Category Archives: International adoption

Let’s Establish Standards of Practice for Adoptive Parents

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Adoption agencies and adoptive parents have long held the most power in international adoption practice, and adoptive parents speak with hugely influential voices on international adoption policy. Many parents started adoption agencies themselves; many employees of the agencies are parents. Many speak at conferences; many blog, before, during, and after adoption. Many post regularly on Facebook groups.

Most professionals—doctors, lawyers, social workers—have standards of practice that integrate values with research and expertise. Some of these standards are advisory; some are enforceable and have significant sanctions.

Standards of practice for adoptive parents are, of course, unenforceable and even unfeasible. Still, since adoptive parents hold such influence and power over adoption policy and practice, perhaps it’s worth discussing what standards of practice might involve for them.

At the annual conference of the Joint Council on International Children’s Services this May in New York City, I will present a workshop called Standards of Practice for Adoptive Parents. I’ll be focusing on Ethiopia, though I’ll look at practices in many countries. JCICS is an umbrella group of international adoption agencies that also includes doctors, lawyers, parent groups, researchers, and others. Joint Council has Standards of Practice for its member agencies.

I think It’s time to examine some hard questions, and to see what harm and what good is being done in the name of adoption. For example:

  • What responsibilities do adoptive parents (and agencies) have to birth parents?
  • When adoptive families hire investigators to search for their child’s birth family, what are the dangers for fraud? for financial impropriety?
  • When adoptive families “find” birth families that the adoption agency either didn’t know about or didn’t disclose, what should be done?
  • What are the ethical responsibilities adoptive families have in offering or providing financial support to birth families?
  • Many adoptive parents blog in great detail about their adopted children, sharing the child’s history, traumas, medications, behaviors, therapies, hospitalizations, personal story.  Is that their right as parents?
  • Adoptive families are supposed to fill out post-placement reports, sometimes for years after placement. With Russia having closed now to US families, some parents might decide not to file any more reports. What is the impact on the children, the agencies, the future? In Ethiopia, birth families are sometimes promised they will receive post-placement reports. How would adoptive parents know if their reports get to the families? Does it matter?
  • Many adoptive parents “give back” to the country of origin, through non-profit work in education, health care, and other needed services, some right in their child’s village. Some employ birth family members in the non-profit’s work. Are these projects creating dependency? Are they encouraging other families inadvertently to place their children for adoption in order to get employment and money? Are the projects a means to alleviate adoptive parent guilt?

I welcome your thoughts on all of this.

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In remembrance of Hana

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Update: Unfortunately, the Senate Committee did not act on the bill. Let’s hope that positive change will occur in the next legislative session.

 

No child should ever be abused. I believe adopted children deserve a special level of protection, since their movement from their biological family and their placement into an adoptive family (if done legally, ethically, and transparently) involves local, state, federal, and sometimes international laws and regulations.

Hana Alemu (aka Hanna Williams), 13 years old, died at the hands of her adoptive parents here in Washington state, in Skagit County, on May 12, 2011. Her obituary said she passed away unexpectedly. The coroner’s report said she died from hypothermia, found naked and dead locked outside her family home on a rainy night when temps were in the 40’s. News reports said she’d been beaten, starved, made to use a toilet outside, and, at the time of death, weighed less than she had at her arrival in the US from Ethiopia in 2008.

Hana (Alemu) Williams

Hana (Alemu) Williams

Her adoptive parents have yet to go on trial.

To its credit, Washington State is working to ensure that additional measures are in place to prevent such horrors happening again to any adopted child. The Department of Social and Health Services and the Office of Family and Children’s Ombudsman issued a report on severe abuse of adopted children; it’s sobering, daunting information about adopted children who were abused in terrible ways. Hana is among them. The children whose abuse (and, in some cases, deaths) prompted this report were from both US and international adoptions.

The report also proposes several important, realistic measures that can strengthen the success of adoptions and the safety of children:

Improved oversight of child-placing agencies, including tracking adoption disruptions and dissolutions (when the adoptive parents end an adoption before or after the adoption has been legally finalized),  as well as developing a list of “red flags” regarding troubled adoptions;

Better assessment of prospective adoptive parents, including enhancement of minimum requirements for home studies; and

Improved training and post-adoption services, including additional support services for adoptive families.

These proposals, which would apply to US and international adoptions, are significant and necessary. Some of the recommendations require relatively small legislative changes, and HB 1675 was introduced in the Washington State House, passing by a vote of 90 to 7. On March 21, the Senate Committee on Human Services and Corrections held a hearing on the bill.  Several people from the Ethiopian Community Association in Seattle traveled to Olympia to speak in favor of the bill at the hearing, as did I.

Some folks would like to see this bill called “Hana’s Law,” to honor her memory. The ECA folks were there because of deep concern about the safety of Ethiopian children adopted to the United States. I was there as the adoptive parent of twin Ethiopian daughters, 6 years old when they came here, 24 years old now. All of our hearts ache for Hana; her death was a tragedy of suffering that never should have happened.

I hope I am wrong in hearing that HB 1675 will not be sent to the Senate floor by the Human Services Committee.  They have only until Wednesday April 3 to move the bill. It is a great opportunity for a state legislature to act publicly and positively on legislation to protect adopted children.