The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption Read Online Free PDF

containing the vast majority of adoption paperwork for Haiti’s children and killed the judge who oversaw adoptions. But on January 18, just days before Silsby and her mission were to arrive in the Dominican Republic, the US State Department and Department of Homeland Security responded to these complications by announcing its “humanitarian parole” policy, which would ultimately expedite the emigration of more than 1,150 “orphaned children” who had been matched with US parents on temporary authorization papers. Adoption advocates, however, pushed for even more measures to open and speed up the process. Although the devastation had rendered the Haitian government incapable of tracking either institutionalized or newly “unaccompanied” children’s existing family connections, adoption advocates pressed to expand the humanitarian parole program to thousands of other children—to get children out of Haiti first and investigate whether those children had surviving families later, after they were safe in the United States, no matter that children of unclear origin taken to America are rarely returned. “The paperwork can wait,” summarized a headline in the Times of London, “everybody wins with adoption.”
    Conversely, UNICEF, along with other aid groups like Save the Children and World Vision, called for an adoption moratorium until Haitian officials could determine which unaccompanied children were legitimate orphans, citing fears of child trafficking and misguided salvation missions. In response some adoption advocates charged that this goal made the perfect the enemy of the good; they accused UNICEF of leaving childrento suffer in the name of bureaucracy and “flexing their muscles” to harass Christian orphanages.
    Such claims weren’t new to UNICEF, long a bête noire of the adoption community and frequently accused of being so anti-adoption that it would rather see children die in institutions than be adopted to the United States. UNICEF’s official stance is that international adoption is a good option for some children and preferable to orphanage care but that in-country options, such as reuniting children with their birth families or placing them with domestic adoptive parents, must be exhausted first. This hierarchy of options, known as “the principle of subsidiarity,” also guides the Hague Adoption Convention, an international compact drawn to prevent adoption trafficking and corruption. Nonetheless, UNICEF still garnered special disdain among the Christian adoption advocates who flocked to the country after the quake.
    Dixie Bickel, director of God’s Littlest Angels orphanage in Fermate, outside Port-au-Prince, charged that “UNICEF appears to be the only organization that we’re aware of that is currently working in Haiti that isn’t working for the good of the children,” while Randy Bohlender, founder of the Christian adoption ministry the Zoe Foundation, called UNICEF’s subsidiarity principle “nation-pandering,” a statement implying that Haiti shouldn’t control what happened to its children.
    Vision Forum Ministries, a far-right offshoot of a fundamentalist Texas homeschooling publisher that had assembled a Haitian rescue mission of its own, asserted that “Haiti’s Children [are being] Held Hostage by UNICEF’s Agenda.” The group went on to make the wild claim that UNICEF would soon move from preventing adoptions to sterilizing Haitians.
    The accusations built to such a pitch that Susan Bissell, UNICEF chief of child protection, spent much of her time addressing them in postearthquake interviews. “UNICEF is very much in favor of international adoption with the right system in place at the right time for the right children,” Bissell repeated to me. “UNICEF isn’t saying this stuff. There are international conventions that lay this out, and we’re just compliant.”
    But adoption organizations and right-wing Christian ministries weren’t the only source of