The Violence of Love: Race, Family, and Adoption in the United States

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Kit Myers is an adoptee from Hong Kong; he is also an assistant professor at the University of California-Merced. I was fortunate recently to attend a talk he gave at the University of Washington about his book, “The Violence of Love: Race, Family and Adoption in the United States.”

It’s a powerful book, and I recommend it. In full transparency, it is an academic book of sorts, with hundreds of footnotes and many pages of bibliography. Lots of great research presented usefully.

“The Violence of Love” is an important exploration of, as Dr. JaeRan Kim notes in her blurb, the question “How can transracial or transnational adoption be an act of both love and violence, and how can we envision a different future?”

Dr. Kim is herself an adoptee from South Korea, and an associate professor at the University of Washington-Tacoma. She also blogs at the highly respected Harlow’s Monkey.

JaeRan and Kit had a great discussion at the book talk. Many in the audience identified themselves as adoptees. I am grateful to scholars like Kit and JaeRan who share their wisdom with grace, insight, and truth.

From the book: “…we must eradicate not just the family policing system and adoption industry but the structural conditions and ideologies that enable them to exist…How do we draw on radical love to care for the most vulnerable–not in isolation but together? What would we do if we allocated the resources and were unafraid?”

A revolutionary sort of love. “There can be no love without truth.”

You can download a free copy here. You can buy a copy of it at that site as well, or from Amazon, or your local bookstore.

14th Anniversary of the Death of Hana Williams

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On May 12, 2011, Carri Williams called 911 to report that Hana, her adopted daughter from Ethiopia, had passed out in the backyard. Hana died that night from hypothermia and malnutrition, In 2013, both Carri and adoptive father Larry Williams were convicted of manslaughter. They remain in jail.

Hana, on the other hand, remains in our hearts.

She was just 13 years old when she died, having been adopted in 2008. She weighed less at her death than when she arrived in the United States. She was horrifically abused, physically and emotionally, for most of those three years preceding her death.

Many of us here in Seattle and around the world think of Hana often, especially on these poignant anniversaries of her death. Much too young, much too soon. May all children be safe. May Hana never be forgotten.

Hana Alemu (Williams)
Hana’s grave site in Sedro-Wooley, WA. A beautiful, isolated place.

That she died so close to Mother’s Day has always been poignant to me. I’ve written at length about Hana, including the trial and, more recently, visiting her grave last autumn. May you be at peace.

Dear U.S. Congress: Bring Our Deported International Adoptees Home

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Many places around the globe are celebrating Christmas today. Many deported international adoptees are “celebrating” alone without family or friends, far from home and the life they were promised when they were brought “home” to the U.S.

International adoptees have been deported because their adoptive parents (or adoption agencies or U.S. government agencies) failed to get them citizenship when they were children.

Thousands of international adoptees are estimated to be without citizenship, and some don’t even know that they are not citizens. Some find out when they commit a crime (and it can relatively minor) and are deported. Some proudly vote in local and federal elections, not knowing they are committing a felony. Some work hard all their lives and then find out they don’t qualify for Social Security or Medicare.

I do not understand why our U.S. Congress has not yet granted citizenship to all international adoptees. It is the humane, responsible, ethically right action to take, especially by those who are proponents of adoption.

Information is available at Adoptees for Justice and Adoptee Rights Law Center. I’ve written about this issue often, including recently here.

Please take action if you can, asking your U.S. elected federal officials to open their hearts and grant citizenship to all adoptees. Please send hope and resilience to the many adoptees who have been deported. May their loneliness end; may they be welcomed back (well before next Christmas) with family and friends in the U.S., the place that was supposed to be their forever home.

The “Preventable Death” of Ethiopian Adoptee Biruk Silvers

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May Biruk Silvers rest in peace and in power. May his family be comforted from heaven.

Accor5ding to a 2015 Chicago Tribune article, Biruk was adopted from Ethiopia when he was eight years old. Last month, on November 5, he died by suicide at a Utah teen treatment center. He was 17 years old.

I’ve written before about the deaths by suicide of adoptees. I don’t mean it to be exploitative or click-baiting. It’s a delicate dance. Talking about suicide is hard, and linking it with adoption is complex.

That said, Biruk’s adoptive parents, Joshua and Kathryn Silvers, have spoken out publicly about their son’s death because they believed that “medical malpractice and staff negligence led to Biruk’s preventable death” at the Discovery Ranch in Mapleton, Utah, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

In late November, the state restricted the license of Discovery Ranch, per the Salt Lake Tribune: “The Utah Department of Health and Human Services’ licensing office…said Discovery Ranch failed to follow state administrative rules because it did not protect and supervise a ‘client who had expressed suicidal ideation and intent.’ ”

The agency inspected Discovery Ranch on Nov. 6, one day after the teen, Biruk Silvers, who was living at the teen residential program, died there. Authorities reported Silvers died by suicide.

A conditional license, a DHHS spokesperson said, allows a care program to continue operation, as long as they adhere to the licensing division’s conditions.” The full Salt Lake Tribune article is here: “State agency restricts license of Utah County treatment center where teen died.”

Discovery Ranch still advertises itself as the “Top Teen Residential Center for Boys.”

Per the Tribune article, Discovery Ranch’s current conditional license requires them to do the following:

  • Comply to increased monitoring by the licensing division. Each inspection, the notice said, will cost Discovery Ranch $393.37.
  • Notify current clients — or their legal guardians and the state agencies that placed those clients in the facility — that Discovery Ranch has been placed on a conditional license. Discovery Ranch has five days to notify everyone.
  • Not accept any new clients while the conditional license is in effect.
  • Increase staff trainings, including sessions on suicide risk prevention. Discovery Ranch must provide proof of training within 15 days of the notice.
  • Submit a detailed plan that demonstrates all staff members can “ensure immediate and effective communication” when a client expresses suicidal ideation or intentions to self-harm.
  • Ensure staff compliance with all Utah Administrative Rules and statutes.

The bottom line is that “Discovery Ranch Academy ‘failed to protect’ Biruk Silvers.”

I hope that the legal decisions by the state of Utah brought a bit of solace to the Silvers family. I cannot imagine their grief.

Teen treatment centers are controversial. In 2021, the American Bar Association issued “Five Facts About the Troubled Teen Industry.” Maybe you’ve seen the Netflix documentaries such as “The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping;” “Hell Camp: Teen Nightmare;” “Teen Torture Inc.” Teen treatment centers are wildly expensive, and can range from $500 to $2000 a day in some cases. Like the prison system, the teen treatment centers can be quite profitable for the companies that own them. In June 2024, U.S. Senate report found that “Residential treatment centers put profit ahead of children’s safety.”

Many teens struggle. Adopted teens have additional struggles due to having been relinquished, having been separated from their mothers and culture, having experienced adversity prior to adoption—that adversity (including violence, neglect, medical conditions) is often the reason children are in need of adoption, or of safe, functioning families in any case. The American Academy of Pediatricians published a report stating that adopted teens are four times more likely to attempt suicide than non-adopted teens. According to Adoption Competent Mental Health Services for Transracial Adoptees, “adult adoptees, who are overrepresented in counseling and more likely than the national average to struggle with suicidality and complete suicide, commonly seek therapy for adoption related issues that involve depression, anxiety, and self-esteem issues.”

Academic and scientific research has substantiated all this, yet we are still far from the number of adoption-competent therapists that are needed. We are far, as a society, from acknowledging the complexity of adoption, wanting only to see it through a Hallmark Special lens.

What to do? Listen to adoptees, both their lived experience and their professional expertise. Learn about suicide prevention. Share adoption-related research with counselors, therapists, doctors, pastors. For example, share the Adoptee Consciousness Model, as well as the Adoptee-Therapist Directory..

My heart aches at the loss of Biruk Silvers, for his friends and families in the U.S. and in Ethiopia.

Additional Resources:

Research on Adoptees and Suicide by JaeRan Kim, PhD. Blog: Harlow’s Monkey

Coping With Loss From Adoptee Suicide by Lina Vanegas, MSW. Lina’s IG

From United Suicide Survivors International (USSI). I was honored to host this discussion, which is the most-watched USSI webinar:. “Adoption and Suicide Prevention: Adult Adoptees Speak Out

Cam Lee Small on “Why Adoptees Need a New Kind of Village”: TedX Talk

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Let’s “make more space for the adoptee voice, so they can be brought up and witnessed in the light, and be met compassionately with the resources they deserve.” That’s one powerful line of many that were shared by Cam Lee Small, MS, LPC, at his recent TedX Talk, Why Adoptees Need A New Kind of Village.

Cam is multi-faceted: an author (The Adoptee’s Journey: From Loss and Trauma to Healing and Empowerment), a licensed clinician, a transnational transracial adoptee from South Korea, and an advocate for adoptees and for adoption literacy.

His TedX Talk was powerful for me as an adoptive parent, and I believe that may also be true for adoptees and birth/first parents. He is compassionate and insightful, balancing his lived experience with years of professional training and expertise.

In the TedX Talk, he uses anecdotes from adoptee summer camps (sometimes the only places that adoptees see others who look like them and who are all adopted as well) along with powerful recommendations to create that vital village to raise a child.

While noting the variety of adoptee stories and experiences, Cam contends that “adoptees need tools that destigmatize mental health support and honestly address how history, loss, early adversity, and adoption can have an impact on nervous system development, brain and body functioning, racial and ethnic socialization, identity, search and reunion.” He calls for “ethical DNA testing” in the U.S. and around the globe so that people who have been relinquished can find their families. Also needed are “quality language interpretation skills” for when adoptees and those who relinquished them find each other.

All adoptees need access to their own health records and to “targeted health screenings, especially when records are kept from them or are falsified,” as happens so often.

It’s a brilliant talk. Please listen, learn, and share.

Follow Cam on Instagram and LinkedIn.

Quebec Suspends International Adoptions

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Due to human rights and trafficking concerns, the Canadian province of Quebec has suspended international adoptions.

The Montreal Gazette reports that ” ‘Quebec’s decision is part of a global “culture change” in recent years as countries have become aware of serious shortcomings in the way many adoptions are carried out,’ Anne-Marie Piché, a professor in the social work department at Université du Québec à Montréal who studies adoption”

Further, according to the Gazette, “The province said it does not believe the current international system guarantees the rights set out under The Hague Convention, which protects children and their families against the risks of illegal, irregular, premature or ill-prepared adoptions abroad. The moratorium, it added, will be in place while it develops a stronger framework to prevent those practices and also limit adoption failures that result in children entering the child welfare system.”

The Canadian province joins many other entities (both so-called sending and receiving countries) around the globe in suspending, limiting, or ending international adoption, including France, Norway, Flanders, Denmark, Romania, Guatemala, China, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, and Russia. South Korea has substantially decreased the number of children it sends out of country for adoption; its Truth and Reconciliation Commission is reviewing fraud and corruption in hundreds of adoptions.

I’d argue that these government decisions are in tandem with increasing calls for the abolition of adoption.

The government decisions seem largely to be rooted in concern over fraud, corruption, bribery, human trafficking, and commodification of children—none of which should be any part of adoption, yet we have evidence for all that, in many countries: hence, the suspensions or closings.

I realize, of course, that governments can have other reasons to suspend or end international adoptions: embarrassment that their children are leaving their country, fear over what happens to internationally adopted children (abuse, neglect, death), political retribution, and so on.

International adoption is under more scrutiny than ever before.

No one wants children to suffer, die, or languish in orphanages. Suspending or ending adoption, along with the demand for abolition, (a thorough overhaul—many would say end–of the current system), are moving to the forefront of policy decisions. This movement is focused on orphan prevention and family preservation, a close examination of the role of money and privilege in adoption, genuine financial and other resources to families in crisis, equitable access to medical care, education, clean water, and more. The goal is lofty. If we really believe children should be in safe and loving families, it’s the only way to move ahead.

Adoptees Support the Abolition of Adoption?

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Adoption Mosaics’s November 9 “We the Experts”panel will feature adoptees who favor the abolition of adoption.

This has to be among the most complex issues in adoption, which overflows with complexity. It’s not a simple issue nor an easy conversation. I know many adoptees who favor abolition. Some had terrible experiences because of adoption. Some love their adoptive family and hate the adoption industry. Some see adoption’s complicity with capitalism and imperialism, along with white saviorism, as more than enough reason to abolish adoption.

And it’s not because they want children to languish, to be unsafe, to die in orphanages, to be aborted, or to suffer in any way. Ideas like family preservation, adequate resources, legal guardianship, systemic change, the dynamics of power and privilege, organized abandonment, and more, I imagine, will be discussed.

These are my ruminations. The best approach is, of course, to hear from the experts, the adoptees themselves.

This Saturday, November 9, you have the chance to do just that. I will be there. We non-adoptees don’t talk or ask questions or make comments—we agree to listen and learn. Whatever connection you have to adoption, please join this conversation. You can register here.

The notion of abolishing adoption is a tough one for many folks; at the same time, it is increasing in the adoption community. “Abolition” is itself is a term that raises controversy and confusion, along with “reparations.” These words need to be parsed thoughtfully; all have nuance and depth.

I have no doubts the panelists—JinYoung Kim, Lina Vanegas, Marly Osma de Forest, and Schai Schairer—will be passionate, insightful, and challenging. As de Forest says on the Adoption Mosaic IG page, this will be an opportunity “to spend time with other adoptees imagining more expansive, holistic, and trauma-informed practices of care that do not demand severance and possession.”

Full disclosure: I am a consultant at Adoption Mosaic, an adoptee-led, adoptee-centric organization providing resources and support to all members of the adoption constellation.

National Adoptee Awareness Month (Formerly National Adoption Month)

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In 1976, Gov. Dukakis of Massachusetts designated the first week of November as Adoption Week, an effort to increase adoptions from foster care. In 1984, President Ford proclaimed Adoption Week a national event. In 1998, President Clinton declared November as “National Adoption Month.”

The month has thus had many iterations, as have attitudes about it. More recently, the month has been recast as National Adoptee Awareness Month, by Grace Newton (a Chinese adoptee) writing here in Red Thread Broken, by Shane Bouel, an adoptee writing on Medium “Taking Back National Adoptee Awareness Month, and via Astrid Castro, a Colombian adoptee and founder of Adoption Mosaic, speaking on Instagram.

Last November, The Rumpus devoted its November issue to adoptee-focused essays to reclaim National Adoptee Awareness Month.

While those examples are current, this effort to reframe the month has been going on for at least ten years.

In 2014, Korean adoptee Rosita Gonzalez of Lost Daughters created a #flipthescript campaign on Twitter. That campaign generated a significant video in 2014, “Adoptees ‘Flip the Script’ on National Adoption Month,” via (and including) Angela Tucker of The Adopted Life. Full disclosure: I know, love, and admire many of the speakers.

U.S. adoptee Laura Barcella wrote about the video and the efforts to reframe National Adoption Month in the New York Times: “Adoptees Like Me ‘Flip the Script’ on the Pro-Adoption Narrative.”

Be sure also to check out this resource: “Flip the Script: Adult Adoptee Anthology (The AN-YA Project,” described on Amazon as “a dynamic artistic exploration of adoptee expression and experience. This anthology offers readers a diverse compilation of literature and artistry from a global community of adoptees. From playwrights to poets, filmmakers to photographers, essay writers to lyricists —all have joined together inside these pages to enlighten and educate.”

This month, if you are reading and learning about adoption, be sure to see who is speaking: is it an adoptee? Or is it an adoptive parent or adoption agency? Focus on learning from adult adoptees first.

Adoptee Remembrance Day

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Today is Adoptee Remembrance Day, designed to honor and remember adoptees who have died, who have been deported, who are survivors of the Troubled Teen Industry, who are incarcerated, who have been abandoned after being adopted, and those dealing with mental illness and/or substance abuse. We honor and remember all the forms of loss in the adoption community.

I realize there are also often gains in adoption. That aspect is in the forefront of the popular narrative around adoption. The losses are often seen as overstated, ungrateful, or not-to-be-mentioned.

The losses, though, are real. Acknowledging them means that we can see a full picture of adoption, and we can help folks in our community who may be struggling.

In the words of Pamela Karanova, a U.S. adoptee who founded Adoptee Remembrance Day, “While our primary goal is to uplift the legacy of those who are no longer with us, we also seek to share the truth of how adoption has impacted each of us. October 30th is our day of truth, transparency, and remembrance—a day for adoptees around the world to come together and be seen.”

What can you do to observe this day? Pause and reflect on the complexity of adoption, and the losses that should be acknowledged. There are many suggestions here. You can read books, blogs, and articles by adoptees; journal about those who are not with us; if you are in the U.S., contact your U.S. federal representatives asking for support of the Adoptee Citizenship Act; pause for a moment of silence for adoptees who have died; donate to organizations that support adoptees (Adoptees United, Ethiopian Adoption Connection, Adoptees Connect; Adoptees For Justice: there are many).

Adoptee Remembrance Day is “a beacon of awareness, remembrance, and solidarity.” Deep gratitude to those who work tirelessly to help and support adopted people around the globe.

A Podcast With Ethiopian Adoptee Mike Davis, Speaking Out for Citizenship for All International Adoptees

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Mike Davis, a 61-year-old Ethiopian adoptee deported to Ethiopia in 2005, did a wonderful job in talking about his hopes for citizenship for himself and all international adoptees, on a podcast with Unraveling Adoption.

I was honored when Mike asked me to join him on the podcast, hosted by Beth Syverson. (Be sure to check out Beth’s other podcasts and resources on Unraveling Adoption.) I appreciated Beth’s compassion and openness. Mike was focused and strong, for which I give him great credit given the harshness of his situation.

You can help Mike with his legal and medical issues via this GoFundMe. All the money goes to Mike, for legal expenses as well as doctor bills and medicines. It is not easy to be alone in a country far from family and friends, and to have significant health issues. Mike has been working with Adoptees for Justice and their lawyers (thank you!) to, we deeply hope, return home to his wife, children, grandchildren, and friends. Many thanks to all who are able to donate, and for sharing the GoFundMe.

If you want more information on ways to help all international adoptees gain citizenship, check out this blog post.

International adoptees prior to 2000 were not granted automatic citizenship, contrary to what many in and out of the adoption community might think. Some have been deported. Many fear being deported. Please join Mike and others in advocating for citizenship for all international adoptees. Please help Mike and all deported adoptees come back home.