Thoughts about privacy and exploitation of victims

A flurry of recent events prompted my desire to write something about privacy and about exploitation of victims.
Adoption can be a nasty business. Adoption advocacy, reform and child welfare can be a nasty business. But I think one of the vilest activities on both sides is when they recruit and use victims for their own agendas.

Adoption agencies love to find and exploit happy adoptees. (And it’s a dream come true for them if “happy” adult adoptees work for them!) They also use adoptive families for glowing media articles and advertising efforts that too often involve names and photos of smiling children coupled with stories about the children’s families of origin, details of their beginnings and at times embellished descriptions of how terrible their lives were pre-adoption.

But what about the other side, the side we at this blog tend to support–the side that often tells the truth about what is going on in poor adoption practices?

Unfortunately, it is only human nature not to always carefully consider the long-term consequences for adoption victims/survivors once they have been paraded around the media, in the news, and elsewhere. Typically, it is adoptees who are used to convey a message, although I have seen duped parents (of origin) and adopting parents pushed to reveal too much as well in an effort for change. Once identifying information is public, it is extremely difficult to make it private again. We need to look no further than Justin Hansen and Masha Allen to see that there are too few restraints, protections for privacy, or respect for vulnerable children who still have a long life ahead of them.

What are people thinking?

They’re not. Or they’re only thinking of their own agendas and how the plight of these souls can be used to further their cause. I wholeheartedly believe the media and the internet can be a powerful tool in educating the masses on these issues, but there are, however, plenty of journalists, bloggers, and advocates who will not think twice about revealing children’s identities along with their very private and personal stories in order to sell a story or further an agenda.

There are rare times when this may be appropriate–times when children’s identities have already been revealed by courts, or when the children themselves have stepped forward–but it still makes me uncomfortable.

Recently, foster youth in Los Angeles joined together to ask the courts not to reveal their abuse stories without their consent. See: http://www.scpr.org/news/2011/11/21/29989/demonstrators-gather-rallying-open-juvenile-court-/ . Although transparency and accountability are important in improving the system and we need more of it, these empowered young people have an excellent point–that it can be done without violating their rights to privacy.

I believe all of these stories and cases can be told and need to be told without revealing the victims names or identifying information. At this blog we do not mention names or identities that have not already been mentioned in the media or in public court proceedings. In some of those cases, I just can’t help wishing the media and the courts had never revealed abuse/trauma victims names in the first place. I wonder how different adulthood for Masha and Justin would be if they could live out the rest of their lives without the world knowing the details of their sad and traumatic childhoods and without adults using them to further their own causes.

**Disclaimer: In no way do I advocate sealing records from their rightful owners or any effort to take away access to a person’s personal information, documents or history.