially as new information emerges.

Ultimately, this article calls for a broader understanding of harm—one that goes beyond narrow legal definitions and recognises the lifelong, relational, and identity-based impacts of intercountry adoption.