{"id":1166,"date":"2005-12-21T13:17:06","date_gmt":"2005-12-21T13:17:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.againstchildtrafficking.org\/?p=1166"},"modified":"2010-09-06T13:22:19","modified_gmt":"2010-09-06T13:22:19","slug":"madagascar-tries-to-clean-up-corrupt-adoption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/madagascar-tries-to-clean-up-corrupt-adoption\/","title":{"rendered":"Madagascar tries to clean up corrupt adoption"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n
Source: khaleejtimes.com<\/a><\/div>\n
21 December 2005<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

ANTANANARIVO – After two years of intense lobbying and longing, Pascale and Rayonde Segalen were finally ready to take their newly adopted daughter home from Madagascar.<\/p>\n

The French couple first found Sarah when she was just a few weeks old, after she had been abandoned and left at an orphanage in the highland city of Antsirabe.
\nEach year, hundreds of babies like Sarah are given up by their mothers in the impoverished former French colony of 17 million people. Many are left on rubbish tips or in the bush.
\nFor years, adoption was a murky process — with no central state controls, orphanages and adoption centres dealt directly with interested couples, money changed hands, officials were bribed for a stamp of approval and the deal was done.
\nNow, the government has made it tougher for foreign couples to adopt, saying the demand for orphans had become so great it was encouraging some extreme practices, like child trafficking by money-hungry middlemen.
\nThe new rules are meant to make the process more transparent but some orphanages complain that they have been left with fewer resources, making life harder for their children.
\nEvery year, thousands of French couples try to adopt children from the vast Indian Ocean island where three quarters of the population live on less than a dollar a day.
\nMany of the couples are willing to lobby politicians or pay large sums of money for the children.
\nThe Segalens say no money changed hands for Sarah and that they fulfilled their dream simply through fierce lobbying.
\nBut by the time the paperwork came through, Sarah had spent nearly two years in an orphanage with no heating and too few blankets. Frostbite left her cheeks scattered with pockmarks.
\n\u201cShe was a bit traumatised at the beginning but she\u2019s more relaxed now,\u201d said Pascale, a 43-year-old banker, as she cuddled the 18-month-old girl in the capital Antananarivo before heading back to France. \u201cShe\u2019s eating properly.\u201d
\nDark trade
\nMadagascar\u2019s government says would-be adoptive parents were offering handsome rewards for children and poor orphanages started to actively seek children to meet the demand.
\nIn extreme and rather rare cases, unscrupulous middlemen would sometimes provide children to the orphanages, where few background checks were done.
\nThe authorities say no statistics exist on child trafficking, partly because it has often been facilitated by corrupt officials. But police believe it was widespread.
\n\u201cWe started receiving complaints about missing children,\u201d said Fulgence Rabetafika, family division police commissioner for Madagascar. \u201cSo we put these orphanages under surveillance.\u201d
\nRabetafika said evidence started to emerge of trafficking rings supplying children to adoption centres for cash. Often the centres knew nothing about the children\u2019s real families, he said.
\n\u201cWe started to uncover well-organised networks. They were taking in children, doing adoption applications,\u201d he said. \u201dWe\u2019ve been able to break up five of these networks. In each case, some centre was implicated.\u201d
\nThe inquiry prompted President Marc Ravalomanana to halt all adoption, pending a review of the system, in December 2004. In September this year, parliament passed a law decreeing that all applications for adoption would go through a central authority – orphanages and shelters would no longer do applications.
\n\u201cThe prospective adopter can no longer address his request directly to the centre,\u201d said Rabetafika. \u201cThat is to avoid trafficking.\u201d
\n\u201cBuying\u201d children
\nThe United Nations children\u2019s fund (UNICEF) thinks the changes are long overdue.
\nIt wants each country\u2019s laws to reflect the Hague Convention on the rights of the child, which says that the best interest of the abandoned child, not the adoptive parents, must be the only priority and that adoption, especially international adoption, should always be a last resort.
\n\u201cThe system as it was before was driven by the demand of adoptive parents,\u201d said UNICEF country director Barbara Bentein. \u201dThe Hague convention wants to end the beauty contest where parents go to the centre and choose their child.\u201d
\nBentein said even when centres knew the mother of the abandoned child, they all too quickly offered adoption as a solution before examining the mother\u2019s predicament, which might often involve poverty and inability to support another child.
\n\u201cThe centres do not have much interest in the biological family of the child. \u2019Why is the child abandoned?\u2019 is not (their) preoccupation,\u201d she said.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s not always sure that the child is really abandoned with the parents fully understanding that this means the link will be broken forever.\u201d
\nBentein also said there was a general assumption that a poor child would be better off in a rich western family.
\nThe rule-free system was also risky for adoptive parents — with no checks and balances, families and children were often mismatched. In extreme cases, parents \u201cbought\u201d a child only to find out later that the child was mentally handicapped.
\nDespite the dangers, aid workers at the Akany Avoko orphanage, outside the capital Antananarivo, said the new law had created bureaucratic bottlenecks that left more children growing up without families.
\nThe centre takes dozens of abandoned babies but its resources are scant. It puts several babies together in each wooden cot and feeds them whatever it can afford.
\n\u201cWe take in children who are completely abandoned – in dustbins, in the road, in the forest,\u201d said Nina Razamamana, the assistant director. \u201cWe can\u2019t find their parents, neither can the police.\u201d
\nRazamamana said such children have no hope of finding a family without adoption.
\n\u201cWe used to do adoptions but we were blocked. Children are coming in, we don\u2019t know what to do with them all,\u201d she said, balancing a crying infant on her arm and another on her knee.
\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source: khaleejtimes.com 21 December 2005 ANTANANARIVO – After two years of intense lobbying and longing, Pascale and Rayonde Segalen were finally ready to take their newly adopted daughter home from Madagascar. The French couple first found Sarah when she was just a few weeks old, after she had been abandoned and left at an orphanage… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1166"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1166"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1166\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1169,"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1166\/revisions\/1169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}