The potent presence of absence: perceptions of child thefts in contemporary Spain

<p dir="ltr">This thesis investigates the theft and illegal adoptions of up to 300,000 newborn babies in Spain’s recent past (1930s–1990s). In doing so, it offers new understandings of the significance of the experience of absence for the victims of these thefts and adoptions in contemporary society. Absence is a potent perception for them, both as profound human emotion, and as a motivational force for the initiatives of victims’ rights groups that first protested throughout Spain in 2015. I draw on genealogical and phenomenological analyses to not only trace the emergence and evolution of situations, practices and ideologies that enabled the crimes, but also to reveal how contemporary victims experience multi-strata and intertwining absences in embodied, ambiguous, nuanced, silent and invisible ways. </p><p dir="ltr">This thesis is first and foremost an ethnographic study of how the absence of an (allegedly) stolen child, or unknow birth family, are perceived and potently present for those who are left behind. I utilise self-narratives of those most affected by the crimes – biological parents and siblings, and illegally appropriated adoptees – to demonstrate victims’ perceptions of ambiguity, grief, victimhood, injustice, lack of closure, identity, and the significance of ‘blood connectedness’. In highlighting victims’ narratives, I aim to give voice, visibility and meaning to their traumatic experiences. I illustrate how, for the biological parents, the ambiguous ontological status of a ‘disappeared’ child underpins their lives and hopes in terms of the flow of time. I examine the ways in which the continuous and ambiguous spectrum of absences filter through families and are transferred from one generation to the next, often with traumatic and enduring repercussions. </p><p dir="ltr">Yet ‘absences’ can be also converted into an organised social force that motivates the objectives and actions of the victims’ rights organisations in contemporary Spain. The latter chapters of this thesis highlight how victims and their supporting organisations have converted their perceptions of victimhood, impunity and rights consciousness into demands for recognition, accountability and justice from state, medical and ecclesiastical institutions implicated in the child theft crimes of Spain’s recent past.</p>