“The Baby trade is likely to continue to grow, partly it is no longer simply a response to wars and humanitarian crises. For better or worse, it now behaves much like a commodities market, with demand informing supply; and neither demand nor supply is likely to subside.” – Ethan Kapstein 2003
Since Madonna and Angelina Jolie famously adopted children from Africa, the international adoption system is under fire. The suspicion is that the system may be driven by market forces and profit seeking, and that regulations and international conventions just camouflage (illegal) market practices and facilitate the trafficking of children. Clearly, international adoptions are serious normative and political issues for the “sending” countries because children are normally understood as “sacred” and are loaded “with sentimental or religious meaning” (Zelizer 1985: 11). They should be protected, educated and loved.
The international dispersion of these ideas is reflected in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which has been signed by 193 countries until now, who
proclaimed that childhood is entitled to special care and assistance … [children] should grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding … in particular in the spirit of peace, dignity, tolerance, freedom, equality and solidarity.
Extra commercium
The idea of child protection clearly reserves them “a separate noncommercial place, extra-commercium” (Zelizer, ibid.). However, although it is prohibited, child trafficking is still a worldwide phenomenon. Usually it takes place between “Third World” countries and the industrialized western world, and it appears in different forms. Especially the practice of “child laundering” has gained high attention.
The intercountry adoption system has become infected with a substantial degree of child laundering. This child laundering is not an inevitable feature of the system, but exists because of specific failings of law and practice within the current system. (Smolin 2005: 200)
(The term “child laundering” expresses the idea of the intercountry adoption system taking children illegally from birth parents and using official processes of adoption and legal systems to “launder“ them as legally adopted children. [see Smolin 2005: 115 and Fuentes et. al. 2012, Ch. 6]).
Due to the emotional and normative value of children, cases of child laundering and trafficking – when discovered – have created national as well as international media coverage and aroused public attention. In the last 20 years, Romania and Guatemala have been outed as the “black sheep” of the international adoption system because of systematic corruption, child stealing and laundering.
“Niños made in Colombia”
Since 2012, the intercountry adoption system of Colombia has also become a focus for critics. However, in comparison to Romania and Guatemala, public attention emerged due to a scandalisation strategy by a private Colombian television channel. Niños made in Colombia was a show broadcasted in 2012 in five episodes which exhibited impoverished families unable to take care of their children. According to Colombian law, every child in a public foster institution is eligible for international adoption, if either the biological parents or relatives are unable to take care of it within four months.
In the last decade, Colombia became one of the five biggest sending countries for children in the world. The show discovered that the reason for this high number of international adoptions was the fact that foster institutions in Colombia get fees from the new parents for any adopted child. Therefore, they expedite international adoption proceedings, do not educate the biological parents about their rights, and even start an adoption process before the four months are over. Furthermore, lawyers, social workers, psychologists, etc., decide about the adoptability, even if they are either not qualified for adoption services in general, or have nor received advanced training for conducting eligibility tests and matching processes between child and prospective adoptive parents. Hence, Colombia was alleged by the TV show to be an international marketplace for the laundering and trafficking of the children for profit.
It remains to be seen whether or not these accusations are valid. However, the show generated huge publicity for the issue and mobilized public protest. It has also already had an enormous effect on the Colombian adoption system, with 1,300 files of children which had been already declared adoptable being re-evaluated by the Institute of Family Welfare (ICBF) on whether they had relatives which could take them in. The search for relatives was extended to the 6th degree. From now on, a family court judge has to confirm the adoptability of a child before a legal adoption proceeding can take place. At the end of the proceeding, a so called procurador has to prove and confirm the decision of the judge, and can stop the process if she or he is not convinced that the adoption is in the best interests of the child.
What seems at first sight a national issue of regulation driven by the scandalisation strategy has had transnational effects. Due to the new regulation, the length of the adoption process has significantly increased. The ICBF has had to search longer for relatives and the procurador has to prove and confirm the adoption.
Checks and balances come at a cost
By how much the difficulty of the process will actually increase cannot be foreseen yet. On the one hand, the national adoption system has become more secure and resistant against child laundering and child trafficking because more checks and balances are in place, which grant authorities from other countries and foreign adoption applicants more legal security and transparency. But on the other hand, the children have to stay in orphanages and the new parents have to wait abroad until they get the permission to adopt.
One can only speculate about the future development of international adoptions from Colombia and the system of transnational adoption overall. Will Colombia still attract enough people willing to adopt a child which genuinely needs a new family, or will applicants from abroad hesitate because of the more difficult procedure? Will they be deterred by negative connotations and the controversial media coverage?
One thing at least is certain: the line between serious transnational adoptions on the one hand, and morally dubious or illegal practices on the other, is blurry and contested. Thus, the system needs professional and independent agencies for proper surveillance. Private TV channels seeking to increase their audience can work to scandalise problems, but aren’t adequate for the task of regulating in the interest of the child.
Christian Tribowski is a Doctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies working on transnational adoption practices. He has studied at the University of Duisburg-Essen and the Ruhr-University Bochum, and has worked in several research projects on regional and economic development, as well as for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Singapore.
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August 22, 2015 at 16:55
Maria-Angeles Rogles-Reos
There is no doubt that some children in Colombia were and are in dire need to be cared for and adopted, but there is also no doubt that Colombia officials have been abusing the adoption system, a system that was created and meant to help children in need.
The television program mentioned in this article did nothing but to bring forward the lives and complaints of some ‘now-adult’ adoptees who are searching for their biological families, some of which have been successful in their search and have discovered the lies their biological, adoptive families were told by the adoption agencies.
Back 30, 40 and more years ago, no one ever thought how public media was going to change, and how the internet was going to revolutionize the world and put into evidence the abuses and crimes committed against innocent children and their biological families.
I am the adoptive mother of one of those ‘needy’ children. I adopted a son in Colombia in 1976. Forty years ago, it never crossed my mind that adoption was a profitable industry in Colombia. I was temporarily living there at the time and we decided to adopt from a reputable adoption agency in Bogota. We adopted an almost six-month old baby boy, however, thirty-four years later, I came to find out, through information received from other adult adoptees, that I had been lied to by the adoption agency, was shown how there was vital information missing from his adoption documents, and although we had entrusted the adoption process to a ‘reputable’ attorney recommended by the adoption agency, he did not comply with Colombian law in ensuring that all the necessary information, not available to us as adoptive parents, but information that SHOULD HAVE BEEN in the files about my adopted son’s biological family. Yes, we fell into their trap…
We were told, among other things, that the baby had not been registered, so the adoption attorney took us to Notaria Doce in Bogota and their notary registered the child naming us his parents… We thought at the time that the Adoption Agency, the adoption attorney, the Notaria Doce, and the ICBF (Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar) had all the information on the biological family, otherwise, the child would not be adoptable.., problem was we trusted the adoption system and were totally unaware of their wrong doings. We requested information on my son’s biological family six years ago from the Adoption Agency, but turned out that they continued lying to us by saying that they had given us all the information they had available on the child… I continued my investigation and found out about the existence at the Adoption Agency of a Kardex containing information on each child and adoption, so I requested a copy and it took over a month to get that from them; I requested additional information and the Adoption Agency insisted that they had no other information. So, I requested information from the ICBF and was told they had nothing other than what I already received from the Adoption Agency.
It was not until I tried hiring a private investigator that I found out and was given copies of my adopted son being born at the Instituto Materno Infantil ‘Concepcion Villaveces de Acosta’ in Bogota, and found out the name of his biological mother as well as some information about his birth and alleged ‘abandonment’, there was an allegation that the home address given by the mother did not exist in North or South of Bogota, however there are other adoption cases with a similar ‘problem’ in that the home address on record is “non-existent”, however, only someone with access to Bogota’s streets nomenclature, such as the Catastro and the like, would know which streets and home numbers exist and which ones do not… in addition, the Cedula Number (or in its defect, identifying finger-prints of the biological mother) are missing in the paperwork, the mother’s name shows one last-name only (in Colombia it usually has two, father and mother last-name), so with such defective and incomplete information, it is just about impossible to locate the biological mother. Last but not least, the private investigator obtained the letter that the Adoption Agency wrote to the Beneficencia de Cundinamarca, on January 23, 1976, in which acknowledges receiving the child from them for his care and adoption placement, and this letter shows the name and last-name of the child…
All this time, all these years we had been lied to by the Adoption Agency and the ICBF.
By belonging to adult adoptees groups from Colombia, I have come familiarized with the abuses committed, to the point that in one of the cases, the adoptee committed suicide because he never adjusted to the change to a foreign country, and the adoptive parents were given a made-up story about the biological mother, and although the mother visited regularly the adoption agency trying to find out about her two sons, the agency never stepped up to help one set of biological parents with the trouble they were having with their adoptee not adjusting, and they lied to the mother telling her that her children were alright, although they knew one of them had committed suicide for their systematic lies to everyone.
I am available to provide further information and details.
August 22, 2015 at 17:21
Maria-Angeles Rogles-Reos
Further to my previous comment, I would like to say that the ICBF does not provide sufficient and efficient support to those adult-adoptees who were victims of the adoption system failure, lies, abuses, etc. They are broadcasting television programs looking for families of children in need, and they are not allocating funds to broadcast television programs to assist those adoptees who are searching for their biological families and most were victims of the inefficient abusive adoption system. They also have to create a cross-reference list of adoptees who are searching for their families, so that their biological families can locate them, or the adult-adoptees can locate them… much more could and should and needs to be done in this aspect.