Do you want to get rid of a book, a painting or your car? Or are you looking for something more specific? No problem! Thanks to the many on-line bidding sites, it is now possible to contact potential buyers and sellers worldwide in just a few mouse clicks!
The internet certainly has its advantages, but it also has disadvantages…
In September 2013, Megan Twohey, a reporter at Reuters, shed light on the horrifying trafficking that takes place in the USA: it is no longer just things that are traded on-line but also adopted children.
The concept is very simple. Couples who have adopted a child, in most cases foreign-born, and whose adoption hasn’t met their expectations post an ad on-line. A short description of the child is accompanied by the reasons why the family no longer want them. Reasons range from “He needs a different environment as he is clearly unhappy with us” to “we do not have the time to invest in the necessary psychological support”, and include “At the time I just wanted to help some less fortunate children, I had no idea what I was getting into”. On average, one new child is posted on the on-line platforms each week. The average age ranges from 6 to 14, although a case of a 10-month-old baby has also been recorded. In 70% of cases, the children were born in another country.
From the other side of the screen, families eager to take in the profiled children, get in touch with the advertisers. A few days later, without going through any official body, without knowing anything about the protagonists other than what they are willing to say, a child’s fate is sealed. They are taken to a new environment and left there.
What happens next? As the exchanges are not subject to any professional monitoring and are made in absolute illegality, any abuse is possible.
The Reuters investigation cited the case of Quita, a 16-year-old Liberian girl whose adoptive parents decided not to keep her. Through an on-line ad, they were able to find a seemingly perfect couple to take her in, and three weeks later Quita was brought into her new home. The issue was that the document proving the parental skills of Quita’s new parents was a fake. Due to the couple’s psychiatric disorders and violent tendencies, they had previously lost custody of their biological children. Furthermore, they had sexual child abuse charges hanging over them. However, as Quita’s placement had taken place on the black market, none of this could have been suspected. In total, at least six families are fooled one after the other by the same seemingly ordinary ‘buyers’ and trust them with the child they originally adopted.
During the first night in her new home, Quita was invited to join her adoptive father and mother in the marital bed. The latter slept naked. A few days later, Quita and her new adoptive parents vanished into thin air. Having called the new school where the teenager was supposed to attend, Quita’s former mother started to worry about her absence. The police were alerted and fortunately found the young girl and her persecutors. The story ended there but it could have had other dreadful scenarios. There is an abundance of creepy stories of children being adopted and then illegally re-homed. A young Chinese girl was taken in by a family off the internet was made to dig her own grave while a 13-year-old Russian girl was sexually abused by her new foster brother who then urinated on her.
Children are not goods. Even if a new family could offer a loving environment, more suited to a child than the previous one, the re-homing of minors from international adoptions via the internet remains illegal and profusely inhuman. Treating a person as an object that can be sold or exchanged is equal to denying that person’s human nature and violating the basic standards laid down by international law. These children are particularly vulnerable because of their young age; they often don’t know the language of their adopted country and are from the start placed in a totally unknown environment.
In light of the 2013 revelations of the Reuters agency, some of the internet platforms used to host such exchange markets have denied access to the groups in question. Others who advocate the right for their users to freely communicate about current social issues haven’t taken any measures.
From a legal point of view, legislation to protect children exists and the tendency is to reinforce it at an international level. However the inter-state treaty on the placement of children, that has existed since 1960 in the United States, has not been sufficient enough to prevent such abuse. Therefore, it appears necessary to consolidate the control mechanisms already in place and to improve the training of those responsible for enforcing the laws on adoption. This is demonstrated by the fact that one of the on-line exchange platform users who re-homed his adopted child with a new family was a police officer.
But even with a sufficient number of qualified staff, the regulation of what happens on the internet is extremely complex as it affects privacy and poses technological challenges. Furthermore, tightening adoption measures is somewhat ambiguous as this phenomenon ends up increasing the number of black markets. Indeed, couples who fail what is known to be a very strict legal adoption process could see these exchange forums as an alternative way to achieve their dream of taking in a child. On the other hand, families who are faced with an adoption that does not go well – which is sadly the case in 10 to 25% of adoptions – sometimes don’t receive sufficient support from social services and consider quick placement as the best option for all concerned. This shows that not only is it necessary to be careful when dealing with this treacherous field which has significant consequences for entire families and innocent children, but also that the cliché of child trafficking not existing in the most developed countries is all but true.
Written by: Valentine Delarze Translated by: Esther Williams Proofread by : Clare Sharman |
