The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (25 page)

In 2006 a US military couple in New Mexico, Katie and Calvin Bradshaw, watched the video. They say they were told that the sisters’ mother had died of AIDS, that their widower father was also HIV-positive and dying, and that they had no other siblings save an older brother who could not care for them. Unless they were adopted, the video warned, “a life of prostitution is all but assured.”

In reality, although the girls’ mother had died in childbirth years earlier, their father, Lemma Debissa (in Ethiopia, a father’s first name becomes his children’s surname) was completely healthy and employed as a government clerk, and the sisters had four older siblings, variously working
as teachers or still attending high school and college. Additionally, the girls were nowhere near as young as CWA had claimed. Tarikuwa, who had been described as either seven or nine, was actually thirteen; six-year-old Meya was really eleven; and four-year-old Maree was six.

The girls were videotaped receiving gifts and photos from the Bradshaws, their future adoptive family, although they didn’t understand that at the time. “There’s a picture of us looking at Katie and Calvin,” Tarikuwa later told me. “Someone shouted smile and took a picture of us. They didn’t tell us who the people were or that they were going to be our new adoptive parents.” Instead, the girls say, they and their family were told that after they completed an education in the United States, they could return to Ethiopia—perhaps in just a few years.

A few weeks later the girls were transferred to the agency’s home in Addis Ababa, where they were unknowingly awaiting the finalization of their adoption. For three days, Tarikuwa remembers, a woman came to the gate crying. The guards wouldn’t explain to the children why she was there, but Tarikuwa said that among the kids in the home was the woman’s young son, who watched, stricken, as the guards yelled at the woman, telling her that it was too late to get her child back.

In mid-August 2006 they were taken to the Addis Ababa Hilton Hotel to meet Katie Bradshaw, and they were surprised when Katie told them they had new names: Maree, Meya, and Journee (for Tarikuwa, who has since reverted to her Ethiopian name). After they flew to America they were surprised again when Katie introduced the girls to her husband, Calvin, and told them to call him “Dad.” Several weeks later, when Tarikuwa asked when they would be going back to Ethiopia, the Brad-shaws sat them down to explain that they wouldn’t, that adoption was forever.

MANY ADOPTIVE PARENTS
flocking to international adoption were responding to the crowded field of US domestic infant adoption, with more prospective parents than relinquishing mothers. The depressing ratio of would-be parents to available infants drove some parents. In the late 1980s the National Committee for Adoption (which would become the National Council for Adoption) estimated that there was a hundred-to-one ratio of parents who wished to adopt and healthy children available for them. Some were repelled by the growth of open adoption, where they had to advertise themselves to potential birthmothers, were left vulnerable to mothers changing their minds, and often had to
promise more ongoing contact than they preferred. By comparison, in international adoption the chance of birthparents reappearing was virtually nil. And adopting a child from a third world country made adoption seem like more than just a way to build a family; it was also a humanitarian cause.

As demand rose for overseas adoptions, a number of popular “sending countries” or “source countries” emerged, and in waves hundreds of children began to arrive from South Korea, Romania, Russia, China, Vietnam, and Guatemala. Many countries’ adoption programs ballooned quickly, rising in just a few years from a handful of annual adoptions to hundreds or even thousands—sudden increases often indicative of behind-the-scenes corruption. International adoptions are often slightly more expensive than domestic adoptions, and although the sums aren’t delivered directly to any one orphanage, the cut that does go to various middlemen is worth far more in developing nations than it is to the adoptive parents writing the check, creating a powerful incentive for adoption workers to find children who match the desires of Western families: most often babies or small children, with a high premium on girls. When a country emerges that can supply numerous healthy, young children through a relatively quick and uncomplicated process, an influx of adoption agencies is usually close behind. As a result, in recent years international adoption has become an ever-quickening boom-bust spiral. “Corruption skips from one unprepared country to the another—until that country gets wise, changes its laws, and corrupt adoptions shift to the next unprepared nation,” wrote journalist E. J. Graff, who researched international adoption corruption for several years at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. The corruption goes unnoticed, Graff continued, because “American perception and policy about orphans have been distorted by a fundamental myth”—that is, the myth of the orphan crisis. The belief that developing nations are full of healthy babies waiting for Western homes also assures aspiring American parents that their desire for a family is likewise an act of charity.

When these prospective adoptive couples then approach adoption agencies, their initial application paperwork includes a checklist asking them to indicate the sort of child they are willing to accept, specifying age, gender, and levels of illness or disability. These checklists, made by individual parents assessing their own desires and capacities, became, in effect, “wish lists.” Collectively, they form a wave of demand, most often for healthy baby girls. Although adoptive parents’ role in this market chain is rarely intentional—as one adoptive mother reflected, “Everyone has their
own personal reasons why they need an infant girl under two”—on the other side of the world those wish lists can read like a stack of orders, which adoption brokers emerge to fill.

A lot of times adoption demand creates an adoption underworld, where children are procured from parents, sometimes with small payments and sometimes through coercion or deception. In Vietnam, for instance, adoption facilitators reportedly used poor families’ hospital bills as leverage to get new parents, many of them illiterate, to sign over their babies; often these parents did not understand that they wouldn’t see their child again. In Cambodia, after adoptions were suspended, the number of infants in orphanages plummeted almost immediately: an indication to adoption reformers that the international adoption system and the revenue it generated was the only reason many babies had been placed in institutions. Yet Western parents continue to display an incredible willingness to believe the stories of their children’s provenance, despite the fact that so many read as remarkably the same: hundreds of children allegedly left on police station doorsteps, swaddled in blankets and waiting to be found—a modern-day version of Moses’s basket among the reeds. In reality, the abandonment of babies is not such a common occurrence. But among Christian adopters lining up, the stories usually go unchallenged.

In other cases the coercion is less a matter of payments than brokers fostering false impressions. The Western understanding of adoption, as a total transfer of parental rights, is not a universal concept, and in many developing nations the closest analogues are traditional systems of temporary care, in which children stay with family members after a parent dies or are sent to richer acquaintances as a means of furthering their education and prospects. When international adopters come to regions that have only ever experienced these traditional forms of adoption, relinquishing parents often mistake the new adoption process for a chance for their children to get educated abroad and return better able to help the family or as a way for the family to make a connection with potential financial sponsors in the United States.

In some of the worst cases there has been outright kidnapping. Guatemala became one of the most notorious examples of adoption corruption, leading the country to close its adoption program in 2008 after a diverse array of abuses that included reports of missing children. Guatemala had a uniquely privatized system, run by unregulated independent adoption lawyers working for some two hundred US agencies. At the height of Guatemalan adoptions, in 2007, nearly 5,000 children came to the United States—up from 257 in 1990 and amounting to nearly 1 in
every 100 children born being sent to America. Most were infants. Among the adoptions were some in which mothers were paid for their babies—creating a system in which some poor women became pregnant explicitly to relinquish—and others in which mothers had been pressured socially or financially. As journalist Erin Siegal painstakingly documented in her 2011 book,
Finding Fernanda: Two Mothers, One Child, and a Cross-Border Search for Truth,
some baby brokers even employed violence and kidnapping to protect what had become, in very real ways, their business.

The tactics grew so abusive that they amounted to what historian Karen Dubinsky calls “a culture of ‘missingness,’” in which the local population sometimes imagined the worst, spreading a macabre rumor frequently repeated in other adoption-boom countries: that adopted children were really being sold to organ harvesters. The rate of children leaving the country inspired a violent backlash, with residents in remote villages twice attacking outsiders who were suspected of or mistakenly thought to be recruiting children for adoption. All the while adoption lawyers and advocates defended the system as rescuing children from near-certain death, and adoptive parents continued signing up by the thousands, even after the US Embassy warned that the program was imploding.

In 2008 Guatemala’s adoption boom went bust, and the country closed to address systemic adoption corruption and implement the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption. But soon enough, adoption scholars say, a new market was found, in Ethiopia, which agencies suddenly began to trumpet as home to five or six million orphans in need.

WHEN ADOPTION BEGAN
to pick up in Ethiopia, it was not party to the Hague Convention either. In spite of this—or perhaps because of it—adoption rates rose from 82 children adopted to the United States in 1997 to 2,511 in 2010—nearly a quarter of all US international adoptions that year. And Americans weren’t the only ones adopting. Ethiopia sent a total of around 4,500 children abroad each year in both 2009 and 2010. It was so rapid a rise that some locals, like radio host Ellene Moria, lamented that children were “becoming the new export industry for our country.” By 2010 adoption advocates began to predict that Ethiopia would overtake China as the top sending country in the world.

“There were many factors to having such a surge in such a short time,” said Mehari Maru, an Ethiopian human rights lawyer whom the Ethiopian government invited to craft an institutional adoption framework. Ethiopia did have large numbers of children who had lost a parent
to HIV/AIDS as well as a significant population of street children. Further, its popularity rose as traditional source countries like Guatemala, China, Romania, and Russia were all slowing or shutting down. Another factor, Maru said, was the wide range of actors involved in the local adoption support industry—from those caring for the child at the local level to hotels catering to adoptive parents, and taxi drivers hired to guide them—who began to find a steady stream of income related to adoption.

The exponential growth in Ethiopia corresponded almost perfectly with the closure of Guatemala, said Karen Smith Rotabi, an intercountry adoption scholar at the Virginia Commonwealth University. In fact, some agencies accused of deeply unethical behavior in Guatemala are widely thought to have moved their operations to Ethiopia. For some of these agencies, which were dependent on new adoption fees to stay afloat, Smith Rotabi wrote, “a shift to Ethiopia was the only way for the agency to remain fiscally solvent.” For other agencies denied Hague accreditation—a prerequisite for those that conduct adoptions from any Hague-approved country—the fact that Ethiopia wasn’t a Hague signatory meant it was on the shrinking list of countries where the agencies could still do business. These factors, together with Ethiopia’s easy regulations and high availability of young children, conspired to create what Smith Rotabi calls “a perfect storm for an emerging adoption industry.”

Agencies weren’t the only ones benefiting. In addition to agency support of orphanages and the trickle-down business for industries serving adoptive parents while they were in the country, the Ethiopian government mandated that adoption agencies make humanitarian aid commitments as a price for doing business, meaning that any agencies performing adoption services for Ethiopian children must also make a separate charitable contribution to the nation, often by supporting the construction of new infrastructure or institutions such as hospitals or schools. A 2010 survey by the adoption reform group Ethica estimated that US agencies licensed in Ethiopia were sending the country approximately $3.7 million in annual humanitarian aid.

With so many incentives to support the adoption business, what followed was predictable. Adoption agencies entered en masse with a seemingly unlimited amount of money, and they started working with existing orphanages or new start-ups to identify children who could go overseas for adoption.

“When Ethiopia started getting popular and opening orphanages and making deals with adoption agencies,” America World Adoption head Brian Luwis told me, a class of child finders rose up to work on a per-child
basis. “A lot of people said, ‘If you give me $5,000, I’ll get you a child.’ So [agencies] paid a fixed fee [to adoption facilitators], and there was no staff maintained. Unfortunately, with that kind of system, when supply gets low, they have tended to go get children.”

What that leads to, said Niels Hoogeveen, spokesperson for the adoption watchdog website Pound Pup Legacy, is nearly automatic corruption. “Imagine what that sum of money does in a country like Ethiopia, where people make $300 to $500 a year. All of a sudden, someone receives $5,000. That’s ten annual incomes. Nearly everyone is corrupt for ten incomes.”