Long Journey Home: Family Reunification Experiences of the Disappeared Children of El Salvador

Abstract

Established in 1994, Salvadoran Asociación Pro-Búsqueda de Niñas y Niños Desaparecidos (Association for the Search of Disappeared Children) has located 384 children, often with the aid of DNA evidence, of the more than 500 who went missing or were abducted during El Salvador's civil war. Families in other countries who were unaware of the forced separations adopted many of these children. Between 2005 and 2009, we conducted semi-structured interviews with twenty-six children, now young adults aged twenty-four to thirty-four years, who had been reunited with their biological families. We found that we could conceptually categorize the process of separation and reunification into six phases: pre-disappearance, disappearance, separation, searching, reunion, and reunification. While these young adults said that reunification was extremely important, they often found this stage psychologically challenging, given their new identities and their uncertainty about how they would reintegrate back-if at all-into their biological families. We call this process "ambiguous reunification."

“Show them how they treat us”: Legal violence in the everyday lives of street vendors

“…Family separations like these are state-sanctioned legal violence that reflect common themes in my study. A study by pediatricians on family reunification shows that when a child is separated from their mother, chronic stress manifested in increased levels of cortisol, which has long-term biological consequences in terms of growth and development, in addition to the psychological damage of traumatic separation (Barnert et al 2015 ).…”

My Child’s Journey Home: Perspectives of Adult Family Members on the Separation and Reunification of the “Disappeared” Children of El Salvador

“…In a prior study, the authors analyzed the family separation and reunification experiences of twenty-six disappeared Salvadoran children who underwent forced separation as children and reunification as adolescents. 8 Most disappeared children were separated from their families during infancy or early childhood and were later reunited as adolescents. The authors conducted ethnographic fieldwork in El Salvador from 2005–2009, with the assistance of Asociación Pro-Búsqueda.…”