Book Offers Strategies to Protect Foster Youth from Online Predators | The Chronicle of Social Change

“The two main times in a foster child’s life at which they are the most vulnerable to fall prey to sexual predators are when the child is undergoing puberty and when the child is aging out of foster care,” Singleton said.

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Black-Market Babies: Broken Families in China, Confused Children in the U.S. - Sushma Subramanian & Deborah Jian Lee - International - The Atlantic

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/10/black-market-babies-broken-families-in-china-confused-children-in-the-us/247329/

Thursday, October 27, 2011

by Sushma Subramanian & Deborah Jian Lee - Sushma Subramanian is a freelance health and science journalist. Deborah Jian Lee is a freelance journalist and independent radio producer. Both are based in New York.

Oct 27 2011, 7:00 AM ET 4 Corruption at Chinese adoption agencies has led to a market for children,
stolen from their families and sold internationally for steep prices and under false pretenses,
often to parents in the U.S.

Children playing outside their home in the village of Lang Shi Cun in Hunan Province / Deborah Jian Lee

HUNAN PROVINCE, China -- This spring, the business magazine Caixin made headlines around the world when it uncovered corruption at Chinese adoption agencies involving children stolen from their families in Hunan Province and sold for steep prices in the international adoption arena. The news hit hard in the United States, which is home to about 60,000 children adopted from China, mostly girls. Adoptive parents are grappling with the news now that the myth they were once sold on -- that orphanages are overrun with abandoned Chinese girls -- has been shattered.

For years, even social scientists supported this narrative. Two decades ago, when the gender ratio first started to skew sharply toward boys, they assumed these official figures were distorted by millions of unreported newborn girls. The country's strict one-child policy, they reasoned, prompted a widespread number of parents to conceal their additional children to avoid harsh penalties. Because of an enduring preference for boys, they surmised, many parents hid their girls or simply abandoned them.

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In recent years, that theory has come undone. "The more we look at the data, the more we realize the hidden children, they are not there," says Yong Cai, a sociologist at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "They have never been born or they have simply been aborted." While some do conceal their children or abandon them, sex-selective abortion and poor health care for baby girls account for most of the sex ratio disparity for very young children, which now stands at about 120 males for every 100 females, Cai says.

Here, we tell the stories of families on both sides of the adoption scandal -- an adoptive mother in the United States who discovered her daughter's adoption papers were forged and a Chinese father whose baby was taken from him. We have not used real names to protect the identity of the American woman's adopted daughter and for the Chinese parent's safety.

A Mother's Story (as told to Sushma Subramanian and Deborah Jian Lee)

Late one night, my then 4-year-old daughter, whom I'll call Cathy, was having trouble sleeping. With tears in her eyes, she said something that shocked me -- "I miss my birth mom." "Of course you do," I replied. I sat down and cried with her. "What would you like to tell her?" I asked. "I love her. And I miss her," she said. A few months later, she asked me to find her biological mother. Since then, it's become my mission, but I never guessed what it would lead me to discover.

I adopted my daughter in 2005 from an orphanage in Guangdong Province. The director took me into a room full of little girls and introduced me to Cathy. At 39, I really wanted a child and I was set on helping a little girl who was likely abandoned by her family. I wanted to bring her up to know that as a woman, she is absolutely valued. I believed the fee of $7,000 would go to the orphanage. I took Cathy into my arms, and the director gave me a bag of soil from her homeland so she would always know where she was from.

I've always talked to her openly about her adoption. I read her stories like "I Love You Like Crazy Cakes" about a girl who was adopted from China. We host play dates with several other neighboring families with children from China. For the Autumn Moon Festival, the kids write letters to their birth moms and send them up into the sky in helium balloons.

While a few of the other kids have also started asking about their biological parents, I'm the only parent I know searching for them. I contacted a man named Brian Stuy, who founded Research-China.org, which helps adoptive families look for the birthplaces of their children. When I told him about Cathy, he said she could have been involved in a scandal like the one in Hunan, where orphanages bought babies and placed them with foreign families. Recent stories show that many children were kidnapped and sold into adoption.

After that discovery, I spent many nights sobbing at my computer. I felt so guilty, like I was part of a crime. How was I going to tell my daughter? The information made me double my effort to find her birth parents.

I hired Stuy's wife to travel with me to Guangdong. According to orphanage papers, a man found two-day-old Cathy in a public place, abandoned, and took her to the orphanage. I tracked down this man, a director of civil affairs. He confessed the story had been made up. He was a friend of the orphanage director. Over Skype, I had to tell my daughter that I wouldn't be able to find her birth mom. "So China tells lies," Cathy said.

Cathy started telling her group of adopted friends about "China's lies" and one of their mothers told me that the girls might have to stop spending time together. Other parents I've encountered in online forums admit that they feel scared and believe their kids are better off in the United States. I told Cathy there are some people who wouldn't understand her desire to find her birth mom and she probably shouldn't talk about it with them. We've patched things up with her friend's family.

Today, at seven, Cathy is an outgoing girl who enjoys jazz dance and excels in her Mandarin classes. I still haven't told her the whole story. I'll wait until she's older. I've hit a dead end on my search, but I'm not going to stop trying. If I ever find her birth mother, I'd want to help Cathy get to know her, if that's what she wants. There are thousands of adopted Chinese children living in the United States, and it's their human right to know where they come from. Good or bad, we all deserve to know our history.

A Father's Story (as told to Sushma Subramanian and Deborah Jian Lee)

I have a family picture of my daughter from my last trip home, and it might be the very last image I'll ever see of her. As a migrant worker, government restrictions prevented me from raising my daughter in the city where I work, so I left her behind in my village with her grandparents. Because of the great distance between us and my limited vacation, I couldn't visit home regularly. I couldn't call often either because the phone connection doesn't always work. In fact, I didn't hear that the government took my baby girl until weeks after it happened.

I'm from a rural town deep in the mountains, and my family is very poor. Our house is so old the walls and ceiling are cracked, and we worry the bricks might fall when the wind blows hard. The villagers survive on growing rice and vegetables and raising children, ducks, pigs and cows. I knew I could provide better for my family by moving to a big city for factory work. So just half a year after my daughter, my first child, was born in July 2004, my wife and I had to leave for Shenzhen to find jobs. In the city, our days are long and hard, and we live in a small dorm, not the kind of environment to bring up children.

The next spring, the local family planning officials stormed my parents' house and took my baby away. They said the child was illegal, but gave no further explanation. At the time, I was in my thirties, but my wife was just shy of 20 years old, the legal marrying age for women. When my wife gave birth, we decided to register the child after my wife turned 20. Many people in our village had done this before.

I called a few weeks later, and my parents gave me the terrible news. I rushed home. We went to a nearby village, where a government official said that we had to pay 6,000 RMB (about $940) to get our daughter back. My monthly salary is just 2,000 RMB, which is usually enough to pay rent and other living expenses for me and my wife and to send a little back home, so we had only 4,000 RMB saved. A few days later, when I returned with the money, the official balked, saying even if I paid 1 million RMB, I would never get my daughter back. She had already been given away to an orphanage.

He tried to cut me a deal, giving me permission to have another child, more than the one-child policy allows. I was furious. I tracked down the orphanage, but by the time I got there, she was gone. As I talked to more people about what happened to my daughter, I discovered that other families had also had their children taken from them. If I speak up, I don't know if the government would help me find my girl, or try to shut me up or detain me.

Now, years later, I continue to live as a migrant worker, making backpacks in a small factory and sleeping in a dorm with roommates. I have a 6-year-old son who attends kindergarten in my hometown, and my parents watch over him. I wish I could see him more often than I do. If I ever find my daughter, I would tell her how badly I've longed for her. I want to let her know that I didn't give her up for adoption. She was stolen from me.

This article was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, an Atlantic partner site.

Moved to adopt Haitians? It's not always best, experts say - CNN.com

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

January 22, 2010 10:33 a.m. EST

{PHOTO}Haitian orphans rest on mattresses in a truck this week at the Maison des Enfants de Dieu orphanage in Port-au-Prince.
Haitian orphans rest on mattresses in a truck this week at the Maison des Enfants de Dieu orphanage in Port-au-Prince.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

(CNN) -- The images of Haitian children crying or injured or wandering the streets alone are heartbreaking. It's no surprise there has been a flood of well-intentioned people who want to adopt those children.

But that's not always the best immediate move, aid groups caution.

Save the Children Chief Executive Jasmine Whitbread said the "vast majority" of children on their own in Haiti are not orphans, but were simply separated from their families in the chaos.

Their family members may still be alive, she said, and "will be desperate to be reunited with them."

"Taking children out of the country would permanently separate thousands of children from their families -- a separation that would compound the acute trauma they are already suffering and inflict long-term damage on their chances of recovery," Whitbread said.

Hurriedly whisking unclassified children out of Haiti will not ensure the children are happy or safe in the long-term, experts said. Homes and potential parents must be reviewed by professional social workers and it's logistically impossible to do that in a short time. Allowing adoptions to proceed without thorough background checks can lead to child trafficking and other crimes.

The United Nations Children's Fund, or UNICEF, does not facilitate adoptions, but it has been bombarded with calls from people who want a Haitian orphan, said Christopher de Bono, a UNICEF spokesman.

In 2007, UNICEF estimated that there were 380,000 orphans in Haiti, but de Bono said Thursday that he'd "hate to vouch for that figure" because that number -- any number -- is impossible to verify.

Between Haiti's "lousy [child welfare] oversight system," and all the challenges that Haitians have endured, it's not uncommon for Haitian parents to put their children in orphanages temporarily, de Bono said. This means knowing who is truly an orphan and who isn't requires great attention to detail and documents.

"Removing children who've just experienced a disaster from their environment, from where they're from is not necessarily good for them," he said. Haitian children must first be fed, sheltered, clothed and given medical attention; the next step is to register them and trace their relatives.

Diana Boni, who works with Port-au-Prince's BRESMA orphanage, is firmly against new adoptions out of Haiti. "Under no circumstances should we evacuate any child newly orphaned or displaced," she wrote in an e-mail to CNN.

"Imagine losing much of your family, only to discover that a surviving relative had been whisked off to the States to be adopted by strangers without your knowledge or consent! Adoptions without consent are child trafficking. Pure and simple."

She has been taking care of children who waited for years in the orphanage to be adopted. "It's a bit sad, as I have several wonderful children who waited literally for years for new families, and no one ever came," she said.

The disaster in Haiti has led to an outpouring of support around the world, with the United States alone donating more than $305 million as of Wednesday, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, a newspaper covering nonprofit organizations.

Because Haiti's poverty already made it "extremely vulnerable" to exploitation and abuse, rushed adoptions could open the door to traffickers, said World Vision Chief Executive Justin Byworth.

"We are concerned not only about premature overseas adoption but also about children increasingly being sent unaccompanied to the Dominican Republic," he said.

Aid groups said adoptions that were already in progress before the January 12 earthquake should go ahead, as long as the right legal documents are in place and they meet Haitian and international law.

For those who want to help Haitian children, Whitbread said, they should donate to aid agencies that are working on reuniting children with their families.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has opened an office at the headquarters of the Haitian Red Cross in Crois de Prez to help people locate their relatives, said Pete Garratt, a disaster response manager at the British Red Cross.

The Red Cross also has set up a Web site to help people searching for relatives, he said.

CNN's Jessica Ravitz contributed to this report.

Moved to adopt Haitians? It's not always best, experts say - CNN.com

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