If you read my comments the other day, you would have seen a mention by MIJK of the Dutch TV show that aired last night about children who are not voluntarily relinquished being placed in international adoptions.
I haven’t seen any full translations yet, but this is my understanding of the content of the show (as gleaned from several internet sources):
A) In the Hunan scandal, the Chinese government insisted that NONE of the trafficked children were adopted internationally. In this program, it was claimed that there is documented proof that at least one of these children was adopted to Canada. On this girl’s finding paperwork, the leader of the child trafficking group was named as the finder.
B) There is evidence of children being taken from their parents by family planning officials and later placed for international adoption. I believe this was also in Hunan province. And I think it said at least 17 children. In one case, one of a pair of twins was taken and when her parents went to claim her after raising the necessary money to pay the 2nd child fine, they were told she had been adopted overseas. There may have been other relatives of other children who had similar stories (?).
There are people out there in the Chinese adoption community that want to say this is old news. If this information can be documented, it is NOT old news. While it is generally accepted that children are trafficked in China, it was previously believed these children were trafficked internally and did not enter the international adoption system. (Despite some anecdotal evidence this may have happened in the past…though I don’t know that this case was ever brought to the attention of the authorities. Read page 10 of that link.)
If there is proof that trafficked children are entering the international adoption pool with fabricated documents, it is very likely that the US and other receiving countries will shut down the China adoption program.
Additionally, trafficking of children may even place completed adoptions at risk. In the NY times article yesterday about some irregularities in Guatemala, there is a mention of returning a child adopted in the US to her birthfamily because she was adopted with false documents. I can’t find the link, but there was another story in the last year about a child adopted out of India who had been kidnapped and sold to an orphanage. I think that the child was in the process of being returned to his birth family (Does anyone know where I can find this article?).
I am not trying to whip up hysteria, but the whole thing is more than a little scary. Ethical adoptions obviously protect children and birth families, but they also protect adoptive families.
You can read more about this story here.
Edited to add: It turns out the link I had in the first paragraph was the addtional information on the show’s website. The full show can be found here. Click on the baby photo. If I can find a transcript in English, I will let you know.
I’ve been pretty worried about this. Once I was in Nanchang, talking to local people, the whole world of adoption looked different. And I suspect that’s part of why my “new friend” from Nanchang is so interested in communicating with me.
Similarly, I’ve been having some discussions with agency staff about the “happy happy” propaganda from Xinran. I wonder (based on no information) if that’s related to the need to quell doubts.
I remember the article about the Indian children-will ask a friend who is waiting for a referral from India and pass it on if you still need it. ~lmc
Just in from work … Do you still need the link?
There’s an Indian child adopted to NL whose birth parents spoke up last year that the child had been kidnapped and sold. IIRC it’s a boy who is about 7 now. I’m not aware of any update on that story.
It makes my heart break and just goes to prove that as long as there’s good money involved, corruption will follow. It’s somewhat surprising that it’s taken this long; I always had the feeling that the China program was almost squeaky-clean in terms of ethics and lack of baby-trafficking. The Hunan scandal was the first inkling that unscrupulous people were beginning to think of getting rich quickly by sliding into the official channels.
Sigh. One certainly hopes the Chinese government will hop on this the way it did on the Hunan scandal.
I’m always perplexed when people are willing to admit there *could* be “irregularities” with any given adoption program and yet are absoultely unwilling to entertain the thought that their beloved child could have been one of the casualties. (Witness several threads on this topic on RQ). We are seeing this now with Guatemala (and I think that if you go to Google news and do a search on Guatemala adoption you will find some links). This is not to say it isn’t horrifying to contemplate. It is on so many levels. But the insistence that bad adoptions only happen to other people is assinine. You know, I’d love to believe only good things as well. Alas it’s not really about me, is it? And I think that’s what many people forget. No, you didn’t cause it (though you may have played a role in it). No. you didn’t knowingly adopt a child who may have been trafficed. But it seems obvious at this point that it has happened with a greater frequency than we’d like to believe. I think there should be an uproar in the IA community. But not for the reasons there is an uproar right now….
I think the reality now is that most countries within the international adoption community have major issues. There is no guarantee and it is a shame and a sham….We adopted from Viet Nam…just look at that community and the inevitable shut-down that will come in sept. and there is another one to add to the list of corruption.
Information about the Indian stolen children
http://www.combatlaw.org/information.php?article_id=1033&issue_id=37
Only the Australian adoptive family has organized contact between the child and its Indian family.
And there is Ethiopia, also a tragedy. The child is still in a children’s home in Austria.
VIENNA’S prosecutor is investigating a local adoption agency amid allegations that it may have brought “stolen” children to Austria, the national press agency APA has reported.
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23026719-38200,00.html
I am sorry I didn’t follow up comments yesterday but scool was closed so I was playing lego’s all day.. As far as I have seen your interpretation of the situation is spot on. Dutch parliament has planned an emergency debate haven’t seen anything about it!
Here is a link to the story that says that children already in the US might be at risk of being taken back to Guatamala:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/11/world/main3924200.shtml
On the second page of the article, it says,
“If fraud is proven, whatever the reason, Guatemala would invalidate the adoption and try to recover the child, even one that has already become a U.S. citizen.
“We would have to do that, according to the law,” Gordillo said.
Custody disputes with Guatemala for babies already in the United States would eventually land before a judge in the adoptive family’s hometown, according to the U.S. Embassy.”
I’m curious, procedurally, how that would work. It seems to me that Guatamala would have to file suit in the Federal Court that had jurisdiction over the area of the US the child is living in. And I would think that the standard the judge hearing the case would have to consider is “best interest of the child” (this is standard for the consideration in custody issues, and I would think this would fall into the broad category of ‘custody’ – but, there would also be the issue of whether or not the child obtained his or her citizenship through fraud – the more I think about it, the more a nightmare it seems – procedurally and emotionally.)
Gretchen
If you would like a full translation, I can make my husband do it. He’s Dutch and it’s about time he did something helpful with that silly language of his.
AmFam –
I haven’t read all of the comments on other online boards about the practice of SWI’s paying babyfinders, nor do I personally want to defend it. I also fear that it might encourage people to ‘find’ babies who have not been abandoned. However, based on the half-dozen comments that I did read, I believe that at least some of the people who were defending the idea of small amounts of money changing hands if an abandoned baby were delivered to an SWI were justifying the practice as a way of preventing what Brian St.uy wrote that he witnessed during one of his trips to China.
In a blog post he wrote on March 22, 2007, entitled ‘Child Abandonment from the Inside III’ (sorry, there’s no permanent link to the post. you can find it by going to the May archives for his blog here: http://research-china.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html) Mr St.uy says that he personally saw and attempted to help an 18-day-old baby girl who was abandoned at the gates of a Buddhist temple with a red note tucked in next to her. The child was not taken to an orphanage; the nuns at the temple told him that the SWI would charge the temple for the cost of the care of the baby. Instead the baby was allowed to freeze to death.
K2
Actually, it wasn’t Brian St.uy who wrote that article. It was translated from this article, from what I think is a Buddhist publication: http://www.lingshh.com/4-a/4-20.htm
But for one minute just imagine that the scenario is true. The orphanage decides to pay a finder fee for people who bring in babies to prevent them from being left to die.
How would they advertise this fact? Would they put it on the radio or in the newspaper: “Hey! If you find any illegally abandoned babies, bring them to us and we will pay you!”
Whether it is publicized or not, how is that not an incentive for someone to go looking for babies? What are the odds that this freak occurance of stumbling across an abaondoned baby would happen to someone who just happened to know about the orphanage incentive program? What is to stop someone from taking it upon themselves to go FIND some babies?
To me, this has to be one of the most ridiculous ways to justify the fact that finders fees are not encouraging trafficking. A finders fee would CREATE a system where rounding up babies is worthwhile.
[...] In the meantime…there’s talk of a Netherlands documentary about Chinese adoption, specifically that there are lots of folks these days who are having their kids kidnapped by government officials and dumped at orphanages. There are those who are appalled and those who think it’s old news. In the meantime, I sit here and realize that, while it was easier to think of someone reclaiming OmegaDotter when she was just a babe, she is firmly entrenched in my heart now and the thought of having someone tell me our adoption was null and void at this point would–yes–make me spend a lifetime and a fortune in court, fighting tooth and nail to keep her with us. That aside, I will write up some thoughts on the issue tomorrow. [...]