The Russian Foreign Ministry announced on Thursday that it would suspend all adoptions of Russian children by Americans after an adoptive mother in Tennessee sent her 7-year-old son back to Moscow alone last week.
The mother, Torry Ann Hansen, said the boy’s emotional problems had overwhelmed her. “After giving my best to this child, I am sorry to say that for the safety of my family, friends and myself, I no longer wish to parent this child,” she wrote in a note placed in his knapsack.
Her actions caused a global uproar. How could such a case have been prevented? What standards of conduct should apply when parents feel they can’t provide for a child adopted from abroad?
- David Smolin, Cumberland Law School
- Peter C. Winkler, social worker
- Diane B. Kunz, Center for Adoption Policy
- Elizabeth Bartholet, Harvard Law School
Fix the System
David Smolin is a professor at the Cumberland Law School at the Samford University in Birmingham, Ala. He has written extensively about adoption.
Intercountry adoption, particularly of older children, and most especially of children from abusive families or neglectful institutions, is inherently a high risk process. Children coming from traumatic backgrounds commonly suffer from serious psychological, behavioral, cognitive and educational issues. The language and cultural transitions of intercountry adoption compound and complicate both the child’s trauma and therapeutic interventions.
Unfortunately, the adoption myth in the United States sends the message that the love and care found in any normal American home is enough to heal any child. This myth leads to numerous inadequacies: inadequate evaluation of children prior to adoption; inadequate preparation, training and selection of prospective adoptive families; and inadequate post-placement services.
Thus, too many prospective adoptive parents, even when warned about hypothetical possible problems, are asked to make a purportedly permanent adoption decision based on inadequate or misleading information about the particular child with whom they are matched. Too many prospective adoptive parents are matched with children whose behaviors, issues and needs are far beyond the capacity of a normal family to manage. Too often, the only expert services offered to such families are too far away or too expensive to be practical, if they exist at all.
The recent decision of Torry Ann Hansen to send her adoptive son back to Russia has occasioned a misleading cascade of judgments about Ms. Hansen’s actions and motivations. This concern needs to be directed toward the other actors in this (and many other) cases.
Investigators need to determine what the orphanage and agency knew about the child, and what was conveyed to Ms. Hansen prior to the adoption. The quality of care at the child’s orphanage should be investigated, to determine if his trauma came from poor quality institutional care, as well as from any abuse or neglect in his original home. Such investigation needs to become commonplace in the significant number of cases involving disrupted adoptions or children with serious issues not disclosed to the adoptive family.
Governments must improve the quality of care for vulnerable children by developing high quality foster care and sharply improving standards for institutional care. Regulators should demand that child study forms and home study documents provide detailed and accurate information that provide the basis for proper matching of each child’s needs with a family prepared to raise and assist that child.
For too long, shoddy child welfare and corrupted adoption systems have traumatized children and shifted the entire risk of the harms they facilitate to children and adoptive families. While the manner in which Ms. Hansen returned her adoptive child to Russia is indefensible, the child welfare and adoption systems that have created countless cases far more tragic, are the real criminals.
Lessons Learned
Peter C. Winkler, an adoption social worker, was the director of New York State Adoption Services from 1985 to 1995.
More than 20 years ago, in New York, Joel Steinberg, a lawyer, took into his home a little girl he was supposed to be placing into an adoptive home. He subsequently beat her to death. As a result of this horrific event, New York adoption laws and regulations were revised and improved.
Legislators in every state should review their laws and regulations on adoptive placements.
I hope that after this recent case, legislators in every state will sit down and review their laws and regulations on adoptive placements, both domestic and international. And here, based on my experience, are a few places to start.
State regulations should require any agency that places adopted children to visit the child regularly over a period of at least one year. In cases involving non-agency or independent adoption, those visits should be made by a representative of the court.
Moreover, adoptive families should be advised that they are responsible for advising the placement agency or court representative if they encounter issues with the child that go beyond a normal adjustment by the child to a new home. Those agencies should either offer services directly or refer the family to appropriate services.
When a family determines that the child can no longer remain in their home, the placement agency should be responsible for finding an alternate placement for the child.
Legislators should also address the question of placements by out-of-state agencies. In the Tennessee case, the placement agency was located in Washington State. I believe that every state should require that agencies making a placement into their state be required to abide by the laws and regulations in the state where the child is placed.
Transparency and Support
Diane B. Kunz, a lawyer, is the executive director of the Center for Adoption Policy, a nonprofit group that provides research and advice on domestic and international adoption.
The first responsibility of anyone involved in the adoption process is to prevent it from failing. And with transparency and support, disastrous adoptions can be greatly reduced.
There is a complete lack of resources for parents who cannot keep or deal with their adopted children.
Every part of the international adoption program must be transparent. Any child adopted internationally should be automatically considered a special-needs child who will bear the scars of both a lack of prenatal care and post-birth institutionalization. Love is necessary but not sufficient for a successful international adoption.
Parents must be thoroughly screened and vetted. Too often home studies conducted by the adoption agency before placement of a child are rubber stamps not investigative procedures. Parents should be required to submit a post-adoption plan that details how they intend to address their new child’s needs and the needs of the adoptive family.
Post-adoption support, including post-placement visits, translators, educational guidance, respite care and telephone hotlines, is vital. In takes a minimum of a year before an adoptive family reaches stability yet many families are left completely on their own during this crucial time. It is no coincidence that both the Russian case and the near fatal beating last month of a 3-year-old in North Carolina adopted from China happened within a year of the child moving into a new home.
But despite all efforts there will always be some children who cannot live in family settings. Whether adopted or not, the standards are the same: parents cannot abandon their children.
Unfortunately, there is a complete lack of resources for these parents who cannot keep their children. The few residential programs are prohibitively expensive and always oversubscribed. Social services are often reluctant to intervene until it is too late. Some parents, destroyed by years of violence and abuse, have paid caregivers to take care of their children. Some have done worse. The parents believed they had no choice. Everyone involved in the adoption process must do better.
Suspending Adoption Is Not the Answer
Elizabeth Bartholet is a professor and the faculty director of the Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law School. She is the author of “Family Bonds” and “Nobody’s Children.”
The recent story of the adopted child sent alone on an airplane to Russia should obviously set off efforts to prevent such incidents in the future: prospective parents need accurate information about the institutional and other maltreatment children have suffered prior to adoption and access after adoption to professional advice for children damaged by such maltreatment. They need to know help is available if they feel incapable of parenting their child.
Policymakers should focus on freeing up children at earlier ages for adoption — age at placement is the best predictor for normal development.
But the risk is that in focusing on the specific wrongs involved in sending this child back, policymakers will ignore the larger story about child tragedy and related policy lessons. That story has to do with the systemic abuse that victimizes the millions of children in institutions worldwide. Many decades of social science demonstrate the destructive impact of such institutions on children’s mental, emotional and physical capacities.
Maltreatment rates are extraordinarily low among internationally adopted children as a group — lower even than in normal biological families. International adoption serves generally to help children, who have suffered horrific maltreatment prior to adoption, overcome the damage done so that they can lead essentially normal lives.
Policymakers who truly care about children should resist the temptation to shut down international adoption in response to the individual abuse or abandonment case. This simply punishes more children, denying them their best chance to escape institutions into the adoptive homes that are generally available only internationally. Yet this response has been sadly typical, in part because Unicef and other official friends of children push countries like Russia in this direction, and the U.S. puts up little resistance.
When biological parents abuse or neglect their children, we don’t try to stop procreation or move all newborn infants into institutions to protect them from the risk of parental maltreatment. It would be irrational, and cruel, to impose even a temporary moratorium on international adoption in response to this case, or to increase existing restrictions on such adoption. Policymakers who genuinely care about children should focus on freeing up children at earlier ages for adoption, because age at placement is the best predictor for normal development.
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/how-to-prevent-adoption-disasters/