Parents that no longer wish to care for the children they’ve adopted can find people online willing to take them off their hands, an investigation by Reuters and NBC News has found. The handoffs are done quickly, simply, and with little or no government oversight. In most cases, the children being relocated were adopted from overseas.
Handling Disrupted Adoptions
Nearly a quarter of a million children have been adopted from overseas since the late 1990s, and it’s estimated that approximately 10 percent, or 24,000 adoptions, are “disrupted” (or “failed”) adoptions. Parents who were not prepared to care for the children, many of whom have emotional or physical problems not previously disclosed, have found a way out of their situation. They “advertise” the child in certain online groups and pages, hoping that someone out there will offer a new home. Sometimes parents rehome their adopted children with people they have communicated with only briefly over the internet.
Since the investigation, Yahoo! has taken down six groups that people used for this purpose, saying that they violated the terms of service agreement. Facebook, however, did not take down a similar page, which remains active.
It’s a fast and easy process. The adoptive parents, who feel they have no other recourse and may fear calling social services, have found a solution to their problem. The new parents have found a way to circumvent the expensive and time-consuming legal adoption process that might have denied them the right to adopt in the first place. But for the children, the process isn’t always so beneficial.
Trauma for Rehomed Children
One child, Nora Gateley, was adopted from China in 1999 and came to live in Florida with her new adoptive parents. One day, her father told her they were going on a road trip, and he dropped her off at the home of Tom and Debra Schmitz. The Schmitzes had many adopted and rehomed children – at one time, as many as 17 – and Nora said that the conditions in the house were abusive. She said she was forced to dig her own grave, and that Debra took away Nora’s leg brace–needed due to polio she contracted as a child–as punishment. A visiting nurse suspected something and alerted authorities. Debra Schmitz was sentenced to six months in jail in 2006 on charges of child abuse and trafficking.
Another child, Quita, was adopted from Liberia by the Puchallas and given up to Illinois couple Calvin and Nicole Eason as a teenager. Although Quita’s adopted mother had never met the Easons before, she thought that they seemed nice and left Quita with them, promising to check in on her. When she discovered that Quita did not show up to school, authorities were alerted and the Easons were traced to New York. Quita stated that the couple made her sleep in their bed and that they had pornography. Quita was sent alone on a bus back to the Puchallas in Wisconsin, while the Easons were let go with no charges against them.
Lack of Government Oversight of Rehoming
The formal adoption process takes months or years, costs upwards of tens of thousands of dollars, and can be emotionally taxing to the families involved. “Private rehoming,” on the other hand, avoids these downsides by going outside the law. People who might not have passed the thorough background checks during the adoption process are able to get a child because parents are so desperate to find a new home for them.
Often, new parents do not legally adopt the child, but become legal guardians through a simple Power of Attorney. The Power of Attorney must be notarized, but it does not have to be on file with any government agency. It can allow the new parents to enroll a child in school and receive government benefits.
Fortunately, there is an agreement called the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC), which requires parents to notify authorities if they transfer their child to a home in a different state. Unfortunately, the agreement is rarely enforced, and the protocols are unclear. As in the case of Quita, described above, the child was simply returned to her adoptive parents, and that was that. Although she was taken across state lines, no charges were brought against either set of parents. There’s nothing to stop adoptive parents or rehoming parents from doing it again.
Nora and Quita are both in their early 20s now and are no longer living with the people who adopted them.
1 comment
Baump
Big Mamma is here to help you.