Niels's blog

In an interview with Le Parisien, The French Secretary of State in charge of foreign affairs and human rights, Rama Yade, has announced she is creating some sort of Peace Corps for international adoption.

It was little over a month ago, I still believed Masha Allen was probably well taken care of, after her ordeal with Matthew Mancuso. Call me stupid, call me naive, but I believed the Allegheny County Department of Human Services would certainly in a case like Masha's, take all precautions possible to make sure her second placement would be done right, if not for Masha's interest (which it should be), then at least for their own sake.  

In several posts made over the last week, references were made about the role being played by churches in both child placement practices and child abuse. The most severe cases of child abuse in church run child placement facilities known, revolve around the Congregation of Christian Brothers.

It's been less than a week ago that I wrote in my blog post Masha Allen Betrayed Again: "I know of at least 77 cases that eventually made the news and that's only a tip of the iceberg".

On June 6, the Committee on the Rights of Children of the United Nations Human Rights office, published a report about measures taken in the United States of America regarding: sales of children, child prostitution and child pornography.

It's 11 pages long, so I am not going to publish it in its entirety here, though I made it available as a PDF attached to this post.

In the report the following observations are made, which I would like to highlight here:

Tonight I watched part of the soccer match between the Netherlands and France at the European Championship in Switzerland. I'm not a big fan of watching sports, but sometimes, when half the nation here is infected with soccer fever, I watch a game or two.

Yesterday I came across an article called Operation Zip Code, which revolved around the theme: where you live determines the quality of your health care. It mentions several of the medical practice hot-spots, where people are several times more likely to receive for example knee surgery than on average or where the hospitalization rates are much higher than in the rest of the country.

Focus on Adoption, so adequately coined a Rogues Gallery by James Marsh, seems to have made internal changes as of late. Reviewing the who we are section of their website, it is plainly evident that Jeanene Smith no longer serves as treasurer.

When late February we started our Abuse Cases section, I had foreseen we could only show the tip of an iceberg, but I hadn't foreseen the size of that tip. Since the incarnation of that section the list of cases has grown with the following recent cases:

To me, one of the most striking examples of adoption lobby lingo has always been the term "children awaiting adoption". According to the various websites on the internet there must be hundreds of thousands of children all around the world all awaiting adoption, though I've never heard a single child use that terminology.