abuse post text

In 2007, Laurie C. Miller, Wilma Chan, Robert A. Reece, Linda Grey Tirella and Adam Pertman published Child Abuse Fatalities Among Internationally Adopted Children., This study was prompted by the realization that a number of children adopted from abroad had been killed by members of their vetted "forever family".

The study, although very thin on substance, and inaccurate in its counting of lethal abuse cases, was quick to point out “Postadoption depression” and severe disturbance of the adopted children as a contributing factors when it comes to abuse cases in the adoptive home.

There is no analysis of the cases upon which this conclusion is based. It's simply an assumption on the part of the authors that in these cases, the disturbance of the children was too overwhelming for the adoptive parents, and that too little support for the adoptive families was available.

This conclusion is no surprise, given the coauthorship of Adam Pertman, then president of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a think tank founded by the Spence Chapin adoption agency. As a result, the educational entity is more often than not defensive of the adoption system.

In most criminal cases, the question is asked what is wrong with the perpetrator?

The aforementioned study, never asks that question. The conclusion has already been made before actual study: the victims of these crimes were instrumental in their own abuse.

In an attempt to take a broader look at causative factors, let's look at a some actual abuse cases and explore another question:  could there be something seriously wrong with adopters, and subsequently with the adoption screening process itself that allows some people prone to abuse adopted children?

In 2014, a journalist from CBS5 in Arizona, wrote the following about the case of two girls adopted by Johann and Kimery Jorg.

The Jorgs are the adoptive parents of four girls, ages 7, 8, 11 and 13 years old.

The 11- and 13-year-olds were found by police to be severely malnourished and emaciated, according to the statement.

The 13-year-old was hospitalized May 30 and in a condition likened to a "concentration camp survivor." She was severely malnourished and medical personnel were wary of re-feeding syndrome, a dangerous condition when a malnourished person begins to receive proper nutrition, according to the statement. She remained in the hospital Friday morning.

The girl also had abnormal growths on her legs, severe "leathering of the skin on her buttocks due to repeated beatings, and calloused and blistered feet consistent with running on the pavement barefoot, according to the statement.

The 13- and 11-year-old girls told police they were forced to run several hours a day, were spanked several times a day with a wooden paddle, and forced to memorize, recite and repeatedly write Bible verses without any mistakes or suffer further punishment, according to an investigating officer's statement. The oldest was also forced to live in the backyard nude with only a bucket to use as a bathroom, according to the statement.

In 2005 a journalist for The Press Enterprise, a news organization in Southern California, wrote the following about the case of the girls adopted by Jessica Banks

When they were discovered, all of the girls were emaciated, their eyes sunken. They had been forced to wear two layers of diapers and long dark dresses. Their hair was cropped short and they bathed in the garage, where they lived in a hidden room.

Banks beat them daily with cords, sticks, high-heeled shoes and belts, and kicked them, court records state.

The girls were fed spoiled food and made to clean the house. Their room in the garage had no heat or air conditioning. Banks, who claimed the girls were mentally slow, made them take sleeping pills, court records show.

In 2011, CNN wrote the following about the case of 3 children adopted by John and Sonja Kluth

Authorities said the Kluths are accused of burning the children with hot spoons, choking them and locking them "in the storm shelter behind the residence for long periods of time with only chairs to sit in and plastic buckets for bathroom use. It was also alleged that the Kluths deprived the children of meals for punishment and fed them cat food and dog food," according to a statement from authorities.
The older boy said all three had their tongues burned with a hot spoon for lying, authorities said. The affidavit said the teen revealed scars to his body and smashed fingers. The girl and younger boy had multiple injuries on their face and bodies.
The girl reported Sonja Kluth hit her with handles of brooms and mops and strangled her until she "could not breathe," according to the affidavit.
The older boy said Sonja Kluth would tell him "get back up here, you know I want blood," during the abuse, authorities said. John Kluth told investigators the couple was strict and that "there is a wall of discipline in the home."

In 2012, CBS4 Miami wrote about the case of

Victor and Nubia Barahona (Doctor)

Jorge and Carmen Barahona now sit in jail awaiting trial for murder and child abuse. Monday, prosecutors released recorded statements from Victor’s foster mom, Katia Garcia.

She told an investigator what she says little Victor has told her.

“That his father used to pour hot sauce in his ears, eyes, nose, and mouth,” said Garcia. “His father made him eat a cockroach.”

“He asked me if I knew that the stomach eats itself when you’re starving,” she said.

Garcia said Victor remembers that Nubia’s feet were wounded because they would be tied up with wires.

“That his father used to place his sister’s feet, submerge his sister’s feet, in Clorox and Pinesol,” said Garcia.

And then there’s this:

“He saw some of my eyelashes and then he said that his was shut with crazy glue, and lost all of his lashes when he opened his eyes,” she said.

Garcia said, at times, Victor did not know if he’d live.

“That his father used to put a bag over his head and that he used to choke him. He says that there was a couple of times that he was very close to dying,” said Garcia.

Garcia also told investigators that the Barahonas gave the children only bread and milk. once a week.

She says leftovers from dinner would be given to the family dog.

We could easily go on supplying similar quotes from similar case for quite some time. There are dozens of cases like these, where adopted children were literally tortured by their adoptive parents.

This pattern of severe maltreatment was observed by the State of Washington, when investigating the abuse of adopted children after the death of Hana Grace-Rose Williams, in 2011, and came with the following finding:

Common elements related to child abuse and neglect noted in several of these cases include:

• Locking the child in a room
  
• Withholding food from the child
  
• Disparaging remarks about the child and discrediting the child as being untruthful
• Exaggerating or misstating the child’s negative behaviors
• Forcing the child to remain outside the home
• Denying the child access to toilet facilities
• and Isolating the child from the community, such as removing the child from public school.

Unfortunately, these specific elements are all too common in the abuse of adopted children, and such cases do not just happen in the State of Washington. There are common patterns of severe abuse, that can not be remedied by better preparation of prospective adopters, but only by having more stringent screening.

It is often said of adopted children that they can lack trust in their care givers. Children in many cases of abuse, are labeled as suffering from Reactive Attachment Disorder. The above cases, however, beg the question whether a lack of trust is a healthy or an unhealthy response when a child is adopted by a true psychopath.

When Pound Pup Legacy was first started, not a single comprehensive study had been written about the phenomenon of abuse in adoptive families.

Since 2006, we at PPL have collected news paper articles, court documents, police reports, and the like about each case of abuse in adoptive families that became known to the public. Even though we have tried to be a thorough as possible, we may have missed some cases that made the news, and we have certainly missed cases that made it to court, but were not reported in the news.

The number of cases that never made it to court, we can only speculate about. Over the years, we have learned from many cases of abuse in

adoptive families that were never reported, so all we can offer is an analysis of the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

Recently we added the 500th case of abuse in adoptive families, and with that, we believe we have enough information to make statistically significant statements.

We tagged each case according to abuse type, perpetrator, family makeup, type of adoption, and other characteristics of the case.

The level of detail varies per case. Sometimes we had to go by only a single newspaper article, sometimes we could base our data on hundreds of news paper articles and several court documents. As a result there are some cases where we only know the bare minimum, while there are also cases where we have a great deal of information about the adoption process, family life and all sorts of detail about the

abuse itself.

As a result, we know for all cases fairly accurately what type of abuse was committed by whom, when and where. However, when it comes to family makeup and details of the abuse our data under-represents the actual prevalence.

Most of the cases we have been able to find, relate to the United States, as is demonstrated in the table below.

This overwhelming abundance of cases from the US, compared to other countries, does not warrant the conclusion that abuse in adoptive families is much more prevalent in America than in the rest of the world. In fact, there are some factors that can help explain the vast discrepancies. For instance, news media in the United States are much more likely to  publish personal details about criminal cases than news media outside the United States. Furthermore, we are not versed in all languages of the world and therefore not capable of monitoring all news outlets around the world for news articles pertaining to abuse in adoptive families.

The adoption rate of the United States is also higher than that of most other countries. This is primarily due to adoption from foster care, which doesn't exist in several countries, and relatively high levels of domestic private adoptions. As a result we expect higher levels of abuse as well.

On the other hand, attitudes towards corporal punishment in the United States are more barbaric than in many other countries where adoption is a common practice, which likely leads to higher levels of physical abuse.

Adoption is also less regulated in the US than in some other countries, making it more likely for unsuitable prospective adopters to acquire children.

Given the great disparity in the number of cases in the United States and cases in the rest of the world, we limit our analysis to cases in the United States.

We also limit ourselves to cases that happened since 2000. In our archives, we have 93 older cases, starting as early as 1957. Since adoption practices have changed over the years, we must assume that older cases are no longer representative for the current situation.

By limiting our analysis to cases in the United States since 2000, we are left with 354 cases, a number still large enough to have statistical significance.

When we look at the rate of abuse in adoptive families, based on our sample of abuse cases relative to the total number of adoptions per year,

per state, there is no clear cut geographical pattern. This may be a result of the sample size.

The number of abuse cases per state are relatively low, and as a result, the contribution of single abuse cases greatly influence the effective rate.

This is best demonstrated when looking at Delaware, which has the 5th highest abuse rate, based on only one case. It is therefore not reasonable to break down the abuse below the national level, and treat the United States as a homogeneous entity.

When we break down the abuse per type, we get a more well-defined picture of abuse in the adoptive home. It is probably not surprising that physical abuse ranks highest, as physical abuse of children is the most prevalent type of abuse in the general population.  Physical abuse is also the form of abuse that mostly easily gets noted by teachers, doctors and others with a mandate to report abuse.

The high number of cases where deprivation plays a role is remarkable, but consistent with the finding of the report by the State of Washington.

(We defined deprivation as that abuse where children were deliberately denied food, where they were locked up inside the house, locked outside the house or somehow held restrained.)

As one can be seen in the following table, physical abuse and deprivation go hand in hand in many cases, and are more strongly correlated with each other than any other type of abuse. This can be explained by the fact that both forms of abuse are often used as a discipline or punishment measure. This is particularly true for deprivation. Although physical abuse is often used as a form of discipline or punishment, there are physical abuse cases where discipline and punishment don't play a role. Parental rage, as in cases of shaken baby syndrome, and cases of murder-suicide result in physical abuse where discipline and punishment don't come into the picture.

It should further be noted that the prevalence of emotional abuse among our cases, is likely to be much higher than we can account for. We only marked cases as pertaining to emotional abuse if news paper articles, court documents and police reports explicitly mentioned it. The other abuse forms are easier to prove than emotional abuse, and are therefore more likely to be included in formal accusations.

Abuse characteristics totals

physical abuse	deprivation	sexual abuse	neglect	emotional abuse	economic exploitation	medical abuse	count
	109
	75
		69
	25
			13
			9
			8
		8
		7
		6
		5
		3
				3
		3
	2
			2
		2
			1
		1
			1
				1
		1
	1

When we look at the perpetrators of abuse in adoptive families, we can notice that the stereotype of the physically abusive man doesn't apply in many cases. In fact, women are more involved in physical abuse than men are. It would be interesting to find if this is the result of the screening of prospective adopters, or whether this is true for the population at large.

The numbers are slightly skewed towards abuse by women, because of a larger prevalence of single-mother adopters (30 cases) than single-father adopters (14 cases). With the exception of one case all single-father abuse cases involved sexual abuse, five of which related to child pornography. With the exception of one case of sexual abuse and two cases of neglect, all cases by single-mothers involve physical abuse.

When we look at the makeup of adoptive families we see a striking prevalence of homeschooling, 84 cases out of a total of 354. When we look at severe cases, where more than one type of abuse takes place, we even find 62 cases out of a total of 142.  When we further narrow it down to those cases where physical abuse and deprivation coincide, we find 48 cases out of a total of 102.

A similar pattern can be seen with strong religiosity, which is a characteristic in 56 out of a total of 354 cases, while that number only drops to 36 when looking at the 142 severe cases. When looking at the 102 cases where physical abuse and deprivation coincide, we find 25 cases where strong religiosity plays a role.

Strong religiosity is likely to be very much under-reported, especially in those parts of the US where that aspect is very common. Differential treatment is also likely to be under-reported. Only well documented abuse cases made mention of it.

family makeup

home schooling	strongly religious	single-mothers	large family	single-fathers	differential treatment	GLBT	Count
	39
	25
	19
	12
		17
		6
	5
			5
	4
	4
		4
			4
				2
			2
		2
		1
			1
		1