Silsby Debacle as Case Study for “Western Disregard for the Integrity of Poor Families.”

Last year, we gave you the complete, sordid rundown of the Laura Silsby cast of characters and actions here.

Now, an academic paper has been published that uses the Silsby case to explain how “MonoHumanism” drives intercountry adoption. The whole 48 page pdf is worth reading. I want to highlight a few parts.

She defines MonoHumanism as follows: “In the context of ICA, MonoHumanism means that children are not seen in the context of their family, community and culture, but rather, narrowly as the potential children of Western adults.

In this Article, therefore, I argue that MonoHumanism is an unstated theoretical justification for the disrespect that society shows for the integrity of poor families. In this context, it is not only the West vs. East juxtaposition that is important, but the poor vs. rich juxtaposition as well. In other words, it is the exclusion and displacement of knowledge and discourse about poor families the failure to see children in the context of their family, community and culture or a slightly broadened version of MonoHumanism, that explains our failure to respect the integrity of poor families in the United States and abroad.”

She gives a nice summary of much of the Laura Silsby story. Then starting on page 11 she discusses how intercountry adoption was developed as a means to “save” children.

Page 23: She explains the Haiti restavek system and discusses the benefits of it. That is not something that you will find in other articles.

Page 39: She cites a statistic of US foster care from 2009. We had been using the statistic of 2/3s of children placed into foster care were due to neglect. Her study-backed statistic is more staggering than this. “In 2009, neglect (not including medical neglect) represented 78.3 percent of the child maltreatment cases across 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.”

Page 42: She discusses how the Adoption and Safe Families Act ( AFSA) actually is causing the child more disruptions than prior to the act. It is an interesting facet of the act that we often malign due to the money incentives to separate children.

Read the whole pdf at silsby.

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