Mirette and Elsabet Franklin, ages 4 and 6, biological sisters adopted in Ethiopia, listen to the singing of the national anthem during a U.S. naturalization ceremony \/ AP
\nThe Atlantic | December 21, 2011<\/p>\n
As the \u201csearchers\u201d who track down adopted children\u2019s histories increasingly uncover stories of fraud, corruption, and worse, these specialists are facing threats and even violence<\/p>\n
In 2008, a 38-year old Oklahoma nurse whom I\u2019ll call Kelly adopted an eight-year old girl, \u201cMary,\u201d from Ethiopia. It was the second adoption for Kelly, following one from Guatemala. She\u2019d sought out a child from Ethiopia in the hopes of avoiding some of the ethical problems of adopting from Guatemala: widespread stories of birthmothers coerced to give up their babies and even payments and abductions at the hands of brokers procuring adoptees for unwitting U.S. parents. Now, even after using a reputable agency in Ethiopia, Kelly has come to believe that Mary never should have been placed for adoption. She came to this determination after hiring what\u2019s known as an adoption searcher.<\/p>\n
Adoption searchers \u2014 specialized independent researchers working in a unique field that few outside the community of adoptive parents even know exists \u2014 track down the birth families of children adopted from other counties. In Ethiopia, searching has arisen in response to a dramatic boom in international adoptions from the country in recent years. In 2010, Ethiopia accounted for nearly a quarter of all international adoptions to the U.S. The number of Ethiopian children adopted into foreign families in the U.S., Canada, and Europe has risen from just a few hundred several years ago to several thousand last year. The increase has been so rapid \u2014 and, for some, so lucrative \u2014 that some locals have said adoption was \u201cbecoming the new export industry for our country.\u201d<\/p>\n
That increase has also brought stories of corruption, child trafficking, and fraud. Parents began to publicize the stories their adopted children told them when they learned English: that they had parents and families at home, who sometimes thought they were going to the U.S. to receive an education and then return. Media investigations have found evidence that adoption agencies had recruited children from intact families. Ethiopia\u2019s government found that some children\u2019s paperwork had been doctored to list children who had been relinquished by living parents as orphans instead, which allowed the agencies to avoid lengthy court vetting procedures.<\/p>\n
\u201cHer entire paperwork, except for a couple of names, was completely falsified,\u201d Kelly said. Mary\u2019s paperwork listed her as two years younger than she was; it said she had one older sister when she in fact had two younger sisters; and, most importantly, it said her mother had died years ago. \u201cOne day I said to Mary, \u2018You know how your paperwork says you were five and you\u2019re really seven?\u201d Kelly recalled. \u201cIt also says that your mom\u2019s dead.\u2019 And she goes, \u2018My mom\u2019s not dead.\u2019 She was adamant that her mother wasn\u2019t dead, and in fact she wasn\u2019t. Her mom is alive and it took our searcher just two days to find her.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kelly, through a friend who\u2019d also adopted from Ethiopia, hired a searcher. She sent copies of all her paperwork and waited for him to make the nine-hour drive from the capital, Addis Ababa, to the northern region from which Mary had been adopted.<\/p>\n
The searcher determined Mary\u2019s real birth date, that her birth family and mother were OK with the adoption, and also collected some photos as well as information about Mary\u2019s background. Kelly is planning to take Mary back to visit her family in March.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to verify that she hadn\u2019t been stolen. I searched with the intention of sending her back to Ethiopia if I found out she\u2019d been stolen,\u201d said Kelly.<\/p>\n
Kelly doesn\u2019t believe her agency knowingly falsified the information. As with many cases of fraud or corruption in Ethiopia\u2019s adoption program, it seems that the story was changed at the local level, long before the adoption proceeded to the country\u2019s federal courts and oversight agencies. Mary\u2019s grandfather, who had often been her main caregiver, relinquished the child while her mother was working elsewhere in Ethiopia; something that was only possible because he and several witnessed claimed that the mother had died.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t imagine the weight that was on her,\u201d Kelly said of Mary\u2019s recollection of her home in Ethiopia. \u201cAfter I told her the paperwork said her mom was dead, she thought maybe she was dead and nobody told her. So it was huge for her to know she was right, that her mother was alive. I was lucky she remembered and was strong enough to stick with her story.\u201d<\/p>\n
SEARCHING<\/p>\n
This summer, I accompanied a young Ethiopian searcher I\u2019ll call Samuel on a birth family interview: a trek deep into the rural countryside of Ethiopia\u2019s Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People\u2019s Region (SNNPR), the province of origin for many Ethiopian children adopted to the West, to locate the family of a toddler-age girl adopted to Canada.<\/p>\n
Starting in the southern town of Sodo, we took a 12-mile drive through rural roads that were so bad it took over an hour: first over deeply-potted dirt throughways, cutting across expanses of grazing land, then off-road until we arrived at a hamlet so small and remote it might have been impossible to find without a guide. But even this village \u2014 a handful of houses and an HIV clinic \u2014 was not our destination. We took a dirt path through the backcountry, but our Land Ranger got stuck in deep trenches of mud. A handful of local children emerged shyly from the bordering fields and led us, on foot, the last half mile up to a solitary mud-walled house surrounded by lush gardens and neatly fenced in with stripped tree branches.<\/p>\n
When we arrived, only a toddler boy stood in the front yard, naked below the waist. But the spectacle of several travelers carrying tripod and camera quickly drew nearly 30 neighboring children and adults, who watched solemnly while Samuel framed shots of the exterior of the house. The birthmother Samuel sought to interview, a widow in her early 40s with seven other children still at home, was called from a neighbor\u2019s house to host her unexpected guests. She smilingly obliged without question when Samuel and his colleagues explained that they\u2019d come to film for several hours at the request of her daughter\u2019s new adoptive parents. Sitting in a chair in the fields behind her house, her fingertips pressed together and her eyes cast down, she answered dozens of questions about her background, her remaining children, and the circumstances of her husband\u2019s death, which had prompted the adoption.<\/p>\n
For several years, Samuel, a soft-spoken filmmaker from Addis Ababa in his mid-20s, has traveled deep into Ethiopia\u2019s countryside to locate the remaining parents, brothers, sisters, and neighbors of Ethiopian children adopted to the U.S. and Europe. For a moderate fee \u2014 around $600, including travel and lodging expenses for a two or three person crew \u2014 he would create a DVD of interviews with family members and a brief glimpse of the country the child came from. He started doing this work for a prominent U.S. adoption agency then later moved on to independent production, working from a script of 60 to 70 questions he\u2019d compile with the adoptive family to ask of whatever closest relative or neighbor could be found.<\/p>\n
But, in the past several years, it\u2019s become increasingly difficult to find a searcher in Ethiopia. Tasked with determining whether an adopted child is a \u201cmanufactured orphan,\u201d searchers have faced intense intimidation in Ethiopia as its adoption system boomed and then came under international scrutiny. It took months to find adoptive families willing to share the name or contact information for searchers they had used. The first several times I emailed or called Samuel, he responded with trepidation, confirming with me repeatedly that I was not associated with any adoption agencies working in Ethiopia and that I wouldn\u2019t pass on his name or information to any agencies.<\/p>\n
He had good reason to be cautious. In August 2010, Samuel was jailed for 41 days in the northern Ethiopian province of Tigray, which shares a hostile border with neighboring Eritrea. He had traveled to the region to film two birth family interviews, one of which Samuel says he did pro bono out of his respect for the family, which had adopted an HIV-positive child. When Samuel met the birth sister of one of the children whose story he was tracking, the local director of a U.S. adoption agency came along, and began accusing Samuel of giving the agency a bad name. (Out of fear of further repercussions, Samuel requested that the agency not be named.) Shortly thereafter, Samuel and his crew were arrested. While in jail, he was told that the arrest was made at the request of the agency, which had accused him of performing illegal adoptions and of filming the \u201cbad side\u201d of Ethiopia to sell to the Eritrean government. An employee of the agency was also arrested \u2014 it\u2019s still not clear why \u2014 as well as three of Samuel\u2019s friends and a translator.<\/p>\n
Although his jailers treated him as a serious criminal, in time, with the help of U.S. adoptive families, Samuel\u2019s case reached the attention of the U.S. and federal Ethiopian governments. Families who had adopted through the agency raised thousands of dollars for bail and led a letter-writing campaign that spurred the Ethiopian ambassador to the U.S., at the consulate in Los Angeles, to get involved.<\/p>\n
Lisa Veleff Day, a Portland, Maine, mother to two Ethiopian children, participated in the campaign. A number of families in Portland have adopted from Ethiopia, and several had turned to Samuel to help uncover their children\u2019s backgrounds \u2014 often after they became suspicious of the stories their agencies had told them. Veleff Day did not hire Samuel \u2014 she was able to find information about her children through a member of their birth family with ties to Portland \u2014 but she had used the same agency that was behind his jailing and had come to doubt their ethics. During one of the last steps of her adoption \u2014 an appointment with the U.S. embassy in Addis Ababa to secure a visa \u2014 the agency\u2019s country representative coached her to say that her children\u2019s birth parents were dead. The representative threatened Veleff Day that the adoption would fall through if she did not.<\/p>\n
\u201cRight before we went into the embassy, we were told that there were certain things we needed to say. We were being coached. We were supposed to say that both of these parents were dead. We knew that not to be true. They were telling us to lie,\u201d says Veleff Day. \u201cHe said if you don\u2019t say these things, there will be questions and you won\u2019t be able to leave with the kids. We really felt like we were over a barrel, so we did what they said. I\u2019m not proud of that, but they waited this long to coach us, because otherwise we wouldn\u2019t have felt as compelled to do what they said.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNot only had [Samuel] been arrested,\u201d recalled Veleff Day, \u201cbut the family member, the uncle of a child adopted by friends of ours, was arrested when he started bringing food and water to him. The agency used scare tactics: you talk to this guy, and you might be arrested too.\u201d<\/p>\n
While Samuel typically finds little more than discrepancies in the children\u2019s ages \u2014 younger children are widely considered more attractive to adoptive families \u2014 sometimes he finds that birth families receive no word about their children despite agency promises for updates. One birth family was not even aware their child had been sent to America. Sometimes, Samuel says, birth families are complicit in these falsehoods, making stories they think are more conducive to getting their children adopted.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople are promoting adoption to foreigners and the birth families were fooled by some adoption advocates,\u201d Samuel said. \u201cThey got the wrong information about adoption: that if you send this child, you will get some money from the adoptive parents and you\u2019ll be someone great.\u201d<\/p>\n
The contradictions unearthed by searchers in recent years have damaged the reputations of adoption agencies in Ethiopia. Agencies, some adoptive parents claim, have retaliated against searchers, with legal action, jail time, and even death threats.<\/p>\n
A PERFECT STORM<\/p>\n
Karen Smith-Rotabi, an inter-country adoption scholar at the Virginia Commonwealth University, has found that after previous \u201chotspot\u201d adoption countries such as Guatemala closed down \u2014 widespread ethical problems, from coercion to outright kidnapping led the country\u2019s adoption authority to suspend the program pending reforms \u2014 Ethiopia became \u201ca perfect storm for an emerging adoption industry.\u201d Its short waiting periods and high availability of very young children made it attractive to international adoption agencies. Some agencies accused of deeply unethical behavior in Guatemala are widely thought by international adoption experts to have moved their operations to Ethiopia.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs Guatemala\u2019s adoption industry ground to a halt at the end of 2007,
\nmany American adoption agencies began setting up new adoption programs
\nin Ethiopia,\u201d says Erin Siegal, author of the book Finding Fernanda, an investigation of corruption in adoption cases from Guatemala. Ethiopia, which is not a signatory to the Hague Adoption Convention, a standard for international adoption practices, gave an opportunity to agencies unable to win Hague accreditation. In some cases, Siegal says, it seemed to save the businesses of agencies in financial trouble after Guatemala shut down.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fundamental issue in Ethiopia is extreme poverty, and that the birth family\u2019s idea of adoption is different than ours,\u201d Smith-Rotabi said. \u201cEthiopians don\u2019t have that conception of a clean break from one family to another. Some really think that their child is going to get an education and they\u2019ll see them again. You have a very sophisticated, legalistic society communicating with a very poor, traditional one.\u201d<\/p>\n
When people see birth families benefitting from their choice to relinquish their child, she said, that can have a contagious effect in these communities. \u201cIt takes over a whole village very quickly. It\u2019s very dangerous stuff, playing with people\u2019s poverty, emotions, and needs in a way that\u2019s really quite profound.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cParents, especially from rural areas, still believe that they are sending their children so they can get money,\u201d said Mehari Maru, a human rights lawyer in Ethiopia whom the Ethiopian government invited to propose an institutional framework for international adoption. \u201cThey are not told what adoption means, that they will have other parents. They think about the money they will get and their children\u2019s welfare.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMuch of the potential for abuse through non-regulation is at a local level,\u201d said Doug Webb, Chief of Section for Adolescent Development, Protection, and HIV\/AIDS at UNICEF Ethiopia, which is working closely with the Ethiopian government to establish a more comprehensive domestic child welfare system in the country. \u201cA lot of the arrangements and paperwork that makes things appear differently than they are happens at the local level, out there in the bush with brokers, agents, officials, and policemen. Once the paperwork reaches the federal level, in some cases, the opportunity for abuse may have already been taken.\u201d<\/p>\n
Smith-Rotabi warned that Ethiopia must learn from other countries that have seen sharp rises in adoption. In Guatemala, adoption corruption eventually came to have what she called \u201chidden structures of organized crime,\u201d with critics facing so much intimidation that many hired bodyguards. In one case, she says, a scholar researching adoption there disappeared completely and is presumed dead.<\/p>\n
Ethiopia\u2019s federal government is working to address problems in the country\u2019s adoption system. But the adoption industry has become so lucrative and so strong, especially in rural parts of the country, that many people who\u2019ve raised questions about the process say they\u2019ve faced intimidation and harassment from the industry.<\/p>\n
\u2018CAN\u2019T DO INDEPENDENT RESEARCH\u2019<\/p>\n
In 2009, Arun Dohle, a researcher for the non-profit Against Child Trafficking (ACT), traveled to Ethiopia to investigate 25 adoptions handled by the Dutch agency Wereldkinderen Child Welfare Association. The research was commissioned by the agency but, when Dohle\u2019s findings led to him being \u201cput out\u201d of the country, ACT published the report independently under the title \u201cFruits of Ethiopia, Intercountry Adoption: The Rights of the Child, or the \u2018Harvesting\u2019 of Children?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were seriously threatened by the orphanage directors and by the local representative of the agency we were working with as well,\u201d Dohle said. \u201cWe got a letter from Ethiopian orphanages saying we were involved in illegal adoptions. The social worker [I was working with] was accused of damaging the image of Ethiopia. It proves you can\u2019t do independent research.\u201d He added, \u201cOf course [the research] was actually legal, but they were dropping high-up names of politicians.\u201d<\/p>\n
In his research, Dohle found that a majority of the 25 cases included clear ethical concerns. These included living and easily-identified parents listed as dead or unknown, agency or orphanage representatives giving false information on court documents, parents relinquishing children in the stated hopes of receiving support from adoptive families, and orphanages recruiting children directly from intact families. He recorded testimony stating that some child recruiters are salaried employees of orphanages and work to collect children from villages, health centers, and other places families visit. He also found, much as Smith-Rotabi later suggested to me, that Ethiopian families don\u2019t have the same understanding of adoption that Western agencies do.<\/p>\n
The report explains that research came \u201cto an abrupt end\u201d when a local representative of the agency learned of Dohle\u2019s research and \u201cthreatened to report the researcher to the Ethiopian immigration or police.\u201d<\/p>\n
Officials from two orphanages that Dohle had identified as problematic (both of which have since been closed by the Ethiopian government), Bethezatha Children\u2019s Home Association and Gelegela Integrated Orphans and Destitute Family Support Association, sent a letter to Wereldkinderen accusing him of engaging in illegal adoptions; of \u201cterrorizing the families of children who have been placed in the Netherlands\u201d by claiming that children are being sold for compensation, for organ harvesting, or for experimental HIV medication testing (his report made none of these claims); and of taking birth families hostage during interviews. \u201cThese situations have proven to be rather problematic to our operations,\u201d the letter stated. It demanded that all Wereldkinderen adoptions be investigated, claiming that the investigation impugned not only the orphanages in question but the government of Ethiopia as well.<\/p>\n
A NEW ADOPTION LANDSCAPE<\/p>\n
The adoption landscape is changing rapidly in Ethiopia. Amid mounting evidence of fraud and ethical problems, the Ethiopian government announced in March that it was putting the brakes on its international adoption program, slowing by 60 to 90 percent the rate at which it processes paperwork for children being internationally adopted. It also revoked the license of one adoption agency accused of creating fraudulent documents for adoptees. In July, the government began implementing a plan to close one third of the nation\u2019s orphanages, shuttering those it found were functioning more as transitional homes for the adoption industry rather than providing care for children in need; to date, 23 in the SNNPR region have been shut down. People with knowledge of the industry told me that agencies were firing staff in response to the slowdown and a number of agencies were expected to face closure without the revenue stream of steady Ethiopian adoptions. A UNICEF analysis of Ethiopian court data, however, indicates that the slowdown didn\u2019t last long and that this fall, the number of adoptions being processed has bounced back to normal levels.<\/p>\n
Still, UNICEF\u2019s Doug Webb said that the environment in which these abuses took place has changed dramatically in the past year. \u201cThere are people in government who are very concerned about this, but we\u2019ve turned a big corner here. The situation is over where alleged abuses were ignored, swept under the carpet; where nobody was listening and there was too much money involved.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIn many ways,\u201d Webb said, \u201cthat story is done. The climate has changed so much. Now it\u2019s discussed more openly. The government at the highest levels is speaking out against abuses in the system.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope the slowdown is helping things,\u201d said adoptive mother Lisa Veleff Day, \u201cbut I sort of doubt it. They say they\u2019re checking things more carefully, but this is big business for Ethiopia. The terrible shame is there are so many kinds who are genuinely in need of adoption, and those are not the ones being adopted.\u201d<\/p>\n
The role of searchers won\u2019t end any time soon, Samuel is certain. The thousands of Ethiopian children adopted by families in the U.S. and Europe over the last decade will grow up one day. They\u2019ll learn about the circumstances around adoption from Ethiopia in earlier years and will want to find out the truth of their background.<\/p>\n
Kelly paid $900 in 2009 for her searcher and Samuel charges an average rate of $600. But Kelly has since heard that her searcher increased his rates, asking as much as $3000 to $4000 for a search. When rising demand and supply made adoption an important and rapidly growing source of money in a country that had little of it, even these investigators who are often at odds with agencies have found a place in the adoption economy.<\/p>\n
This article supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
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Mirette and Elsabet Franklin, ages 4 and 6, biological sisters adopted in Ethiopia, listen to the singing of the national anthem during a U.S. naturalization ceremony \/ AP The Atlantic | December 21, 2011 As the \u201csearchers\u201d who track down adopted children\u2019s histories increasingly uncover stories of fraud, corruption, and worse, these specialists are facing… 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":[3,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3806"}],"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=3806"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3808,"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3806\/revisions\/3808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}