The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (36 page)

PEARL’S MINISTRY,
No Greater Joy, began to receive letters, said ministry representative Chuck Joyner, from some of the hundreds of
Above Rubies
families that adopted from Liberia, a number of whom lived along the forty miles between Campbell and Pearl. “Many if not the majority of the families encountered problems so severe that they had to give up the children,” Joyner told me. Pearl published a warning about some Liberian children adopted by his followers in an advice column for parents. “Right here in our own community a family adopted three children from Liberia. We warned them, but they were so caught up with good feelings about how they were sacrificing their lives to save poor starving children from orphanages that they danced their way into tragedy. They have several children younger than the three adopted kids, who, unknowing to them, were well-versed in all the dark arts of eroticism and ghastly perversion.” Pearl continued that he had received many letters from families who adopted from Liberia, “and nearly every one of them—if not all—told sad stories of the fall of their natural children into sexual deviance.”

“You could see the sexualness in all four of them,” Pearl elaborated to me. “The predatorness.”

Pearl’s accusation resonated with many parents whose adopted children had been sexually abused while in the orphanages and who had acted out sexually after adoption—and this fed the imaginations of other adopters. A 2008 letter from Acres of Hope explained that ministry staff had discovered children “engaging in sexual exploration” in the orphanage. On online forums parents exchanged stories of children manifesting inappropriate behaviors and their suspicions of lasciviousness in the children’s actions. One mother on a listserv claimed that her adopted son had told her, “In Liberia we did sex all the time, how do you expect us to come to America, be around your beautiful children and not try to have sex with them!”

“I think it’s important to understand that children are exposed to so much more here [in Africa],” Acres of Hope’s Patty Anglin told me. “With many of these kids who grow up in orphanages, they don’t learn parameters because they’re basically raising themselves. Many times we would see in a twelve- or thirteen-year-old behavior that we would consider normal in a six-year-old.”

The parents complained more broadly about behavioral issues. They called Liberian children manipulative and wild, compulsive liars or thieves, and sometimes violent. “When I share that I trust a particular person in Liberia I say ‘as much as you can trust a Liberian,’” wrote one adoptive mother. “There are two languages in Liberia,” another wrote. “English and lying.” Families described the distressing reactions of Liberian children to scolding, as they fell from pouting into an unresponsive state or sometimes began to wail uncontrollably. Some parents regarded it as the manifestations of PTSD, whereas others saw it as defiance. Some claimed they feared for their own or their family’s safety.

Tama Covert, a New Mexico mother who adopted two Liberian children and who also learned about adoption through
Above Rubies
, became pen pals with Elizabeth Schatz after she was charged with Lydia’s murder. Before the Schatzes entered a plea, Covert wrote to the district attorney prosecuting the case to offer a counter-perspective on how she felt Liberian adoptees could “push parents’ buttons” by, for example, willfully refusing to enunciate. Having disrupted one of her own two adoptions, Covert wrote, “It is only by God’s Grace and Mercy I am not sitting in a cell next to Elizabeth now.”

“Most of us who have adopted these children have come from Christian homes and have a strong faith,” Covert told me. “We felt God was telling us, ‘This is what I want you to do.’ And I know that Elizabeth and
Kevin said ‘Yes’ to God. They tried to get these children who are so unbelievably damaged to be able to enter into society.”

IN ADDITION
to the Pearls’ prescriptions, some parents in the forums began trading suggestions for treating Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD), a severe and uncommon disorder that traditionally results when children’s early bonds are disrupted. Although attachment problems are a legitimate issue, and there are legitimate and respected treatments for RAD, many critics say the disorder is greatly overdiagnosed in adoptive children; some quoted in the
Los Angeles Times
compared it to “the ‘attention deficit hyperactivity disorder of the 1990s.’” “These kiddos are exhausting and you need a break,” one adoptive parent wrote. “Make sure you take him to a therapist who has experience with RAD . . . traditional therapy does NOT work.” Others recommended methods like “holding therapy,” in which children are physically restrained within a caregiver’s or surrogate’s embrace for prolonged periods of time while forcing them to maintain eye contact and sometimes being fed sweets, “power sitting” sessions of making the child sit in one location for many hours, and a restricted diet—standbys of attachment therapy that seem to resonate with methods like Pearl’s.

Rachael Stryker, an anthropologist of human development and women’s studies at California State University and author of
The Road to Evergreen: Adoption, Attachment Therapy, and the Promise of Family
, said there’s a common language between one school of RAD therapies that became prominent in the ’90s, the “Evergreen model,” and methods like Pearl’s. Both present parenting “as a battle.” “The synergy comes from a ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ perspective,” Stryker continued. “The RAD therapies are really all about taking control of the children, under the auspices of keeping them safe and helping them trust adults.” In Stryker’s survey of a number of families seeking RAD treatments for their children in Evergreen, Colorado, the industry center of the Evergreen model,
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enough parents identified as strongly religious to give these secular RAD therapies a sense of being imbued with Christian teachings. “Even though they couldn’t articulate it, there was something about the philosophy that
matched up with their intuition and their folk wisdom about parenting,” she said.

Dr. Jean Mercer, a psychology professor emerita at Richard Stockton College and a critic of attachment therapy, said the language of these RAD therapies—like the language that became common around Liberian adoptions—opens the door for more aggressive tactics. Descriptions of RAD carried an extra urgency, with warnings that RAD children will grow into criminals, sociopaths, addicts, or, in an odd equivalence for women, prostitutes, unless they receive extreme intervention. “The phrase, ‘these children,’ is something said again and again. They’re saying, ‘we’re talking about a special kind of person here, not an everyday child. This is a person who will grow up to be a serial killer.’ This is beyond pathologizing—it’s demonization.”

The demonization could be quite literal. On some attachment disorder websites one indicator listed for RAD is “a darkness behind the eyes when raging.” Renee Polreis, a Colorado adoptive mother convicted for the 1997 beating death of her two-year-old son, and sentenced to 22 years in prison, had defended herself by claiming her son had RAD; she’d earlier described her fear of her son’s home country, Russia, as a nation filled with atheists. Liberia’s Ministry of Health and Social Welfare heard about one case of an adoptee beaten because his adoptive parents believed “he had a devil sitting on him.” And Tama Covert told me that she had always wondered whether the daughter whose adoption she had disrupted—and who she said she fears may one day return to harm the family—had refused to submit because her birthmother had used her in a tribal ritual and the girl had thereby been “sold out to the devil.”

“The very basic idea of attachment therapy is that you want the child to be obedient, and the child must recognize your authority,” Mercer continued. “They equate attachment with obedience. When you have that point of view, you go on to all the nasty kinds of things that human beings do to each other.”

Experience from other adoptions gone awry indicates what this could mean. A little-understood corner of the adoption world is the realm of ad hoc respite caregivers who take in adopted children whose parents have declared they can no longer care for them. Although respite care at its best can be a temporary break for both child and parents who have reached their limit, at other times the term can be used to cover “dumping” kids in paid or unpaid group homes. Among these facilities is Montana’s the Ranch For Kids Project, a church-owned residential home where international adoptees, mostly Russian, are sent for “horse therapy” and farm
work at a cost of approximately $3,500 to $4,000 per month. For some parents sending children to the Ranch is a means to effectively disrupt or end the adoption. For others, like one Christian couple who began fundraising online for Ranch tuition just a few months after adopting a teenage girl from China—whose $30,000 adoption they had also financed almost entirely with donations—it was presented as another step in saving their daughter’s soul. “We are battling for our daughter’s heart,” they wrote in block letters on their website,
Hope. Believe. Obey
. “We will do whatever it takes until she is healed, complete and full of joy!”

In 2012 officials from Russia, angry over a stream of cases in which Russian adoptees were abused, neglected, or killed—to date, US adoptive parents have been accused of having killed nearly twenty children adopted from Russia—staged a photo op outside the Ranch, demanding entry to see whether the children were safe.

Other options for parents seeking a respite from their adopted child or to dissolve the adoption entirely are even less savory, including a series of homes run by private families who function as an underground network for what has come to be known euphemistically as “rehoming” children of failed adoptions.
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Operating largely by word of mouth, these families put out a shingle as self-declared experts on attachment therapy and large adoptive families. They take in dozens of children, sometimes in exchange for payment from the disrupting adoptive parents and sometimes as a means of adopting more children if they can’t afford adoption fees, if they’ve failed a home study, or if state foster care or home study agencies have cut them off for having too many children already. “There are homes all across the United States that transfer kids from one place to another. No one’s keeping tabs on this,” Tennessee Sheriff Joe Shepard told
USA Today
in 2006.

Incredibly, many of these homes have focused particularly on children with intensive medical or emotional needs, to the point at which their homes begin to resemble therapeutic group homes rather than the family life that adoption advocates say they’re working to provide each child. While in some cases, that may be a beneficial arrangement, in others, it can shade into abuse. In one case a fundamentalist Christian family in Oregon, Dennis and Diane Nason—Diane is the author of the Christian adoption book
The Celebration Family
and the family was featured on an
eponymous ABC made-for-television movie as well as on
60 Minutes
—adopted an astounding seventy-eight children (in addition to their six biological kids). Many of these adopted children had high medical needs and three of them died, allegedly of neglect. When their family inevitably fell apart, more than sixty children were sent to other homes, and the Nasons were charged with the children’s deaths. The couple was cleared of manslaughter and child abuse charges in a 1995 trial, but convicted of lesser charges of forgery and racketeering for falsifying records so they could adopt more children, and using their family as a “criminal enterprise” to maintain a flow of donations from supporters. Some children were reportedly left “damaged beyond repair,” while the Nasons served 60 days for their sentence.

While Stryker was conducting her research in Evergreen, she encountered some people running private respite homes, taking in dozens of special-needs adoptees or foster kids whose adoptions were disrupted. They had come to Colorado to observe attachment therapists work, learning a modicum of technique to apply at home.

Some homes in this mold were later shut down for severe child abuse, including, in 2006, that of Debra and Tom Schmitz of Tennessee. The Schmitzes had eighteen children, mostly disabled, at the time of their arrest, and they were accused of locking them in caged-in beds, depriving them of physical aids like braces, and bizarre punishments resonant of those allegedly inflicted on other adoptees: holding children’s heads under water or forcing them to “dig their own graves.” The line between families that are simply large and religious and those that tip into abuse is not always clear, even to those on the inside. Years before the Schmitzes were arrested, Patty Anglin wrote about helping the couple, who then lived in Wisconsin—they reportedly later moved to Tennessee after they were investigated on child abuse allegations—to navigate a tricky interstate adoption in her 1999 book,
Acres of Hope: The Miraculous Story of One Family’s Gift of Love to Children Without Hope
. Initial charges against the couple resulted in a mistrial. On the second trial, the Schmitzes pled guilty. Debra received a six-month sentence and her husband, a year of probation.

IT SEEMED EQUALLY
difficult for adoption advocates to recognize the potential for abuse inside the comparatively smaller families conducting Liberian adoptions, families that averaged just ten or twelve kids instead of the eighteen or twenty common to the unofficial respite homes. Although Anglin referred to Pearl’s book as “a religious cult” she would
never recommend to her clients, she had sympathy for other parents, whom she saw as simply in over their heads, unprepared “for the devastation that these children were suffering from.” The
Above Rubies
families that adopted from Liberia were “good, good families, but oftentimes they have the heart, but not necessarily the background or education to understand what is involved,” Anglin told me. “It’s not just about an orphan child. It’s an orphan child who has gone through trauma and who may have posttraumatic stress disorder or has obviously seen and experienced things that we can’t even imagine.”