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by Kerry and Niels on Wednesday, 03 November 2010

As foreplay to Adoption Awareness Month, the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute (CCAI) held its annual Angels in Adoption Award gala, October 4. The Angels in Adoption Awards have become a formulaic adoption love-fest, praising an industry no politician dares to regulate, with the occasional celebrity to give the gala an aura of importance.

This year, CCAI was able to book Kristin Chenoweth and Rhea Perlman, to honor them with an award. Over the years, CCAI has given awards to celebrities such as Rosie O’Donnell, Bruce Willis, Muhammad Ali, Jane Seymour, Patti LaBelle and in 2005, CCAI was even able to get the First Lady to accept an Angel in Adoption Award.

The gala is of course not only a meet and greet with celebrities, it is also a means for certain industries to approach lawmakers. Boeing, Target, 3M and the American Chemistry Council were cheap dates, going for the $5,000 table. BP, Disney, Textron and PhRMA had more money to burn, booking the $10,000 table. Chevron, Exxon Mobil, FedEx and Mortgage Insurance Company of America coughed up $25,000 each, to have access to the congress men and women participating in the event, while the Freddy Mac Foundation and the American Petroleum Institute even paid undisclosed amounts in excess of $50,000 for their tables.

For some reason the energy sector had a huge interest in the plight of "orphans", with further tables sold to: Marathon Oil Company, Occidental Petroleum Corporation, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, Duke Energy, Entergy and Palo Verde Oil.

by Kerry and Niels on Monday, 01 November 2010

When Pound Pup Legacy started the Demons of Adoption Awards in 2007, it was very much a spur-of-the-moment action, triggered by the sugar coated news surrounding the Congressional Angels of Adoption Awards

TM

. Over the last couple of years the Demons of Adoption Awards have grown into an anticipated annual event, followed by many in the adoption community, and a critical voice kicking off Adoption Awareness Month.

This year we want to add an even more sobering element to the start of the adoption love-fest, introducing Rohnor's Angels, honoring those children who died this year due to abuse in their forever family.

by Kerry and Niels on Monday, 01 November 2010

On September 28, 1854. the New York Times ran an article with the title: Murder of an Adopted Child in New-Orleans, describing the abuse and subsequent death of Christian Rohnor, a two-year-old boy, adopted by a couple from New Orleans. Christian Rohnor was locked up in the attic, starved to the point of being completely emaciated, and eventually beaten to death by his adoptive father.

The story of Christian Rohnor is almost entirely forgotten and we may like to think those barbaric times are long gone. We may be compelled to think that in the 156 years that have passed since the death of Christian Rohnor, adoption standards have been raised to the point that such horrific abuse of an adopted child no longer takes place.

Christian Rohnor may have been the first documented case of lethal abuse in an adoptive family, his death was certainly not the last. To this day adoptees are abused and killed by members found in their new "forever family". Every year there are several cases of adopted children being tortured to death, shaken to death or disciplined to death. 156 years after the cruelties performed on Christian Rohnor, there are still adopters who choose not to love,  care for and protect their young additions, but instead, choose to lock up the children in their care, starve them, sexually abuse them and beat them to death.

In memory of Christian Rohnor, we honor the children who met their death due to abuse in adoptive families since Adoption Awareness Month 2009.

by Kerry and Niels on Thursday, 21 October 2010

This week the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute published a lengthy report calling for improvement in post-adoption services.

The executive summary starts with the following observation:

Several months ago, when the media focused the nation’s attention on yet another sensational adoption story – this time about a Tennessee mother who put her 7-year-old son on a plane back to Russia – all sorts of disquieting questions flowed through people’s minds. They ranged from the rhetorical (“What kind of mother would do such a thing?”) to the important (“Are children in orphanages being adequately cared for before adoption?”) to the inadvertently stigmatizing (“If a child can be so easily `returned,’ is adoption really permanent?”).

Most child welfare and adoption professionals watched the drama with better-trained, more experienced eyes, however, and so they raised very different questions. For example: “Did the mother get accurate information about the boy before adopting, as well as training and education, so she would be prepared for the challenges of parenting a child who had been institutionalized?” And, most pointedly: “Were post-adoption services readily available to her so that she could help her son, and herself, rather than giving up?”

Apparently the well trained eyes of adoption professionals saw something the stupid sheeple overlooked. Yet nothing is further from the truth. Much of the debate among non-professionals was about post-placement services and training. Apparently the professionals don't want to talk about the not so rhetorical question: "What kind of mother would do such a thing" or the not so inadvertently sigmatizing “If a child can be so easily `returned,’ is adoption really permanent?”.

Both questions are not addressed in the report, since it's not so much a scientific investigation into the failings of the adoption system, as it is a policy piece to push for more adoption subsidies.

by Kerry and Niels on Saturday, 25 September 2010

Since we started archiving cases of abuse in adoptive families, we have been able to find information about

such cases.

In this article, we'd like to explore the meaning of this number and what it says about the the adoption system in place.

There are no official statistical sources about abuse in adoptive families. In fact, there are in general very few reliable statistics in the field of adoption.

This is why we have to rely on an archive of abuse cases, mostly based on news paper articles, and in some cases court documents.

A lack of source information makes it difficult to make reliable statements about the prevalence of abuse in adoptive families for several reasons:
  • Abuse may not be reported at all. Many cases of abuse (whether in adoptive or in non-adoptive families) are never reported to authorities. As a result the number of abuse cases we can report is always much lower than the actual number of abuse cases.
  • The status of adoptee may not be mentioned in the reporting about abuse cases.
  • News papers are not a consistent source of information about investigated abuse cases. While several investigated abuse cases are reported by news papers, many others are not. Reporting is based on the "news-worthiness" of the case, making it likely that many investigated cases never made the news.
This article provides some break downs of number of abuse cases by location, with the provision that the figures listed in this post are far from reliable, and in general much lower than the actual numbers.

The vast majority of cases of abuse in adoptive families take place in the United States, as can be seen in the following table. Table 1

The disproportionately high ranking of the US may not necessarily relate to a higher rate of abuse in adoptive families than in other countries, though it is likely to be a contributing factor.

Most countries listed in table 1 will likely have much higher abuse rates than listed. There are various reasons for that:
  • Lower number of news outlets available over the internet. Many American news papers have internet editions, this is not always the case in other countries.
  • For the US, several cases older cases (the oldest going back to 1956) are listed. For other countries we have not been able to access news archives, so the US is certainly overrepresented with older cases. Although the number of cases before 1990 is less than 25. Of course there is no reason to expect abuse in adoptive families had a lower prevalence in earlier times, there simply is less information available/accessible about older cases. This is especially true since larger news papers are archived better than small local news papers, while they are less likely to contain information about specific abuse cases.
  • Language barrier. It is possible for us to screen news on the internet in the English language, and to a lesser extent languages like: French, Spanish, German and Dutch, but none of our members is fluent in many of the other languages. As a result news outlets in the English language will disproportionately provide us information about abuse cases.
  • Privacy issues. Many American news papers provide private information about abuse cases. Some go as far as providing the address information of the family the abuse took place in. The status of the victim as adoptee may easily be provided more in American news outlets. In other countries such information may be suppressed by the press out of privacy concerns.
  • Higher overall adoption rate. Most Anglo-saxon countries know a form of adoption from foster care, which in the US comprises approximately half of the total number of adoptions. Most European countries have no adoption from foster care, and some have hardly any domestic infant adoption either. Of course higher adoption rates will likely contribute to higher rates of abuse in adoptive families too.
  • Higher absolute number of adoptions. The US has a much larger population than any other country in the Western World. So even when adoption rates are equal, the total number of adoptions will still be much larger in the US than in other countries, giving a higher likelihood of higher numbers of abuse in adoptive families.
Despite these provisions, there is reason to believe that the abuse rate in adoptive families in the US is actually higher than in other countries.
  • The number of abuse cases in our archive from the US is so much larger than that of any other English speaking country, it is unlikely this can be contributed to higher adoption figures and issues of news paper reporting only.
  • The US has an adoption system that is far less regulated than that of nearly any other country in the world. Regulation of industries is in general lower in the US than in many other countries, and this especially applies to adoption. There is federal oversight over inter-country adoption on paper, but in practice this has been outsourced to the Council on Accreditation, which doesn't have the capacity to properly monitor inter-country adoption. The federal government does not regulate domestic adoption at all, despite its inter-state character. All state governments regulate their adoption agencies to a degree, though there is a vast difference between states. Inter-state adoptions make it sometimes impossible for state authorities to properly regulate or monitor the activities of adoption agencies.
  • The US has an adoption system that is far more commercial in nature than that of nearly any other country. Unlike most other countries, the US does not prohibit for-profit adoption agencies, while several not-for-profit adoption agencies operate with for-profit motivations. The latter group of agencies pays their executive directors highly fluctuating compensations, which can in principle be equated to profit.
  • The US has an adoption system that is far more competitive than that of nearly any other country. The US has far more adoption agencies per capita than any other country in the world. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has approximately as many adoption agencies as all the countries in Europe combined.
  • Attitudes towards corporal punishment differ strongly from those in most other Western countries, making the prevalence of physical abuse more likely.
Abuse in adoptive families does not only differ per country, it also differs within countries. The following map shows all known cases of abuse in adoptive families and pin points their location.


The map is overwhelming due to the large number of cases we have been able to collect. When we break down the figures by state we get the following table.
  1. Cases of abuse in adopted families according to Pound Pup Legacy database. States with less than 5 cases were omitted.
  2. Population size as of 2005
  3. Number of abuse cases per 100,000 state inhabitants
Table 2

All of the provisions we mentioned before, apply to table 2 as well. The ranking of this table is determined by relating the number of abuse cases to the population size. As a result states with a higher adoption rate will likely rank higher than those states with a low adoption rate. This may very well explain the leading position of Minnesota, which is known to be a state with more than average numbers of adoption. Unfortunately there are no reliable adoption statistics at the state level, so we can't relate the number of abuse cases to the number of adoptions.

Reporting about abuse cases may also differ significantly from state to state. Some states are more metropolitan than others, making the reporting of abuse cases less likely; the news being drowned out by other newsworthy events. Some states have more local news papers than others, or have more local news papers with internet presence than others.

Despite these provisions, the high ranking of certain states will likely relate to relatively high levels of abuse in adoptive families. The differences between the five highest ranking states and the bottom five ranking states is large. This difference is unlikely related to reporting issues and adoption rate alone.

The break down of adoption statistics by location is a tricky issue, with many caveats, but given the sometimes overwhelming differences between locations, there are indications that adoption practices in the US in particular and in certain states within the US, are contributing to higher levels of abuse in adoptive families.

Unfortunately there are no reliable adoption statistics, and abuse statistics are not coded for adoption either, so reliable statements about abuse in adopted families by location can not be made. We hope nevertheless that the break down we have given is somewhat indicative of the locations that perform exceptionally poor. Until child welfare authorities take up a serious interest in this issue, we will remain having more questions than answers.
by Kerry and Niels on Wednesday, 15 September 2010

This week, E.J. Graff published a long article called Anatomy of an Adoption Crises, in which she describes the shut down of adoptions from Vietnam in 2008. The article is based upon the release of several government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. We are not going to rehash the story as told by E.J. Graff, instead I'd like to focus on the players in this drama.

The first released documents is dated July 2007 and details several visits made by members of the US. Embassy in Hanoi, to several orphanages in Vietnam. Unfortunately the document doesn't provide any detail into the findings of the investigations, since most of it is redacted in accordance with the Privacy Act of 1974.

In the following month Michael W. Michalak is installed as the new United States Ambassador to Vietnam and in the following months the adoption drama in Vietnam starts to unfold. Ambassador Michalak writes a devastating report, January 8, 2008, with the title: Vietnam Adoptions: A trail of corruption. The report makes the point:

1. (SBU) Summary: Reftels document the series of investigations that post has conducted over the past six months. Taken together, these investigations have documented widespread adoption fraud and organized networks engaged in child buying and laundering throughout Vietnam. Post has been able to piece together a picture of how adoption service providers (ASPs), orphanages, and Vietnamese officials are colluding to create a supply of orphans to meet international demand for "as young as possible" infants. While the specific details vary from orphanage to orphanage, the general pattern is consistent throughout all regions of the country, The trail begins with ASPs passing out large sums of money to orphanage directors and ends with infant children, often of unknown origin, in the arms of unsuspecting prospective adoptive parents. End Summary.
by Kerry and Niels on Thursday, 02 September 2010

Two days ago we started the nominations for the Annual Demons of Adoption Awards for the fourth time in succession. As much as we like that we do this every year, and how much we love to point out the "bad guys" in adoption, it's also important to realize that the adoption system itself is most evil of all and that pointing out a few "bad guys" is not going to solve the ethical problems related to adoption.

The Demons of Adoption awards started four years ago in response to the congressional Angels in Adoption, annually awarded by the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute (CCAI). What is presented as a means to promote the adoption of children, in fact is an adoption industry love fest. Among the recipients of the award, we do not just find families that opened their doors for children from foster care, but also couples whose only "merit" is that they adopted through Bethany Christian Services of Virginia. Many of the other recipients are insiders in the adoption industry. Among the recipients are many adoption lawyers, whose "merit" only exist in the fact that they make a living preparing the paperwork for an adoption.

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That is to say, at best they only make a living preparing the paperwork for an adoption, there are many adoption attorneys whose work far exceeds the handling of legal issues of an adoption, but who work the supply chain as well, targeting pregnant women for the supply and prospective adoptive parents for the demand. Running an actual adoption boutique is not uncommon for adoption attorneys.

Some adoption attorneys are deeply involved in the politics of adoption, such is the case with Larry S Jenkins, an attorney from Utah, involved in many law suits where father's rights are successfully disputed, and member of the Utah Adoption Council, an LDS-church controlled organization involved in the politics of adoption in Utah. Ironically, Larry Jenkins is the recipient of an Angel in Adoption award.

by Kerry and Niels on Tuesday, 31 August 2010

In 2007 Pound Pup Legacy instituted the annual

Demons of Adoption Award

to raise a voice against adoption propaganda and the self congratulatory practices of the

Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute's
by Kerry and Niels on Thursday, 22 July 2010

This week, Goldman Sachs reported an 82% drop in earnings, while at the same time Bethany Christian Services reported a 66% increase in the number of inter-country adoptions performed. Both organizations are doing god's work in their own special way, yet Bethany Christian Services seems to have outscored the finance behemoth in success rate this year.

Not only Bethany Christian Services was in a gleeful mood, according to an article in Christianity Today, both Nightlight Christian Adoption and Buckner International were being content with the results booked this year as well.

The business opportunities created in the wake of the Haiti earthquake certainly have amplified the results for 2010, and demand seems to be rising, Bethany Christian Services reporting inquiries about inter-country adoption being up 95%. Both Nightlight and Buckner have seen "an uptick in interest from couples wanting to adopt".

Christianity Today is jubilant about the success booked, yet the article fails to relay the fact that adoption business primarily hit the jackpot this year with the earthquake in Haiti. Such a lucky break is not likely to be had every year.

by Kerry and Niels on Friday, 16 April 2010

Ever since the case of Artem Justin Hansen made the news last week, the adoption industry has feared a moratorium of adoptions from Russia.

The National Council for Adoption (NCFA), the trade association of Christian adoption service providers, was quick with their response, publishing a statement within 24 hours after the case made the news.

The Joint Council on International Children’s Services (JCICS), the trade association of not-necessarily-Christian adoption service providers, was equally eager to make a statement, followed a couple of days later by a campaign, arrogantly called "

We are the truth