Disclosure of the secret of adoption of a child: is it protected in the Russian Federation, liability

The secret of child adoption and its provision

The secret of adoption and its provision lies with many people. Among them:

The judges who made the adoption order;
All officials who carried out the fact of state registration;
Other persons who in one way or another relate to the adoption process: • Employees of guardianship and trusteeship authorities; • Medical workers; • Employees of children's organizations where adopted children were located; • Relatives, friends and acquaintances of the family involved in the adoption.

According to the rules of adoption, civil registry officials, without the consent of the adoptive parents, do not have the right to provide any information or issue documents that disclose information about the adoptive parents and the child.

If the court finds the reasons valid, changes in the date of birth can be made to the birth certificate of a child who is one year old or more. According to the same provision, the date of registration of the birth certificate may also change.

The secrecy of the adoption of a child and its provision are provided for by the norms of the Family Code, which are designed to prevent the dissemination of information about the fact of adoption. Thus, women who have adopted a child are granted maternity leave (instead of adoption leave) from the date of adoption and for 70 calendar days, and when adopting two or more children - 110 calendar days.

The Mystery of Adoption

What is the “secret of adoption”? Who should keep it, and should it? From whom and for whom was this “secret” invented?

The Family Code also establishes the right of a child “to know his parents” (Article 54), but then, many articles later, there is still an article about the secrecy of adoption, which neutralizes this right (Article 139).

My position on this issue is clear: the secret of adoption is the same personal secret of personal life as any other. And this secret should be protected no more and no less than other personal data. And there is certainly a person from whom this secret cannot be kept - the child himself.

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The Mystery of Adoption: What is it? What is it for and how to use it to our advantage?

After I tell you what the secret of adoption is and how to use it, we will talk about what the child we are adopting will have a first name, last name, patronymic, date of birth and place of birth.

Please note that everything that will be discussed further concerns only adoption

, that is, situations when you take the child forever as your own. When you adopt a child, the legal consequences are such that the child becomes yours, i.e. only a very few people will know that you did not give birth to this child yourself, but took him from a special institution. Many people, when they take a child into a family, try not to tell him that he came into the family in some other way than other children.

Where the babies come from?

Usually children are found in cabbage, children are brought by a stork, Alexey Rudov says that foster children are brought by a penguin on a motorcycle, children are bought in a store, sometimes a child grows in the mother’s tummy... and some children are taken from a special house.

And it happens like this: “a mother had a baby, and she suddenly realizes that this is not her child (maybe the stork was mistaken or the head of cabbage was not the right one), and then the mother takes the child to a special house, where dad and I looked for you for a long time, baby , and were eventually found and then taken home.” This is roughly the story many people tell adopted children when they ask where they came from.

Psychologists who recommend telling children such fairy tales believe that it is wrong to hide its origin from a child. The child must understand that the differences that appear in him are not at all due to the fact that he is bad... Indeed, the child ends up in a family, and the shape of the nose is not the same as that of the mother, and not the same as that of the father, the eyes are a little different such as ears, body structure, height. Inevitably, by adolescence, a child has a question: who am I, because he is not like his parents? Even natural children have such questions and thoughts like “they understand me so poorly, so these are not my parents.”

So, in my opinion, as a specialist who has been involved in family placement of children for more than 15 years, it is impossible to hide from an adopted child that he is adopted.

. This does not mean that you need to sit him in front of you and say: “Darling, you are already 8 years old, and we have to tell you unpleasant news.” There is no need to do this, but the child only needs to answer direct questions with the truth. Maybe it will be in the form of a fairy tale for a small child, or a more serious story for a teenager. But, in any case, who are we to deprive a child of the right to know where he came from?

Nevertheless, our legislation was born not yesterday, but a very long time ago, and it contains a norm called “secret of adoption.” Despite the fact that all experts came to the consensus that the secret of adoption, namely the secret from the child about his origin, is a relic of old ideas, this norm has still been preserved, and it is quite “tenacious”.

If we take international legislation, the secrecy of adoption has been preserved in only a few countries. Perhaps, besides Russia, I can reliably name only a few Central Asian republics. In all other countries, there is no secrecy of adoption as such: either it is absolutely absent (as, for example, in the USA, when at the age of 14 a special employee of the child protection service asks the child if he knows that he is adopted), or it is not there in fact ( that is, it doesn’t even occur to us to hide the fact that the child appeared in the family in a different way).

The secrecy of adoption has been protected by Russian law since approximately the mid-20th century, and this was due to two reasons:

Historically, there was an idea that a woman who could not give birth and bear a child herself was bad, somehow different, with some problems, so women tried to hide the fact that they could not get pregnant and bear a child. When a child was taken into an orphanage (this did not happen very often in the 40s and 50s), they tried to carefully hide it.
Trying to protect children. The history of our country, especially the 30s, when a lot of children ended up in orphanages with the stigma of “a child is an enemy of the people.” Of course, the people who were going to adopt them wanted this stigma not to remain on the child, and, accordingly, the secrecy of adoption was required, it was required that the child was not aware of how he came into the family.

But times are changing; in the modern world, none of the European countries supports the secrecy of adoption under any circumstances. We are probably looking at examples not from Saudi Arabia, but from European countries. Therefore, it should be expected that the mystery of adoption in Russia will “live out” in recent years. In a short time, the secret of adoption will disappear from Russian legislation, I am convinced of this.

Moreover, the secrecy of adoption itself protects whom and from whom?

What do we keep as a secret?

What is the secret?

The secret of adoption is a secret from the child

. All those people who took part in the consideration of the adoption case, worked in the guardianship and trusteeship authority at that time, were medical workers in the hospital or in the orphanage from which the child was taken - all of them, of course, will be aware of your adoption. But by virtue of Article 139 of the Family Code of the Russian Federation, they will be obliged to keep this secret. How should they store it?

Judges who made a decision on the adoption of a child, officials who carried out state registration of adoption, as well as persons otherwise aware of the adoption, are obliged to maintain the secrecy of the adoption of a child. They are responsible for this and can be held accountable in the manner prescribed by law.

What is the responsibility for?

Responsibility arises for the fact that a person intentionally (specially) disclosed this secret of adoption. Relatively speaking, he sat the child down and said: “Dear child, I announce to you that you are adopted!” This kind of behavior, if it is caused by selfish motives or is associated with the need to maintain official secrets, will be punishable.

What if, for example, this is some neighbor who knew about the adoption, and accidentally in the elevator, patting the child on the head, says to him: “When we adopted him, he was so skinny, but now he’s fat!” Or maybe someone at school knows, and therefore may have special treatment for the child, and thus this information will leak out? Since all these people did it with the best intentions, and not out of malice or self-interest, they will not bear any responsibility.

You should not think that this secret will be kept absolutely when you adopt a child. Yes, the adoption case that will be heard in court will be heard behind closed doors. This means that there will be no strangers in the hall. As a matter of fact, it seems to me that all family matters should be heard behind closed doors, since any family issues should not be brought to public attention. However, in the courtroom there will still be at least a prosecutor, a guardianship officer (possibly more than one), a court secretary, maybe an assistant judge, and, of course, the judge himself. These are already 5 people who will clearly know that your child is adopted. Add here all the employees of the child guardianship authority, as well as employees of the guardianship authorities who will come to you to examine your living conditions, doctors, because if a child appears on the site, it is impossible to say that he appeared “out of nowhere”, any doctor will guess that the child is adopted. For employees of medical organizations and for guardianship workers, such children are not news, not a situation that requires increased attention, they will take it calmly.

How will the child react to this?

If you hide from him that he is adopted, then there are different situations. If the child is small, then most likely he will not understand anything. To assess any situation, a person needs to somehow live it, master it, and have some information about it. A 4-year-old child does not understand how to react to the information that he was found not in cabbage, but in a special house. Moreover, they will say some words like “adopted” to him. This word most likely means nothing to him. Therefore, if the child is small, then everything will pass emotionally unnoticeably.

If the child is older, a dilemma arises. If this is a teenager of about 15 years old, then this age is characterized by protests against parents, hormonal explosions and the feeling that the whole world does not understand me (primarily, of course, these “ancestors”). And then a person at the age of 15 - in the middle of hormonal changes - receives information that he is not his own child, but an adopted one. Of course, this information will also be superimposed on the situation of sudden maturation, and this will not add mutual understanding with parents. If the child knew this from a very young age, nothing would be hidden from him, then, most likely, the relationship with his parents would not change at all. This is an illusion that the child has a different attitude towards his origin. He lives for the first time and perceives this world not through his own experience, but through the experience of his parents. And if parents look in horror at every word “adopted” and try to close their child’s ears when there is a film on TV where the topic of adoption is raised, then the child will treat this topic accordingly. If this topic is not a stigma or some kind of problem for parents, then the child will treat it calmly.

There was a video where they showed a child walking with two parents and saying: “Vasya was found in cabbage, Petya was brought by a stork, and they took me to a special house.” And this is almost true for a child, this is how he treats it. The child does not evaluate the situation until adults tell him how to treat it. Let these adults be you, the parents of this child, who will show you how to approach adoption. Yes, by and large, there is no need to treat this in any way - it’s just a fact of biography. There are people with red hair, and there are people with blond hair, it just happened that way, and nothing can be changed, and there is no problem here.

Therefore, the mystery of adoption, which exists today,

firstly, it is rather poorly protected (protection is only provided in the case where the person who divulged this secret acted for selfish or other base motives);

secondly, it will still be known to a large number of people, including (quite possibly) school or kindergarten employees.

And now about those things that the mystery of adoption still brings to us

These are not only concerns, problems and the need to discuss this with the child, but also some rather pleasant things. The Family Code of the Russian Federation, precisely motivating this by secret adoption, allows the child to be given a new last name, first name and patronymic. Of course, the patronymic name is based on the father’s name, the surname is based on the adoptive father or adoptive mother, and you can also choose a new name. The Family Code interprets this precisely as concern for maintaining the secrecy of adoption, but in fact, the point here is not the secrecy of adoption, but the fact that you are taking your child for yourself

. You “master” it, it becomes yours, and if you could not call it by your name, it would be wrong. The legislator has provided for this

You can change your child's place of birth

. Why is it worth changing the place of birth of the child to the place where you currently live or lived at the time when the child could have been born? This eliminates unnecessary questions. For example, you have always lived in Moscow, but your child was born in the Kirov region. You can, of course, tell some stories, but during adoption it’s easier to change the place of birth. Second: you can draw up a new birth certificate for a child after adoption, and if you suddenly lose the birth certificate, you will not have to go to another city for a new certificate or not send a request, but receive the document at your place of residence. It is always more convenient when you can get a birth certificate at the nearest registry office, and not far away. This eliminates unnecessary questions. But the “secret of adoption” ensures this insofar as. Anyone in the child welfare field can generally guess that the child was adopted.

Another change that can be made to the child’s metrics is to change his date of birth

. The date of birth changes only for children under one year old and no more than three months in one direction or the other. Having listened to the advice of specialists and doctors, I consider it inappropriate to change the date of birth. Any doctor will determine that you have shifted your date of birth. This is the first argument. Second: it’s up to everyone to believe/not believe in horoscopes, but, probably, something in a person depends on the date of birth. If you write a different date of birth, then suddenly you changed his fate a little?

I have been involved in adoption for many years, and many parents who have globally changed the date of birth of their child sooner or later encounter problems. For example, doctors begin to not understand, try to catch up to the “level” or are surprised by the rapid development. All these changes lead to the need for additional movements: either you will have to inform the doctor, and then the doctor will more or less calm down, but the secret of adoption will be revealed to him, or you risk being “healed,” because for a small child not only slow development is bad, but also too fast; here the doctor may suspect some kind of hormonal imbalance, and you may receive extra medications for the child, instead of the joy of motherhood. Moreover, you should not move this date to the date of birth of relatives or something else. This makes no sense for the child, and you are formatting his fate. Set the date of birth so that grandma will be pleased... - think about it. After all, at 40 years old, in relation to yourself, you would hardly do this. Therefore, it makes sense to change the place of birth, but not the date.

Therefore, I do not recommend changing your date of birth, but if you want to do it ritually, then you can change it for one day in one direction or the other.

What else can be changed in the birth certificate of a child?

In the birth certificate of a child, you need to make the most important entry, which, as practice shows, people often forget about when drawing up an application to the court for adoption - this is that you need to be recorded as the parents of this child.

Please note that in the application to the court for adoption it is written that you are asking you - Ivanova Maria Ivanovna and Petrov Sidor Moiseevich - to be registered as the parents of this child. The court, of course, will satisfy your demands, but if you forget to declare it and for some reason they do not prompt you to do so, then it will no longer be possible to “fit in” as parents. Don't forget about it!

All teachers of adoptive parents schools always want you to take the child, to be happy, so that he finally becomes exactly yours, so today we spent time talking about changing the child’s data that you do when adopting.

I’ll say it briefly again: you can assign your child your last name (or your mother’s, or your father’s, if they are different), you can assign the child a new name, a new patronymic (by the name of the father or by the name of the person who will be recorded as the father , if the only adoptive parent is a woman). You can change the child’s place of residence and it makes sense to do this so that a new birth certificate is drawn up in your city, and you have the opportunity to receive, for example, a duplicate birth certificate in your city, and not go to where it was registered the birth of a child initially. You can change your child's date of birth, but experts generally do not recommend this.

We have questions:

They write to us: “Good afternoon! We have had children at home for six months, now we cannot adopt them, but soon they will have “status” for adoption. We began to have doubts: the children are 2.5 and 4.5 years old, they lived for a couple of years in an orphanage, they don’t remember the family, they themselves say that they went to kindergarten temporarily while we were renovating the house. For now we keep the secret, and they don’t ask anything. But I think - is it worth adopting? Can I leave custody? But then there can be no question of a secret; biological parents and relatives will be able to find them by their previous last name, for example, on social networks. We were preparing for adoption, but now we are confused. It turns out that upon adoption they will claim an inheritance? During our lifetime, will they be able to demand a share in the apartment when they grow up? The apartment is our property. I wouldn't want such problems. Do you think it’s realistic to keep everything secret when adopting children at this age?”

Anton Alekseevich: “How old are the children? How much time is there in the family?”

Svetlana: “2.5 and 4.5 years. In the family for six months"

Anton Alekseevich: “Svetlana, thank you for the question. I think that children are simply too young in the family. After about six months, the questions will disappear. The question itself reveals a certain uncertainty among the parents as to whether these are their children. Everything, of course, is good about the secret of adoption, while the children “ate” this version that arose from no matter where about the fact that they were not at home while the renovation was going on. But when the children turn 10 years old, they will understand that, in principle, parents do not send their children to an orphanage or kindergarten during renovations. And your idea, your fairy tale will go somewhere, and you will have to come up with something new. But this can be a problem.

In addition, these are two different types of arrangements - adoption and guardianship. Adoption - the child becomes completely yours, and then you decide for yourself how to live, what to do, etc. And you can control your life, and theoretically you can try to keep the adoption secret. If the child is a ward, then there is no secret, there cannot be one by definition; on the contrary, you are controlled, everything is open. The school will have a list of children who are under guardianship or trusteeship, the same list will be in the kindergarten, and there will be increased attention. And here I cannot even say that the state and government officials are wrong in this matter. Indeed, if children are state children, then they are looked after as best they can. Therefore, in the case of guardianship, of course there will be no secret. In the case of adoption, as our knowledgeable potential adoptive parents show us, the children will indeed have the right to inheritance. Children will have certain rights to financial assistance from their own parents, at least until they are old enough to need it. For example, if parents want to divorce, then one of them will pay alimony to the other for the maintenance of these children. That is, children completely become their own with all the ensuing consequences: inheritance, the right to use the property of their parents until the age of 18, all their patronage and count on their parents to support them. After 18 years, the child is an independent person and, of course, he has no right to any share in the apartment if this apartment belongs to the parents, but the question of inheritance will arise.

Will it be possible to keep the adoption secret?

I talked about this a little, but I will say it in even more detail. We once calculated at the School of Adoptive Parents that about 70 people would know that the child was adopted by the time the court made a decision. If you live in a metropolis, you yourself live in Medvedkovo, and you are adopting in Chertanovo, then perhaps you will never meet these people. But in ordinary life, it can also happen that, for example, your child’s classmate’s mother works as a guardian. Do you think they will discuss this issue with the teacher in a purely feminine way, among themselves, a little, without disclosing or telling anyone? Do you think this will be possible, when the child first went to kindergarten under the surname Petrov, and then went under the surname Vasin - no one will guess? Everyone will know this. By the time this becomes important to a child - by adolescence - there will be up to a thousand such people who know that he is adopted. Which of them and how can manifest itself is a big question of fate and chance; we cannot control this in any way. My advice: don’t get caught up in the mystery of adoption and decide among ourselves whether these are our children, or are we ready to raise them only until they are 18 years old. If our children, then there are no questions. If you are under 18 years old, then guardianship is also a good form of arrangement and you can continue it while raising children in the family.

About relatives who can find

The devil is not as scary as he is painted. In my practice, it is not very often that some relatives begin to appear, but this, of course, cannot be ruled out, especially as children grow. Moreover, now there are social networks that will help with this. How to protect yourself from this? If you change your child's last name upon adoption, no additional steps are required. The child simply disappears like the former Ivanov from this situation. Relatives will not find him without special efforts.

If they make a special effort, then I think they will somehow get information that the child is adopted and perhaps find where this happened. I can count such cases on one hand in 15 years of practice. Usually, such children are of no interest to anyone, and if a child ends up in the orphanage system, as a rule, no one except you, who take him from there, needs him. Therefore, I would not worry about this topic at all. If the child is under guardianship, the likelihood that some official relatives may appear remains, but this is a different story, not about a secret or about adoption.

You want to talk about any secret, especially someone else’s. We still somehow keep ours, but with strangers it’s very difficult. We cannot forbid grandmothers at the entrance to discuss why Lucy from apartment 5 suddenly suddenly had a two-year-old child, although she had not been pregnant for the previous three years, we cannot forbid a nanny from a kindergarten to discuss this with the same nanny from a children's clinic. We cannot shut people's mouths, we cannot stop the spread of rumors, but we can lead this process. If your child learns that he is adopted and how he came into the family, from you

, it will be much better than if he finds out from strangers. Therefore, think about who you really need to keep the adoption secret from. You can scare grandmothers, but I don’t think it’s worth saving it from a child.

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Which persons can act as adoptive parents?

Adoptive parents can be all adults of both sexes, with the exception of:

People who have been declared incompetent or have limited legal capacity by a court.
A married couple, one of whose representatives is declared incompetent.
Those who have been deprived of parental rights by court
People who are removed from their duties as a guardian because they have not fully fulfilled their responsibilities.
Former adoptive parents, if their adoption was canceled by court.
People who cannot act as parents for medical reasons.
Those individuals who, at the time of adoption, do not have sufficient income to ensure the proper maintenance and upbringing of the child
People who do not have a permanent place of residence.
Those who have a criminal record or are under investigation.

Also, people who are not married cannot jointly adopt the same child.

Violation

Disclosure of the secret of adoption can be carried out by any persons participating in the process.
However, they must understand that for this they will have to be punished, which is provided for by the country’s criminal code, namely Art. 155 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Thus, it is a crime. At the same time, a violation can be carried out for various reasons. That is, the dissemination of secret information may be caused by prevailing circumstances and may be intentional. Depending on this, the law provides for one or another consequence for the violation committed. Therefore, to determine the elements of the offense, it is necessary to understand the reasons that prompted such actions.

Necessary

It happens that the secret of adoption should be disclosed out of necessity. This occurs when concealing this fact becomes impossible. For example, if a little person has already reached ten years old and remembers everything that happened to him. Moreover, he can remember his biological parents.

Disclosure of this information may be carried out by adoptive parents for educational purposes. If the information is going to be transferred to third parties, then it is first necessary to obtain the consent of the adoptive parents for this action.

Deliberate

The secret of adoption is considered to be deliberately disclosed if the relevant information was transferred to third parties without asking the opinion of the adoptive parents. As an example, this may occur when third parties pursue their own selfish interests. Such an action is illegal and is punishable by law.

Responsibility

Existing Russian legislation defines some measures to suppress the disclosure of the secret of adoption by introducing punishment. When an adoption is carried out in court, the parties to the proceedings are informed of the need to maintain secrecy. This fact is entered into the protocol and certified by the signature of each individual person.

Responsibility for violating the secrecy of adoption is determined by Article 155 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation and the culprit is charged at the discretion of the judge with:

a fine of up to 80 thousand rubles or deduction of funds from wages for six months;
compulsory work up to 360 hours (15 days);
correctional labor for up to 1 year;
conviction and imprisonment for up to 4 months;
In order to ensure the secrecy of adoption, the law also provided, in accordance with Article 155 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, a ban on holding certain positions or carrying out activities for up to 3 years.

When choosing the degree of punishment for the person guilty of disclosure, the judge takes into account the reasons that prompted such a step and the consequences that this act had on the adoptive family.

Responsibility for disclosing the secret of adoption

The main punishment is a fine of up to 80,000 rubles. It is also possible to impose a ban on professional activities for up to three years.
The type of punishment is determined based on the characteristics of the offense. There is a necessary and deliberate disclosure of secrecy. It is worth considering both of these options in more detail. Required disclosure is where the child remembers his or her parents or is over 10 years old and has become a party to adoption proceedings.

Adoptive parents are allowed to reveal the secret of the child’s origin at any time for educational purposes or when the minor shows increased interest in this area. Third parties should do this only with the written consent of the adoptive parents.

Thus, any communication of information to a minor by third parties is considered intentional. Therefore, an entity that violates a secret is subject to punishment in accordance with the requirements of current legislation.

Usually the crime is committed:

for selfish reasons;
through negligence when documents or other evidence of adoption fall into the hands of a child.

The amount of the fine and other punishment are established based on how exactly the child learned about his adoption, from whom and under what circumstances.

It is also possible to assign up to 360 hours of correctional labor or arrest for up to four months.

It is prohibited to tell third parties about the origin of an adopted child without the consent of the guardians.