Ethiopia: Let the JCICS Games Begin UPDATED

As Rally predicted on Friday March 4th, when the Voice of America article discussing the Ethiopia slowdown was published, the adoption industry (JCICS) has started their campaign to “save”.

But who are they trying to save? Themselves or the children?

Their message has the window-dressing of stepping up to the plate in response to the MOWA slowdown, but yet again they strike out. For them to claim now that “The Ministry’s plan is a tragic, unnecessary and disproportionate reaction to concerns of isolated abuses in the adoption process and fails to reflect the overwhelmingly positive, ethical and legal services provided to children and families through intercountry adoption” says everything you need to know about their unethical member agencies and nothing about what is truly going on in Ethiopia.

Just yesterday, we compared JCICS’ twin EurAdopt’s tabling of the Ethiopia issue to JCICS’ lack of promised public response in 2009 when they had their “fact-finding” mission. An educated consumer would be asking why did JCICS not report their findings? If adoptions from Ethiopia were so “overwhelmingly positive,” why not share the proof?

JCICS’ new campaign says, “Rather than eliminate the right of Ethiopian children to a permanent family, we encourage the Ministry to accept the partnerships offered by governments, NGOs, and foundations. Such partnerships could increase the Ministry’s capacity to regulate service providers and further ensure ethical adoptions.”

What partnerships should the MOWA “accept”? Those agency-NGO orphanage compounds relationships set up to help children?

We wait with bated breath for the campaign to begin!

Update: In a similar way to the Haiti campaign last year, JCICS has set up a 5-step campaign . The Step 1 “emergency” petition says the MOWA has made 2 assumptions:

“The Ministry’s plan for a dramatic reduction is apparently based on two primary issues;

1) the assumption that corruption in intercountry adoption is systemic and rampant and;

2) the Ministry’s resources should be focused on the children for whom intercountry adoption is not an option.”

Well, the Fruits of Ethiopia report shows how the corruption is systemic and rampant.

And JCICS themselves mention in their updated spiel that “At present, intercountry adoption only serves .001 percent of all orphaned children in Ethiopia.” So, that means that the 99.999 percent of orphaned children are indeed being underserved! Hmmm….

The new spiel also states “A gardener who wants to beautify a landscape does not cut the weeds in his garden by a certain percent. Rather, he mindfully detects the weeds and eliminates them from the root up. A quota, no matter how small, will not eliminate corruption. It simply reduces the quantity of ethical violations that can occur in an environment. In fact corruption, like a weed, can actually grow in a restricted environment if it is allowed to exist.”

For a second, I thought I was watching the old movie “Being There” with Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine (Vudu it, you young readers! It’s like the older version of Forrest Gump) when Chance (the) Gardner says “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well. And all will be well in the garden…Yes. In the garden, growth has it seasons. First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.”

The movie ends with “Life is a state of mind” and the scene below. This is life imitating art in that just like how everyone seemed to accept whatever Chance the simple-minded recluse in the movie said,  everyone seems to just accept what the JCICS is saying.
Their Steps 2 and 3 are all about accumulating happy stories-a predictable MO. They pull this one out every time they have the need to “persuade” government officials with the old to keep the bad players still operating..remember this is all for the children.

Step 4 is all about JCICS controlling all the information on this matter by keeping PAPs informed with only their information. Please note that do NOT recommend looking to the State Department website  for accurate information.

Step 5 is all about fundraising. A crisis IS a horrible thing to waste, you know.

Update 2: JCICS never stops trying to outdo itself. Their latest “notes” from the State Department conference call add something about “special needs.”  It is questionable whether this was actually stated in the conference call since the State Department did not want anything to be attributable to them.Another statement from March 9 says that 40% of ET kids are “special needs“.

This Children’s Services propaganda bit is attempting to draw from data from their poorly-responded-to survey of their members representing a small number of overall international adoptions to push their agenda of keeping their agencies open in Ethiopia.

They are throwing everything they have into the “special needs” argument and basing it on their recently- published survey here.

They had a pathetic 25 members respond to their survey about FY2008. As of January 2009 ,JCICS had 224 members, the majority of which were agencies. This data represented 4,736 adoptions. That may sound large at first glance, but this leaves out 72% of adoptions from that timeframe. They have looked at a narrow swath of data to manipulate it for the  biggest  factor.

They are using data from countries that place very small numbers of kids to justify their Ethiopia campaign. An example is that they state in a prominent place that 60% of Moldovan children were special needs. In that timeframe, only 30 children were adopted total. At maximum, that means that 18 of 30 children from a small Eastern European country in which 2 agencies that had been COA-approved prior to Hague coming into force and operate in a centrally-contolled system that is now under Hague are special needs. What does this have to the wildly uncontrolled, uncentralized large placing country of Ethiopia where even Hague-denied agencies operate?

It is ridiculous to compare Ethiopia to South Korea and China programs, both centrally-controlled. Both of these countries have very different things going on in them. South Korea is on the verge of closing. China is completely reconfiguring their child welfare system and adopting from different kinds of orphanages. Neither of them are placing from adoption agency orphanage setups like Ethiopia.

Look at the very bottom of their report to find the most important statistic: Only 4% of their African placements are special needs. Not 40%!

Update 3: Pound Pup Legacy has a breakdown of the JCICS petition signers at here and here .

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