David Joles, Star Tribune August 2008

I began compiling notes to do a post last week about the sentencing and conclusion of the attempted murder trial of 61 year old defendant Sylvia Sieferman. It has taken me a bit of time to get my ducks in a row, so while this is slightly belated, it’s still deeply important, particularly in light of the broader questions (far beyond that of sentencing Sieferman) of how these events were enabled to unfold.

In August 2008 Sieferman went on a bloody rampage, wielding first a knife, then an axe trying to murder her two adopteed Chinese daughers, (now named) Hannah and Linnea.

The attack was concluded by Hannah’s escape to a neighbor’s home who called the police, Sieferman’s own attempted suicide, and a note left in the bedroom saying among other things “sorry, I can’t deal with them anymore.”

Linnea had her throat slashed and multiple stab wounds.

Hannah, after first seeing her sister attacked, was then also attacked with a knife, and struck at least five times by an axe. In the course of the attack she ran downstairs to a bathroom, but neglected to lock the door. Sieferman found her and Hannah suffered further attempts to stab her in the neck and in the heart.

Incredibly, she defended herself by grabbing the blade, causing severe lacerations on her hand. Somehow she was able to escape and made it to a neighbor’s house to call for help.

When police arrived at the house,

The 60-year-old woman, sitting cross-legged in front of her house in this St. Paul suburb, was bleeding profusely from her neck.

Inside the house, the horror continued: Blood was everywhere, and the woman’s 11-year-old daughter was lying unresponsive on her bedroom floor in a pool of blood. Her throat had been cut. And at a neighbor’s house, the woman’s other 11-year-old daughter was also bleeding – from knife and ax wounds.

“Kill me! Kill me!” the woman yelled as police approached her, according to a criminal complaint filed Friday in Ramsey County District Court.

The girls barely surived.

Linnea Sieferman suffered life-threatening injuries and was in critical condition at Gillette Children’s Hospital in St. Paul.

and

Hannah was in good condition at Gillette Children’s Hospital, where she was being treated for head trauma, a fractured skull and severe lacerations to her hand.

Here is a Star Tribune piece filed at the time, back in August almost a year ago.

Sieferman’s excuse for the vicious attack? (also see video connected to the piece,)

When Sieferman entered her plea, she told the court she planned to kill the girls because she feared they would be placed in foster care and raised by strangers.

Ironic, in that at the time she adopted the girls Sieferman, herself an American “stranger” became a single mother (adopting Hannah at age 53.)

This twisted form of rationalization is all too familiar to those who work in the domestic violence field or adoptionland: family members who decide “their” families are better off dead than beyond their reach.

As part of her adoption process Sieferman blogged about the adoptions, though the blog has since been taken down.

Neighbors said Sieferman is a single mother who adopted the girls from China. Her online blog identifies the girls as Hannah, adopted in 1999, and Linnea, adopted in 2003.

The blog contains Sieferman’s account of her longheld desire to adopt daughters from overseas and her joy upon meeting them and watching them grow.

Quotes from the blog can still be found online such as this one, describing the final post dated 2005,

“I suppose my adoption journey really started 25 years ago, when I used to dream of adopting an Asian girl someday,” Sieferman wrote. After reading an article on the subject, “(I) started off to explore exactly what would prevent me, then nearly 50 and single, from becoming a mom.”

But this attack did not come out of the blue, Sieferman had told medical personnel she feared harming the girls,

Sylvia Sieferman was hospitalized two months ago after fearing she might hurt herself or her daughters, former neighbor Carrie Micko told the Star Tribune of Minneapolis.

Micko said she didn’t understand how Sieferman could be released and the girls go back into the home, apparently without any follow-up. “Somebody should have gotten the clue that unless the circumstances at home changed those kids should not have gone back into the house,” she told the newspaper.

Roseville police Capt. Rick Mathwig said that in this case, rules involving patient confidentiality would have likely prevented police from knowing if there had been trouble in the home.

“Bad Mom,”

During the assault, Sylvia Sieferman said “I’m a bad mom” and “I had to do this,” according to her daughter’s account of the assault.

Clearly her self image and self doubts as a(n adoptive) Mother played an important role in the attack.

At least one neighbor was aware of the concerns,

A former neighbor, Carrie Micko, said Sieferman was severely depressed and worried about the safety of the girls.

Micko, in fact, was the one who took her to the hospital,

In the six and half years between when she adopted Hannah and now, Micko said many things changed. She said one of Sieferman’s homes was in foreclosure and she’d lost several jobs.

About two months ago, Micko took Sieferman to the hospital. Sieferman had been making comments that she wanted to hurt herself and her children.

“Her children were everything to her. Her whole life was about her kids,” she said. “And after a series of financial mishaps, she just couldn’t see her way through. She was under extreme financial, emotional and spiritual distress and didn’t want to fail them. She couldn’t bear to have them see her fail.”

Micko said Sieferman left the hospital after three days because she had some job interviews lined up. Sieferman also feared the county might take her children away. Micko said she tried to talk to the social workers and hospital personnel but couldn’t get through because she wasn’t family.

Fear of failure and adopter expectations, and appearing to fail against the societal standard of parents appear to have played an important role.

From further down in the story, we learn,

Neighbors said Sieferman had foreclosed on a home and was having legal problems.

and

“It didn’t have to happen. She was very clear about her intentions and told them and I think that was her way of saying help me, that the children,” Micko said. “They didn’t respond the way she was hoping or I was hoping.”

According to the Mental Health Association of Minnesota, doctors could have involuntarily committed Sieferman for six months. Generally, though, they prefer friends or families members to encourage them to stay voluntarily.

Tom Johnson, a client advocate with the Mental Health Association, wouldn’t talk specifically about Sieferman’s case, but said ones like hers are difficult.

“It can be an easy process if it’s very clear the person is a danger to herself or others,” he said. “It’s not quite as easy is someone has said outside ‘I’m going to do something to myself’ but then they come in to the hospital and the doctor sees them and the person says ‘I wasn’t really serious about that.’”

Ironically, Minneapolis IS one of the places in the county that is set up to provide a sort of “time out” by way of emergency child care, though it is unclear whether Sieferman was aware of the program at the time. Clearly fear of losing the girls is part of what led to her decision to leave the mental health services.

Micko said a group of neighbors stepped into the watch Hannah and Linnea when Sieferman was in the hospital. She also when social workers mentioned protective custody to Sieferman, she wanted to leave the hospital.

Molly Kenney, interim program director for the Greater Minneapolis Crisis Nursery, said her organization is there to help families like the Siefermans. Families in need of help can call the nursery for advice or a safe place for kids to stay. Children can stay there for three nights at no cost to give parents a break. Kenney said it helps to prevent violence.

“The point is they have to call us and that reaching out for help is the first point of entry we see as a sign of strength,” she said. “They want what’s best for their kids.”

The Crisis Nursery parent hotline is open 24 hours a day. Each county in Minnesota also has a 24 hours crisis hotline.

Hennepin (Children): 612-348-2233
Hennepin (Adult): 612-379-6363
Washington: 651-777-5222
Anoka: 1-888-422-6522
Dakota: 952-891-7171
Carver: 952-442-7601
Ramsey (Adult): 651-266-7900
Ramsey (Children): 651-774-7000

Still, in light of the fact that she Sieferman was explicit about being a potential threat to the girls, where was the follow up? Why was she simply allowed to return home to them?

The lack of follow up, and unwillingness to step in to protect the girls was a direct factor that led to the horror that ensued.

Thus this is not merely a matter of Sylvia Sieferman failing these girls in one of the worst ways imaginable, it is ALSO a failure of the system itself.

Where is the investigation of ultimately whose job it was to ensure that a woman who had threatened her adopted kids lives wasn’t just left alone with them to do with as she pleased?

Apparently with Sieferman now sentenced there appears to be a growing consensus that everything has been taken care of and it was all merely an individual problem. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Ignoring the systemic failures only ensures the same mistakes will be repeated.

By and large I’ve been unable to find the direct voices of the girls speaking for themselves, though I did find this one small paragraph

When police arrived Hannah told them her mother “attacked me and my sister with a knife. My sister should be dead.” She said that during the assault her mother said, “I’m a bad mom, I had to do this.”

Police at the scene discribed it thusly

“This townhome has five levels to it and when I went in there and looked, there was blood on at least three levels. Pools, splatters and things like that. It’s a horrible, horrible thing to look at,” said Captain Rick Mathwig of the Roseville Police Department.

Sieferman…

…was sentenced in Ramsey County District Court to 16 years and six months for one second-degree attempted murder charge, and 12 years and 7 1/2 months for the other charge. She will serve at least two-thirds of that time for each concurrent sentence.

Sieferman pleaded guilty in May to spare her daughters the trauma of trial, her attorney, Paul Rogosheske, said. She initially faced a first-degree attempted murder charge.

While you might think there would be massive media coverage, or international coverage, most of what you” find online treats it as a mere local story.

What coverage there has been has often tied it to the larger story of the American financial meltdown (see this piece as well,) rather than understanding it in the context of the nuances of adoption and expectations specific to adoption marketing like giving a child “a better life” so often create. (As better life” so often translates directly to children coming from economic dire circumstances to wealthy western adopters.)

The girls are recovering from their many injuries and are now living with a family member (of their adoptive mother.)

A fund has been set up to help them go forward with their lives.

HOW TO HELP HANNAH AND LINNEA

A trust fund has been set up for Sylvia Sieferman’s former adopted daughters. Donors can contribute at any Wells Fargo branch, or they can mail donations to Sieferman’s civil attorney, Cynthia Stange, at 1970 Oakcrest Ave., Suite 217, Roseville, MN 55113, payable to the Hannah & Linnea Sieferman Trust.

Much as I wish that was all there was to the story, naturally it isn’t. Because in the midst of it all a quack pseudo-therapy “attachment disorder” self promoter has decided the brutal attacks could make a useful career stepping stone.

A Search for Survivors has a comprehensive overview of the case and then reports on Heather Forbes’ efforts to utilize the attempted murders to gain media personal appearances in this piece,

Attachment Therapist Heather Forbes tries to twist the repeated stabbings of adopted children Hannah & Linnea Sieferman into personal publicity campaign

Far beyond mere ‘ambulance chasers’, people like Heather Forbes view every blood spattered townhouse as an opportunity.

Attachquacks of course, don’t blame the Adoptive Mother, they don’t blame the system, nope, they blame the adoptees themselves, (quoting the ASFS post,)

Never mind the fact that Hannah and Linnea Sieferman were clearly intelligent, sweet children. Never mind the fact that their adoptive mother had serious mental problems, to the point where she was willingly checked into a hospital to prevent her from hurting herself and others.

No, to Heather Forbes and the rest of the RAD cultists, the fault lies with the children, never the parent. By virtue of being adopted, children are automatically written off as traumatized, disabled, inferior and ultimately the catalyst for any tragedy, no matter how undeserved or utterly indefensible.

Never mind the reproductive coercion INHERENT to the one child policy, etc. Americans and other receiving countries adopters have slurped up any “surplus” kids that could be found, all while insisting their adoption was ’special,’ that it was somehow far superior to other ethically ‘inferior’ forms of international adoption as have been revealed in recent years by the International scandals in places such as Guatemala or Vietnam.

Time to wake up and smell the coffee.

When China tightened its restrictions on who could adopt in 2006 many people assumed the new restrictions related to wanting a different set of adoptive parents on the other end. While that no doubt was part of the picture, those us watching the international adoption market change, began to see the new restrictions in a different light: even China was having difficulty producing enough children to keep up with international demand.

The demand for very young (and presumed healthy) children has not diminished, but it has rapidly overwhelmed supply.

The new restrictions may well have been an effort by the Chinese to reduce the number of adopters eligible, out of recognition that the sheer numbers of couples attempting to gain a child are simply inherently disproportional to the numbers of children that are, or perhaps will ever be available.

And when not enough children are available to fill even that demand?

New “orphans” must be manufactured to fill that need.

Enter, China’s “Baby Economy” scandal that made international headlines at the beginning of the month. The “Baby Economy” has been a direct byproduct of the (nearly impossible for most to pay) economic fines placed upon country dwellers who exceed their baby quota. The fines are used to extort the children from families unable to pay.

Guizhou Province

‘Illegal’ babies sold

Mr Lu and his wife, farmers in a remote county in south-west China, could not pay the steep fines imposed for having too many children. Their fifth child’s current whereabouts are unknown, according to a report by the Southern Metropolis News.

The child, who was six months old when she was taken away, is believed to be among 80 newborn girls ‘confiscated’ from parents who broke family planning laws, and then ’sold’ for adoption overseas in the past eight years.

The girls were put in orphanages in Zhenyuan county in Guizhou province and then adopted by couples from the United States and European countries under the foreign adoption programme. Under Chinese law, abandoned babies can be registered for adoption. It is believed that the authorities forged documents stating the babies were orphans, said Chinese reports.

The adoption fee of US$3,000 (S$4,350) per baby was reportedly split between the orphanages and local officials.

The foreign adoption programme has spawned what local reports termed as ‘Baby Economy’, which earned local orphanages massive profits.

These 80, in the wake of the revelation of earlier baby selling systems, such as this-

In late 2005, police busted a baby-trafficking ring that had abducted or bought as many as 800 children in Guangdong province since 2002 and sold them to orphanages in Hunan province for 3,200 yuan to 4,300 yuan (S$679 to S$912) each. The children were put on the adoption programme.

China babies ’sold for adoption’

An investigation by the state-owned Southern Metropolis News found that about 80 girls in one county had been sold for $3,000 (£1,800).

The fines are set at rates simply unobtainable for most families:

Parents in rural areas are allowed two children, unlike urban dwellers who are allowed one.

But if they have more than that, they face a fine of about $3,000 -several times many farmers’ annual income.

The policy is deeply unpopular among rural residents, says the BBC’s Quentin Somerville in Beijing.

The BBC attempts to lay the blame at the doorstep of “local corruption” rather than the more systemic view that the law itself creates such opportunities for extortion:

Child trafficking is widespread. A tightening of adoption rules for foreigners in 2006 has proved ineffective in the face of local corruption.

SW China: Baby girls taken and sold for adoption

Like every other father in Zhenyuan, Lu wanted a boy, who finally arrived after three daughters. His wife then gave birth to another girl, and the couple had to support five children with a yearly income of about 5,000 yuan ($732).

Shi Guangying, a local family planning official, gave them an ultimatum: Give away their little daughter or pay fines of about 20,000 yuan ($2,928).

“This is the policy”, Shi said. “You pay, or you let the government take care of the baby,” he was quoted by the newspaper on Wednesday.

But instead of being raised as promised, the girl was taken to the Zhenyuan orphanage and later adopted out to a foreign family, at a reported price of $3,000.

At least 78 girls have been handed over to foreign families in the past eight years. Two children with disabilities remain at the orphanage.

“a parent’s right of guardianship over their children:”

Zhou Ze, a lawyer and professor with China Youth College for Political Sciences, said local family planning officials and the orphanage had committed a crime because nobody had the right to exploit a parent’s right of guardianship over their children.

The fact that babies had been removed to make a profit meant it was also abduction, Zhou said.

“It is legal that they can charge fines, as the parents did violate the law by giving birth to more than one child. But that doesn’t mean they can take away the child. The fines can be paid later or reduced”, he said.

Tang Jian, an official of the Zhenyuan family planning bureau, said: “According to our investigation, it is true that babies who have parents were forced into the orphanage and then abroad”.

China Welfare Home Seizes Babies to Put Up For Adoption

The former chief of the local birth control office, Shi Guangying, claimed that they have documentation from all the families who have had babies out of line with China’s “one-child policy.” According to the local policies in this region, once a baby is born, there is a window anywhere from 20 days to 3 months, where the baby may be seized. It seems that they don’t want kids who are a few years old as they are afraid of kids running away and going back home to their families.

Between 2003 and 2005, there were almost no families in Zhenyuan County who had kids out of compliance with the Chinese policy who could afford to pay the fines, which were in the upwards of 40,000 Yuan (US $5,882). Shi said, “If they cannot pay, we will seize their children to compensate for the fines. Once the baby was taken into the welfare home by the birth control office, they remain there indefinitely or until they are adopted.”

Chinese babies sold for adoption to US and Europe, report claims

An investigation has alleged that up to 78 babies taken into care in Guizhou province, in southern China, were sold for £1,800 each, mostly to childless couples in the US but also to families from European countries, including Sweden and Spain.

In a climate of what amounts to economic and legal extortion, taking the act of abandonment or of a child being “orphaned” (which as we’ve seen time and time again, the legal defintion of “orphan” in adoption often has little or nothing to do with the popular misconception of a child being somehow rendered “parentless”) words like “genuine orphan” lose their meaning.

Some women will simply abandon their children after birth rather than have them forcibly removed when confronted with impossible economic fines. Such coercion renders terminilogy such as “genuine orphan” a status that is by definition impossible to determine.

Many of the girls were genuine orphans or had been abandoned by their parents as unwanted, however, in at least three cases it is alleged the children were removed in lieu of £2,000 fines levied for breach of China’s draconian one-child policy.

The cases relate to a three-year period between 2004-2006, when the policy was being strictly enforced by the local government of Zhenyuan county in Guizhou.

The Telegraph piece provides some of the details originally reported in the “Southern Weekly” pertaining to how these children were rebranded as having been “abandoned:”

Yang Jibin, the reporter who researched the story for the Southern Weekly newspaper in Guangzhou, said he was shown a list of 80 female babies while on a visit to the Zhenyuan state orphanage, of which 78 had been adopted abroad.

He told the story of one couple, Lu and Yang, who gave up their fourth baby girl in 2003 after a visit from a birth control officer who insisted on taking the baby away, describing the girl as “abandoned baby, found and turned in by Lu” in the orphanage register.

“That was my job. I just followed the policy,” the officer was reported as saying, “They were willing to give up their baby to offset the fine” After relinquishing their child without signing any formal contracts, Lu and Yang never returned to the orphanage to visit. They added that, even if the child was now found, they would not take her back for fear of having to pay the outstanding fine.

Tang Jian, leader of Birth Control Administrative Bureau Inspection Team of Zhenyuan county apparently admitted the practice was prevalent at the time.

“It is true that some baby girls were forced be brought into the charity house and then sent abroad,” he was quoted as saying.

What can consent mean in such a climate, wherein coercion is bedrock to the very system, where words are maliable and paperwork forged?

Other parents who had their children removed fought for them before they were forever out of reach, adopted abroad:

Other parents were less compliant when asked to give up their children. A former worker at the orphanage quoted in the report recalled one local father who tried several times to take back his daughter in 2004, even offering bribes to staff to let her go.

When this failed, he came to visit his daughter more and more often until, one day, he grabbed her, stood up and ran. “Four or five nannies surrounded him immediately and took back the baby,” the worker recalled.

The story also makes a brief note of the investigation:

The local government issued a statement saying that two senior local officials had been warned and had received “executive demerits” following a local disciplinary inquiry. The statement said the government would continue to investigate the allegations. “There will be no cover up,” the statement added.

Orphanage-scandal probe starts

A JOINT work team including family planning, civil affairs personnel, police and Party disciplinary officials are investigating a scandal in which babies were taken from parents and sent overseas for adoption from southwest China’s Guizhou Province, an official told Xinhua news agency yesterday.

Yang Jiesheng, deputy secretary general of the Qiandongnan Prefecture government and deputy head of the work team, said that the public orphanage in Zhenyuan County in Guizhou is suspected of violating rules in accepting “abandoned” babies.

As we see so often in these cases, though, “punishments” rarely involve restoration of parental rights and the kids being returned to their familes, resulting in an ends justifies the means mentality whereby once the kids are out of the country, no matter what criminal actions led to their adoptions, those who got a hold of them get to keep them,

It wasn’t clear whether there would be any attempt to retrieve the children who were improperly sent out for adoption.

Also see, China Punishes Adoption Officials.

Note that the penalties only relate to 3 of the 80 cases:

Chinese authorities have punished six government officials after three baby girls whose parents were still alive were sent to an orphanage in southern China that subsequently put them up for adoption overseas, state media and an official said.

Family planning officials in impoverished Guizhou province’s Zhenyuan County sent the babies to a state-run orphanage during 2003 and 2004 without properly investigating their backgrounds, the county government said on its Web site.

All the parents were still alive but had given up their children to avoid harsh fines under the country’s controversial one-child policy. State-run orphanages are only allowed to take in children who have no parents or those whom police have certified as abandoned.

Parents living abroad legally adopted the girls in 2006 and 2007, the government said. The orphanage – which received $3,000 for every adopted baby – has been cleared of wrongdoing, Zhenyuan county government said.

The official Xinhua News Agency said Friday it was not clear if any of the officials who were punished had benefited financially.

The article details the circumstances of the three cases as much as possible from the information provided,

One of the girls was the third daughter of Li Zeji, who did not want to pay the 40,000 yuan ($5,854) fine for violating the one-child policy, Xinhua said. Mr. Li sent the baby to his cousin who in turn told family planning officials the child had been abandoned, the report said.

The Zhenyuan government said other officials misled another set of parents into handing over their girl by telling them that because they were giving her up voluntarily, they could reclaim her later. The Web site did not provide details.

In the third case, the Luo family gave their second child to a sister who told town officials she had found the baby abandoned, the Zhenyuan government said.

In all three cases the officials sent the girls to the orphanage without proper investigation, the government report said.

Xinhua said six government and Communist Party officials had been punished for their role in the case, including two family planning officials who had been demoted. Wang Daohua, the former assistant head of Jiaoxi township where the babies came from was dismissed for “direct liability.”

An official surnamed Zhang from the Zhenyuan county discipline inspection committee confirmed six officials had been disciplined, but did not identify them or specify their punishments.

So, that “taken care of” I guess it’s back to business as usual.

What is business as usual? As always it comes down to the money flowing through adoption and how every link in the chain is dependent upon those would-be-adopter’s foreign dollars flowing in-

Adoption scandal sheds light on orphanages’ struggle

The orphanage involved in the scandal in Zhengyuan County of Guizhou Province was accused of taking children away from parents who could not afford fines for violating family planning rules and then sending the children overseas for adoption. The orphanage earned US$3,000 for each child placed with a foreign family, according to earlier media reports.

The money from the adoptions was worth 1.1 million yuan (US$160,992.7) and enabled the orphanage to add a new building. The local government shouldered the remaining 2.9 million yuan needed.

The new building, measuring 18,000 square meters, will house more than 80 beds, compared with the 10-plus beds in the existing home, which was built in 1991 with a total area of 20-plus square meters, according to vice director Rao Fujian.

“Without the money, the new building would have been impossible,” confirmed Wu Benhua, director of Zhengyuan County Civil Affairs Bureau.

Rao denied the orphanage made profits by giving up children for overseas adoption. All the money earned was used to improve the facility – as ruled by the country.

“We didn’t spend a penny of the money for any other purpose than improving the facilities of the orphanage,” he stressed.

Rao also denied the orphanage had conspired with family planning officials to snatch babies from their parents as abandoned children. The orphanage just accepted the children, he said. According to law, abandoned children must be sent to local orphanages, he added.

A joint investigation into the orphanage confirmed Rao’s claim. There was no economic relationship between the local family planning commission and the orphanage, Yang Jiansheng, leader of the investigation group, told the Southern Metropolis Daily.

Whether all the money actually went back into the orphanage or not is something we will probably never know.

The political will to delve deep into the intricacies of such a system is, to put it mildly, lacking, at best.

BUT even if every penny of it did go into the orphanage (highly unlikely,) part of the problem is, “improving the orphanage” particularly in an economically empoverished province, ultimately means increased capacity and over the long term potentially improved cash flow.

Moving from roughly ten to more than 80 beds means the ability to move far more ‘product’, i.e. infant girls, out of a country that requires that children available for export be part of the orphanage system.

For most of those being exported, the orphanages are temporary holding at best. The eventual international adoptees won’t be staying at the orphanage long. Many will be adopted before they turn a single year old, all but a tiny fraction being adopted before they reach age 4.

Of those that remain, some will be adopted domestically in China, others will remain long term, having disabilities and having been deemed unmarketable or undesirable.

The orphanage began taking abandoned babies from June 1995 and from May 2002, it joined the overseas adoption program.

Of the 81 abandoned babies it took, 60 were adopted by overseas families in developed countries. Eleven were adopted by Chinese families. Another 10 were cared for at the orphanage.

While the Chinese may feel they’ve dealt with the situation domestically, internationally a least one receiving country may undertake its own investigation, Justice minister investigates Chinese adoptions

Dutch Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin has asked the Dutch childcare inspectorate to investigate the adoption of children from China.

His request is in response to revelations in a television programme that in one of China’s provinces the authorities force parents to give their children up for adoption.

The children are then adopted by foreigners, including Dutch couples. On their papers it is stated that the children have no parents.

Finally let me provide two last links,

Syracuse University College of Law’s Impunity Watch website, piece, Chinese Baby Girls Being Sold for $3,000 (from which some of the links in this post were gathered) and

Lorraine Dusky’s Babies “confiscated” in China and sold as orphans to the western market on Birth Mother, First Mother Forum that just hit this afternoon. The entire piece is well worth the read, but I wanted to quote a couple of important passages. She views the situation very similarly to how I do (but says it ten times better than I could.)

China, long a provider of babies for the burgeoning market in the U.S., has cracked under the pressure to keep up with the demand.

Lorraine, like myself (though coming at it from a slightly different perspective) definitely sees the larger picture:

This is not the first time child trafficking from China (or India)has been uncovered. We’ve previously written about the international trade in babies, all documented and published in magazines such as Foreign Policy and Mother Jones–from the poor nations of the world, such as Guatemala, Vietnam, India, Nepal, Russia, Kazhakstan and others. Because the baby economy is a cash cow for poor nations and demand is high, unscrupulous individuals will find a way to provide the goods–even when there are no babies available through honest means. Children are kidnapped, mothers are tricked into giving up their babies for what they think is a temporary time, papers are forged and children are stolen. Why? Because people are willing to not look deeply into where the children come from, or if they are indeed orphans.

What creates this market? People who believe that they are entitled to a child, simply because they can afford one, when nature does not provide

So back to our mythical “Gold Standard?”

The only “Gold Standard” I see at work here has to do with what the going rate for girls from China happens to be at any given point.

***

The (dripping with adoption marketing) Adoptive Families Magazine provides some recent INS Immigration Statistics on Chinese adoptions here in America:

Number of Adoptions from China:
2007: 5,453
2006: 6,493
2005: 7,906
2004: 7,044
2003: 6,859
2002: 5,053

Age/Gender of Children Adopted From China in 2006
Source: INS Immigration Statistics
91% Female
44% under 1 year of age
52% 1 – 4 years of age

Being legally prohibited from attaining my State sealed records, I have no idea what heritage cultural or genetic my biological family might contain, other than a quick glance in a mirror appears to indicate pretty clearly a hefty chunk of what would generally be termed “white” by sociological definition. The family history of those who adopted me has interwoven at times with First Nations peoples on both the American and Canadian sides of the border.

While my interest in this subject, yes at times does relate to aspects of ‘familial’ history, my primary interest in such is historical and political, speaking from both a Bastard perspective, as one who opposes forms and tactics of colonialism (religious, political, etc), and as one who supports indigenous peoples’ autonomy and demands for redress.

***

I’m going to use this Aug 2nd, ‘08 CTV piece, At least 22,000 Canadian children need parents, as a jumping off point to provide some background readings links towards understanding some of the history reguarding the Canadian pool of children currently available for adoption. The CTV piece is pretty much par for the course adoption marketing, but it does provide a few useful statistics:

“There are 76,000 children in child welfare care and over 22,000 we know are actively waiting for adoption right now,” Sandra Scarth, president of the Adoption Council of Canada, told CTV News.

In 2006, Canadians adopted 1,535 children from other countries, according to the most recent Citizenship and Immigration Canada report on international adoption statistics.

China was the top choice for Canadian families, followed by Haiti.

Of the kids labeled available many are First Nations:

In Canada, many on the adoption waiting lists are First Nations children, some of whom are victims of poverty and their parents’ substance abuse.

“We actually have three times the number of First Nations children in child welfare care today than we did at the height of the residential schools,” said Cindy Blackstone of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada.

So what percentage of kids in Canadian child welfare are Aboriginal? An April 2004 study, entitled Keeping the Promise: the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Lived Experiences of First Nations Children and Youth (link to a PDF) produced by the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada estimated the number at 30-40%. This is gross over representation of Aboriginal children in ‘care’ considering Native children represent only 5% of the Canadian child population.

What about the “residential schools” referred to in the above, and why would that be used as a frame of reference?

Many Americans are unaware of the systematic cultural genocide the “Indian Residential Schools” inflicted upon First Nations people in Canada, despite America’s very similar own history with the “Indian Boarding Schools”.

The religious schools in Canada, (which were later government funded) were a core program used in the attempted systematic dismantling of First Nations identity, familial bonds, culture, and heritage. While such were labeled “schools” they utilized systems of punishments and brute force against those who refused to assimilate, (see Schooling as genocide. Residential schools for First Nations in Canada 1900-1980) a summary of a paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, University of Hamburg, 17-20 Sept. 2003:)

Preliminary results suggest that there were substantial differences between the national policies of the three countries towards the aboriginal population. Also schooling and pedagogy took different shapes. In Canada, violence, abuse and oppression formed the educational practice under the guidance of the religious bodies. Children were collected by force from their parents and suffered in the residential schools. The Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia is a prominent example of the intruder’s policy for subordination of the population. Overall, the research indicates that schooling can play a major role in suppression and even genocide. Still today, former students must get medical help to recover from the damages caused by colonial school policy.

and

Different measures were used to discipline the pupils. The strap, humiliation, spanking with hands, head shaving and a diet of bread and water, filling the mouth with soap or motor oil, and not at least, not letting the children be in contact with their families (Haig-Brown, 1998, pp 82). All the sexual assaults that have been reported damaged many of the children for the rest of their lives.

By way of most basic background, look to pages such as this, Residential Schools: The Background:

One of the most acrimonious issues to result from the Treaty process is the dark legacy of the residential school system. The purpose of the residential schools in Canada was to educate and civilize or westernize the First Nation peoples in order that they adopt a more western – that is European – lifestyle. Separating the children from their parents and forcing religion on them, it was believed, was the only means by which to achieve this “civilizing” of the First Nations peoples.

Or even the wikipedia page if only to get an overview of important milestones and dates, Canadian residential school system. The CBC has also prepared a timeline, A timeline of residential schools. The CBC also has a video archive, A Lost Heritage: Canada’s Residential Schools with footage from the ’schools’.

As but one of many firsthand accounts, see quotations from We were not the savages: A Mi’kmaq Perspective on the Collision Between European and Native American Civilizations, First Nation History.

All of which has led to Canada’s attempts at ‘restitution’ (as if such could ever be ‘made right’.) Articles such as Canada makes first residential school payment , (from Oct 5th, ‘07, also see the links at the bottom of the article ) about the residential school settlement make a jumping off point.

This past June, Stephen Harper (The Canadian Prime Minister) delivered a formal apology in the House of Commons. (See PM cites ’sad chapter’ in apology for residential schools):

Wednesday marked the first time a Canadian prime minister has formally apologized for the physical and sexual abuse that occurred in the now-defunct network of federally financed, church-run residential schools.

Fist Nations peoples reactions have been mixed. As but one example, I will again point readers at Daniel N. Paul’s, (author of “We were not the Savages”) reaction at the bottom of this page-

OBSERVATION

Let’s say I’m somewhat encouraged, not overwhelmed, by Mr. Harper’s apology- it touches the tip of the iceberg. I will congratulate him on this, he has gone further than any Prime Minister has gone to-date in acknowledging Canada’s inglorious past mistreatment of First Nation Peoples, but, he didn’t go overboard.

Today, I would encourage National Chief Phil Fontaine, and others, to keep in mind that our First Nations are owed an apology for a long list of horrors perpetuated against our Peoples by Canadian and British colonial governments. A few examples, the extermination of the Beothuk, the use of scalp proclamations to try to exterminate the Mi’kmaq, medical experimentation, Indian Act sections that barred us from pool rooms, from hiring lawyers to fight our claims, centralization in the Maritimes, economic exclusion, etc., etc., the list is extensive.

When the day comes that a Canadian Prime Minister gets up in the House of Commons and make a full unequivocal apology for all the wrongs we and our ancestors suffered, it will be the day that we can fully celebrate.

Daniel N. Paul, June 12, 2008

So, in light of such history how does this relate to the pool of children made available to adoption in modern Canada? The residential schools may be closed, but as the CTV adoption puff piece laid out, legally severing Native rights to their own children has been a far more effective and perhaps socially acceptable means of destabilizing First Nations communities:

“We actually have three times the number of First Nations children in child welfare care today than we did at the height of the residential schools,” said Cindy Blackstone of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada.

Here Daniel N. Paul deconstructs an article by Michael Downey entitled “Canada’s genocide”. The ‘child grab’ was intertwined with the ’schools’ as part of an overarching strategy to dismantle Native cultures:

Downey relates in his piece the heart-wrenching tale of how thousands of First Nations children were “legally” seized from their parents by provincial governments during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and placed with white adoptive parents in homes around the world. Placement agencies in the United States often received fees from the adoptive parents in the range of 15 to 20 thousand dollars per child.

The stage for the playing out of this tragedy was set in the 1950s when the federal government shirked part of its constitutional mandate for insuring the protection and welfare of Registered Indians and delegated to the provinces, via federal-provincial agreements, its responsibility for the care and control of minor Native children. Downey relates how quickly the process mushroomed into another fast-track process to rob First Nations of their most precious possessions, their children: “In 1959, only one per cent of Canadian children in custody were Native; a decade later, the number had risen to 40 per cent…”

Tie this child grab in with the mid-1800s establishment of Indian day schools and with the late-1800s establishment of Indian residential schools- institutions where the white teachers perceived their most important duty to be to teach Native children to be ashamed of who they were- and it adds up to a wholesale attempt by government to kill First Nations cultures by destroying pride their children had in their heritage. The results for the children were horrific- the mental, physical, and sexual abuse dished out in these homes and institutions badly damaged, and in many cases extinguished, self -esteem.

The adoption of First Nations children even domestically in Canada has had high profile visibility. Former Canadian Prime Minister, Jean Chretien and his wife adopted Native a child, for example. Many of the children, however were sent to the U.S..

Also see Stolen Nation: For more than 20 years, Canada took native children from their homes and placed them with white families. Now a lost generation want its history back. Which details how sealed and amended adoption records are part of the lasting legacy of the “scoop” era used to lock First Nations adoptees away from their biological kin.

Further, due to the record keeping practices of the time, we may never know the full scope of how many children were taken through adoption:

Even now, researchers trying to determine exactly how many aboriginal children were removed from their families during the Scoop say the task is all but impossible because adoption records from the ’60s and ’70s rarely indicated aboriginal status (as they are now required to).

Those records which are complete, however, suggest the adoption of native children by non-native families was pervasive, at least in Northern Ontario and Manitoba. In her March, 1999 report, “Our Way Home: A Report to the Aboriginal Healing and Wellness Strategy on the Repatriation of Aboriginal People Removed by the Child Welfare System,” author Janet Budgell notes that in the Kenora region in 1981, “a staggering 85 per cent of the children in care were First Nations children, although First Nations people made up only 25 per cent of the population. The number of First Nations children adopted by non-First Nations parents increased fivefold from the early 1960s to the late 1970s. Non-First Nations families accounted for 78 per cent of the adoptions of First Nations children.”

Similarly, “One Manitoba community of 800 people lost 150 children to adoption between 1966-1980,” reports Budgell, who prepared the report in conjunction with Native Child and Family Services of Toronto.

Another article from 2001, Manitoba Repatriation Program Connects First Nations Adoptees with Their Heritage explains the use of the repatriation program by Aboriginal ‘adoptees’:

Thousands of First Nations children were placed into adoptive homes in the U.S., often through private agencies in Alaska, California, Indiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Pennsylvania. Adopting a native child was relatively easy for U.S. parents. After paying a registration fee, parents could take a native child home without going through any criminal checks or preparation classes.

U.S. agencies have been complicit in these crimes against First Nations peoples.

While there have been certain ‘reforms’ in the Canadian child welfare systems, allowing for increased Native people’s input, the bottom line remains, First Nations children remain disproportionately represented in the pool of adoptable children.

In the U.S. in 1978, ICWA, the Indian Child Welfare Act passed, protecting First Nations children from being removed from their tribal context. (Though baby dump laws/legalized abandonment laws/Baby Moses laws circumvent ICWA.) Canada unfortunately has no similar law protecting aboriginal children.

Quoting briefly from this description of the film Red Road,

In 1982, the Manitoba government finally agreed to impose a moratorium on the export of children outside of the province, the last province to do so. There was an investigation into the practice. Justice Edwin C. Kimelman wrote a report in 1985 entitled ‘No Quiet Place’, based primarily on looking at the 93 children that were “exported” in 1981. He did not mince his words in his conclusions, saying: “Cultural genocide has been taking place in a systematic routine manner. One gets an image of children stacked in foster homes as used cars are stacked on corner lots, just waiting for the right ‘buyer’ to stroll by”. (as reported in Fournier and Crey 1997:88)…

WHY TAKE THE CHILDREN AWAY?
Why did they take these children from their homes and from their people? There are a number of reasons. Part of it is cultural. Non-Native social workers and agencies have in their minds a set of ideas as to what a “family” and a “good home” are like. For “family”, they think of two parents and their children, the nuclear family. However, there are strong traditions in Native cultures in Canada that think of the family as something larger than this… Then there is the “good home” in terms of physical resources. For non-Native Canadians, this would include a separate bedroom for each child, sewage or a septic tank, and running water. Most Native houses, often structures designed by Indian Affairs, could not meet those “standards”…Sometimes the children were taken away “for health reasons”. This could mean that newborn infants needing to be in or near an urban hospital for treatment would be fostered to a non-Native family who lived nearby and would never be given back to their Native parents. This despite the fact that those parents had done nothing to abuse or even harm the children.

So let’s revisit those ‘justifications’ so often given to permanently legally sever the ties between Native children and their kin; poverty and substance abuse.

Poverty globally, is used as a barometer for ‘unfit parents’, and thusly used as an excuse to strip children from their biological kin. Such is often done under the false meme of “a better life.” (I have written about such before.) Yet the ‘better life” false meme can also be used as a cover to redistribute children of those governments oppose, politically culturally, etc. (Such tactics are frequently used in politically unstable conflict zones where use of violence against a population is encouraged, such as the Argentinian adoptions of the children of the ‘disappeared’, or in wartime for example.)

Poverty can also be used as an excuse towards ‘resource extraction’ of children. Sometimes all flowery language simply falls away and the outright accusations come out, “those womyn are poor, they can’t provide. We’re wealthy two parent families, we can do what they can’t.” All of which can be reduced to their core argument, ‘the poor don’t deserve their children, only the wealthy should have children.’

First Nations activists are acutely aware of the poverty their people (and yes their children) face societally, they are the first speak out about such as part of almost any discussion of the circumstances under which they live. The situation is not personal, it is not any one single family’s ‘problem’, it is a result of systematic exclusion of a people. Exclusion that has been enforced against aboriginal peoples, as classes of people. Their communities have been denied access to economic resources, they have been forcibly removed from lands deemed to have value, (including resources,) essentially anything of value to their colonizers has been taken from them.

Over and over again, it is easy to see First Nations peoples explicitly lay out the economic disparities they face as classes of people in their grievances. See the “First Nations Drum”, June ‘08 Vol, 18, Issue 6 piece entitled National Day of Action draws thousands in support of First Nations or the Assembly of First Nations piece, AFN National Chief Joins Premiers In Call For Action Plan On Closing The Socio-Economic Gap For First Nations as but two very recent articulations of such. The income gap between non-native Canadians and First Nations people is a key point of contention.

Utilization of “poverty” as a crowbar to remove Tribal children is a global adoption tactic, visible around the world, be it in Canada or Guatemala. By laying charges of ‘poverty’ against individual parents, the broader systems of oppression against Tribal peoples as classes of people are ignored.

A second key factor in why First Nations’ legal rights to their own children are so often severed, “substance abuse” is likewise, far from an ‘individual problem’ that can be viewed isolation as if completely disconnected from the context of these people’s lives.

Take this Journal article, Counselling with First Nations Women: Considerations of Oppression and Renewal and summary that deals with counseling Native womyn and the importance of placing the behaviors into the broader context of colonialism they live their lives in:

This article maps the historical background of First Nations women focusing on the residential school system, subsequent intergenerational trauma, and the effects of the Indian Act. Colonization has impacted the health and current roles and responsibilities of First Nations women. First Nations women’s health needs to be viewed in a holistic framework that considers multiple levels of oppression, poverty, colonization, and life as a minority in a dominant culture. Social constructionism provides a new lens from which to question and re-conceptualize ways of working with First Nations women.

In short, one cannot deal with the issues Native parents face without first understanding the context they live their lives in, a context wherein they have been buffeted by wave upon wave of colonialist tactics perpetrated by a variety of institutions such as government and church. For the same State to utilize the very end results of what previous waves of colonialism have done to a people as an excuse to remove their legal right to their own children, continuing similar cycles, goes beyond the height of cynicism. Such can only be viewed as capitalizing upon said cycles. None of this is takes place in a vacuum. Native ’substance abuse issues’, far from being some personal failing, are often direct results of individuals attempting to cope with previous waves of colonizing behaviours perpetrated by those external to their Tribe.

As I said, this post is merely a starting point to begin to come to an understanding of how adoption is but one tool in a toolbox for penalizing and politically destabilizing recalcitrant populations. Any ‘final word’ on such must be left to those who directly experienced such themselves.

My point in bringing such up was for other Bastards to begin to understand webs of connection and contextualization in regard to ways in which adoption has been used against populations.

I’ll end by once again quoting from Stolen Nation, (referenced above) this time at length, as this spells out precisely what I have been aiming to express through this post:

WAS IT GENOCIDE?

According to the UN Declaration of Indigenous Rights, Justice Kimelman’s description of the Sixties Scoop as cultural genocide is accurate. It reads: “Indigenous peoples have the collective right to live in freedom, peace and security as distinct people with guarantees against genocide or any other act of violence, including the removal of indigenous children from their families and communities under any pretext.”

So why was the wholesale removal of aboriginal children not considered a crime, or even a wrong, that the Minister of Indian Affairs felt obliged to redress along with the residential school system?

The answer isn’t that complicated, says Kenn Richard, director of Native Child and Family Services of Toronto and the man who commissioned the “Our Way Home” report. “British colonialism has a certain process and formula, and it’s been applied around the world with different populations, often indigenous populations, in different countries that they choose to colonize,” says Richard. “And that is to make people into good little Englishmen. Because the best ally you have is someone just like you. One of the ones you hear most about is obviously the residential schools, and residential schools have gotten considerable media attention over the past decade or so. And so it should, because it had a dramatic impact that we’re still feeling today. But child welfare to a large extent picked up where residential schools left off.

“The lesser-known story is the child welfare story and its assimilationist program. And you have to remember that none of this was written down as policy: ‘We’ll assimilate aboriginal kids openly through the residential schools. And after we close the residential schools we’ll quietly pick it up with child welfare.’ It was never written down. But it was an organic process, part of the colonial process in general.”

This from the Australian Broadcasting Corp-

Baby traffickers arrested on China-Vietnam border

To quote just a little:

The two babies were turned over to a social welfare centre, the officer said.

“This is the third baby trafficking case we have detected this year, bringing the number of rescued babies to five,” he said.

Vietnamese police busted a trafficking syndicate in February, which sold babies to China for adoption, reportedly charging about $US500 each for girls and $US1,000 for boys.

___________

Late addition-

Ethnically Incorrect Daughter has more details, “6 Vietnamese suspeted of trying to sell babies arrested.”

Looks like I’m not the one paying attention.