Meet the Parents: The Dark Side of Overseas Adoption
A Midwestern kid's family believes his birth parents put him up for adoption. An Indian couple claim he was kidnapped from them and sold. Who's right?
Listen to an interview with the author.
After hours hunched behind the wheel of a rented Kia, flying past cornfields and small-town churches, I'm parked on a Midwestern street, trying not to look conspicuous. Across the way, a preteen boy dressed in silver athletic shorts and a football T-shirt plays with a stick in his front yard. My heart thumps painfully. I wonder if I'm ready to change his life forever.
I've been preparing for this moment for months in the South Indian metropolis of Chennai, talking to khaki-clad officers in dusty police stations and combing through endless stacks of court documents. The amassed evidence tells a heartrending tale of children kidnapped from Indian slums, sold to orphanages, and funneled into the global adoption stream. I've zeroed in on one case in particular, in which police insist they've tracked a specific stolen child in India to a specific address in the United States. Two days ago, the boy's parents asked me to deliver a message to the American family via their lawyer, seeking friendship and communication. But after traveling across 10 time zones to get here, I'm at a loss for how to proceed.
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The dog-eared beige folder on the passenger seat contains the evidence—a packet of photos, police reports, hair samples, and legal documents detailing a case that has languished in the Indian courts for a decade. There's a good chance that nobody in this suburban household has a clue. I wait until the boy ambles around to the back of the house, then jog over and ring the bell.
An adolescent Indian girl with a curious smile answers the door. "Is your mother home?" I stammer. Moments later, a blond woman comes to the door in jeans and a sweatshirt. She eyes me suspiciously.
On February 18, 1999, the day Sivagama last saw her son Subash, he was still small enough to balance on her hip. Sivagama—who, like many in the state of Tamil Nadu, has no last name—lives in Chennai's Pulianthope slum, a place about as distant from the American Midwest culturally as it is in miles. Children play cricket in bustling streets swathed in the unbearable humidity that drifts in from the nearby Indian Ocean. Despite the hubbub, it's considered a safe area. Unattended kids are seldom far from a neighbor's watchful eye.
So when Sivagama left Subash by the neighborhood pump a few dozen feet from their home, she figured someone would be watching him. And someone was. During her five-minute absence, Indian police say, a man likely dragged the toddler into a three-wheeled auto rickshaw. The next day, Subash was brought to an orphanage on the city's outskirts that paid cash for healthy children.
It was every parent's worst nightmare. Sivagama and her husband, Nageshwar Rao, a construction painter, spent the next five years scouring southern India for Subash. They employed friends and family as private detectives and followed up on rumors and false reports from as far north as Hyderabad, some 325 miles away. To finance the search, Nageshwar Rao sold two small huts he'd inherited from his parents and moved the family into a one-room concrete house with a thatched roof in the shadow of a mosque. The couple also pulled their daughter out of school to save money; the ordeal plunged the family from the cusp of lower-middle-class mobility into solid poverty. And none of it brought them any closer to Subash.
In 2005, though, there was a lucky break. A cop in Chennai heard reports of two men arguing loudly about kidnapping in a crowded bar. Under questioning, police say, the men and two female accomplices admitted they'd been snatching kids on behalf of an orphanage, Malaysian Social Services (mss), which exported the children to unwitting families abroad. The kidnappers were paid 10,000 rupees, about $236, per child.
According to a police document filed in court, the orphanage's former gardener, G.P. Manoharan, specifically confessed to grabbing Subash; records seized from mss show that it admitted a boy about the same age the next day—the same day Nageshwar Rao filed his missing-person report. He was adopted about two years later. The surrender deed, which I reviewed along with similar documents for other kids, is a fraud, police say: The conspirators changed the child's name to Ashraf and concocted a false history, including a statement from a fictitious birth mother.
From 1991 through 2003, note documents filed by Chennai police, mss arranged at least 165 international adoptions, mostly to the United States, the Netherlands, and Australia, earning some $250,000 in "fees."
Assuming the Indian police have their facts straight, the boy they seek has a new name and a new life. He has no memory of his Indian mother or his native tongue. Most international adoptions are "closed," meaning the birth parents have no guaranteed right to contact their child, and the confidentiality of the process makes it difficult to track kids who may have been adopted under false pretenses.
After Subash disappeared, Sivagama fell into a deep depression. Ten years later, she's still fragile, her eyes ringed by heavy dark circles. At the mention of her son's name, she breaks into tears, dabbing at the corners of her eyes with her sari.
"Why should we pay like this," she pleads, "for what criminals started?"
And why would a crowded orphanage conspire to steal children off the streets? Perhaps Subash was viewed as particularly adoptable due to his light skin and good health. In Chennai, hoping to learn more, I negotiate my tiny black Hyundai past an endless stream of lorries, rickshaws, and stray cattle toward the outskirts of the city, where mss is located. It has closed the orphanage and no longer does international adoptions, but still runs several social programs and a school for young children.
I pull up outside the bright pink building, get out, and peek through the wrought-iron gate. A man in a crisp white shirt promptly intercepts me and then introduces himself as Dinesh Ravindranath, a name I recognize from police reports that list him as an accomplice in the kidnappings. He says he has been running mss since his father died in 2006. He's also its lawyer.
Ravindranath tells me the investigation of his organization—which made headlines in India—has been blown out of proportion; he's the real victim here. The police, he alleges, have been using their investigation to extort money from the institution. "The law says that we cannot ask too much about the history of a woman who wants to give up her child to adoption, so we have to accept children on faith," he says.
But surrender deeds obtained by Mother Jones bear the signatures of mss officials alongside those of the suspected kidnappers, who have admitted to handing over multiple children under different aliases. When I press Ravindranath about the fees the suspects told police they'd received from mss, he claims the situation was misconstrued. "We give the women 2,000 or 3,000 rupees [about $47] when they come here out of charity, not as a fee for kidnapping," he says. "This happens everywhere. We are only the scapegoats."
The problems with adoption are certainly widespread. Over the past decade, scandals in Delhi and the Indian states of Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu have exposed severe breaches of adoption protocol and claims by parents who have lost children to foreign families. The promise of lucrative adoption fees motivates orphanages to create a steady supply of adoptable children. (It costs about $14,000 to bring a child to the United States from India, not including the standard $3,500 fee to the orphanage.) In the most egregious cases, once-respected agencies get wrapped up in child trafficking, and well-meaning American families never realize they're not adopting a child—they're buying one.
The scandals aren't limited to India. In 2007, employees at the French charity Zoe's Ark were arrested trying to fly out of Chad with 103 children they claimed were Sudanese war refugees; police later determined that most of the kids had been stolen from families in Chad. In China's Hunan province, a half-dozen orphanages were found to have purchased nearly 1,000 children between 2002 and 2005, many of whom ended up in foreign homes. Last spring, an abc News team discovered that some institutions in the region were still purchasing children openly for $300 to $350.
In 2006, celebrity watchers were riveted by Madonna's adoption, from a Malawi orphanage, of David Banda, a child who was not, in fact, an orphan. More recently, in January, workers from the Utah adoption agency Focus on Children pleaded guilty to fraud and immigration violations; according to a federal indictment, they had imported at least 37 Samoan children for adoption after misleading the birth parents and telling prospective adoptive parents that the kids had been orphaned or abandoned. "This is an industry to export children," says Sarah Crowe, unicef's media director for South Asia. "When adoption agencies focus first on profits and not child rights, they open up the door to gross abuses."
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Author Information
For more information on this case, visit the author's website at http://www.scottcarneyonline.com
I would like to thank Scott
I would like to thank Scott Carney and Mother Jones magazine for shedding light on this far-to-often taboo subject. Children ARE being kidnapped and sold into the adoption business all around the world and nothing is going to change that until the big-business money making aspect is removed from the equation. To quote the article "although it's worth pondering whether any moral statute of limitations would be applied in the case of an American child kidnapped and raised in an Indian slum" - think about this people. Any child kidnapped from the US and sold by an unethical adoption agency to people in another country would be returned to his/her parents.
My heart goes out to Sivagama and Nageshwar Rao - I can't fathom the trauma they are going through.
Good To See This ..
I wish I could say that this article shocked or even surprised me. Sadly it did not. I've heard stories too much like this one before. It is good to see this being brought to larger audience that may been unaware that things like this are happening.
As long as children are reduced to a commodity to be consumed by those with the money to pay for them, this will go on.
I feel for everyone involved, the parents who were robbed of their children the adoptors that were lied to, but most of all for the adoptees that may never know that they did have a loving family that wanted them.
"most of all for the
"most of all for the adoptees that may never know that they did have a loving family that wanted them."
I believe this adoptee will find out. Adoptees are networking with each other, much to the dismay of agencies who work hard to marginalize their experiences or belittle them when they go searching for their origins. All this information is being cataloged and recorded. When this adoptee is of age, he will connect with other adoptees, and eventually he will read this story.
My heart breaks to think of him reading his adoptive mother saying "India does't exist for him". How insensitive, how callous, how typically white-entitled. They had a moral obligation to ensure that India most certainly did exist for him. To erase his name and belittle his origin is emotionally abusive.
This story is
This story is heartwrenching. I've heard of many of these stories, including the Smolins story. One thing I would like to say is that it is very common for adoptive parents to give the child a new name. Sometimes the child wants a new name. Sometimes the name is too difficult for the name to be pronounced properly.
Another slant to that is that a very few of the Indian names actually have a negative connotation in English. No child nor mother would want their child made fun of at school and with friends.
However, what typically happens is the families keep the name given by the orphanage or birthfamily. Sometimes they put this name as the middle name, and give a new American family name as the first name.
I'm an adoptive mother and I have done both. Only one of my children has her birth name as her first name. However, all three of my childreh have beautiful Indian names.
Adoption in the utmost legal form is hard on children. It hurt me when I was leaving India with each of my children to know they would loose their birth language, or for one of my kids, never learn it. The culture, the family interactions are treasures, and my kids and I both only wish that they could have grown up with their birthfamilies so they would not have lost those things.
Each of my children wants to meet and know their birth families, and I only hope that they will be able to do that. I don't however have any idea how to go about finding them from over here in America. I've asked our agencies for information, I've talked to the orphanage directors, and I get nothing. One of the orphanage directors did say that my son would be able to get more information and SEE the records, legal info once he turns 18 years old. We have 6 years to go, and he is hoping the time will move quickly.
I hope and pray that my children's adoptions were legal. If they were not, and we find that out, we I will certainly help my children take legal action.
Thank you to Scott Carney for the detailed story you shared. I only pray that this family will wake up and realize what their child is missing. It will be a great shock, but in the end this child will have the best of both worlds. The parents are affraid that they will loose their son, and as attached as I am to my children, I can understand that fear. However, their son would love to hear from his birthparents, I am sure! Please follow up with this story so we can know the outcome!
I'd like to make a
I'd like to make a suggestion.
Why not make it a legal requirement that all adoption agencies file DNA samples of every single child who comes into an agency, and every child that goes out? As the courts are proving, DNA is the single best identification of any person, plant or animal in the world.
Thank you for this article.
Thank you for this article. It is disturbing to say the least to imagine what would happen if this were a stolen American child adopted in another country – how different many people would feel about this. Would it be acceptable not to return the child to his parents? I think not. As a society we are arrogant enough to believe that a child from another country would be better off raised here regardless of the circumstances. When questions arise about whether a child was stolen from his or her family, we tend to shrug it off because deep down many here believe that, loving family or not, the child is better off here in the land of freedom and plenty.
As an adult adoptee I was very upset to hear the adoptive mother say that India did not exist for her child - how can that be when she is raising three Indian children? It goes to show the multitude of problems with adoption. American parents believe they have a right to these ‘unwanted’ children – a right to turn them into their ‘own’ American children. But is that really best for a child, even if he were a true orphan or abandoned? This child has a memory of his family in India, whether conscious or not and this child has every right to know of his family and his culture at the very least. If he was in fact stolen, he has a right to return to his real family. Wouldn’t a loving parent want their son to know who he is, where he came from, and if he has parents and siblings to have a relationship with them?
As this article suggests, as long as money is involved in adoption, there will be stories like this. I would go a step further and say that as long as we believe a child is better off with more money or affluence than in their own family and culture we will have situations where one family is torn apart in order to create another.
Adoption is a sacred cow in the US. It is brave to tackle a story like this and I thank and commend Scott and Mother Jones for doing so.
Bravo, Scott
Thank you for this brave story.
I'm not sure which of the atrocities this article documents appalls me the most: (1) the kidnapping of children for trafficking in the adoption market, (2) the authorities turning a blind eye, both in the India and abroad, or (3) the narcissism of the adoptive parents who have betrayed their child by raising him as if India doesn't exist and by denying him the right to find the truth about his past.
Meet the parents: the dark side of overseas adoption
Adoption is a sacred cow in the U.S. is good way of putting it. My way is adoption is synonymous with apple pie and the recipe is slow to change. Ethica is a U.S. watch dog organization that believes adoption must be reformed and is concerned that adoptions are ethical. It seems money and hard economic times can be at the root of black market baby stealing, but so is arrogance or ethnocentric thinking in some cases. Thinking the children will be better off in the U.S. The recent convictions of Americans for stealing and selling Samoan children is another horror story. It's hard to believe the four convicted could all go along with the crime. After World War II in impoverished Italy Americans convinced many Italians to send there children to the U.S. to be educated and taken care of until the parents regained economic stability. After a few years the parents indicated it was time to return the children only to learn they were all adopted in closed adoptions. Florence Fischer the founder of the Adoptees Liberation Movement Association made several trips to Italy in the 1970's and 1980's and even appeared on television in Rome to help the parents reunite with the children now adults. The loss and grief suffered by these parents is tremendous.
Our story of child trafficking
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I am so saddened to read this story. My youngest two children were also victims of child trafficking for adoption in Chennai, by an agency with links to MSS. Our children were also taken in the Pulianthope district at the same time, so possibly the same gang. We located our children's Indian mother and uncovered their story. We told our children the truth when they were aged 12 and 13 years old, and we had our first reunion with their other mother, Sunama, the following year. Our children are now nurtured by two families who love them, and our families have built a strong bond. Last year I published a book to tell our story and to raise funds to support Sunama's younger children in India, as she is now a widow. We have proven that it is possible to have a happy ending. I urge this boy's parents to reach out in love and trust. I am confident that gesture will be returned in kind.
http://www.harpercollins.com.au/books/9780732288136/Love_Our_Way_A_Mothers_Story/index.aspx
How can you say you have
How can you say you have proof that there can be a happy outcome? What will your adopted children think when they are adults. Do you think the pain for their Mother has just been miracuously lifted by having some limited contact with the children that were STOLEN from her. You might feel happy with it. Does not mean it was a good result at all!
This adoptive family will
This adoptive family will sure be sorry that they did not act in a respectful way in regards to the parents and the child. If only they recognized that if they would have worked towards a reasonable relationship and allowed access or some sort of custody arrangements they may have saved themselves the reality of some day having to answer to their adoptive son. Obviously they can't keep this information from him forever, there will be a day when the boy understands the further pain and loss that they have caused both the natural parents and the boy.
Their time will come when they see the mistakes in their decision to refuse DNA and relations.
This article is an eye-opening account of how many victims international adoption can create when corruption becomes part of it. Very sad indeed.
Trafficking in children
I know the problem well in Andhra Pradesh where international adoptions were closed in 2001 after several agencies got wrapped up in not so ethical ventures. And so you know my wife and I adopted from Andhra Pradesh.
The problem with child trafficking is extensive for prostitution, adoption, child labor, begging and other purposes. Adoption is by far not the major problem in this. It is one but be real, children are stolen or sold continuously and unless we as a western world take the extreem poverity that 4 billion people live in, it will not stop soon. We sit comfortably by and express our outrage but yet, we do little to solve the underlying problems that cause rise to this horrible abuse. International adoption is not an evil industry even though unicef may want you to believe it is. Children being stolen or sold into prostitution is far far worse. So keep inperspective.
We invest extensively in introducing our child to the culture and network heavily so that the culture is a natural part of his/her future. And we intend to try to find the birth parents at some time through our extense network in AP.
And the other dark side to the abuse. In AP the abusive agencies were "Christian" agencies, not secular agencies. Seems that they believed that saving the children was ok regardless of the method. So do not assume everything is as it seems.
Good Christians an oxymoron
Crusades, Manifest Destiny, child adoption, missionaries, gimme a break. Organized religion is the root of all evil. Too often I witness "good christian" people doing bad things, using "gods will" as the excuse.
Parents, no matter how impoverished, are still human beings. Strip away the facade and we are all the same. I hope Sivagama, & Nageshwar Rao get their son Subash back.
Peace & Love
This is like King Solomon's
This is like King Solomon's story. The birth parents are willing to give him up for a good life for him. But the adoptive parents are thinking only of themselves. The fact that you can erase the pain of the birth parents and you refuse to is perpetuating the evil. This is wickedness!
It's not like the kid doesn't know he's adopted. He's probably thought about the people who gave birth to him a lot. "India doesn't exist for him": that's the joke. As if he cant see his identity reflected in the mirror and in the eyes of everyone who he meets.
Are we so entitled?
How is it that we can actually hear the facts of this story and not scream in horror? How is it that we have become a nation so enarmoured of adoption that we cannot even hear the truth?
These parents were not willing to give this child away for a better life.
This child was not endanger of being sold for sex or slavery.
This child was stolen for adoption.
The adoption was made for profits destined for dirty hands.
The separated family is willing to do what is least disruptive for the boy and still have full parental rights to do so! They never relinquished him.
The adoptive family is doing a great disservice to that boy by refusing to find out his truth. They do not have the right to decide that.
And one day, they will have to look him in his no deniying he is Indian eyes and explain how when his distrought, grieving family finially found him after years of searching, they were too afraid to even give them some peace of mind and heart.
But let's all keep this in perpective. Let's console ourselves with words like "At least he wasn't sold to prostitution" and he has a much "better" life than he would have in poverty stricken India. Plus, his adoptive family loves him too much. They had the "adoption bug".
And no, India doesn't exist (except everytime this boy looks in the mirror and sees India looking back at him)
How did we get so entilted that somehow this all flies and the simple facts can be dismissed? How did we become a nation that think it is OK to take other peoles wanted and loved children from them? When did we begin to endorse kidnapping and family separations?
Oh, right we call it adoption and that makes everything OK.
Claudia Corrigan D'Arcy
www.MusingsoftheLame.com
Thank you for this story.
Thank you for this story. Tragic though it is, those of us who have been trying to get word out for years aren't surprised. Unfortunately, until very recently, various forms of censorship in mainstream media have silenced any voice that did not properly feed the "sacred cow." Adoption money has devoured internet domain names that contain the words "adoption," etc., making less-than-glowing perspectives difficult to find. From Lifetime TV to Oprah endorsements, from libraries to bookstores, it's damned tough to find information that even begins to brush upon ethical concerns in adoption at large, let alone on the international front.
I worked for an international adoption agency and was appalled by what I saw: Children who truly needed homes languished in orphanages year after year while "healthy newborn" after "healthy newborn" was promptly found, procured, and transported to a U.S. couple to the tune of large sums.
Adding insult, more often than not, the "parenting plan" (as noted on homestudies) indicated that the child would be transfered into full-time daycare at six weeks old. Six weeks old. Separation trauma/anxiety, bonding and attachment issues, etc. were overlooked in the name of the almighty dollar and Christianization.
The only positive thing I noted with the agency I worked for was that they strongly encouraged adopting couples to expose adopted children to their native cultures. (That doesn't mean they did, however, as "exposure" is subjective.) India does indeed exist for this child and in this child. In extinguishing his birth country and family, they are forcing him to extinguish a part of himself.
In any other context, this would be called what it is: abduction and trafficking. Somehow, when we relegate human beings to "angels" and "miracles," we allow ourselves to become anesthesitized by our own arrogance.
The domestic infant adoption system here in the US is also riddled with corruption.
Resource Allocation
This is truly a terrible case. It's a shame that the international treaty is so weak, and that American nonprofits have to rely on paperwork done overseas, and aren't able to check up on each adoption in person. There should really be better protections for children everywhere.
I do wonder, Mr. Carney, how you decided to devote your time and energy to adoption.
Are you aware that Americans adopted 308 children from India last year? http://adoption.state.gov/country/india.html
Meanwhile, some 12.6 million Indian children are engaged in hazardous occupations, 40% of sex workers go into prostitution before the age of 18, and 45% of girls are forced to marry in childhood. http://www.unicef.org/india/children_3220.htm
Interesting that you've invested so much to uncovering adoption abuses.
re: resource allocation
Dear Anonymous,
It's true that there are terrible issues with human rights in India and the rest of the world. Children are sexually abused, sold into slavery and forced to work in dangerous conditions at early ages. And it is important for reporters to allocate time to those issues. If you look at my website http://www.scottcarneyonline.com you will find that I do not only focus on adoption problems in India, but a wide range of stories from illegal clinical trials, to acid violence, gender disparity, organized crime and pollution.
But just because there many problems in India, does not mean that this story of corruption in the adoption system should not be covered. In fact, there is a large and vocal community of adoption activists--many former adoptees themselves--who are trying to raise awareness of systemic problems in the adoption industry--from sensational issues like kidnapping, and fraud to the disturbing implications of confidentiality at any cost. I encourage you to find out more, one place to start is http://www.adultadoptees.org
further information?
My husband and I are planning to adopt (though not necessarily from India). We are obviously NOT looking to adopt children who are kidnapped or sold. This article is terrifying. Any suggestions as how we could proceed toward adoption without taking the chance of being responsible for ruining people's lives by kidnapping their child?
RE: Further Information
As an adoptive parent of wonderful twin girls, I can make an absolute recommendation as to how to adopt and know everything is on the 'up-and-up'. Simply, adopt from your own neighborhood.
Although my heart goes out to the thousands of children who legitimately need a place to call home throughout the world, Americans tend to forget the over 100,000 children in foster care throughout the United States that are eligible for adoption.
Not only is it, to me, being a responsible member of our own American society (and no, I am not isolationist), but it is also significantly cheaper. Adopted children are automatically covered by Medicaid until at least the age of 18, and special needs children often come with a monthly subsidy payment to help support their care.
I get somewhat distraught when Angelina's or Madonna's or (insert other Hollywood star here)'s foreign adoptions generate so much publicity, as we have children in our own backyard who are being ignored, and additionally, are taxing the financial resources of our social welfare system.
So, call your local Department of Family Services, or visit www.adoptuskids.org, and provide a forever home to a very deserving child.
Your adoption question
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Dear anonymous:
Your question about how to ensure our child has not been trafficked is difficult to answer. There are no guarantees when it comes to international adoption.
Still, you can minimize the likelihood of trafficking by seeking a special needs child. My wife and I have adopted one child and are adopting another; both have mild special needs that are not easily correctable in their home country. Foreign orphanages are not seeking these children (many times due to the extra costs of care). I recommend you look at children with cleft palates or similar disabilities.
Thank you to Scott Carney
Thank you to Scott Carney for a very well-written article. This is just so heartbreaking, though unfortunately all too true. I don't know which is more sickening here--the adoptive parents narcissism and entitlement (the adoptive mother's statement of "India doesn't exist" for this boy is especially appalling); the kidnapping and continued child trafficking that exists in international adoption; the fact that there remain so many cases out there in which this has happened and nothing is being done; or the slow as molasses "authorities" handling of these types of situations. I am an adoptive parent to 3 children born in South Korea and it angers me greatly that more is not being done to stop child trafficking in international adoption. Yes, I am well aware of the money issue and how big of a role it plays in all this. Still, I feel we all should be essentially "shouting from the roof-tops" to call attention to this to bring movement to stop child trafficking in adoption. The rigidity of the adoptive parents in this particular story and their refusal to even have contact with the boy's Indian family should not be allowed by the courts. It is NOT in the best interest of the child, and the courts should ensure that everything possible be done in the best interest of the child, regardless of what the adoptive parents wishes are. I hope and pray that Nageshwar Rao and his wife will be able to have contact with their son very soon. It is also my hope and prayer that all kidnapped children sold for adoption will be located and be able to at the very least have contact with their birth parents. My final hope and prayer about this is that all adoptive parents who find out that their child(ren) were in fact not legitimately relinquished but were kidnapped and sold to them--will think about what is in the best interest of the child(ren) and will establish contact, etc with the birth family. Julia and Barry Rollings example is an excellent one which we can all learn from and which we all NEED to learn from. Unfortunately, when I review this "wish list," as it were--it looks very unrealistic. How sad that is, indeed.
Illegitmate adoption
I too was adopted without my mother's consent or knowledge. I am now 46 and have known only since I was 31 that I was adopted underhandedly.
Check out my blog at http://pushpaduncklee.wordpress.com to see my story.
I hope the best for this family and the child. It is the child that gets trapped in the middle with dual identities...
i think alot of you are
i think alot of you are being a bit preachy towards the parents and have clearly little empathy. It is NOT the parent's fault that this child was kidnapped nor should it be expected that they drop everything with regards to their lives to re-connect the child with the natural parents. Putting yourself in their shoes is important before you make a rash, emotive response. Coming from a journalistic background I find that the author of the article has written the piece for a emotive response and was prob quite judgemental in his approach towards the parents and the way he wrote the piece. When looking at it from the parents postion it is clear this would have shocked them and caused grief for them. The intial stages of grief are normally denial and then anger. Looking at this from all angles and including the child's best interest it is clear that no one else here is to blames besides the kidnappers and orphanges and in some ways the poilce that do little about this and just cry ' what can i do'. The parents are completely blameless here and to take one sentence that the writer has used in the article ref to 'the child does not even know india' amd making sweeping judgements from this is just plain dumb. In time hopefully thier attitude will change if indeed the child had been kidnapped. It is not a 'must' that all parent who adopt have to keep links with biological parents and cultural. It is prob in the best interets of the child and a healthy approach to do so but it is not a given. Sure the biological parents could insist they get thier child back but could they ? And would that be what the child wants or in the child's best interests ??? Let me conclude by saying that this is awful sittuion and feel for all those involved. If it was my child i would be emotive too and am unsure what i would want to do. Give the parents some time and try not to be so quick to make sweeping judgements on americans (i am australian) and the parents as this is not their fault. To the biological parents, i feel their grief and once again have no idea what they are going through and the injustice of the sitution but once again do not blame the adoptive parents as that would be just plain ignorance.
You are right
They really need to take it slow. Truly you don't really know what the natural parents motives are no matter what they say now. They are represented by someone who may be trying to make money of the adopted parents. I would tell the child about his natural parents and I would let them receive picture of him. Let them see that he is OK and being raised they way they would be proud. Its to late to put him back in India slums when he wasn't raised any longer. When the child reaches 18 yrs and if he wants to him them it should be up to him. Right now is not the time to be shifting this kid around.
@Michael Slater
If it was my child i would be emotive too. But you know what? I know exactly what I'd do. Because I know better than to make a situation like this about ME. My child had a life before me - and I'm not so ego-driven as to pretend that life started for him the day I got referral papers and a photo in the mail. To turn a blind eye to that kind of information would be to disrespect HIM.
yes it is difficult on the
yes it is difficult on the adoptive parents, but for them to assume it is best for their child to not know any of the details surrounding his adoption is fairly callous. when he gets older and asks, what will they say? "you were unwanted in India, so we saved you" or somethign that gets that message across.
i hope they come to their senses and allow for some contact with the boy's birth family.
Incorrect. It is exactly the
Incorrect. It is exactly the ignorance of the Adopters that leads to these situations. Anyone with a questioning mind and a computer would be able to uncover the mountains of evidence and reports on IA all over the world, not just India. Every country that has participated in IA has closed adoption at one stage or another because of the corruption. Ignorance is bliss for western adopters!
Re: i think a lot of you are
I think you have to be "a bit preachy" to parents who would deny a child his birthright. This type of thinking is exactly what needs to change. The most important person in this story is the child. The child with no power, to whom terrible things were done. Every person is entitled to grow up in the family who bore him. That right was taken away, first by the kidnappers, secondly by the orphanage and now by the adoptive family.
"India doesn't exist for him" indeed. When he is a young adult and out in the world without the borrowed privilege of his white parents, India will come crashing down on him. To pretend that isn't so, does him a great injustice. If the duty of any parent is to prepare the child for living in the world independently, then these parents are failing miserably.
By the way, I am an adoptive parent of two girls from China. Both of my girls are from Hunan, one from the time and place that makes it possible she, too, was trafficked. I'm doing everything I can to find out if this was the case, which is very difficult.
When I think about the child I now consider "mine" could be taken away from me, I feel sick. But then I think of how her original mother would have felt having a small baby taken away and I feel even sicker on her behalf. This is not all about me and my feelings. There are two or more other people, who, though brown skinned, deserve my respect and empathy. To be raised in the west, to be raised by "rich" people, to be raised by "Christians", to be raised by white people, is not inherently any better than being raised where you were meant to be, in your family of origin.
I'm sure none of us who set out to adopt, thought that our desire to build a family, coupled with the desire to help a child without a family, would lead to this. But the fact is that there are very few healthy newborns in the world who need adoptive homes. Prospective adoptive parents need to wake up and realize that your desire for the "ideal" child is fueling babies being stolen or purchased for your desire. Most of the time, the education that PAPs do for themselves pre-adoption is limited to which programs are fastest and cheapest and occasionally whether the agency they want to work with is corrupt. Its not until these children are placed in our homes and we come to care about them beyond the fact that they are "ours" that most of us educate ourselves on these hard facts.
Bottom line is, one day our kids will be adults. Very pissed off adults. And if you want a continued relationship with them, tell them the truth and treat them and their original families with respect. They deserve it.
I can imagine this boy
I can imagine this boy deciding to do some on line research about adoptions from India, reading this very article and recognizing himself in the story. He then wonders why his adoptive parents lied to him and protected themselves, not him, from investigating what may have been a link to his birth family. He wonders how his adoptive parents could ever understand who he is if they would prevent him from this link and if they have pretended that 'India does not exist for him" when it is part of who he is, part of his self-identity whether it is embraced with love or avoided with ignorance. If his a-parents have been so deceitful about these matters critical to his core being, what else have they lied about...their love? their family? With this betrayal, he tried to make sense of his relationship with his a-parents and finds he cannot create a loving honest relationship built on lies and leaves their lives forever when he moves from home to attend college. Is this what his a-parents want? Their sense of 'white priviledge' and parent-controlling-child power is bordering on abusive. They are dishonest with their son and their fear. This will eat away at their family. I hope they read this article and these comments and learn about adoptive families who connect with birthfamilies in homecountries to create a sense of wholeness for their child. I would jump at the chance to be able to support my daughter in meeting her birth family. We have searched and searched in her country of origin without success. Her yearning to know is beyond pain. In my love for her, I would learn to handle my own fears. We always tell our kids that we have enough love to share with however many children we have....why can we not trust our children to be able to love however many parents they have?
Adoption
I don't blame the parents who adopted the child. You don't know how this will really effect him. I would wait til is he at least 18 yrs old. Than if he wants to contact his family than let him. I tell people who are adopted to be careful what they wish for. Sometimes it doesn't come out the way you think. My husband was adopted from Germany. When he was an adult and we were stationed overseas we had a German friend help us find his natural mother. We did. She was living in the states. A few years later he met her and his half sister. They shared different fathers. She was very proud of my husband and all his progress in life. His half sister was jealous. He tried to tell his mother not to compare them because she is making it difficult for him to have a relationship with. Well after a couple of years we stopped having anything to do with either of them. What you want and what you get is usually very different from reality. I wish all the best. But give it time.
A bigger picture
For the record, I have two beautiful children adopted here in the United States, I have worked with several orphanages in Africa and am involved with a non-profit organization that helps the 'children left behind' in Vietnam, Eastern Europe and Africa.
This article makes it easy to slide into the emotion and heart wrenching agony of the birth parents and to scorn and riddle American ignorance which is exactly how media prevents us from seeing the bigger picture. Instead, we take opinion as truth and announce emotion as reality, extrapolating one incident onto many.
International adoption is the savior of thousands and thousands of children who would otherwise be doomed into poverty and the life denying existence it provides. I agree, there are children that fall through the cracks of the system as reported in the article. But it has to be said that most do not. Having worked in an orphanage in Kenya, a country where international adoption was shut down because of such reporting of a 'few' incidences, and having seen the despair that arose when these children were denied any chance, I cringe when I read this. I won't write what I have seen but I can honestly say that the pain is real and huge in these countries.
The countries who are still open to adoption need to stay that way. Reducing adoption expenses and fees will not help them stay open, will not motivate or make it possible for those who want to help. The article was so focused on the money it forgot to mention that many many organizations use these fees to help other children. That they use these fees to run orphanages, to feed homeless children and to provide medical services. Adoption is complicated and takes a lot of energy and time.
I'm not saying the system is perfect. I am saying that there is a mountain of good happening, even great, and we need to recognize this and substantiate it before we decide how to 'revamp' the system so others don't get a chance at the west riches. Maybe this might be the authors next article? It won't do as well though.
Paging Dr. Solomon
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Isn't it interesting the way so many adoptive parents are totally incurious about the origins of their children? You know, most people who can will pursue their own roots. Why is it so important to cut off the roots of the children who are taken into the home? Could it be that the adoptive parents have entered a fantasy world? I know that there is comeuppance awaiting when the children might not just reject their own backgrounds as too poor and too embarrassing, but may also slough off the adoptive parents who taught them how to do this.
As for the Indian case, it is a maxim of the law that where property is concerned, you cannot "hold of a thief". And as we know, where US kids are kidnapped, no matter who winds up with them, they do not get to keep them if this is discovered, no matter how ignorant they were of the crime. This would also apply to diamond necklaces.
What would Solomon do? I think the fair thing is to admit that a kidnapping took place, that the child was beloved in a poor Indian village, never rejected or sold, and that this tragedy should be a part of that child's identity. Sooner or later, this truth will come out. What to do? Make life in India better for the child's family, which should also be, to some degree, adopted.
I can see this from all
I can see this from all sides of the story. The grief of the birth parents is palpable. I also think that Mr. Slater is correct in reminding us that we should consider the purpose of a journalist in writing this story the way he did and why on earth he decided he was the right person to meet with the family - he even mentions himself that it was supposed to go through an attorney. We sometimes forget that journalists have agendas. That is clearly the case here, and it's not just to share "unbiased" news. I am really disturbed that so much venom is being shot at the adoptive parents, simply based on this one reporter's article. Maybe the outcome would have been different had he not just showed up on their doorstep one day and totally devastated them! I also think that the parents are trying to do what they think is best for the child, and that they are feeling grief, fear, and anger. There was probably a better way for the family to be approached. Who knows what the real context of these parents comments were!!! I would just encourage us to focus more on the real problem here, which is people kidnapping children for money. They are the bad guys. Where are all the posts lambasting them for what they did??? Instead, people are ranting and raving about the adoptive parents who are just trying to do what they think is best. We do not know if they have found ways to keep the children in touch with their culture. We do not know anything at all about them really. Read every article with a grain of salt and consider the source. I don't really trust a journalist who would put his own interest in writing a story ahead of compassion and caring for those involved - and that is exactly what he did by showing up on their doorstep. How cruel!!!!! There had to be a better way if he really cared about connecting this kid with his family. And by the way, we do not KNOW that he is connected with the family in India.
re: I can see this from all (Agenda)
Dear Anonymous,
I think you are right that that the comments here have thrown a fair amount of vitriol onto the adoptive family in America. The truth is that they ARE good people trying to do the best for their son, and they are deathly afraid of him either being taken away from them, or the possible emotional fallout he will feel if he discovers that he was kidnapped, not abandoned by his birth parents. My heart goes out to them as they are faced with the incredibly painful decision of searching for the truth. As you point out, there is still some uncertainty about whether the child they adopted is, in fact, the kidnapped Subash. And while a DNA test could resolve the issue, they are still faced with a complex and frightening situation.
There are two things that I would like to address in your comment specifically. The first is my agenda as a journalist. My goal in writing this is to highlight a problem with international adoptions that exists perpetually under the radar, and yet threatens the identities of hundreds, if not thousands of adopted children around the world. For the most part we, as Americans, view adoptions uncritically as selfless actions that pull children out of depressing and dangerous circumstances and into loving homes. And much of the time (as an adoption agent on this board points out) that is exactly what happens. But the sad fact is that when criminal elements get involved in the adoption industry the poster children for poverty and ill health stay in those sad, overcrowded cribs, while healthy, marketable children move easily through the adoption stream. Money makes this happen. If it was possible to factor that out of the equation then the world would be better for it. So, if I had an agenda, that would be it: tell the world about the problem, and hope something changes. The best way for me to put that story forward is to tell the truth about what I have seen in my six months of research. I present as much evidence as a I can in a relatively long, (but still far too short), space and let the readers come to their own conclusions. Hopefully, this article is enough to get interested people to look deeper into adoption problems, maybe do their own investigations, or network with adoption activists who know far more than I do about the situation.
Finally, I'd like to address the question of how best I might have approached the adoptive parents. It was a horribly difficult thing to do, but of all the options out there, it was the only one that made any sense to me at the time. I struggled with sending e-mails, making a phone call or a letter and couldn't think of a way that both represented Nageshwar Rao and Sivagama's search for their son and still had the necessary compassion for the adoptive family who are good people stuck in a bad position. Phone calls and e-mails are too easy to ignore. I had to go in person. It wasn't easy for them, or for me as a reporter, but it was the best option I could come up with. You wrote that you thought that there "had to be a better way". I'm not sure that there was.
Thankyou Fund for Investigative Journalism
My heart goes out to both families of this young boy.
quotations
What is it with quotations from the article and commenters on this site? The article clearly quotes the adoptive mother as saying, "To him, India does not exist." Commenters have pointed out how this attitude attempts to delete the child's Indian heritage which is recorded in his face and must be reflected in the expressions of everyone who meets his eye in Middle America. Commenter Michael Slater above seems to think the adoptive mother made a much less effacing comment.
Methinks thou dost protest too much, Michael. Certainly the adoptive parents have a lot to absorb and must make a difficult choice about whether and how to break the disturbing news to their son (and whether to pursue any similar investigations in respect of their older adopted children). It is clear that their choice, for the time being, is not to rock the boat of their established family unit. It is equally clear that this decision is a denial of reality and will only make the pain more acute when the truth comes out. There's nothing wrong with people pointing this out too!
P.S. Any relation to the cricketer? I'm Australian too.
International Adoption
Dear Scott and readers,
The Guatemala Human Rights Commission, in conjunction with Virginia Commonwealth University, will be leading a delegation to Guatemala in August to understand the problem of Violence Against Women. Over 5,500 women and girls have been killed since 2001 in Guatemala. As one component of the delegation, we will be looking at adoption and how it can lead to violence against women, from abductions to killings. Anyone interested in a better understanding of this problem is welcome to join us.
Please visit our Web site for further info: www.ghrc-usa.org
Thank you.
Honestly. You have to ask
Honestly. You have to ask whether this boy's parents (not "birth parents", PARENTS) are lying? It's India. They're living in a poverty from which they will likely never recover, and economically it's easier to be poor without kids, or with one less child. If they didn't love this boy very, very much, they wouldn't be demanding him back. If they just wanted a son and didn't already have one, they have more realistic options than pick a fight with an American family they'll likely never meet: make a baby themselves, or kidnap someone else's baby boy if their morals run along those lines. Never mind any forensic evidence, how about a little common sense?
This isn't the first story you've run about international adoption where the privileged rich white person waxes philosophical about kidnapping. Know why they're adopting internationally? Because at least seven times out of ten in the U.S., the real mother didn't want to give her baby or older child away. Because real mothers finally wised up to their legal rights and got outraged and began fighting back. Not that it's done a lot of good. I'm suspicious, for instance, that more white children than black are removed from homes for ill treatment, since they would be more in-demand for adoption. Nearly every time I hear a tale about a child who was not removed from his home and was later killed by his parents, it's a child of color. Nearly. Every. Time. And nearly every time I hear a story from a real mom who's lost her child for stupid reasons--where any reasonable court would have kept the family together, had Child Protective Services actually honored the parents' constitutional rights and allowed them a trial before sentencing--the family has been white. And perfect white newborns are in the most demand for adoption in the U.S., which is why white women are targeted by the anti-abortion movement. (If this were really about the life of a child, anti-choicers wouldn't be OK with abortion in the case of rape or incest. Some of them aren't, but most of them are.) I'm not going on a racial supremacist rant here, by the way--it is, rather, racial supremacism which leads white kids to be in greater demand, since it's led to greater poverty among people of color, who then can't afford to take care of their own. Women of all races in this country AND their kids would be well-served if Mother Jones or any other major publication would investigate these matters and see if my suspicions are correct.
Anyway, real moms gaining more rights or learning about their legal rights--we can't have that. So baby-stealers turned to other countries instead, where they could feel all heroic about "saving babies" from "a horrific life"--one their own country likely exacerbated with its abysmal foreign policy. Such lovely, enlightened racist undertones there, and I'm ashamed to note progressives fall for this crap too, but not really surprised after all I've seen. It's easier to put someone else's happiness and mental health on the line stealing their kids from them than it is to put your own butt on the line helping them improve their living conditions. That's true here in the U.S., where progressives sold us poor moms down the river with "welfare reform" and an anemic response to public attitudes about welfare rather than a real effort to change them. And it's true overseas as well. Conservative Christians do more overseas than progressives do to help the poor and they're still amazingly destructive. You could do better... why don't you?
Meanwhile... You know, I've had some artistic talent all my life. It's nothing to write home about, but enough to get people's attention when I choose to exercise it. If it were an object someone could take away from me, the fact that I have not chosen to make my living as an artist thus far would doubtless inspire some unartistic person who envied me to take my talent away and claim it as their own, excusing it with a "Oh, you weren't using it anyway, it's better off with me." But they can't do that, so they have to do the sensible, reasonable thing: find out where their talents DO lie, and pursue the development of those instead. People take one another's babies in this cruel world because they can. If they suddenly couldn't, they would have to come to terms with the fact that they can't have children (or, if they can, would have to learn to be content with their own) and find something else to do with all those resources, time, and energy. It astounds me that Americans who don't want maybe $90 per $1000 a year of their tax money going into welfare programs are willing to spend $14,000 to take someone's child away instead. I thought our collective entitlement complex was bad anyway, but my God, we've lost our damn minds.
Overseas Adoption
Why are so many Americans looking overseas to adopt a child? That is the core question. Are overseas children perceived to be "cuter" or "smarter" or "genetically superior" to American children.?
Re: Overseas Adoption
Anonymous, it's the process of adoptiong children from foster care that is so difficult. If it were easier, a lot more people would do it. It has nothing to do with the children.
http://www.nacac.org/adoptalk/reallyfeel.html
From the link above:
Agencies do not handle the first call well. Parents find that their initial contact with an agency is the most difficult aspect of the process for two reasons. First, many find it hard to get a worker to answer their call. They get lost in voice mail, are transferred from person to person, and leave messages that are never returned. Many focus group participants had to make several calls before getting an information packet or application form.
"I think my initial call was in July and it took about six weeks for them to call back… I think the only reason I did get a call back was because I made a second phone call."
"I didn't get the information until maybe the third call. Then I actually came down here to get the forms… I just feel like I've really had to push."
Second, many who did speak with someone were frustrated by their initial contact. These callers, who had little or no knowledge of how adoption works, made their first call to seek general information and ran into a system bent on preemptively weeding out those who aren't interested in hard-to-place children.
"It was like trick questions, like 'Are you interested only in an infant?' and I would say that would be my hope, for a child who has had less trauma, and then they would snap, 'Well you will never get an infant.' She was a b—— about it. She didn't say 'Would you consider an older child?' I am a human being; I can be flexible."
I feel sorry for both parents
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My heart goes out for both the parents. The Indian parents who have lost their child and the kind-hearted American parents who adopt children from poor countries. It would have been better if the American parents had taken the initiative and conducted DNA test and if proven, establish a communication with the Indian parents. It would only hurt the kid badly if he is suddenly made to live in India. His Indian parents know this.
It is, as Scott says, as many miles as the distance between two places in culture and lifestyle.
I can say this because my home is near Pulianthopu, Chennai and currently living in US.
I appreciate Scott Carney and Mother Jones for their effort in bringing these atrocities to light. Politicians and Police in India need to be ashamed to get them to do anything.
adoption
As this article shows, and many others like it, international adoption is fraught with risks and abuse. It would be quite difficult for the adoptive parents to figure out for *sure* if their child was not kidnapped or obtained under spurious circumstances in another country whose language they do not speak. At the same time there is some willful ignorance occurring here, as well some adoptive parents choose international adoption precisely because they feel it will keep the birth parents at length and prevent them from reclaiming their child.
As an adoptive parent who adopted domestically I sought an open adoption because I wanted to try to avoid the possibility that our child's natural mother was coerced in any way. The woman who chose us to raise her baby didn't want to meet us, but I still think that people who are concerned about the ethics of adoption should look more closely at domestic situations.
I'm not saying that someone who is placing their baby for adoption in the U.S. is always making that choice freely--certainly not free from the interpersonal problems, poverty or other issues that might be causing her not to raise her child. Yet because they live in the United States, often speak English and have some experience with the U.S. legal system people like the ones who lost their child in this article would have a greater chance of reclaiming their baby, American women coerced into placing their baby have a greater chance of contesting the adoption. Not that these things don't happen, but by reducing the power differential between adoptive parents and birthparents you reduce the risk of abuse.
You also increase the chance that your domestically adopted child will have contact with their birthparents or be reclaimed by them. And this risk is the reason why so many adoptive parents and others resist adoption reform.
PS. Many people believe there are very few babies available for adoption in the U.S. That is not entirely accurate. According to our agency there is no shortage of babies for adoption domestically, there is only a shortage of white babies. (this doesn't even account for other non infant options.)
Proof of Identity Needed
I'd like to make a suggestion.
Why not make it a legal requirement that all adoption agencies file DNA samples of every single child who comes into an agency, and every child that goes out? As the courts are proving, DNA is the single best identification of any person, plant or animal in the world.
The behaviour of the
The behaviour of the adoptive family digusts me. How can they be so selifsh?
"Why are so many Americans looking overseas to adopt a child? That is the core question. Are overseas children perceived to be "cuter" or "smarter" or "genetically superior" to American children.?"
In my most cynuical moments I think it is becuase it's much harder for their parents to track them down if their child is overseas.
Shorter waiting periods
The waiting period, at least for a healthy infant, is on the order of years. The international bidding war for adoptable American infants excludes all but the wealthy from adoption. Parents can now appear in public with children of another race without courting the wrath of Jim Crow or charges of kidnapping, so they do so. National boundaries get crossed because every adoptable, healthy American infant of any color is in demand while foreign babies are readily available, if by nefarious means.
Adoption Bug?
as someone who is considering adoption, this was one of the most saddening, enlightening and frightening articles I've read . I'm of Indian origin and now live in the US and many aspects of both "sides" of the story ring true. Of course, the ones to be held accountable are those who kidnap and sell kids.
But, I'm curious to understand what the adoptive parents mean by "having the adoption bug". Adoption is not a fad, as I'm sure they understand having adopted three kids.
This is horrific.
As an AP this is my worst nightmare. And as an AP I am appalled at this child's adoptive parents that they are not taking their heads out of the sand and facing reality. They are worried 'if' their son finds out? Well he WILL find out, and he will likely hate them, with good reason. His family in India is devastated and all they are asking for is friendship and contact? What an incredible opportunity to take a horrible situation and make it even a little bit right. Shame on these people.
No prospective adoptive
No prospective adoptive parent, not one, wants to see a child taken from his birth parents and sold into adoption. But let's not forget that there are legitimate orphans throughout the world who have a very dismal future with poverty, early death, poor nutrition, no education, and subject to illegal child labor and sex trafficking.
How about not assuming that every overseas adoption falls into the premise that the adopted child was bought? Given Unicef's 2007 statistics that there are 132 million orphans in the world, with at least 13 million kids of that number who have lost both parents, there are great odds that most adoptions are legitimate. International children are given up for the same reason that American parents have given up their children for generations: for the child to have a better life than they could provide.
Are there bad actors in the field of adoption? Sure, just like there are bad and incompetent people almost everywhere, some also which yield tragic results: alcohol impaired driving killed 12,998 people on American roads in 2007. Do you believe that there were that many illegal adoption cases that year? Perhaps we should ban alcohol to ensure that no family suffers the death of people they love (including innocent children) to drunk driving.
Reputable adoption agencies work towards making sure adoptions are ethical. Bad actors in adoption should be prosecuted and punished. Writing about inflammatory cases that allude to overseas adoptions being suspect – without offering a balanced view of legitimate adoption cases -- serves only to cast aspersions on all international adoptions.
Let us not deny children, who truly have no future, the right to a loving home and a life of basic human rights.
