Book Review: The Child Catchers: Rescue Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption UPDATED

Kathyrn Joyce’s latest book details the rapid rise of scandals of the Evangelical Christian Adoption business and its growth. The book delves into the deception of the Adoption-as-“win-win” by examining specific cases that occurred in multiple countries. We are glad that we were able to provide some content to assist Kathryn in recounting this important history of corruption to shine the light on these non-child-centered placements of the past. We hope that agencies and prospective parents take this information to heart so these scenarios do not repeat themselves in the future. This is a must-read for anyone thinking about adopting, in the process or who has already adopted.

Kathryn interviewed more than two hundred people over a few years and traveled across the US and abroad to gather the eye-opening, stomach-turning details that should shock anyone with a conscience.

Topics include the following:

•  Silsby Haiti debacle
• BridgeStone’s Alabama ministry that involves post-earthquake Haiti medical visa fraud and current hosting programs. This was covered in a previous article that she wrote. See the link here
• Saddleback Church and Christian Alliance for Orphan’s Summits. She interviews the FacePalmtastic Jedd Medefind and Russell Moore.
•Youth With a Mission (YWAM)  and Bethany’s domestic adoption and maternity home coercions and isolations
• Crisis Pregnancy Center’s relationships with adoption centers and how NCFA’s involvement put the adoption/abortion marketing into the American lexicon
• Christian World Adoption (CWA)’s debacle in Ethiopia (See Fly Away Children expose )and how the local people view adoption differently than the West
• An Ethiopia disruption story
• BFAS
• Against Child Trafficking (ACT)’s Fruits of Ethiopia report (See our links here)
• Ethiopia’s deinstitutionalization efforts
• USCIS and JCICS “investigations” in Ethiopia
• Liberian adoptions, Above Rubies movement , disruptions and RAD
• Why adoption is inadequately regulated
• Why the decline in international adoption placements has placed greater emphasis on the Christian Adoption Movement as the last “Savior” for the Adoption Industry
• Both Ends Burning campaign
• Rwanda’s resistance to International Adoption and success in deinstitutionalization (See our posts here)
• South Korea and coercion of pregnant woman and adoptee’s effort for reform.

Two themes kept crossing my mind as I read the book. One was the deception of how the adoption industry markets the supply of children needing adoption. The second was the lack of adoptive parent training and needed support and services of adoptees in postplacement.

Three excerpts that illustrate these themes:

Page 113/Not enough supply of children for domestic adoptions and disdain for those that do not place

Rev. Flip Benham, director of Operation Save America   which has affiliates in 20 states and was the baptizer of Norma (Jane Roe) McCorvey, says “ We could adopt a child in a second. We have every tool available…But [the women] aren’t going to do that,” Benham told me, “Because they’re selfish.”

Interestingly, his website really does not discuss adoption at all. It details efforts to reduce and eliminate abortions.

 Page 155/Which children are being placed internationally does not match up with which children are most in need of international adoption

“As Jedd Medefind of the Christian Alliance for Orphans admits, too often the children who end up in the pipeline for international adoption-which starts at the orphanages-are not the same children advertised as composing the orphan crisis.”

This surprised me and concerned me at the same time. I fully understand that when people first start looking into adoption be it as a PAP or researcher or churchgoer, that there will be a lack of knowledge of how things operate. This tells me that he does understand that they are falsely marketing which children need adoption. Lies are always wrong, so why does he continue with it? (Stay tuned for tomorrow’s column)

Page 186/Lack of critical thinking in homestudy vetting by social workers and the resulting risky situations

This Liberia case shows that the adoptive parents’ punishment has uncanny similarity to Hana Williams Ethiopia case  . Hana died outside her home and her parents have been charged with murder .

“In the Fall of 2009, Graham [neighbor and a fifty-seven year old veteran police officer who is the county’s first black cop] said that Colin Campbell knocked on his door on one of the first freezing mornings of the year and asked if had seen Jennice [adopted from Liberia to an Above Rubies family], because she had left sometime in the night. Buford [another neighbor] said Nancy Campbell had come to ask her the same thing. Graham said he would organize a search party and went to the Campbells’ house. There, Nancy Campbell told him she had just found Jennice (who did not answer my requests for an interview) out back. Graham went to look , and said that he found her in a crawl space below the porch, dressed in summer clothes and open shoes. She was shivering like nothing I had ever seen and crying uncontrollably.”

Graham said Nancy Campbell told him that Jennice had been disobedient and couldn’t come in until she apologized. It was then Graham thought he understood what had really happened, “She had been out all night in the freeze. They had put her out, “ he said. “If you want my opinion, they were building an alibi.” Graham told Campbell she could let the girl in the house or he would take her home with him; Campbell grudgingly let them enter. “I got her warmed up enough that she got herself composed. And I whispered in her ear, I am going to get you out of here, but I need you to apologize and just be here until I can.”

In the end, the only important measure of an adoption is its outcome, not the feelings of the adoptive parents at any time in the process or the $ in the pockets of the adoption agency owners or statistics that lobbyists can wail about and influence the passing of new exploitative laws (See North Korean Refugee Adoption Act).

Child Catchers paints a picture of bad outcomes due to the ill-conceived, shady foundation of how international adoptions were established in the first place.

Each one of the true stories Joyce recounts has the following truths that require awareness and reform:

(1) The Evangelical Christian Adoption Movement is becoming the key pathway to placements. This is the case not only in international adoptions, but domestic and even foster care as the largest conglomerate Bethany Christian Services is taking on foster care in state after state and setting up foreign foster care in countries like Ethiopia and China through their subsidiaries. Additionally, it is deeply complicit with US government officials and the US media in its marketing efforts. The history of how the movement has taken over the industry and how it continues to misrepresent the poverty crisis as an orphan crisis is important to understand. The strawman of Orphans in Crisis is deflecting Christians away from the root of solving poverty and causing havoc in communities that truly need the most help.

(2) These anecdotes are just the tip of the iceberg of stories we have heard over the past decades. Critics will play these down as one-off scenarios but it points to the root of how poor people are exploited in countries that do not have solid child welfare infrastructures.

(3) American agencies, including evangelical types, went into foreign nations and FIRST established booming adoption businesses before addressing the root of the poverty issues on the ground. They did so with a US worldview of child care and without paying attention to local customs, ethnicities, language, religions and cultures.

(4) Poverty solutions which include day care, microloans, paying local foster families, and stopping the stigmatization of single and/or poor parents need to be focused on by Christians who want to help the world.

(5) Postadoption assistance and monitoring need to occur. It needs to occur now, it needs to occur often and accountability needs to accompany it.

I commend Kathyrn for her independent research; interviews with top leaders in the movement; and gracious telling of these stories. (There are no Rally-style smackdowns, I assure you).

The leaders’ own words show how corrupt and misguided the industry is. The Adoption Industry shows itself for what it is—A Ponzi scheme sickeningly labeling the modern-day, money-grubbing process as a continuation of Jesus’ ministry. The truth is that the process is the antithesis of what Jesus would do. It was built on the backs of poor families with no way for their voices to be heard  and no reprimands of those agencies who are responsible. Compassion is reserved for those that pay. Justice is not to be found.

REFORM Puzzle Pieces

Addition: Our concerns about the Evangelical Adoption Movement was discussed in January 2011. See that post here.

Update: Link to interview on MSNBC here.

Update 2: Transcript to MSNBC interview: MHP transcript Child Catchers 052713

Another truthful  review is at The Evangelical Christian adoption movement: The orphan crisis that wasn’t  [Al Jazeera 5/1/13 by Jill Filipovic]

An interview with Kathryn can be read at How the Christian right perverts adoption  [Salon.co 5/4/13 by Laura Barcella]

A thoughtful piece by an Evangelical Christian who was interviewed and is part of the book can be read at Evangelical trafficking? A guest post by Caleb David [Marty Duren.com 5/1/13 by Caleb David]

 

Update 3: Four more reviews and interview

Interview: Truth-Telling in Vulgaria [Killing the Buddha.com 5/9/13 by Nathan Schneider]

Review by adoptive parent: Why Christians Like Me Should Listen to Critiques of Evangelical Adoption# [The Nation 5/17/13 by Melanie Springer Mock]

Interview: Adoption Imperialism: A Q&A With ‘The Child Catchers’ Author Kathryn Joyce [RH Reality Check 5/14/13 by Sarah Seltzer]

Review by birth mother: The Child Catchers exposes the stench of international adoption–and domestic adoption too  [First Mother Forum 5/20/13 by Jane Edwards]

Update 4: Another column that Kathryn has written on this subject can be read at The Problem With the Christian Adoption Movement [Huffington Post 6/2/13]

Update 5: May/June 2013 issue of Mother Jones captures Liberia-specific stories including disruptions.

“The Thompsons begged them to reconsider, to send Isaiah to counseling instead. They also called Children’s Services, which, according to Kate, warned the Allisons that it could be illegal to repatriate Isaiah. But Sam and Serene sent him off anyway. “They told me, ‘If we told people about what you did, they’d put you in jail,'” Isaiah told me later. “I felt so bad, I didn’t even care.”

When Isaiah and his escort, a man Sam knew, arrived in Monrovia, they found the orphanage closed. The escort left him instead with a pastor who cared for street children. Isaiah begged the man not to leave him behind. He had only a backpack of clothes and $40—and his green card would expire in six months if he remained in Liberia. He spent three weeks scavenging for food, until his great aunt found out he was in Liberia and brought him home to River Cess, a desolate coastal outpost where he could no longer understand the Kru language his cousins spoke. Isaiah felt safe, at least, but food was scarce, and he took to sleeping most of the day to escape his hunger. He also contracted malaria, as did a five-year-old cousin, who died one night by his side. “To stop myself from crying,” he told me, “I would think that what I did was really bad, and this is the least I can do.”

Frantic, Kate and Roger Thompson eventually tracked down Isaiah in River Cess and brought him back to Atlanta. Shortly before they did, the Allisons emailed Isaiah in care of Acres of Hope, assuring him that they had forgiven him, as well as the Thompsons, “for this interference…Remember the beautiful times we had together, remember we loved you always. No one can ever take away the truth of what really happened here.”

Isaiah had a printout of the email on him when he arrived in Atlanta 20 pounds lighter and suffering from PTSD. He hadn’t read it. During his four years at the Allisons’, he hadn’t learned how.
ULTIMATELY, all but 3 of the Campbells’ and Allisons’ 10 adoptions ran into serious problems. They were purged for a time from Campbell’s website, prompting readers to gossip about the family’s “disappearing children.” In a 2009 video, Serene claimed that the missing adoptees were off at school. Campbell’s biography was amended to say she had adopted “some” Liberian children.

In response to specific questions for this story, Sam Allison responded with a blanket email dismissing the children’s allegations as “lies and untruths.” Nancy Campbell conceded that Serene “did have some problems with her older children (who were adults) and wanted their independence immediately…She embraced these children as though they were from her womb and it was terribly painful for her to be rejected by them.” Only one of her own adoptions failed, Campbell said.

The Campbell-Allison clan was hardly the only one struggling. The Liberia forums were overflowing with tales of failed adoptions, most of them involving placements facilitated by the Christian brokers Campbell endorsed.

Some ended in tragedy. In 2008, Kimberly Forder, a Washington woman whose adopted eight-year-old boy had died of pneumonia in 2002, pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Prosecutors blamed his death on her systematic abuse, alleging in court documents that Forder starved the boy (he ate dog food) and made him sleep in a crib. One punishment reportedly consisted of dunking his head in a bucket of water used to clean dirty diapers. This was the same family Nancy Campbell escorted through Dulles with their Liberian triplets—adoptions arranged by WACSN after the eight-year-old’s death.

In 2010, a county court stripped a Mennonite Brethren family in Fairview, Oklahoma (WACSN also had ties to the Mennonites, most of whom are not evangelical), of custody of four Liberian sisters. Penny and Ardee Tyler had been convicted of felony child abuse for, among other things, tying one of their adopted kids to a bedpost for two nights, and leaving her outside in the cold; their adult son was convicted of rape by instrumentation.

The next year, Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz, a home-schooling California couple adopting through Acres of Hope, admitted to beating one of their three Liberian daughters, seven-year-old Lydia, to death for mispronouncing a word. In their home was a copy of Michael Pearl’s To Train Up a Child. “You must know that they did not kill their children with the little switches that we advocate using,” Pearl said, in reference to several fatal incidents. They were “locking them outdoors, giving them cold baths, denying them foods, and beating them mercilessly. There’s nothing in our literature that would suggest anything like that.”

Stories also began to pile up about children who had been returned to Liberia. “You heard about the Tennessee case that returned the child to Russia?” Edward Winant, former vice consul in charge of adoptions at the US Embassy in Monrovia, asked me when I visited the country for my book. “We’ve had at least three similar cases.” One girl, no more than 10 years old, was found wandering around the airport with $200 in her pocket.

I also met Bishop Emmanuel Jones, a Liberian evangelist who runs a home for street children. He has taken in three returned adoptees and says he knows of at least five others. Most are boys who have displayed sexual behavior or girls who “don’t want to submit,” he said. It’s hard to say what happens to other “rehomed” Liberian children because disrupted adoptions are poorly tracked, and many times the children simply drop off the map. At one point the Liberia forums were abuzz with adoptive and foster parents seeking new homes for their children. Some families called for suspending judgment of parents coping with failed adoptions, which were beginning to seem almost a routine part of the process. “Let’s be a community of support for ALL adoptions,” wrote one poster, “in any aspect of their journey.”

CECE NOW LIVES with her husband, Samuel, a fellow Daniel Hoover adoptee, and Sammy, their toddler, in a modest apartment complex in a suburb of Charlotte, North Carolina. Samuel’s sister, who was also adopted, lives there as well. Charlotte is a hub of Liberian adoptees; Samuel, a slim and quiet 23-year-old, was part of a touring boy choir adopted, almost in its entirety, to local families—the heartwarming story of the “Hallelujah Chorus” was featured in Oprah’s O magazine. When he and CeCe married, in 2011, all of her bridesmaids were Daniel Hoover alums, and a good number of their friends were children from adoptions that fell apart. “Most of us, when we came to America, there was some part of us that a lot of adoptive parents didn’t understand, that we would never be the same like their own kids,” CeCe said.

Samuel works days at a Tyson chicken processing plant where CeCe began working nights when their baby was about a year old. She also tries to supplement their income with a direct-sales jewelry business. She applied to cosmetology school but didn’t have adoption papers to prove her citizenship, nor full educational records. CeCe had asked the Allisons for them, but for close to four years they wouldn’t return her calls.

It turned out the Allisons had neglected to complete the stateside adoption process, thus jeopardizing the legal residency of some of the children—as Kula discovered during her 2011 readoption by Pam Epperly, a longtime Tennessee foster mother. “Kula made disclosures that disturbed our court staff as well as the judge,” a representative from a Tennessee children’s service provider told me. The rep alerted the Department of Children’s Services, which opened two cases on the Allisons but closed one of them after the remaining children did not disclose any abuse. Several months later, with the other case still pending, the Allisons left the state. Unable to track them down, DCS ended its investigation.

At some later point, the Allisons apparently returned to Tennessee. In the summer of 2012, hoping to keep tabs on her kid sister, CeCe sent them a message on Facebook. Alfred had already reconnected with the family, and when CeCe asked to see Cherish, she heard back at long last. Sam and Serene asked if she was “ready to move on and let God take control of things.”

Last September, for the first time in years, CeCe returned to the Allisons’ home. Cherish was nearly a teenager, and Engedi, who hadn’t been talking when CeCe left home, was a big girl now. Sam cried and Serene apologized. CeCe posted a Facebook picture of Serene holding baby Sammy (“First grandchild!”), and before long she had resumed friendships with the entire Campbell clan. When she returned for Thanksgiving, Alfred and Kula came too.

The turnaround doesn’t surprise the social-services worker who asked DCS to investigate the family. It’s like battered wives syndrome, she told me. “If the children at any point established a connection, they’re going to want to return…Even though it ended badly, it’s still a connection.”
IN 2009, LIBERIA imposed an emergency moratorium on international adoptions, citing “gross mismanagement.” The move came in response to a tense child-trafficking dispute between the government and Addy’s Hope, then an unlicensed Texas agency whose clients, the government said, did not have permission to take children out of the country. (Addy’s Hope disputes this.) The agency’s representatives had rushed a group of seven children onto a plane, evading the British NGO Save the Children and Liberian officials who tried to stop them. It was the last straw for a problem-plagued program.

During my 2011 trip, I visited Addy’s Hope’s old orphanage. In a bare but tidy concrete building, pastor Baryee Bonnor and his wife were still caring for 19 children left in limbo by the moratorium. The American parents who had intended to adopt “stopped supporting them when adoptions closed,” he explained, and few of the Liberian parents had returned to reclaim their children.

Now Liberia is poised to reopen for overseas adoptions, supposedly under more stringent requirements. Thus far, only three agencies have been approved to work in the country. One of them is Acres of Hope, which now partners with a licensed agency and also has begun arranging adoptions from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

On my very first night in Monrovia, as I ate at a hotel restaurant popular with expats and development workers, a Christian Lebanese logging executive came to my table. When I told him why I was there, he asked if I wanted to adopt a child, and offered to take me the next day to the interior, where he would help me find a baby to bring home. I declined, but he remained excited by the prospect, and was already forming a plan. “They all need adoption,” he said, his eyes growing misty. “It would be viewed as a miracle.””

Orphan Fever: The Evangelical Movement’s Adoption Obsession

[Mother Jones 5/2013 by Kathryn Joyce]

Update 6/September 24, 2013

New York Times published an editorial on September 21, 2013 by Kathryn Joyce

“IF you attend an evangelical church these days, there’s a good chance you’ll hear about the “orphan crisis” affecting millions of children around the world.

These Christian advocates of transnational adoption will often say that some 150 million children need homes — though that figure, derived from a Unicef report, includes not only parentless children, but also those who have lost only one parent, and orphans who live with relatives.

Evangelical adoptions picked up in earnest in the middle of the last decade, when a wave of prominent Christians, including the megachurch pastor Rick Warren and leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, began to promote adoption as a special imperative for believers. Adoption mirrored the Christian salvation experience, they argued, likening the adoption of orphans to Christ’s adoption of the faithful. Adoption also embodied a more holistic “pro-life” message — caring for children outside the womb as well as within — and an emphasis on good deeds, not just belief, that some evangelicals felt had been ceded to mainline Protestant denominations.

Believers rose to the challenge. The Christian Alliance for Orphans estimates that hundreds of thousands of people worldwide participate in its annual Orphan Sunday (this year’s is Nov. 3). Evangelicals from the Bible Belt to Southern California don wristbands or T-shirts reading “orphan addict” or “serial adopter.” Ministries have emerged to raise money and award grants to help Christians pay the fees (some $30,000 on average, plus travel) associated with transnational adoption.

However well intended, this enthusiasm has exacerbated what has become a boom-and-bust market for children that leaps from country to country. In many cases, the influx of money has created incentives to establish or expand orphanages — and identify children to fill them.

In some cases, agencies may hire “child finders” to recruit children of the age and gender that prospective adoptive parents prefer, sometimes from impoverished but intact families. Even nonprofit agencies with good reputations may turn to such local recruiters in countries where they don’t already have established partners — or where the demand for children exceeds the supply.

The potential for fraud and abuse is high. Orphanages tend to be filled by kids whose parents want better opportunities for them, while the root problem — extreme poverty — goes unaddressed, a Unicef worker in Ethiopia told me. Worse, some families in places with different cultural norms and legal systems relinquish their kids believing that it is a temporary guardianship arrangement, rather than an irrevocable severance of family ties.

In 2006, the family of three sisters adopted from Sodo, Ethiopia, said they were told that adoption would give the children a chance at an American education and that they would later return. The adoptive parents, then living in New Mexico, said they’d been falsely assured by an evangelical agency, Christian World Adoption, that they were saving destitute children orphaned by AIDS, who might otherwise have become sex workers.

When the children arrived and were told the adoption was permanent, they were distraught. And when the adoptive family complained, the agency maintained that the adoption was justified under Ethiopian law and counseled the parents to trust in God’s plan. When the adoptive family complained to the Better Business Bureau in North Carolina, where the agency was based, it threatened to report the family to child protective services in New Mexico. (The agency has since gone bankrupt.)

Though most are not as nightmarish, adoption complications are common. Some adoptive parents have even hired private investigators to try to verify the stories they were told about their kids.

When scandals emerge, governments lumber into action. But then the demand just shifts to another country, and the problems start all over again. In the early 1990s, Romania saw an adoption boom after shocking images of orphanages — housing young victims of Nicolae Ceausescu’s compulsory birth policies — became public. But over time, stories of other Romanian kids’ being coerced into adoption or bought from their families surfaced. Romania halted international adoptions in 2001.

Also in the 1990s, the number of adoptions from Vietnam soared, but the outrageous fees paid to child finders — sometimes more than $10,000 — caused the government in 2003 to press pause to reform the system. (But when the adoptions resumed in 2005, so did the problems.)

At the height of Guatemala’s adoption boom in the middle of the last decade, nearly 1 percent of babies were sent to the United States, before stories of child buying and even kidnapping prompted a shutdown in 2008. Then the boom shifted to Ethiopia and, now, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Of course, adoption problems aren’t limited to Christian agencies, and they don’t originate with them, but some movement insiders say that evangelicals — whether driven by zeal or naïveté — have had a disproportionate impact on the international adoption system. Groups like Unicef and Save the Children have made clear that millions of “orphans” are, in fact, not eligible for transnational adoption, but advocates often disregard these warnings as signs of ideological opposition to adoption — a charge Unicef has denied.

After some high-profile adoption horror stories, the number of transnational adoptions to the United States fell to fewer than 9,000 last year, from a high of nearly 23,000 in 2004. Last year, only China and Ethiopia sent more than 1,000 adoptees to America, and only South Korea and Russia topped 500. (Russia this year banned adoptions by American parents.)

This boom-and-bust, musical-chairs cycle does little to improve child-welfare systems in developing countries and has perpetuated a culture of aid-based orphanage construction — the reverse of the trend in wealthy countries, which have phased out institutions in favor of foster care.

The United States must improve regulation. There are no specific limits to what agencies can spend in other countries and little oversight in the system, which relies on peer reviews from other adoption agencies. And often there is little political will to investigate agency wrongdoing. While the United States abides by the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption — a set of standards promulgated in 1993 to prevent abuses — American agencies can often dodge responsibility for abuses by blaming local partners. Moreover, many foreign children brought into America come from countries that have not signed the convention.

Policy reforms, domestic and international, won’t be enough without a change in thinking, particularly among American evangelicals. Some Christian groups have begun to heed the call to do good works overseas, by focusing on aid that keeps families intact or improves local foster care and adoption. Some churches have backed programs overseas that provide emergency foster parents, or day care programs for widowed mothers. But many churches still preach the simplistic message that there are more Christians in the world than orphans, and that every adoption means a child saved.

For too long, well-meaning Americans have brought their advocacy and money to bear on an adoption industry that revolves around Western demand. Adoption can be wonderful when it’s about finding the right family for a child who is truly in need, but it can also be tragic and unjust if it involves deception, removes children from their home countries when other options are available, or is used as a substitute for addressing the underlying problems of poverty and inequality. We can no longer be blind to the collateral damage that good intentions bring.”