Archive for February, 2010

Lost children: Why they should stay in Haiti

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

The high price of foreign adoption is corrupting – meaning parents may be getting `paper orphans’

By Nicole Baute

There is no fool like the one who wants to be fooled.

Professor David Smolin wrote those words in 2005 referring to adoptive parents in the Western world. Eager to believe they are saving orphaned children from poverty, he wrote, they are easily fooled into accepting laundered children from the developing world.

He knows first-hand how such a thing could happen.

In 1998, Smolin, who teaches at Samford University’s Cumberland School of Law , and his wife, Desiree, adopted two girls from India who did not take kindly to joining their large American family in Birmingham, Ala. “They had a very, very difficult time from the very moment that they arrived,” Desiree Smolin says.

The sisters, roughly 10 and 12 years old, had been living in a hostel – what most North Americans would recognize as an orphanage – in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India, until their adoption. But they were not orphans.

It was not until 2004, after a series of scandals halted adoption in that part of India, that the Smolins were able to confirm the story their adopted daughters had told them six weeks after their arrival – that their parents had sent them to a hostel for an education, and they had been adopted out, without their consent.

For the last several years, the Smolins have been researching international adoption to try to figure out whether their case was a tragic fluke, akin to an airplane crash, or whether there are systemic problems within the inter-country adoption system that make it inherently vulnerable to corruption and abuse.

“The answer has unfortunately been it is systemic,” Desiree Smolin says.

David Smolin argues that children have been commodified and often made into “paper orphans.” In one scenario, poor parents send the children to live in a hostel or orphanage to receive food, care and education; in others, developing world recruiters use false statements or money to separate kids from their parents, or persuade them to relinquish a child to repay a debt. Sometimes extended family members or strangers simply take them. Other times lost children are taken in and little effort is made to find their families.

The children in orphanages in many countries (including potentially Haiti, UNICEF warns) are not necessarily parentless children, orphans in the Western understanding of the word.

“Our assumptions are all off,” Desiree Smolin says. “We assume that every child in an orphanage is an orphan.”

There are opportunities throughout the expensive adoption process for recruiters, adoption agencies, orphanages, officials and attorneys to pocket thousands of dollars – and unless we limit the amount of money Westerners can spend on foreign adoption, the financial incentive will continue to fuel corruption, David Smolin argues.

“When my wife and I first began talking about this we got very negative reactions, overwhelmingly,” David Smolin says. But he says that has changed in more recent years, with well-publicized scandals in countries such as Cambodia and Guatemala and fewer foreign adoptees coming into the U.S. since 2004, when the figure peaked at 22,884.

And the media have indeed started paying attention.

In 2008, E.J. Graff published an often-cited award-winning investigative piece in Foreign Policy called “The Lie We Love,” describing international adoption as a corrupt industry driven by poverty and Western demand.

And just last fall, for example, the L.A. Times reported that instead of levying fines for failing to comply with one-child policies in some rural parts of China, officials were snatching babies for adoption, turning a $3,000 per child profit in the process.

COULD THE international adoption system be inherently flawed? The idea is understandably unsettling for people in Canada, a country that saw 1,908 international adoptions in 2008 – and in the past two weeks, has ushered two planeloads of Haitian orphans into the arms of Canadian families.

In 1993, Canada became a part of the Hague Convention on inter-country adoption, which was formed to better protect children from abuse and trafficking. Although it has a lengthy adoption approval process, Haiti is not a part of the Hague Convention.

Because of stricter regulation in many countries, it became more difficult for Canadians to adopt from abroad; between 2003 and 2006 the numbers dropped. They have since been edging back up.

Karen Shadd, a spokesperson for Citizenship and Immigration, says adoption can be a lengthy process because of the need to ensure children are not being trafficked. “It’s really not red tape … the best interests of the child come first and we have to ensure that everything has been done, that the children have been legitimately placed for adoption,” she says.

Even the system’s skeptics and critics will say international adoption can be a good alternative for poor children in poor countries – if governments, parents and adoption agencies are vigilant.

The threat of trafficking for the purposes of adoption or prostitution becomes much graver during disasters like the current one in Haiti, which has left thousands of children orphaned or unaccompanied. Even before the earthquake, trafficking and kidnapping of children was a problem in the Western hemisphere’s poorest country, and the post-quake chaos has reportedly made things worse.

In one case, a Canadian pastor told reporters that a man offered to sell him a little Haitian boy for $50. He refused.

Concern for the children’s well being led Canadia and the U.S. to expedite adoptions already underway – Canada has welcomed 76 children and counting.

But it is not a time for haste. The Haitian government has since decided that the prime minister must sign off on every child that leaves the country. The U.S. government has asked its citizens for patience.

“We’ve heard quite a few who have suggested, `Why don’t we just bring these children out (of Haiti) until things are better?’” says Patrick McCormick, an emergency communications officer with UNICEF. “Our problem with that is that it makes the whole registration, tracing process difficult to impossible, if they’re kind of gone.”

McCormick says UNICEF supports the decision to fast-track adoptions that were already approved, provided the paperwork is in order. But he says: “Now, post-earthquake, just because there is this disaster there’s no reason to take any short cuts.”

Sandra Scarth, president of the Adoption Council of Canada, agrees that the inter-country adoption system is flawed. She signed the Hague Convention as a non-governmental representative – and says, like the Smolins, that because it does not place a financial limit on adoption fees, tragedies will continue.

“I think until there is some agreement that no more than the actual cost plus a reasonable compensation for people doing the work (is allowed), I think we will continue to see people rush from one country to the next country,” she says. “Then practices will be poor, they will then close that country down and start over.”

KAREN DUBINSKY, a history professor at Queen’s University with a 10-year-old son adopted from Guatemala, says the corruption in international adoption is a symptom of systemic poverty.

“Global poverty and political economy creates desperate people,” says Dubinsky, whose book Babies Without Borders: Adoption and Migration Across the Americas, is due this spring. “One desperate person might snatch the child out of the arms of another desperate person, or one desperate mother might make her own set of decisions about needing to relinquish her child. I don’t think it’s adoption that creates that stuff – I think adoption responds to it, and it sometimes doesn’t respond all that well.”

Dubinsky says we must not assume that orphaned children in impoverished countries are isolated and alone – as if they live in cabbage patches, like the popular dolls of the ’80s.

“When I see the imagery that comes through, sometimes in the media and certainly the imagery of adoption agencies, it’s always children alone,” Dubinsky says. “Children aren’t alone. They may or may not have parents, but they have communities and they have extended family and they’re not waiting for Western people to rescue them.”

Dubinsky believes international adoption can indeed be done ethically. She knows her son wasn’t stolen – she has met his biological mother and his foster family in Guatemala. She believes that in the “good” adoption scenario, we must respect the mother’s decision to relinquish her child, whatever her reasons might be.

There is a lot of potential loss involved in international adoption, says Rachel Wegner, a board member on the international policy advocacy team of Ethica, a not-for-profit dedicated to ethical adoption. “There’s a loss of culture, there’s a loss of family and there’s also a loss of friends and support networks the child has developed in the orphanage.”

In an ideal world, Wegner says, foreign adoption would be the last resort for children – they would ideally be placed with extended family members first, and then in domestic placements to unrelated caregivers.

“Our fear in a lot of this is that those two steps are skipped.”

Desiree Smolin puts it in starker terms. “I’ll give you an analogy,” she says. “Amputations are sometimes necessary, but you don’t want every doctor that you see when you go in with your toe hurting, you don’t want an amputation.”

You need a doctor, she says, who is careful enough to know when the amputation is needed and when it isn’t.

Link to article:
http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/758229–lost-children-why-they-should-stay-in-haiti

Gordon Brown to apologise for Britain’s ’shameful’ child migration policies

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Britain is to join Australia in issuing an official apology for the “shameful” export of tens of thousands of children to Commonwealth countries with the promise of a better life, only for many of them to end up abused and neglected.

By Richard Alleyne

In what Ed Balls, the children secretary, described as “stain on our society” the child migrant programmes saw poor, orphaned and illegitimate children sent to Australia, Canada and other former colonies until as recently as the late 1960s, often without the knowledge of their families.

Many ended up in institutions, many suffered abuse and neglect and many others were used as “slave labour” on farms.

Now after years of campaigning from pressure groups, Gordon Brown has agreed to meet with representatives of the surviving children before making a formal apology next year.

Mr Balls said the apology would be “symbolically very important”.

“I think it is important that we say to the children who are now adults and older people and to their offspring that this is something that we look back on in shame,” he said.

“It would never happen today. But I think it is right that as a society when we look back and see things which we now know were morally wrong, that we are willing to say we’re sorry.”

The government has estimated that a total of 150,000 British children may have been shipped abroad under a variety of programs that operated between the early 19th century and 1967.

A 2001 Australian report said that between 6,000 and 30,000 children from Britain and Malta, often taken from unmarried mothers or impoverished families, were sent alone to Australia as migrants during the 20th century.

Some of the children were told, wrongly, that they were orphans.

The migration was intended to stop the children being a burden on the British state while supplying the receiving countries with potential workers.

A 1998 British parliamentary inquiry noted that “a further motive was racist: the importation of ‘good white stock’ was seen as a desirable policy objective in the developing British Colonies”.

Mr Balls said that while an apology would not “take away the suffering” it was important to the victims to admit it was wrong and to make sure lessons are learnt.

He said the government was talking to the victims’ organisation to work out how to frame the apology.

“These were children who were shipped out of the country, often without their parents even knowing, went on to be labourers thousands and thousands of miles away, suffered physical and sometimes sexual abuse as well and it was something that was sanctioned by government and that is no way to treat children,” he said,

“I think there have been discussions going on for some months about how to do this but to be honest it’s a matter of shame for our country and countries around the world that this terrible policy happened for so many years and decades and was actually government policy.”

The issue of the UK child migrants was investigated in 1998 by the Commons health select committee, a process which led to the Department of Health drawing up guidance for families to trace those sent away.

Kevin Barron, the chairman, said Mr Brown wrote to him over the weekend to confirm he would issue an apology in the new year.

The Prime Minister told him “the time is now right” for the UK government to apologise for the “misguided policies” of previous governments.

However some survivors felt the apology was too little too late.

Harold Haig, the secretary of the International Child Migrants Association, said he was appalled that the Australian apology has come before any British apology.

“Gordon Brown should hang his head in shame,” he said.

“He is allowing the country that we were deported to to apologise before the country where we were born. It is an absolute disgrace. He should hang his head in shame.”

Link to article:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/6575200/Gordon-Brown-to-apologise-for-Britains-shameful-child-migration-policies.html