The guilty plea to three counts of child rape by Eddy Tony Whisenhunt back in mid-December has led to an announcement from the China Center of Adoption Affairs (CCAA.)

Pound Pup Legacy has a profile page on the Chinese girl adopted by Eddy and Donna Whisenhunt that links across to a number of pertinent articles.

This KIRO tv piece (also see attached video) from last May lays out the basics of the case as it was reported at the time-

A girl adopted from China has allegedly been sexually assaulted for years by both her adoptive mother and father, said Lt. Jim Mack of the Lacey Police Department.

A 51-year-old man and his 47-year-old wife face multiple charges of rape as they are accused of sexually assaulting their adoptive daughter for at least the past four years, Mack said.

Police said the alleged crimes may never have stopped if they didn’t have a chance encounter with the victim on Tuesday.

Police were called to the girl’s Lacey school after a little boy exposed himself. While asking the 8-year-old girl about what she’d seen, she ended up revealing details about her parents, Mack said.

“The 8-year-old female disclosed to the detective there was some secret time with her mother and her father,” Mack said.

Prosecutors allege both the mother and the father independently and secretly sexually assaulted the girl inside their Lacey home.

“Adopted from China, brought here and appears to become the personal sex toy of these two defendants,” said senior deputy prosecutor Joe Wheeler.

After the December 11th guilty plea, the CCAA issued an anouncement on December 22nd responding to the case. It contained among other details a suspension and assessment for the agency involved.

1. CCAA will suspend the cooperation with relevant American agency and decide whether to continue cooperation with this agency depending on its treatment of this incident.

The agency that handled the Whisenhunt adoption was  Faith International Adoptions (see the Pound Pup Legacy profile page on FIA as well).

5. Depending on individual cases, CCAA will suspend or terminate cooperation with agencies that are involved in cases where adopted children’s interests and rights are harmed. Home study reports prepared by social workers who are involved in such cases as well as the social workers themselves will not be recognized by CCAA.

Both points 1 and 5 leave plenty of wiggle room. The announcement is not an absolutist statement that when such circumstances are uncovered agencies will be barred, rather it offers potential suspensions, assessments, and squirm-phrases like “depending on individual cases.”

Social workers responsible for the home studies will become the fall guys. As many agencies subcontract out home studies, this creates a useful compartmentalization, the agency that placed the child can continue their relationship, while the contracted social worker gets the blame.

This allows agencies to continue on, business as usual, and any time one of these ‘unpleasantnesses’ crops up, the social worker involved can be moved from doing that agency’s China placements across to another country’s placements. (Opps, had a bad Chinese placement, time to move her over to Indian placements.) The idea that such would somehow protect kids adopted via any given agency is laughable.

There is no notion inherent to the announcement that agencies are ultimately responsible for the placements they do.

Portions of point 3 of the announcement is highly problematic as well (emphasis added):

3. To learn a lesson from this incident, it is suggested that social workers of government departments and adoption agencies evaluate the eligibility of applicants factually and in details. Social workers shall not only evaluate quantifiable factors such as age, profession, education background, income etc., but also evaluate whether the applicants are loving parents and with good personalities, as reflected in feedbacks from schools, communities, churches, social groups, etc. so that the reports provided can serve as dependable reference for CCAA during the reviewing process.

When you have church-based structures (see this Show HOPE backgrounder) built upon the notion of Christian movement growth via adoption, (also see this Show HOPE backgrounder) one really has to ask what the worth of any potential adoptive couple’s reference coming from churches could possibly hold at this point?

OF COURSE those associated with a church would give a regular churchgoing couple a positive recommendation if the institution itself is attempting to grow its flock via adoption. All the more so when the very churches offering said reference are associated with networks offering grants to Christian couples specifically for adoptions in hopes the child would likewise be raised within the belief system, or as such is more commonly phrased internally to the movement, “set orphans into loving, Christian families“.

Churches have realized a potential use for adoption and have mobilized towards utilizing it purely for their own reasons.

Under such a system the church criteria for a reference is not based on whether or not the couple would be an optimal home for a child, but whether or not the couple themselves are believers and would raise said potential adoptee within the faith.

The idea of adoption as a form of social movement growth undermines any notion of the needs of any single individual child. Results are not measured via the actual needs to the child, but the projected so called “spiritual needs” of the child (to become a christian themselves), and the demands  of churches as institutions, intent upon ‘self’ preservation, even if it means importing children from China (as but one example) to do so.

The final point from the announcement that I’ll address is point 2:

2. It is suggested that all the government departments and adoption agencies conduct a following-up research of all the children adopted from China. If problems turn up, relevant parties shall assist in the re-placement of the child affected and notify CCAA accordingly. It is also advised that government departments and adoption agencies do a good job in the post-placement following-up of adopted children in the future.

Follow up is “suggested.”

If an ongoing pattern of child rape happens to turn up in the course of such “suggested” or “advised” follow up, the answer is apparently a replacement, oh and don’t forget to notify CCAA. No demand law enforcement be notified immediately. No counseling or other such forms of support for the kid, just hand ’em a new “forever family” and get on with it.

Follow up in the wake of adoption, international or otherwise is all too often non-existent unless and until headlines hit the papers.

Heck, we’ve got domestic adoptees who move from DC to Maryland, disappear, are killed and left frozen in a block of ice no less,  all while adoption subsidy checks continue to flow to the adopter who apparently killed the kids.

If Renee Bowman was able to do this to her domestically adopted daughters who came out of DC foster care, who were not in school as she claimed to “home school” them, and all while she was receiving adoption subsidies for them, as absolutely no one was checking up on the girls or doing any form of follow-up, just whose job does the CCAA think it’s going to be to do their “suggested” follow up?

No one is doing any follow through checking up on the wellbeing of these kids.

We only learn of their deaths when such hits the papers.

Without “follow-up” becoming someone’s actual job, with a budget and reporting requirements, “suggestions” remain just that, nothing more.

Moreover, the Whisenhunts are not an “isloated incident.” Just as we’ve seen with the murdered and abused Russian adoptees, there are also a growing number of cases relating to kids adopted from China as well.

Niels (of Pound Pup Legacy)  has compiled a list of fourteen other cases involving murder or abuse of Chinese adoptees by their American adopters.

So long as everyone continues to take their suffering and deaths so lightly, there is no doubt in my mind that the number of these cases will continue to grow.