I started writing this post last week and had to walk away. The original post for Legalized Human Trafficking garnered just a bit of controversial conversation, some of it hard to hear. Comments from other adoptive parents, for those of us still in adoption PTSD mode, comes across as condescending and a little harsh. That, on top of the news that someone close to me died ,was all too much to handle in the moment so I walked away to get some perspective and space.
This adoption business is fraught with emotion. Each person has their own perspective and we have all dug our heels into our positions. Politics has nothing on the adoption world in polarizing points of view. It’s almost impossible to view just the facts and leave our hearts out of it. As I wrote in Adoption Combat Zone, emotion is very dangerous when making such life-altering decisions as adoption. Our family would not have adopted without emotion – the feeling afraid for the “poor orphan”. I was told this week adopting to “save” an orphan was the wrong reason to adopt. That the only “right” reason to adopt is wanting to add to your family. Tell that to the hosting agencies who use emotion and saving the children as their mission directives. Don’t tell me those agencies aren’t specifically playing on emotions when they talk first about hosting these ‘worthy and wonderful children’ and then go on to tell prospective adoptive parents about all the horrible things that will happen to the orphans if they aren’t adopted. It is ALL emotion based. We, and hundreds of others, got sucked in.
I want to make one thing CRYSTAL CLEAR. People hear me say I want adoption stopped. And they get angry with me. I’m told I won’t like the world I’m creating if there is no adoption. They fail to read the rest of my statement…I want adoption stopped UNTIL safeguards are put into place to protect good, honest, and caring families from fraud and from children/teens who have no real wish to be adopted or that have diagnosis such as RAD (Reactive Attachment Disorder), which makes it nearly impossible to attach to any person in a family type living arrangement, is destructive to the family, and can add a very dangerous element to adoption as it did in our case.
I’m told there are no guarantees in life, even with biological children. This is true. Plenty of “normal” families are messed up or have messed up members. HOWEVER, adoption is a choice. We made the choice to bring psychopaths into our home to brutalize and abuse us. Of course, at the time we adopted them we were told they were “the best in the orphanage and had no mental issues at all”. We made the choice to hurt and cause trauma to two perfectly well-adjusted younger teens in order to rescue, save, help, and give a better future to four others. In what universe is it okay to hurt one child in order to help another?
As I stated at the beginning of my original post I knew labeling it Legalized Human Trafficking would stir things up a bit. Actually, that’s my whole point. People need to get stirred up over this issue because there are too many families living in crisis and family units breaking down for things to continue as they are. We need wide-open dialog about adoption. What is best for families? What is best for orphans? How we can do things differently to protect children and teens like mine who are lost in the fallout of trying to make a difference?
People living in horrible adoption scenarios are SO AFRAID to speak out. For every comment on a Facebook post I receive ten or more private messages thanking me for telling their stories. They live in constant fear of their lives and sanity. They are afraid for their biological children who are breaking before their very eyes. Their marriages have broken, their families are shattered, they are completely isolated, and they are forced to keep living with the orphan who is causing it all. And they are AFRAID. Afraid to speak out because someone is ready to tell them they just need to love more, or love longer, or that they themselves adopted a hard case and managed it just fine. One more person telling us we aren’t doing enough, or we aren’t good enough parents. And the voices are silenced.
To everyone out there I will say this AGAIN. I know there are good adoptions. I wish to Yahweh ours had been one of those. The hundreds of people who reach out to me privately wish they had one of those. The more than 350 families who contributed their stories to Adoption Combat Zone wish theirs had been. Let me just say this out loud. Every single time you say that adoptions should continue the way they are you are telling us that our experience has no value, that we just didn’t do it good enough, that we are wrong, and that we just need to keep silent. You invalidate our experience and our hurt and our trauma – and the trauma our children are experiencing. It HURTS! Especially coming from another adoptive parent. You completely minimize the incredible pain our families live with on a daily basis.
We need to take a hard look at how we are serving orphans and our own families and until things can be done to protect them both from further harm we need to slow way down before more families wind up like mine, or like some, far worse. We need more accountability from EVERYONE involved in the adoption process, including the countries themselves. If a country is not willing to take the steps needed for truth in adoption then adoptions need to be shut down until they are. We need gut-honest truth about not only the adoption process but the orphans themselves. We need full medical histories and psychological exams by competent professionals. We need protection in place for families who wind up with a child/teen with RAD or other medical or physical diagnosis for which they were not prepared, approved for, or trained to handle. We need support and funding for RTF’s (residential treatment facilities) for orphans who should not live with a family for safety reasons such as a family whose RAD daughter (5) has sworn to burn down their house while all the family is sleeping.
I’m not against adoption. I think it can be a beautiful thing. But only when done in complete honesty and integrity and doesn’t jeopardize the family who is only trying to do the right thing. I won’t rest until families who have put everything on the line to make a difference in the life of a child/teen are heard and protected.
This is Simply My Opinion,
Kathe
www.adoptioncombatzone.com
www.katheray.arbonne.com
https://www.facebook.com/adoptioncombatzone/
Oh my. I don’t know whether to be happy someone who adopted became anti adoption or whether to be ticked off because the reason you changed your mind was to protect you and people who adopt rather than to protect people from being adopted. You are anti adoption. Go join the anti adoption group on face book where I am an active member (though not adopted and have not lost a relative to adoption myself – I reunite separated families for free)
So you are onto something when you say legalized trafficking. I’ll go you one further and call it slavery, totally legal because it benefits the government. I reviewed that with you in a comment on a separate post. Look the changes you think need to be made to adoption where people who adopt get all kinds of truthful information and financial and emotional support after the fact – that will never happen because THE WHOLE POINT OF ADOPTION IS TO TRANSFER LIABILITY FOR POOR TROUBLED CHILDREN TO THE WEALTHY PRIVATE SECTOR SO THE GOVERNMENT CAN WASH THEIR HANDS OF ANY CULPABILITY FOR PLACEMENT DECISIONS OR FURTHER FINANCIAL SUPPORT. The government does not actually give a damn if people raising children are on drugs or drink so long as they foot the bill for raising the kid. Here is a cold splash of reality for you, how many drug or alcohol tests were you required to take in order to adopt? None. That is exactly how man foster carers are required to take. Meanwhile people on welfare loose their kids all the time for drinking and drugs because the government wants to stop paying those people welfare. Adoption strips minors of citizenship in their home countries – something that happens to American kids adopted into Canada and Europe also experience – loosing citizenship only happens if people are adopted or guilty of high treason. Don’t go thinking adoption needs to stop until it gets better because it is working just exactly like how they want. Yes people who adopt are victimized to a certain extent because they assume responsibility for someone else’s kid as if that kid were their own when they are not truly their responsibility because they did not create them. If people are nice enough to take care of someone else’s kid at their own expense they should be able to draw the line in the sand and say, I’ve had enough and I don’t want to do this anymore. Instead of vilifying them, the government should just say thanks for your time. Kids acting out like that don’t want more love or more commitment they are rejecting the suffocating foreverness of a situation that may truly only need to be temporary until their families can take them back or until they are old enough to return home on their own. But people who adopt are also to blame for pushing the idea that adoption makes people parents rather than caregivers. The law can only end relationships it creates and the law does not create parents, people make themselves parents when they have offspring. All the law does is state that parents have obligations to and for their offspring and that they have certain rights to the custody of their own offspring as long as their offspring are safe in their care. Adoption does not give a kid new parents for real its all lies on paper. Doing the job of a parent cannot make a person a parent for real. At best it makes them a parent in the mind of the child they are caring for because they’ve been lying to the child and referring to them as their son or daughter until the kid is trained to believe it. Victor is not your son. He might someday grow to be like a son if he is loved and respected for who he is and his family is acknowledged and everyone recognizes how his government peddled him off to another country and forced him to serve in the roll of another couples child in order to be fed and clothed. You’d be rioting too. Children should not have to change anything about themselves to be deserving of food and shelter. Now he is trapped across the water from his family and culture with his documents seized and altered to prevent him from returning as his real self. It is a recipe for monster making you are right, but there is no fix for it within the framework of adoption. Hosting is fine, guardianship is fine, fostering is fine, group homes are sad but fine none of those violate the essential freedoms and liberties of the whole person the way adoption does. It’s unfortunate that adoptive families suffer when they adopt kids but they fed that monster with their desire to ‘add to their family’ rather than simply helping another family out with their kid.
Thank you for writing. I appreciate your viewpoint. If you read my book, Adoption Combat Zone, you will see that I also take the side of the adoptees. This is a situation where everyone loses. There are no winners. Adoption itself is based on loss. Much of what I know now we did not know going into it. That’s a sad reality for both parents and children. There is a lot of hope that gets smashed along the way. It’s the way the system is set up.
I will say though that part of what you write is incorrect. We had to go through a battery of tests including physical and psychological. That was required by the home country, not the USA however, so it is probably quite different adopting from the foster care system here. We had to prove we were good parents including even having our children go through testing.
I’m hoping that through education we can change this terrible system so the children and teens are protected and cared for HOW THEY NEED IT. Again, much of what I know now we didn’t know then. The lack of education leads to the destruction of families and does not help the children.
Thank you again for writing.