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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the complex ways in which the theft, trafficking and illegal adoptions of thousands of new born babies in Spain's past offer new understandings of the significance of absence for the victims in contemporary society.

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnographic research, this paper analyses the ways in which 'absences' have shaped the present for the living victims of the theft and illegal adoptions of 300,000 new born babies that occurred in Spain between the early Franco dictatorship era and the 1990s. Over a period of five decades, elements working within the most powerful social, religious and judicial institutions in Spain changed their perception of vulnerable birth parents and their babies from that of human subjects to objects of manipulation, commodification and significant financial gain.

Absence is a potent notion, both as a profound human experience, and as a motivational force for victims' rights organisations that first mobilised in major cities throughout Spain in early 2015. In the framework of 'absences', this paper presents some of the complex processes in which certain social and political ideologies and practices in Spain emerge and continue to shape the present for the victims. I aim to demonstrate how 'absences' can be converted into an organised social force that motivates the objectives and actions of the victims' rights organisations that call for accountability from the Spanish State. In this context, absences perform a labour and intensify the protesters' engagement based on what is strikingly not present. This profound void relates to a missing child, sibling or biological parents, but also a deficit of information, a lack of investigation and justice, and the absence of State and international recognition of the child thefts as human rights violations.