Justin Foxton  | 27 août, 2012 00:30

        Anton Middleton and Jean Paul Krooneman at Camps Bay with their six-year-old adopted son Picture: ROB DURAND

        Wimpie and Andrew Mattison want to adopt a child. But repeatedly, they have been told "according to the Lord, it is wrong to help gay people to adopt".

As many as 10 different government accredited adoption agencies and social workers over a three-year period have refused to help this loving and committed couple.

Their story echoes that of Dutch couple Pieter and Dennis Duisburg* who, having registered to adopt from the Netherlands, discovered they were not welcome to adopt a child from South Africa.

Many local and international prospective adoptive parents are being turned away because of their sexual orientation.

Pam Wilson, head of adoptions at Johannesburg Child Welfare, has said there are 1.8 million children in SA children's homes, with the potential to be adopted. Yet the website of the National Adoption Coalition states that South Africa has on average less than 2400 adoptions per year.

Discrimination is not limited to gay people. Single parent and non-Christian applicants are allegedly also being chased away from certain local agencies that believe adoption is only for heterosexual, Christian couples.

These discriminatory practices are illegal and unconstitutional.

"The Children's Act clearly states that anyone who has been assessed by an adoption social worker and found to be fit and proper to parent may apply to adopt," said specialist adoption attorney and founder of Wandisa Adoption Agency, Debbie Wybrow.

"It is clear that, provided you are over 18, you can be single or in a committed relationship such as marriage, a permanent life-partnership or permanent family unit. Theconstitution declares discrimination on the basis of race, gender, marital status or sexual orientation to be unfair, and prohibits such discrimination by the state or any individual."

However, some adoption agencies - and the Department of Social Development that accredits them - are seemingly ignoring these sections of the Children's Act and the constitution. This is causing a diplomatic embarrassment for South Africa.

In the Netherlands an adoption lobby group, Ek Sien Jou[I See You], has been established comprising gay, single and non-Christian prospective adoptive parents who are being prevented from adopting from South Africa.

The 35 Dutch couples and singles who have joined Ek Sien Jou have close ties to South Africa and wish to adopt a child from here.

According to Ek Sien Jou, the Pretoria-based adoption agency Abba Adoptions, the only one in South Africa accredited to do adoptions into the Netherlands, prefers children not to be adopted by applicants who are gay, single or non-Christian.

The group is lobbying to have the Department of Social Development accredit a second agency - one that will allow them to adopt - to do placements from South Africa into the Netherlands.

Executive head of Abba Adoptions, Katinka Pieterse, declined to say how many adoptions they had done to gay, single or non-Christian applicants, saying only that while they still "valued" families with a Christian belief system, most of their applicants were single and not necessarily Christians.

"Please be assured that Abba does facilitate adoptions to all types of applicants that you have referred to in our national programme."

However, the website of local Abba partner, The Infertility Support Network, states: "Same-sex applicants, atheists or couples not belonging to or not actively involved in a Christian church will be referred to other adoption agencies by Abba Adoptions."

In the past few weeks, members of Ek Sien Jou have received e-mails from Wêreldkinderen - Abba's partner agency in The Netherlands - stating that they cannot adopt from South Africa.

No response was received from the Department of Social Development as to why such discriminatory practices were being allowed to continue or why a second adoption agency had not been accredited for adoptions into the Netherlands.

The few gay adoptions allowed to proceed are proving to be successful.

Cape Town couple Anton Middleton and Jean Paul Krooneman explain how well their six-year-old adopted son is doing: "Although he was three months premature and has mild cerebral palsy, he is in a mainstream school and doing phenomenally well. His teachers say he is the happiest kid in the class."

Said Wybrow: "We have amazing case studies where a child's interests have best been met by parents with views on marriage, sexual orientation and religion that are different to ours. Checks and balances must always be in place, but family life has to take precedence over institutionalisation."

*Couple's names have been changed to prevent further discrimination
Foxton is founder of the national awareness campaign for Stop Crime, Say Hello and The Baby House in Umhlanga

Adopting from Africa, Saving the Children?

Intercountry adoption exposes many shortcomings in domestic and international legislation.

ARTICLE | 6 AUGUST 2012 - 11:14AM | BY ELIZABETH WILLMOTT HARROP

The veneer of philanthropy regarding intercountry adoption is beginning to fade as issues are more broadly and better understood, and a dangerous connection to child trafficking becomes more prominent. It is worrying for Africa then that it has been dubbed the 'new frontier' for intercountry adoption by the African Child Policy Forum (ACPF). Despite global rates falling to a 15-year low, Africa has experienced with a threefold rise in intercountry adoption cases in the last eight years.

Demand outweighs supply with 50 prospective adoptersfor every available child, and between 2003 and 2011 more than 41,000 African children moved overseas. Ethiopia now ranks second only to China in the number of children that leave for intercountry adoption.

Not bereavement or abandonment but poverty

It is estimated that there are 58 million orphans on the continent. While the proportion of these adopted may be small, it is clear that the trends are significant enough for government officials from over 20 African countries to have convened at the Intercountry Adoption: Alternatives and Controversies of the ACPF Conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in May 2012.

What is shocking is how these orphans are characterised. According to Save the Children, over 80% of children in orphanages around the world have a living parent and most are there because their parents cannot afford to feed, clothe and educate them. In Ghana, the figure is as high as 90%. In Ethiopia, the government recently attempted to trace the families of 385 children from 45 institutions; the families of all but 15 children were located.

When seen through this lens, the African orphan crisis is more of a crisis in family support. Poverty is not a reason to remove a child from his or her parent, yet this is exactly what is driving Africans to give up their children in what they perceive are temporary arrangements which will give their children stability and an education before returning home.

The "orphan creation" industry

There is no word for adoption in most African languages and the concept is greatly misunderstood. Many African family systems have traditionally favoured informal care of children by extended family or community with no legal basis for the arrangement. Adoption agencies are accused of profiting from this misconception as parents are persuaded to sign away their children.

This is exemplified by the situation in Ethiopia. It could soon become the leading sending country in the world as adoption agencies there are accused of soliciting children directly from families. Women are coerced into relinquishing their new-borns and according to Dutch NGO Against Child Trafficking (ACT) the adoption process in Ethiopia “is riddled by fraud and other criminal activities. Parents are stated dead when they are not, dates of birth are falsified, false information is provided to the courts”.

While Ethiopia has made progress in the past two years by placing 700,000 vulnerable children into alternative care such as community placements and domestic adoption, family reunification has still not been a priority and impoverished parents are coerced into giving up their children in what is dubbed an “orphan creation” industry.

A matter of money

The finances this industry commands shows why it is so hard to suppress. According to the Bureau of Consular Affairs in the United States, adoption service providers charged prospective parents up to $64,357 for processing an intercountry adoption in 2011. One UNICEF representative commented that running an orphanage in Ghana had been transformed into a lucrative 'business venture', beyond the realms of philanthropy. And in stark contrast is the amount of money needed to keep a mother and child together: it has been suggested that in Addis Ababa this would total $15 per month.

What is clear in international standards is that intercountry adoption is not mandatory and should be used only as a measure of last resort. This “principle of subsidiarity” protects the child’s right to cultural identity and means domestic family-based solutions should take precedence over international ones. So, while there may be some circumstances when intercountry adoption is in the best interests of the child, this can only be determined if and when all necessary steps have been taken to secure appropriate care in the child’s country of origin.

“Supporting families and communities so that they can look after their children themselves... pays enormous dividends,” according to Jasmine Whitbread, Chief Executive of Save the Children International, “not only are individual children more likely to thrive and go on to be better parents, they are more likely to contribute to their communities and to their country’s development.”

However, there are extreme cases where family reunification is simply not possible. One example is when preachers brand children as witches, as has happened in Nigeria, blaming them for adverse events. As a result these children suffer physical or psychological violence and are driven out, attacked or even killed. Intercountry adoption may be the best alternative for these types of risk.

Legislation lacking

While African states largely fail to deal with the issue of adoption in their national legislation, international child rights law contains explicit measures addressing it. The Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (Hague Convention) lies at the forefront of international protection.

The UNICEF Office of Research notes that abuses occur more frequently in private adoptions. The Hague Convention prohibits independent or private adoptions and only allows “accredited bodies” to perform tasks relating to intercountry adoption. This can only be done on a non-profit basis. Worryingly, only 13 African countries have ratified the convention. And this creates something of a legal loophole that preserves the images of some countries at the expense of others – both France and the US allow independent adoptions from non-Hague countries even though they are themselves signatories of it. A parochial understanding of forced migration crimes will continue to prevent progress: the US does not count children trafficked through international adoption in its trafficking statistics which include only labour and sex trafficking.

Robust and comprehensive domestic legislation is crucially missing to link the provision of social protection measures with adoption law. With family protection measures in place, intercountry adoption should only be applied in exceptional cases, the need determined by the sending and not the receiving country, and only in accordance with the best interests of the child. Africa is currently failing its children in allowing intercountry adoption to take precedence over family reunification and family strengthening, and in allowing receiving countries to dictate the terms under which Africa’s children find the homes they deserve.

There is much to be done. As Benyam Dawit Mezmur, Vice-Chair of the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, noted at the close of the ACPF conference: “Africa loves its children...this requires action.”

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