Britain’s child snatchers are a scandal

By Christopher Booker

Is any human instinct more fundamental than the love of a mother for her children? Last week I reported how Maureen Spalek from Liverpool had been arrested and held in a cell for 24 hours for sending a birthday card to her son, one of three children taken away from her by a family court, despite its agreeing that she was “an excellent mother”.

In Runcorn magistrates’ court on Wednesday Mrs Spalek was told she must return for a pre-trial hearing, before her criminal charge of sending a birthday card goes for trial at a Crown Court. Last month, Mrs Spalek was one of 200 mothers who gathered in Stafford to set up a group known as Child Snatching by the State. They were addressed by Ian Josephs, a businessman based in Monaco, who has championed the cause of parents whose children were unjustly removed by social workers ever since he was a Tory county councillor in the 1960s.

As Mr Josephs describes on his Forced Adoptions website, he has dealt with hundreds of such harrowing cases (always being careful to check that there was no evidence of physical or emotional harm to the children). One is that of Sarah White, repeatedly arrested for attempting to contact her “stolen children”, including an instance when she was jailed for a month for waving to her son when she unexpectedly saw him across the street. Two weeks ago, she was again held in custody for five hours, after her brother posted a YouTube video describing her plight.

Julie Cipriani is another mother arrested for waving to her child in the street and forbidden from further contact after reading out in court her daughter’s loving birthday card.

When another mother threatened with having her baby abducted recently fled to Ireland, her family were repeatedly visited by police, demanding to know her whereabouts. She is now receiving much more humane treatment from Irish social services. (Britain is almost the only country in Europe that permits forced adoptions against the wishes of loving parents.)

In the Commons last October, the Tory MP Tim Yeo described a case where Suffolk social workers waited until the father was out of the house to snatch an 11-week-old baby from the arms of its distraught mother, in order to put the child out for adoption. Until recently social workers were set “adoption targets” by the government, as part of a system where it seems they, the courts and the police are too often conspiring to abduct children from loving parents in the name of what amounts to heartless “social engineering”. Few scandals call for more urgent attention by our new Parliament than this.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7728931/Britains-child-snatchers-are-a-scandal.html

Posted on May 24, 2010 at 12:20 pm, by admin

Yukon to unseal adoption files

Posted on May 24, 2010 at 12:04 pm, by admin

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

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

Posted on March 30, 2010 at 12:21 am, by admin

Origins-USA urges keeping Haitian orphans with their families

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.

Posted on March 30, 2010 at 12:07 am, by admin

Our Dirty Adoption Secret

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.

Posted on March 30, 2010 at 12:02 am, by admin

International adoption: A big fix brings dramatic decline

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.”

Posted on March 30, 2010 at 12:00 am, by admin

Lost children: Why they should stay in Haiti

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

Posted on February 9, 2010 at 12:53 pm, by admin

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

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

Posted on February 9, 2010 at 12:43 pm, by admin

How social services are paid bonuses to snatch babies for adoption

By SUE REID

For a mother, there can be no greater horror than having a baby snatched away by the State at birth.

The women to whom it has happened say their lives are ruined for ever – and goodness knows what longterm effect it has on the child.

Most never recover from this trauma.

Imagine a baby growing in your body for nine months, imagine going through the emotion of bringing it into the world, only to have social workers seize the newborn, sometimes within minutes of its first cry and often on the flimsiest of excuses.

Yet this disturbing scenario is played out every day.

The number of babies under one month old being taken into care for adoption is now running at almost four a day (a 300 per cent increase over a decade).

In total, 75 children of all ages are being removed from their parents every week before being handed over to new families.

Some of these may have been willingly given up for adoption, but critics of the Government’s policy are convinced that the vast majority are taken by force.

Time and again, the mothers say they are innocent of any wrongdoing.

Of course, there are people who are not fit to be parents and it is the duty of any responsible State to protect their children.

But over the five years since I began investigating the scandal of forced adoptions, I have found a deeply secretive system which is too often biased against basically decent families.

I have been told of routine dishonesty by social workers and questionable evidence given by doctors which has wrongly condemned mothers.

Meanwhile, millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money has been given to councils to encourage them to meet high Government targets on child adoptions.

Under New Labour policy, Tony Blair changed targets in 2000 to raise the number of children being adopted by 50 per cent to 5,400 a year.

The annual tally has now reached almost 4,000 in England and Wales – four times higher than in France, which has a similar-sized population.

Blair promised millions of pounds to councils that achieved the targets and some have already received more than £2million each in rewards for successful adoptions.

Figures recently released by the Department for Local Government and Community Cohesion show that two councils – Essex and Kent – were offered more than £2million “bonuses” over three years to encourage additional adoptions.

Four others – Norfolk, Gloucestershire, Cheshire and Hampshire – were promised an extra £1million.

This sweeping shake-up was designed for all the right reasons: to get difficult-to-place older children in care homes allocated to new parents.

But the reforms didn’t work. Encouraged by the promise of extra cash, social workers began to earmark babies and cute toddlers who were most easy to place in adoptive homes, leaving the more difficultto-place older children in care.

As a result, the number of over-sevens adopted has plummeted by half.

Critics – including family solicitors, MPs and midwives as well as the wronged families – report cases where young children are selected, even before birth, by social workers in order to win the bonuses.

More chillingly, parents have been told by social workers they must lose their children because, at some time in the future, they might abuse them.

One mother’s son was adopted on the grounds that there was a chance she might shout at him when he was older.

In Scotland, where there are no official targets, adoptions are a fraction of the number south of the border, even allowing for the smaller population.

What’s more, the obsessive secrecy of the system means that the public only occasionally gets an inkling of the human tragedy now unfolding across the country.

For at the heart of this adoption system are the family courts, whose hearings are conducted behind closed doors in order to protect the identity of the children involved.

Yet this secrecy threatens the centuries-old tradition of Britain’s legal system – the principle that people are innocent until proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt.

From the moment a mother is first accused of being incapable as a parent – a decision nearly always made by a social worker or doctor – the system is pitted against her.

There are no juries in family courts, only a lone judge or trio of magistrates who make decisions based on the balance of probability.

Crucially, the courts’ culture of secrecy means that if a social worker lies or fabricates notes or a medical expert giving evidence makes a mistake, no one finds out and there is no retribution.

Only the workings of the homeland security service, MI5, are guarded more closely than those of the family courts.

From the time a child is named on a social services care order until the day they are adopted, the parents are breaking the law – a crime punishable by imprisonment – if they tell anyone what is happening to their family.

Anything from a chat with a neighbour to a letter sent to a friend can land them in jail.

And many have found themselves sent to prison for breaching court orders by talking about their case.

As High Court judge Mr Justice Munby told MPs last year: “It seems quite indefensible that there should be no access by the media, and no access by the public, to what is going on in courts where judges are, day by day, taking people’s children away.”

However, it is not only secretive and publicly unscrutinised family courts that are creating an injustice in our adoption system.

There is a more worrying factor involved. Look at the official figures. Why are they so high? Is it really true that more mothers are becoming potential killers or abusers?

Or are the financial bonuses offered to councils fuelling the astonishing rise in forced adoptions?

John Hemming, a Liberal Democrat MP campaigning to change the adoption system, said yesterday: “I have evidence that 1,000 children are wrongly being seized from their birth parents each year even though they have not been harmed in any way.

“The targets are dangerous and lead to social workers being over-eager.

“The system’s secrecy hides any wrongdoing. One has to ask if a mother is expected to have problems looking after her baby, why doesn’t the State help her instead of taking her child away?”

The MP’s concerns are echoed by the Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services (AIMS), a body which advises new mothers.

Spokeswoman Beverley Beech insists: “Babies are being removed from their mothers by social workers using any excuse.

“We strongly suspect this is because newborns and toddlers are more easily found homes than older children. They are a marketable commodity.

“I know of social workers making up stories about innocent mothers simply to ensure their babies are put up for adoption.

“Suitable babies are even being earmarked when they are still in the womb.

“One baby was forcibly removed in the maternity ward by social workers before the mother had even finished the birth process and produced the placenta.”

Her words may be emotive. But are they true? Six months ago, I wrote an article about a young couple – who must remain anonymous because of family court law – fighting for the return of their three-year-old daughter.

She was taken within weeks of birth and is about to be adopted.

Astonishingly, a judge has issued a Draconian order gagging them from revealing anything, to anyone at all, which could identify their daughter until her 18th birthday in 2022.

Immediately after the article was published, I heard from 35 families whose children were forcibly removed.

The letters and e-mails continue to arrive – coming from a wide range of families across the social classes (including from a castle in the heart of England).

An e-mail from one father said: “Please, please help, NOW. We are about to lose our son . . . in court tomorrow for final disposals hearing before he is taken for adoption … we have done nothing wrong.”

Another father calling himself “James” rang to say his wife’s baby was one of eight seized by social workers from hospital maternity units in one small part of North-East England during one fortnight last summer.

A Welsh man complained that his grandson of three weeks was earmarked for forcible adoption by social workers.

The mother, a 21-year-old with a mild learning disorder, was told she might, just might, get post-natal depression and neglect her son.

To her great distress, her baby was put in the care of Monmouthshire social services within minutes of birth.

The grandfather said: “Our entire extended family – which includes two nurses, a qualified nanny and a police officer – have offered to help care for the baby.

“I believe my grandson has been targeted for adoption since he was in the womb.”

A Worcestershire woman told how her daughter’s baby was snatched away by three police officers and two social workers who came to the door of her house.

The girl has now been adopted.

The mother’s failure? She was said to be too young to cope.

Yet – a little over a year later – she had another baby, a boy, whom she was allowed to keep, in the same home and with the same partner.

Why on earth did she have to lose her little girl?

The grandmother emotionally explained: “All the family came forward to offer to help look after my granddaughter, and all of them were told they were not good enough.

“The social worker told us to forget her. He said: ‘She is water under the bridge.’

“We think they wanted her for adoption from the beginning.”

No wonder she, and thousands of other parents, want a shake-up of the heart-breakingly cruel adoption system which has ripped apart so many families – and which continues to do so.

Like to article:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-511609/How-social-services-paid-bonuses-snatch-babies-adoption.html

Posted on February 9, 2010 at 12:43 pm, by admin

Adoptees can find Mom, but not Dad

From the Toronto Star By Nicole Baute
December 10, 2009

When Ontario opened its adoption records on June 1, adult adoptees yearning for information about their birth parents applied in droves.

But as the replies came back, it became clear something was missing: the names of their fathers.

Out of all 250,000 Ontario adoption registrations, less than 10 per cent have fathers’ names on them, according to the Ministry of Government Services.

Ruth Rideout was devastated by the omission.

The 61-year-old adoptee received her statement of birth in October and found the father’s section of the form blank, with a line drawn through it.

“He is half of my biological makeup and I need to know if there are any illnesses, conditions,” she says.

Rideout’s birth mother recently died, at 81. Although she has since met her birth mother’s family, they do not know who her father was.

It turns out legislation prohibited her mother from naming him.

Until the mid-1980s, an unmarried woman could not put her baby’s father’s name on the statement of birth unless she and the father made a statutory declaration that he be named, according to the Vital Statistics Act. The child was “illegitimate,” a word that was not removed from the act until 1981.

But when unmarried women filled out the father’s section anyway, it seems the information was removed – whited out, blacked out or covered up.

A Waterloo man, John S., who did not want his last name published, received his statement of birth from 1955. The information on the “husband” side of the form was blacked out, line by line. An accompanying letter from ServiceOntario explains that his father’s information was removed because, in 1955, the Vital Statistics Act did not allow it to be included.

Mothers interviewed by the Star say they remember putting the names of their children’s fathers on birth registration forms they filled out in hospitals many years ago. In some cases, the fathers were present at the time of birth, or signed a declaration of paternity and other identifying documents during the adoption process.

Now, they feel betrayed.

Karen Lynn distinctly remembers writing her son’s father’s name on his birth registration in the hospital in 1963, when she was 19. She recalls fussing over how to spell his second middle name – was it Lawrence or Laurence? She settled on Lawrence.

Lynn is the president of the Canadian Council of Natural Mothers and a member of the coordinating committee for the Coalition for Open Adoption Records. She says she expected many fathers’ names to be missing from records, because unmarried women were discouraged from naming them.

But she was shocked to learn, as records trickled in, that names had been removed.

Lynn reunited with her son in 1999, but for her this is a matter of principle. “You expect that the document you signed is going to be kept intact,” she says.

Michael Prue, the community and social services critic for the Ontario NDP, says unmarried women were told not to name a father. “Young women were discouraged, and it was because of shame and everything else,” he says. Summing up the attitude then, he says: “You’re not married, the child doesn’t have a father, leave that blank.”

Yes, he says, some names could have been scratched out. “Some people 30 or 40 or 50 years ago may have thought that was the right thing to do. A lot has changed.”

Leslie Wagner received a copy of her son’s statement of live birth, which she filled out at the Toronto Western Hospital in June 1982. The record is in her 17-year-old handwriting, but it appears to have been doctored: the father section looks like it has been replaced with a blank version of the same section.

Catherine Cunningham (her maiden name) says her son’s father was by her side in the hospital in November 1981. She was sure he was named on the birth registration – and he later signed an acknowledgment of parentage with the Ministry of Community and Social Services. But his name isn’t on the statement of birth. “Should my son request his original birth certificate, his first instinct will be that I did not know who his father was, which is unsettling to say the least, and completely not true,” she says.

As far as they know, none of the people in this story has been affected by a nondisclosure veto.

The mothers have questions about their records. “Who altered them?” Wagner asks. “We still haven’t got a clear answer around who had the authority to alter that.”

Adoptees such as Rideout will have a difficult time finding their fathers if their mothers cannot or will not help them – or if they have changed their names or died.

Rideout says staff at Family and Children’s Services of Waterloo Region have confirmed in emails that her father’s name is on three of their documents, but say they cannot share it with her.

She knows her father was a German Canadian Lutheran truck driver from the Kitchener area and that he would be 84 if he is still alive today. Without his name, she will have a hard time finding him.

Valerie Andrews is executive director of Origins Canada, a support group for people separated by adoption. She says the missing fathers illustrate how poorly mothers were treated in the past. “I think it shows quite clearly that the so-called `unwed mother’ was someone without rights (or) status in our society,” she says.

Today, a father does not have to make a statutory declaration to be included on the statement of birth, but he and the mother have to sign the form. So even today, if the father is not involved at birth, his name will not be on his child’s records.

Lynn realizes there are concerns about men being held financially liable for children they did not father. But today, a simple DNA test can determine paternity, she points out. She finds the assumption that women would lie about or not know who fathered their baby insulting.

“Are we trying to protect the 0.1 per cent of men who may have been accused and they aren’t the father, or are we trying to serve the best interests of the child?”

Lynn says fathers’ rights have also been violated. If a father of a child given up for adoption is not listed on the statement of birth, he probably won’t be able to see the file. “They can apply, but they won’t get it, because they weren’t named.”

Link to article:
http://www.thestar.com/living/article/736964–adoptees-can-find-mom-but-not-dad

Posted on December 30, 2009 at 4:12 pm, by admin