Archive for March, 2010

Children’s Aid Society workers should be reined in, critics say

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

By Kevin Libin, National Post
Published: Friday, June 12, 2009

They are charged with the most essential of duties: protecting vulnerable children from abuse and neglect. They will intervene in the lives of roughly 200,000 Canadian children this year.

For most of us, they are generally unseen, save for occasional mentions in news reports, when they rescue children from misery. Or, as sometimes happens, deliver it.

Canada’s child-welfare agencies, says University of Manitoba social work professor Brad McKenzie, have among the broadest intervention powers in the Western world.

Caseworkers come armed with vaster powers than any police officer investigating crime. It is an immense authority easily abused, without vigilant restraint.

It is time, critics say, they were reined in.

“The social worker system, as it applies to children, is out of control, seriously out of control,” says Katherine McNeil, a children’s advocate who has worked with families in Nova Scotia and B.C. “And nobody’s doing anything about it.”

Child-welfare agencies step in when kids are homeless, exploited, hungry or abused. They do not stop there. As the highly publicized neo-Nazi case in Winnipeg demonstrates, they might seize children from parents for teaching racist views, or for “emotional neglect.” They have taken newborns from parents considered insufficiently intelligent; from religious families believing the Bible commands them to discipline kids with a rod. They order homeschooling parents to enroll children in public school, deeming them inadequately socialized.

“They violate all kinds of privacy and rights,” says Chris Klicka, senior counsel for the Home School Defense League, which represents Canadian and American parents.

Whether we wanted it or not, knew it or not, over time, the work of child-welfare organizations has become “parenting by the state and the imposition of their value system on other people,” says Marty McKay, a clinical psychologist who has worked on abuse cases in the U.S and Canada. Provincial agencies have the power to intervene when children are considered “at risk” of abuse or neglect – even if none has actually occurred. Or, where spousal abuse happens, but kids are untouched. And what they do with the children they take can sometimes be worse than what they suffered at home.

***

When journalist J.J. Kelso founded Canada’s first Children’s Aid Society in 1891, it was from revulsion at what he had witnessed working in Toronto’s slums: the filthy, homeless urchins begging on the street, the school-aged girls whored out by parents for whiskey money; children needing “rescue,” Kelso exhorted, “from the environments of vice, cruelty or mendicancy.”

Courts could imprison parents for cruelty, but not revoke custody. Backed by the 1893 Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to and Better Protection of Children, the society had unique authority to directly interfere in affairs of parents and children: Anyone under 14 found begging, receiving alms, out late, homeless, orphaned, imprisoned, thieving, or associating with thieves, drunkards or vagrants, would be appropriated by the province.

Since then, as child-welfare agencies multiplied across Canada, their authority expanded, too.

One Calgary mother said her kids were recently pulled from class and questioned by a caseworker after she kept them home from school for a week, fearing they might be exposed to Swine Flu. When the mother protested, the worker threatened to seize all six children in her house, including two toddlers.

“All because I was overtly concerned about my children’s health,” says an incredulous Ms. K, who, as is the case with all investigations, cannot be identified. Nor can she ever know who lodged the complaint against her.

The worker later visited the house. There, Ms. K reports (and witnesses confirm), when she further protested the interference – at one point calling police – the agent hollered at her, physically accosted her, and threatened to report her for abuse, of which, the caseworker later relented, there was no evidence.

The secrecy that envelops these cases makes it nearly impossible to fully investigate Ms. K’s remarkable claims: caseworkers do not permit “clients,” as they’re called, to record meetings, and agencies cannot comment on any case. But the account doesn’t shock those who work closely with the authorities.

“I’m certainly not surprised, and hear over and over again of workers … threatening [parents] with apprehension. They’ll never admit it in court, of course, but I hear it all the time,” says Bradley Spier, a Calgary family lawyer. “Most of the time they’re above board. … They all have an attitude, but they’ll do their investigation and, if they can’t substantiate it, they’re generally pretty honest about that, and won’t take any action. But until then, they’re god-like creatures, for lack of a better word. Or they think they are.”

***

The government’s role in protecting vulnerable children treads an impossibly fine line. Without anonymous complaints, and the power to interview and apprehend, some children would undoubtedly suffer terribly. Accordingly, legislators grant workers astounding licence: a social work graduate, fresh from college, can enter a home without warrant; apprehend children without due process; and commandeer police officers to enforce his or her efforts. A caseworker can order children dressed, fed, medicated, and educated any way they consider appropriate. Parents who do not submit risk losing custody, even visitation of their kids. Or have them taken away permanently.

It is an authority that is sometimes severely misused. When that happens, Ms. McKay says, families can be traumatized in a perversion of the very system designed to prevent abuse.

The anonymous process, for example, invites bogus tips – commonly from divorcing parents, for instance, since agencies can unilaterally alter custody arrangements. Most complaints prove “unsubstantiated”: 55% according to the most recent Health Canada study.

“Children’s Aid, even when they don’t start an investigation [themselves], they can be manipulated by people,” says Ms. McKay.

Prof. McKenzie says child-welfare agencies typically do good work under difficult circumstances. Overstretched caseworkers, with general training, can be unequipped to specialize in interventions and the complexities each case brings. What some, middle-class agents might consider neglect, for example, is often a matter of poverty, not necessarily cruelty.

And some child-welfare workers also exploit their tremendous clout to behave unethically, prejudicially or illegally.

“Some of them get a real power complex because they have a bachelor of social work, or a masters, and they suddenly have this power [to] apprehend,” says Ms. McKay. “They throw their weight around.” She sees in some workers a “police mentality.” It may be a coincidence, but in the largest English-speaking provinces, Alberta, B.C. and Ontario (Quebec data are incomplete), the number of children taken into care by provincial agencies between 1993 and 2001, rose a remarkable 97%, 63% and 72% respectively.

Prof. McKenzie is encouraged by a nascent trend in Canadian agencies away from historic, heavier-handed investigative and apprehension focus, and toward working more co-operatively with families to improve home conditions.

Studies show that under the current system, he says, “generally we find that the majority of children that are served [by welfare agencies] do well” – meaning they thrive at school, seem generally well-adjusted, are free from abuse and neglect. About 15% to 20%, he says, do not.

That is not a trifling number. But the stories behind it – let alone the validity of the initial apprehensions – can prove impenetrable. Cases are shrouded in silence, media blocked from reporting details, or questioning workers, in the legitimate name of protecting children involved (even in the high-profile Winnipeg neo-Nazi case, most details were concealed). But such limits thwart public scrutiny into an arm of government as capable of error as any other, yet, in determining how much or even whether families stay together, working with some of the highest stakes imaginable.

Last year, Ontario MPP Andrea Horwath tabled a private member’s bill to make Children’s Aid Societies answerable to the provincial ombudsman, something Ontario’s Children and Youth Services has repeatedly resisted (ombudsmen in some other provinces, such as Alberta, have that authority). Ontario’s CAS typically refuses to share files with its Child Advocate; in his annual report released earlier this year – which found 90 children in provincial care died in 2008 – Irwin Elman called it “almost impossible” to get information necessary to investigate potential agency wrongdoing. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled parents could not sue child-welfare agencies; provinces, it ruled, owed no “duty of care” to families. The lack of oversight, says Ms. McNeil, creates departments accountable only to themselves.

And there are numerous instances of caseworkers acting improperly. Two years ago, a Nova Scotia judge ruled that workers intervening in a divorce custody dispute were so biased against the mother, and in favour of the father – who lived with a woman previously the subject of interventions for violence and neglect – that they took “intentional and deliberate” steps to “mislead the court” by concealing evidence against him. A few years earlier, the CAS of Prescott and Russell, near Ottawa, and one worker, were convicted of contempt of court for refusing to return a two-year-old boy to his parents, defying a judge’s instructions to do so. Agents insisted they were acting in the boy’s “best interests.” In 2001, two judges in Simcoe, Ont., criticized the CAS there for “arbitrary use of government power” and unreasonableness “verging on blind obstinacy” in fighting to keep children from being adopted by certain foster parents. Several parents interviewed for this story claim to have faced false accusations and bullying from caseworkers harbouring apparent agendas.

A report this year from Saskatchewan’s Children’s Advocate, Marvin Bernstein, found children suffering serious, ongoing abuse and neglect in the care of the province amidst a “culture of non-compliance with policy” among social services staff.

Even when acting with utmost professionalism, whether agents are able to provide children a better, safer environment than where they came from is not certain.

Mr. Bernstein’s report found staff knowingly placing children with histories of committing sexual abuse into crowded foster homes where they preyed on other kids, without alerting foster parents to the problem (one reported that a caseworker assured her “a certain amount of sexual abuse is to be expected in a foster home”). A quarter of children were placed in overcrowded homes, he found, as staff routinely used “manipulative methods” to “trick” foster parents into taking more kids than they were approved for. Two Saskatchewan caseworkers were suspended in February after being discovered shuffling children between foster homes to hide overcrowding conditions from investigators.

“Children’s Aid has no business placing into care a child that they can foresee is going to come out worse the other end than when they went in,” Ms. McKay says. “If that’s the best they can do, just leave them.”

Two teens charged in connection with the recent double murder near Edmonton were in care of a ministry-licensed group home – a place neighbours say they warned the government for years was poorly monitored. In March, a 15-month-old baby in care of Alberta’s Children and Youth Services suffered critical head injuries in a foster home; in the past four years, two Alberta children have been killed by foster parents. A 2008 report found Alberta caseworkers regularly placing kids in unsafe conditions, including abusive situations.

Last year, seven-year-old Katelynn Sampson was killed in Toronto in care of a foster parent with a record of violent crimes, and in Vancouver, police discovered minors in provincial care working as prostitutes. In 2002, Jeffrey Baldwin was abused and neglected to death by a couple with a known history of child abuse but were nonetheless granted custody of the five-year-old by the Catholic Children’s Aid Society of Toronto. A 2006 CBC investigation uncovered Ontario caseworkers drugging a seven-year-old Ontario boy into a stupor with massive doses of psychotropic medications, which a psychiatrist would later find had “no actual treatment value,” except making him more compliant in his group home. While in his drugged state, he was sexually abused by fellow residents.

Those who believe in the good intentions of child-welfare agencies argue they lack the resources to deal properly with each case; with some workers handling more than 30 clients simultaneously, it is impossible to act perfectly. One problem, believes Ms. McKay, is caseworkers spread too thin, drifting far from the original vision of the state’s role in family matters: protecting kids from verifiable and authentic abuse, cruelty and neglect.

“They need to go back to the basics,” she says. “Do the children look well-nourished? Do they have bruises on them? Are they molested? Is the house crawling with cockroaches? If not, they’re not being abused or neglected.”

But with powerful, generally unaccountable agencies, dependent on justifying their place in a world far improved from the cruelties of J.J. Kelso’s Victorian Toronto, the need to intervene in more cases, for more reasons, may make such discipline difficult. “I would love to just demolish the system and start from scratch again,” she says. “Because it’s gone very far awry here.”

Link to article

Origins-USA urges keeping Haitian orphans with their families

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

By Karen Ciandella

The Adoption Community continues to come forward with position papers regarding adoptions in Haiti.

Origins-USA is a national, non-profit organization working to protect the natural rights of mothers to nurture their children. Origins-USA released the following position statement this week:

Origins-USA Urges Keeping Haitian Orphans with Their Families

Many news stories have talked about Americans seeking to adopt Haitian orphans in the wake of the devastating earthquake. Origins-USA encourages efforts to help Haitians through donations to respected relief agencies which can use funds to reunite children with their families and to help care for children in their own country.

International adoption should be a last resort, used only when necessary for children to receive medical care that they cannot obtain in their own country (Position Statement on International Adoption). Money spent bringing children to the US is better spent helping their families and relatives care for them in their own countries.

There’s talk about eliminating “red tape” to expedite adoptions. In truth, the so-called red tape is regulations designed to assure children are true orphans and do not have family members or neighbors to care for them. Origins-USA urges you to let your representatives in Congress, President Barack Obama, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton know that family support, not adoption, is the way to help the almost 400,000 children in Haitian orphanages.

Last week, 10 Americans were arrested in Haiti for attempting to illegally remove children from the earthquake devastated country.

The group of men and women, members of a church group in Idaho, are part of the “Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission”. They described their effort to save abandoned, traumatized children and the plan to “scoop up” children and relocate them to the Dominican Republic. They were arrested at the border for not having proper paperwork.

The fear that Haiti’s children will be exploited by child traffickers or illegal adoption is a reality.
Children that are parentless or lost are more vulnerable than ever to be seized. While the Americans may have been “trying to do the right thing” – removing children from Haiti is illegal and requires the Prime Ministers’ personal authorization.

While the Americans claim they were acting in good faith, many of the children continued to claim their parents are alive. If a child tells you they are not orphans and their parents are alive – how can you still claim “good faith and doing the right thing”?

Now, it’s up to the legal system to determine whether the Americans were acting out of good faith or are exploiting children.

Haiti’s government halted all adoptions unless they were in progress prior to the earthquake. Children have to be protected from people who will exploit them and from those who think they are doing the right thing.

Humanitarian efforts need to focus on tracking children, reuniting them with their families and taking care of them in their own country.

Our Dirty Adoption Secret

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

By Emily Wolfinger

The Federal Government wants to give forced adoption victims an apology, but seems very keen to prevent the public finding out exactly what the apology is for, writes Emily Wolfinger

During a meeting at Minister for Families Jenny Macklin’s Canberra office on 27 August, the offer of an apology to an estimated 150,000 women and their children who were “unethically” and “unlawfully” separated between 1950 and 2000 was declined by Origins, the official body representing these women.

Macklin’s advisor Tracey Mackey phoned Origins NSW coordinator Lily Arthur the next day, asking whether Origins would reconsider accepting their offer of an apology. They declined a second time. But get this: the apology may still go ahead in November. As if it were an afterthought, the Government plans to tack this apology onto the apology to the “Forgotten Australians”, those half-million Australians abused as children in institutions. The Forgotten Australians are also upset about this, as they want their apology to be their own — and fair enough. However, it seems the Government is determined to kill two birds with one stone.

Far from being a well-meaning gesture, the offer of an apology is an insulting and deeply disappointing outcome for Origins, who have waited nearly 10 years for a Government response on this issue. They have been campaigning for a national inquiry for even longer, and not once have they asked for an apology. According to the group, it is only through a national inquiry that Australians will learn of the nationwide extent of the crimes acknowledged as “kidnapping” by Family Court Justice Richard Chisholm in evidence he gave at the NSW Parliamentary Inquiry into past adoption practices in 1999.

That inquiry only served to reveal the extent of criminal and unethical adoption practices committed in NSW. Origins fears that until all states are held accountable in a national inquiry, Australians forcibly removed from their unmarried mothers in other states will remain in the dark about the circumstances surrounding their adoption. A national inquiry will also provide an opportunity for mothers from all states to tell their stories. Origins says it is very unlikely that any of this will happen if the Government goes ahead with the apology, because such a move would look to many as if some degree of recompense had been made.

It makes no sense at all for the Government to insist on making an apology before Australians even know of the nationwide extent of the crimes to which such an apology would correspond. The Indigenous Stolen Generations had their national inquiry first, and it demonstrated very clearly just what was being apologised for. Why not use the same process for mothers forcibly separated from their children through adoption? Is this offer of an apology an attempt at an easy way out of actually doing something to address the damage caused by Australia’s adoption practices? Perhaps, worse still, it is an attempt at a cover-up of the extent of the crimes perpetrated against these women and their babies.

Lily Arthur believes it is. “The reason why they want us to accept an apology is [so that they can] continue to hide the unlawful practices.” She says that the Government is trying to cover for the states who are afraid of what a national inquiry could reveal, and in turn, how much it could end up costing them in terms of redress and litigation.

It’s not hard to see why the many victims of these criminal adoptions are deeply sceptical of government bona fides on this issue. Beyond failing to fully investigate and acknowledge what happened to these women, the federal and state governments are still misinforming people about the bumper adoption era that occurred from the 1950s to the 1980s and even trivialising what happened. The Victorian Government, for one, attributes the decline in adoptions from the mid-70s to “… a number of interrelated factors: the introduction of government benefits for single parents, increasingly tolerant community attitudes toward exnuptual births and single parenthood, improved contraception [and] the widespread availability of pregnancy terminations”.

In fact, while the Supporting Mother’s Benefit for single mothers was not introduced until 1973 under the Whitlam Government (and it did not extend to fathers until 1977 under the Fraser Government), financial assistance was actually available to single mothers well before the 1970s, as outlined in a 1956 government publication titled Children in Need by Donald McLean: “To avoid any misunderstanding or any suggestion that the mother was misled or misinformed, District Officers are instructed to explain fully to the mother, before taking the consent, the facilities which are available to help her keep her child. These include…financial assistance to unmarried mothers under section 27 of the Child Welfare Act …” However, as documented in the transcripts of the NSW Parliamentary Inquiry this fact was largely concealed from mothers.

While that inquiry has put on the public record much that needs to be better understood, there is still much more that needs to see the light of day. An apology, therefore, would be an irresponsibly premature step on an issue already so marked by institutional culpability. Origins want full acknowledgement and accountability first — which they believe a national inquiry would ensure — then suitable redress, and then perhaps an apology.

The other point about government apologies is that they must be done properly, and at the right time — that is, when people want them — otherwise they become devalued. As Arthur also points out, in their eagerness to issue an apology, the Government is reducing the significance of the apology to the Stolen Generations of Indigenous people. “If they are prepared to offer an apology to people who don’t want one, what kind of substance does the original apology to the Stolen Generations have?”

So, what were some of the unethical and illegal practices perpetrated against these women? Well, as documented in the transcripts of the NSW Parliamentary Inquiry into past adoption practices, they include: the detainment of unmarried women during pregnancy; the immediate separation of mothers and babies following births (many mothers were not allowed to see their babies until they signed adoption forms and many others never met their babies); the use of coercion to solicit adoption consents from mothers (in some cases, mothers were told the adoption papers were discharge forms); the use of mind altering drugs (not administered to married mothers) following births and preceding consents; promises of a 30-day cooling off period to get mothers to give consents when the rights to revoke consent during this period were rarely observed; the absence of any counselling prior to and following adoptions, and the failure to notify mothers of alternative options to adoption (as noted above, many mothers did not know that financial support was available).

It is not surprising then that these mothers suffer a number of mental health conditions ranging from depression to post-traumatic stress disorder. Half of these mothers did not go on to have more children, while the female suicide rate was highest between 1962-72, reaching an all-time high of 13 per 100,000 women in 1967, compared to 4.3 today. This period coincided with the peak in adoptions — nearly 10,000 in 1971-2. Taken together, these facts represent an appalling and poorly understood blemish on our human rights record.

In a press release on the Sunday following the meeting at Jenny Macklin’s office, the minister said that she had “begun a dialogue” with mothers separated from their babies. However, when asked whether this means a national inquiry is on the cards, a spokesperson from Macklin’s office would not say, sending instead this vague response: “This dialogue will explore what sort of acknowledgement of their experiences would assist their healing process.”

Clearly the Federal Government wants this issue to go away, but that isn’t about to happen any time soon. Arthur says that mothers like her won’t go away until the so-called past adoption practices — or, as she calls them “abduction practices” — are seen for what they were.

Next year will mark 10 years since the Final Report into past adoption practices in NSW, titled Releasing the Past, labelled those practices “unethical” and “unlawful”. It will also mark 15 years since Origins was founded and first started campaigning for a national inquiry. It is time that the Federal Government allowed the country to face the reality of this part of Australian history and set up a national inquiry. National inquiries have been instigated for much less serious reasons than the theft of over 100,000 children.

These mothers want their children to know the full truth. They are not asking for much.

International adoption: A big fix brings dramatic decline

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

By Scott Baldauf in Johannesburg, South Africa; Sarah E. Burton in Beijing; Ezra Fieser in Guatemala City; Kathie Klarreich in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; and Fred Weir in Moscow

When Silvia Sebac’s birth mother made the five-hour bus ride through the mountainous countryside to leave her at an orphanage in Guatemala City, the infant had every prospect of an international adoption – of captivating adoptive parents from the US or Europe.

That was four years ago, when the adoption business was booming and people from rich countries were traveling the globe from China and South Korea to Russia and Ethiopia to find a child to complete their families. At the time Silvia arrived in Guatemala City, her country was giving up nearly 5,000 children annually – 1 in every 100 births. Adoption was an estimated $100 million industry that attracted thousands of international families willing to pay more than $30,000 to lawyers and agencies and to the capital city’s towering hotels that dedicated entire floors to adoptive parents, catering to their every diaper and baby cream need.

But by the time her two-year wait to be declared legally abandoned was up, dark-eyed Silvia had no takers. Intercountry adoptions had begun to plummet.

Once a secretive or shameful process in many countries, adoption – particularly the heartwarming gesture of rich people traveling to the ends of the earth for a baby – became iconic in modern culture. The likes of Madonna and Angelina Jolie adopting in Africa injected glamorous publicity as well as drew suspicion and cynicism to the process.

Along with the growth of international adoption came publicized scandal and consequently a chillier new adoption climate, with stricter government controls. It has caused the number of international adoptions to plummet, and left behind – if also protected – many orphans around the globe.

Silvia is one of them, prevented from joining a new family in what is considered the most adoptable period – the infant to toddler years. In the final days of 2007, with the system beset by allegations of baby theft and coercion of birth mothers, Guatemalan lawmakers placed a moratorium on international adoptions. It put in place a new system that

followed the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, which is an international standard – and it implemented UNICEF-inspired policy dictating that a family within the country, preferably a relative, should be sought before international families.

Today when asked who her mother is, Silvia points to an orphanage caretaker, and says, beaming, “Mama Nico.” A slight, pretty girl, Silvia flashes four stubby fingers when asked her age: “Cuatro.”

And, says Alejandra Diaz, the director of the orphanage, “Hannah’s Hope,” Silvia is probably going to spend many more birthdays in the orphanage: “It is hard to say it, because I knew her when she was a baby, but she’s going to be here for years.” Ms. Diaz says her facility, which used to process 90 adoptions a year, now has 31 seemingly permanent orphan residents, and cannot afford to take in more of the estimated 4,000 Guatemalan children now backed up in state and private orphanages.

“We are in a period of adoption history where growing transparency is having a significant impact in various ways: Many of them are very good and some of them are very complicated,” observes Adam Pertman, author of “Adoption Nation” and the executive director of the Evan Donaldson Adoption Institute.

“Now that everyone’s watching, it’s incumbent on us to get it right – the short-term consequences clearly are leading to a decline in international adoptions,” Mr. Pertman adds. “But hopefully, if we really get it right now, the decline will be a blip, and more kids, not fewer, who need homes will wind up getting them, in their own countries or, if necessary, in others.”

As shown by the recent arrest of American missionaries in Haiti – accused of child trafficking for trying to take 33 Haitian children out of the quake-stricken country – the world’s intercountry adoption system needs to be fixed, agree children’s advocates and adoption agencies.

“Haiti magnified and amplified the issue that we deal with in over 180 countries,” says Susan Bissell, chief of child protection for UNICEF in New York. The earthquake – and the media attention that followed it – simply exposed the multitude of problems that many developing countries face and that drive the supply of orphans: extreme poverty among families, weak social welfare systems to find alternative family arrangements closer to home, and corrupt legal systems that operate on personal deals rather than legal principles.

Instead of finding families for every child in need, the present system is set up to find a child for every family that wants one. Navigating the unfamiliar and wildly varying rules of foreign courts has created a huge industry of adoption agencies and adoption-law specialists, who command large fees – often $20,000 to $40,000 per child. And while many adoption agencies do their work legitimately, the lure of such large fees has created powerful incentives for less legitimate agencies to procure children.

In Guatemala’s case, for example, “the government had lost control of the system,” says Marilys Barrientos de Estrada, a director of the governmental agency created to oversee the new adoption process. “It was purely in the hands of the lawyers and agencies. And it wasn’t about the children, it was about the money.”

To ensure that a child’s interests are put first, the 1993 Hague Adoption Convention gave countries a legal blueprint to help them make adoption a transparent, predictable, and legitimate process. As implementation of the treaty by the United States and 81 other countries progressed over the past few years, the number of intercountry adoptions dropped dramatically.

“The intention of the Hague convention is not to slow down adoptions,” says William Duncan, deputy secretary-general of the Hague Conference on Private International Law, which oversees implementation of the Hague Adoption Convention. “In the last few years, the number of adoptions has tended to drop, but my impression is that has to do with a lot of specific conditions in specific countries.”

The new rules of adoption combined with fewer available children have caused the slowdown, says Pertman. The Hague convention “caused a real shake-up” because a lot of social agencies in developing countries simply can’t comply. And scandals in Guatemala and Romania, and China’s rethink of its pro-adoption policies, dramatically reduced the supply of adoptable children. The result, he says, is “a very long wait period.”

Guatemala’s scandals resulted in the moratorium on international adoption. Likewise, while Haiti deals with the postquake tsunami of international requests to adopt orphaned children, and as it processes the case of the arrested missionaries, it has become acutely aware of the weakness of its documentation process. (“If a child isn’t registered, the child doesn’t exist,” says Jennifer Bakody, UNICEF communications officer in Haiti. “Then there’s no way to protect the child, he/she is really lost from the system.” And that’s how good intentions can turn into scandal.)

So the Haitian government has announced a shutdown of all adoptions, partly out of caution but partly out of necessity – its main adoption judge was killed in the quake and government documents have been lost in the chaos. But international adoption officials in Port-au-Prince report that irregularities continue in the chaos: The Haitian government declared that adoptions in process could only be signed off by the prime minister, but it’s clear that some adoptions continue with other ministers signing off.

International authorities are encouraging Haiti not to attempt adoptions at the moment. A country like Haiti needs to rebuild before it gets into the business of helping find individual homes for adoptable children, Ms. Bissell argues.

And once it can focus on adoption again, Haiti’s priority should be less international adoption than sorting through the chaos that may reveal many so-called orphans do have family. One complication unique to Haiti, say observers, is its informal “gifting” of children to better-off families with the hope the child’s lot will improve and the child will be better cared for (sometimes it has been called a form of slavery). This restavek system (from the French rest avec, rest with), broke down in the earthquake, says Carol Bakker, UNICEF subregional adviser for child protection, and hosts are leaving these children behind. Adoption authorities are trying to register them so that they can be returned to families, placed in interim care, or – as a last resort – put up for international adoption.

“Ideally,” says Donald Moore, the US general consul in Port-au-Prince, “the government has to vet the best solution for every child. In most countries, adoption is not the first solution. You want to reestablish the child on the ground before you look for external solutions.”

China, Russia, and Guatemala have been, until recently, the biggest source countries for adoptable children. But each for its own reasons has drastically reduced the number of children available for international adoption.

In China, the number of children sent abroad plummeted from 14,500 in 2005 to 5,942 in 2008, according to figures collected for UNICEF by Peter Selman, an adoption expert at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, in England.

Great changes in social and economic policies, say experts, have affected the availability of children for international adoption.

In the past, the one-child policy – blamed for the current demographic bulge of boys, which have been seen as more valuable than girls – caused an influx of unwanted, healthy Chinese girls to orphanages.

Today, few healthy Chinese girls are put up for adoption, and the decline is driven by adjustments in the one-child policy – including encouragement of domestic adoption and, in some regions, of higher birthrates – and an increase in prosperity that have made parents more likely to keep a girl.

In 2008, the number of domestic adoptions, according to official Chinese statistics, had grown to more than 37,000 annually. There is high demand in China and the US to adopt, says Kay Johnson, an expert on domestic Chinese adoptions at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. “The bottom line is that the supply of healthy babies [in China] is down,” she says.

So nearly 50 percent of Chinese children adopted by US parents have special needs, such as congenital heart defects, cleft palates, and clubfeet, explains Chuck Johnson, chief operating officer at the National Council for Adoption, in Alexandria, Va. Half of these special-needs adoption cases come through a Chinese government-designed program called the Waiting Child Program, which seeks to find outstanding families for children diagnosed with special medical needs.

“Make no mistake, those of us who have been in this field for a long time knew that there would be a day like this, and it has happened,” says Melody Zhang, associate director of Children’s Hope International, an organization that has helped more than 100,000 Chinese children find homes with US families. Ultimately, it’s a good thing, she says, because more children – healthy or not – are being placed.

The shift in adoption trends is felt nowhere more than at Detksi Dom No. 1 – Children’s House No. 1 – in the Moscow suburb of Vikhino. About 60 children, ages 3 to 7, call the squat concrete orphanage beneath towering apartment blocks home.

Though many from this orphanage were adopted in the past by European or American families, now almost all who are adopted from this facility are claimed by Russian parents and taken to new homes inside their own country.

The dramatic change is captured best in national statistics: In 2004, foreigners adopted 9,400 Russian children, and Russian citizens adopted 7,000, according to the Ministry of Education and Science.

By 2008, only 1,198 Russian children were given to foreigners for adoption, and Russian citizens adopted 7,683. Also, more than 100,000 Russian children were placed in temporary foster homes in Russia.

One of the main reasons for the dramatic change is that Russian lawmakers have made a concerted effort to put domestic adoptions first.

“Adoption to another country will be considered as an alternative only if the child cannot be transferred to a family in [the] country of his origin,” a spokeswoman for the Education Ministry said in a written response to questions.

And the government now pays families a bonus of $1,000 for taking in a foster child, with generous monthly payments for upkeep. Under a program started by former President Vladimir Putin in 2006, women can now receive up to $10,000 for bearing – or adopting – a second child.

In the recent past, a historic Russian reluctance to adopt children stood in irony alongside nationalist rhetoric against the idea of “selling Russian children abroad.” But both attitudes have largely disappeared, experts say.

“Russians were reluctant to adopt in the past, and the system of foster homes was completely undeveloped in this country. But that’s turned around amazingly in the past few years,” says Natalia Serova, director of Detski Dom No. 1.

Even five years ago, says Yekaterina Bridge, Moscow representative of World Association for Children and Parents (WACAP), “the average Russian thought foreign adoption was all about black-marketing Russian kids. But the Russian media has stopped publishing scare stories like that, and we find the social attitude about international adoptions is now much calmer and more positive.”

Some Russian celebrities, such as the TV presenter Svetlana Sorokina (Russia’s version of Katie Couric), have adopted in recent years. Ms. Sorokina wrote a very compelling account, with photos, in a popular magazine in which she detailed her personal search, her bureaucratic ordeal, and her profound feelings of happiness when she eventually brought her child home.

Also, there’s a middle class in Russia now that didn’t exist before, and it includes middle-aged professionals with means and stable lives who want to have more children in their homes. Further, philanthropic notions – such as individual helping and giving to the less fortunate – have also grown, particularly within that same class of Russians.

Russia’s Ministry of Education and Science says there are about 760,000 orphans in Russia (out of a population of 27 million children), but only 140,000 of them are listed in the huge official database as available for adoption. About 70 adoption agencies from a dozen countries still work in Russia, despite a severe shakeout three years ago that saw all international adoptions frozen and many agencies stripped of their accreditation.

With new rules governing adoptions, an American couple hoping to adopt a Russian child may expect the process to take two or three years and to be very costly.

Despite all the red tape, Russia is far from the worst country in which to work in the former Soviet region, says Ms. Bridge. “The Russian system actually cuts some of the corruption that is very prevalent [elsewhere],” she says. “In Russia, there are very clear written rules, so there’s no ambiguity about what’s required. It’s that ambiguity in other places that opens the door to corruption.”

Once the world’s second-largest source for adopted children, Guatemala is set to open itself to international adoptions again this year. It received letters of interest from 10 countries – including the US, France, Spain, and Denmark – that want their residents to be able to adopt from Guatemala, says Rudy Zepeda, spokesman for the National Adoption Council, the new government agency. Once the pilot program starts, in June or July, only 60 Guatemalan children will be made available to international families. After that, intercountry adoption will still be limited to 100 or 150 cases, mostly older children like Silvia or those with disabilities.

The estimated 4,000 other children now living in orphanages will have to first be declared “adoptable” by Guatemalan courts and then be made available to Guatemalan families. As of mid-February, after more than two years under the new system, 590 Guatemalan families had applied to adopt a child and the courts had cleared 559 children, but just 253 of those children had been adopted.

Meanwhile, children like Silvia wait, growing up in homes that try to replicate family life. “We can give them love, we can give them clothes, and feed them,” says Diaz, the orphanage director, “but it’s not the same as sitting down for a meal with your family.”