Harlow's Monkey

Discussing a contested adoption ruling on MPR

Tomorrow morning I am scheduled to be a guest on Minnesota Public Radio to discuss the Supreme Court's ruling in a contested adoption case. The conflict, which was profiled by reporter Olivia LaVecchia for the City Pages in January, centers around the adoption of two little girls. The lower court had ruled in favor of the foster parents that had cared for both of the girls since their births and the grandmother in Missouri who had been trying to adopt them for nearly the same amount of time. 

The show is scheduled to air at about 11 am. I'll post a de-brief after the show.

Article in Brain, Child magazine

Many thanks to Dawn Friedman for this very nuanced article, "The Myth of the Forever Family" in Brain, Child magazine about adoption myths and specifically, the best article I've read so far on the really, really difficult and complex inner-workings on a family who is considering or has considered dissolving an adoption.

I have know adult Korean adoptees who were "re-adopted" after their first placement(s) were dissolved or disrupted, and while working in a county public child welfare agency most of the children and youth on my case load had experienced multiple adoption disruptions, and a few had experienced complete dissolutions (one after 6 years with their "forever family"). The subject, as Dawn writes, is adoptions "dirty little secret." It's something that as a child welfare professional, I struggle with. How do we both encourage adoption as a form of care for children in need of placement while at the same time be honest, real, and transparent about the needs of the children without scaring away prospective adoptive parents? What kind of "marketing" are we doing in terms of soliciting the public to consider adoption?

Adoption is not just "a way to build a family." Adoption is much more complex. I sometimes think about how the military markets and advertises for recruits and the television ads they create compared to how it is in real life. In the ads on television, it's all about looking for the best, the brightest, the ones who want action and have a lot of initiative - "Be the best you can be." In reality, it appears to be more about filling the seats with warm bodies, as the recruiters to go to the high schools and talk to all the students who don't have college plans.

Okay, so neither of these scenarios tells the whole story - just like the way the public thinks about and the way adoption agencies solicit prospective adoptive parents. In reality, the military recruits and enlists both. And in adoption it is the same. We market and accept both as well. We tell adoptive parents "You don't have to be perfect" and then we expect adoptive parents to be mental health specialists, parenting specialists, educational specialists, experts on child development and oh yeah, make sure you love them like your own too. But if you can't be all those things, oh well - the kid just needs a family, because "families are better than institutions."

On the one hand what we really would like is "the best"  (and by the best I totally do NOT consider how much money prospective parents have in the bank, what their house looks like or that they are a white, heterosexual married couple. To me, the "best" is a parent that can understand and provide for the needs of a child that has likely been traumatized, hurt, neglected in some (or multiple) ways). Not parents who expect an adopted chlid to behave like a child "born to them" (whatever that means) nor a parent who is just a temporary station, i.e. a warm body, for the child. Yet, agencies are often so desperate that they're willing to take the warm bodies. Because, as we've said, over and over again, "families are better than institutions" - and that leaves us with little choice in the end when we've set ourselves up for placing children in unprepared families just because we have this idea that "families are better than institutions" and then totally blame the families when it doesn't work out.

Anyway, please read this article, and participate in the discussion that will accompany it at the Brain, Child blog. And thanks to Dawn especially for including adult adoptees in this article as well. I am quoted, as is Astrid Dabbeni from Adoption Mosaic.

Restoring Family Links - the International Committee of the Red Cross

Restoring contact between families separated by armed conflicts and natural disasters

What to do if you are looking for a missing relative? Every year, armed conflicts, other situations of violence and natural disasters leave countless people seeking news of family members.

Restoring family links means carrying out, in those situations, a range of activities that aim to prevent separation and disappearance, restore and maintain contact between family members, and clarify the fate of persons reported missing. It involves collecting information about persons who are missing, persons who have died, and vulnerable persons such as children separated from their families and persons deprived of their freedom. It also involves tracing persons unaccounted for, organizing the exchange of family news and the transmission of documents when normal means of communication have broken down, organizing family reunifications and repatriations, and issuing travel documents and attestations.

more about the Red Cross Family Links program:

Who are the separated family members assisted by the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement?

We assist people who have been separated from their family members or whose relatives are unaccounted for as a result of conflicts, disasters, migration or other situations requiring a humanitarian response.

Certain groups of people are particularly vulnerable and have specific needs that we seek to address. These include children who may find themselves separated from their parents as a result of armed violence, arrests, poverty or disasters. Equally vulnerable are elderly people who may not be able to fend for themselves. Detainees make up yet another group, and keeping them in touch with their families remains of utmost importance to us.


What is the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement doing to assist separated family members?

A person's well-being depends to a large extent on the ability to stay in touch with loved ones, or at least receive information about their welfare. Receiving news from a loved one or being reunited with one's family can change everything. It can end the anguish for a five-year-old and her parents who get back together or help a survivor of a natural disaster to reassure his family that he is alive.

The Movement has a worldwide Family Links Network comprising the ICRC's Central Tracing Agency, together with its tracing agencies in ICRC delegations, and the tracing services of national Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies around the world.

The role of the Family Links Network is to restore and maintain contact between family members and to clarify the fate of persons reported missing. We restore family links by offering separated family members telephone services, enabling them to exchange written messages, creating websites adapted to specific contexts, responding to individual tracing requests and reuniting families. Our work also involves collecting, managing and forwarding information on dead and missing persons.

The Movement has long-standing experience and extensive expertise in restoring family links. Through the Family Links Network, we are able to provide services across national borders in full transparency and with the consent of the authorities concerned. Therefore, as a Movement, we are in a unique position; we have a global network with the potential to assist people who are separated from their families, wherever they may be.

For more about the Red Cross and its programs to help families who have been separated, see the following links:

A ten-year strategy to strengthen the restoration of family links
Restoring contact between families separated by armed conflicts and natural disasters

And before you send money to an agency promoting adoptions from Haiti, why not read this statement first and donate money to help restore families who have been separated as a result of the earthquake.

Haiti: helping restore family links severed by the earthquake

Read this

I am almost finished. I think it is the best book on adoption history I have read thus far. Especially to understand how social work, psychology and child development experts formed and shaped how we practice and think about child placement.

Kinship by Design: A History of Adoption in the Modern United States, Ellen Herman

Is international adoption protecting the child or a breach of human rights?

In this Conducive article, author Roelie Post, who spent years uncovering the fraud embedded in Romanian adoptions chronicled in her book Romania For Export Only, The Untold Story Of The Romanian ‘Orphans’ offers her perspective. From the article:

Author Roelie Post wants to distance herself from pro and anti-adoption labels and direct the discussion back to the heart of the matter: whether intercountry adoption is a child protection measure, if children have rights in their own country, and if intercountry adoption is ultimately a breach of such rights? Post ends with the crucial question: can intercountry adoption be legislated without it leading to a demand-driven child market? Romanian banned intercountry adoptions, Post will describe the experience and the consequences for other countries.  

You can read the article in full here.

Language barrier at CPS

A very disturbing article about how CPS bungled the case of a Chinese-American family. Clearly this child could have been raised by relatives, yet because the caseworker and the agency did not provide interpreters and basically operated out of a white, English-language framework, this child has now been with his foster parents long enough for the courts to consider it in his best interests to remain with them.

As a former public child welfare worker, I believe the agency and caseworker completely mishandled this case and operated out of a white supremacist framework. Harsh words, maybe, but there was a complete lack of best practices here.

Language Barrier at Child Protective Services

For the first year, Baby Raymond lived happily with his family. Then the agency took him away and even though his Chinese-American family fought to get him back, they couldn't find the right words.

If Raymond loses access to his extended family, there is a good chance he will never be apprised of the facts surrounding his removal from their lives. This story has tried to present the unvarnished facts, which are buried in a bungle of oft-­puzzling court orders and about 1,000 pages of trial testimony and exhibits. Hopefully, if Raymond ever chooses to read anything about that part of his life, he will have the time to look at the primary sources.

And if he chooses to read anything else, I hope it would be this:

Raymond, due to language and geographic issues, it has been difficult to illustrate exactly how much your Aunt Connie loves you, and how this ordeal has torn her, and the rest of your family, apart.

However Connie appeared to the jurors, her words on paper express a woman unsure of her tongue and unsure of the legal system, who was stumbling over herself to, in her words, "try to explain so the jury member can understand better."

By the time your mother's case went to trial, it really ceased to be about the truth and about what was best for Raymond Liu. It was purely adversarial. It was about using your family's lack of English and lack of legal sophistication against them. And it worked. Sure, it was also about pointing the finger at CPS. And you can make up your own mind about that.

This is an extremely long-winded way of saying you have to believe this: Your Aunt Connie loves you. She fought hard for you. She and your Aunt Ling were there for the first year of your life. They had such respect for your grandmother, who they always wanted you to be with, so she could care for you like she cared for them. And you have to believe this: You were happy.

You can read the entire article here (it is very lengthy)

Transnational Adoption and the “Financialization of Everything”

From Conducive Magazine, a new online publication, is this article by Jane Jeong Trenka. You can read the entire article here.

Transnational Adoption and the “Financialization of Everything”

International adoption is often seen as a mutually beneficial relationship between children in need of a home and financially stable adults wanting to raise a child. But it is also big-money business. In line with neoliberalism, or the hollowing out of government services, many adopted children are born to single mothers who are offered little to no resources to care for their children. International adoption agencies have stepped into this gap by offering homes, and making a profit in the process. The transformation of adoption into a global business creates a further incentive not to assist mothers, who may turn to adoption out of desperation, not desire. Adoptee activists are working to shed light on this issue. Focusing particularly on South Korea, author and co-founder of Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea (TRACK) Jane Jeong Trenka argues the process should be re-engineered to put the money and fateful decisions back where they belong: with the mothers and their children.  TRACK is now working with the Korean government to get the the voices of birth parents and Korean adoptees heard in South Korean adoption law revisions.

One of the arguments I have been trying to make for several years as a social worker who has worked for adoption agencies is one that Jane points out as well - that adoption is a band-aid and that social workers, adoption agencies and society should be working to eliminate the pre-existing conditions that lead to adoption as a service. Jane writes,

The adoption agencies would like to portray themselves as the leaders of the movement to end the monetary incentive behind transnational adoption.  They would like to be perceived as the people who originally came up with the wonderful idea to preserve families instead of separating them.  But, let’s look at this logically.  The ideal situation, which everyone seems to pay lip service to, is for children to stay with their own families in their own countries.  Therefore, the adoption agencies should be working to put themselves out of business.  The agencies say that they are doing wonderful work in “sending countries” to support families, but the reality is that the adoptions themselves fund this work. In other words, supporting vulnerable families is directly at odds with their main source of revenue.  Adoption agencies exist because of adoption, not in spite of it.  Their work to support families will therefore always be half-hearted.  This contradiction exists on the organizational level.

On an individual level, the very jobs that adoption agency workers keep, with which they support their own children, are dependent on keeping the existing order intact.  In other words, if the adoption agencies stop doing adoptions, a lot of people are going to have to get job retraining.  On the other hand, people who do not have any business ties to the adoption industry have no vested interest in continuing adoptions or constantly renewing their customer base.

Please read the whole article.

Re/Defining Orphans

Two very important statements about the definition of orphans. One of the main points - that within the the US and other economically developed nations, "orphan" is a term to describe a child who has lost both parents to death (as in, children in these nations are considered orphans if they've lost both parents to death*). However, as UNICEF and other NGOs define the term, in the 1990s, "Orphan" was used to describe a child who had lost one or more parents. This is no small consideration as it changes the scope of justification in terms of how children in need are deemed appropriate for different kinds of services both in country and abroad.

[* Edited to add: As Rich brought to my attention, the U.S. State Department's definition of who counts as an orphan is here. This definition defined by the INA is not what I was referring to above; as I should have worded better. I meant that when people in the U.S. consider children living in this country "orphans" they mean those with two parents deceased.For the purposes of international adoption, orphan is defined by the State Department similarly as UNICEF and the Hague Convention.]

Unicef's definition of orphans
Ethica: Majority of Global "Orphans" have families

This paragraph from Ethica sums up how I feel about the over-justification of saving "orphans" from foreign countries.

13 million orphans is still a vast sea of needy children, and a number which far exceeds the number of children adopted each year. But of special note is UNICEF's comment that 95% of all orphans are age 5 and over. This contrasts sharply with the demographics of adoptions to the U.S. According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services 2006 statistic on orphan visas granted to American families adopting children from abroad, only 3,337 of the total 20,705 children adopted that year were age 5 and older. Ethica recognizes that the majority of younger children who have been internationally adopted legally qualified as orphans under U.S. immigration law, and were recognized as orphans by their birth countries. However, these statistics indicate that babies orphaned through parental relinquishment do not constitute the majority of the orphan population. While it is true that many children who have a surviving parent may still require placement in adoptive families, these statistics also challenge the adoption community to look carefully at assumptions that current practices are based upon.

UNICEF has been demonized among some groups of adoption agencies and adoptive parents for what they believe is an anti-adoption philosophy; however I fully support UNICEF's hierarchy of placement decisions which follow the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-Operation in Respect to International Adoption:

• Recognizing that the child, for the full and harmonious development of his or her personality, should grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding,

• Recalling that each State should take, as a matter of priority, appropriate measures to enable the child to remain in the care of his or her family of origin,

• Recognizing that intercountry adoption may offer the advantage of a permanent family to a child for whom a suitable family cannot be found in his or her State of origin,

• Convinced of the necessity to take measures to ensure that intercountry adoptions are made in the best interests of the child and with respect for his or her fundamental rights, and to prevent the abduction, the sale of, or traffic in children

It is NOT that UNICEF is completely anti-adoption; what they ARE is an organization justly concerned with ETHICAL practices.

For children who cannot be raised by their own families, an appropriate alternative family environment should be sought in preference to institutional care, which should be used only as a last resort and as a temporary measure. Inter-country adoption is one of a range of care options which may be open to children, and for individual children who cannot be placed in a permanent family setting in their countries of origin, it may indeed be the best solution. 

...At the same time, lack of regulation and oversight, particularly in the countries of origin, coupled with the potential for financial gain, has spurred the growth of an industry around adoption, where profit, rather than the best interests of children, takes centre stage.  Abuses include the sale and abduction of children, coercion of parents, and bribery, as well as trafficking to individuals whose intentions are to exploit rather than care for children.

How one can be opposed to that, I don't comprehend.

Boys and Girls

I attended a training yesterday, for professionals in the adoption world. The speaker was talking about what beliefs we as adoption workers bring to our work. I thought it really was an appropriate and timely discussion and I wish we talked about this more openly in our field.

One thing the presenter brought up was that in her experience (mostly with international and private agency domestic adoption) is that the majority of prospective adoptive parents want girls, and Asian girls specifically if they are adopting internationally. She says that in the international sphere at least (and she works for one of the biggest and most respected agencies in our area), they have to do special "marketing" for boys. The presenter wondered aloud why that was.

After the presentation, I offered my hypothesis.

1) Asian girls are seen as being submissive, obedient, and more easily assimilated. We're cute, when we grow up we're "exotic" and as one person in the audience today mentions, we're "smart."

2) Little boys of color grow into MEN of color. And there's nothing more fearsome than a Man of color. Unless it's an Asian man, and then the stereotype is that of an emasculated man.

In my experience, the preference for girls (when adopting) is overwhelming, crossing all racial lines (same-race and transracial). Yet strangely, for people I know who have children by birth, the stated preference seems to be boys or no preference.

Summer Adoption Programs

I tend to have a hard time falling asleep at night, having suffered on and off with insomnia for the better part of twenty years. Late at night, I often flip through the channels hoping for some mindless show that will help me drift off to Nod. A few weeks ago, I was watching BET's re-run of "A Different World," the spin-off of The Cosby Show that takes place at "Hillman College"

In the particular episode I was watching that night, Blues for Nobody's Child, Freddie befriends a young boy named Alex who turns out to be living in foster care. She follows him to a "meet and greet" event - for those who aren't familiar with this, it's where kids and prospective parents interact with the hopes that a "match" will be made. If you think this is like speed dating, you'd be right. In this episode, Freddie is outraged when she sees this boy walking up to families, trying his best to get their attention, only to have the prospective parents fall in love with a younger kid.

Thanks to Rich for bringing this story about a "meet and greet" on steroids to my attention. This news clip brings a few things to mind. First it reminded me of the program in which Irish children are brought to the US for the summer and stay with a host family.

However, the point of this summer vacation is not to give children in a war-torn country a respite but to have them audition for a family.

I am disturbed by the "try out" aspect of this current story. When I worked for the County we often facilitated these kinds of "matching events" where kids and prospective parents interact (let me add as an aside that the kids are almost always teenagers). On the one hand, I have a huge ethical problem with them. As much as you prepare prospective adoptive parents that the focus of these events is to get to know kids beyond a piece of paper and a photograph and that the idea is to get to know who the kinds of kids in foster care are, inevitably there is always a PAP who blurts out to a kid, "Would you like me to adopt you?" And there is always at least one kid who goes up to a PAP and asks, "Would you adopt me?" There is no way to honestly and compassionately prepare these kids for the kind of rejection they are likely to face.

It's heart-wrenching and yet, there are almost always at least a few adoptions that happen because of these events. Because for many PAP's, they look at the kid's profiles and can't really get a sense of who these kids are. Because some have opened their hearts up to tough, tough kids after spending an afternoon getting to know them. In fact, last week I attended an adoption move-in ceremony for one of my former kids, who met his adoptive father at one of these events.

Ethically, I really struggle with these things - the photographs and descriptions of kids on web sites and flyers; the "matching events," and all the ways in which children are marketed for adoption. One of my youth on my case load told me, after watching his "Thursday's Child" segment, "I feel like I'm being sold to the highest bidder, like I'm for sale."

How could these kids in these orphanages in Taiwan deal with knowing that they had spent the summer with a prospective adoptive family only to find out later the family didn't want them? Just like one of my kids asked me, as we were driving to one of these events, "I wonder which one of these people will adopt me?" As it turns out, none of them did. And still today, a year later, he waits.

I know the result of these marketing efforts and programs means some children get adopted

-- but at what cost to their dignity?

-- And what about all the others who put themselves on the line and never get adopted?