A peek inside international adoption

Samoan adoptions raise eyebrows

The Samoan government has launched an inquiry into an international agency that arranges adoptions of village children to Americans.

A One News investigation has found the children are not orphans or abandoned. Instead they come from big families.

Auckland has become a staging post for American parents picking up Samoan children. Last year the American consulate in Auckland issued visas for 61 Samoan children.

That figure is expected to grow and that has prompted a Samoan government investigation.

In addition some parents claim they did not know they were signing their children away forever. They say they had no idea that adoption meant permanent seperation from their children.

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Death prompts Samoan adoption change

Samoa has rushed through legislation to tighten up on foreign adoptions following the death of a child who had been in the care of an American agency.

Last year a One News investigation revealed Samoan parents had put their children up for adoption with the organisation Focus On Children, not realising they would never see them again. Parents thought the children would stay in America only for their education and that the adoption was not permanent.

Now the agency is once again in the spotlight - this time in the midst of a police investigation.

Avea Sioka was struggling to bring up six children when the family placed baby Heta and three of her siblings with Focus On Children.

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http://tvnz.co.nz/content/594334

Arrests over Samoa adoption scam

The owners of an American adoption agency have been charged with running a baby-smuggling operation out of Samoa.

An investigation by ONE News Pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver first highlighted the alleged scam which US officials have called "shocking and appalling".

Seven people involved with the Utah-based agency are accused of deceiving parents in Samoa into signing away their children.

US investigators allege that as well as being mistreated in a nanny or halfway house, Samoan birth parents were deceived into thinking they would get their children back when they were older.

US officials allege the agency targeted Samoan children for adoption by observing the market or other places where women gathered.

Local agent Dan Wakefield is one of those charged. He told ONE News it wasn't his fault if Samoan parents misunderstood.

Behind the tale of alleged fraud, selling children and money laundering are the families.The parents only intention was to give their children a good future that they could not afford to give themselves.

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African adoption should be discouraged 'at all costs,' group says

Hong Kong (CNN) -- Nyla was just two or three days old, no one really knows for sure, when she was found abandoned in the middle of a field in Rwanda. She was "black and blue," says her adoptive mother, Karen Brown. Her umbilical cord was still attached.

One year later, Nyla lives in a high-rise building in Hong Kong with American parents and a four-year-old sister who is Chinese. She just started walking and has "seven-and-a-half" teeth, though she's too shy to show them.

The bright-eyed baby is one of more than 35,000 children sent from Africa in a surge of adoptions in the last eight years, according to adoption expert Peter Selman from Newcastle University in the UK.

During that time, figures have risen three-fold at the same time as international adoptions from all countries have slumped to a 15-year low, Selman said.

A new report from The African Child Policy Forum (ACPF) entitled "Africa: The New Frontier for Intercountry Adoption," says the trend indicates that receiving countries are turning "en masse" to Africa to meet demand for adoptive children as other options close. It's a trend, they say, that needs to stop.

"It must at all costs be discouraged. It should be a last resort and an exception rather than the normal recourse to solving the situation of children in difficult circumstances, as it seems to have now become," said David Mugawe, executive director of the ACPF in a press statement.

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http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/29/world/africa/africa-child-adoption/index.html

Chinese police bust child trafficking ring

Press Trust of India / Beijing June 01, 2012, 15:25

In crackdown on a child trafficking ring, Chinese police have arrested 76 people and rescued 31 infants.

The ring abducted babies in Yunnan province and sold them in Hebei and Shandong in northern China, Police department of the Chinese Ministry of Railway said.

The police have arrested 76 suspects so far.

The ring purchased the infants at a price of about 10,000 yuan (USD 1,582) each in Yunnan and sold them in Hebei and Shandong for 20,000 to 50,000 yuan, it said.

The ring is connected by well-organised members who abduct, purchase, transport and sell the infants for adoption Wang Ansi, state-run Xinhua news agency quoted police officials as saying.

Chinese police have beefed up their efforts to crack down on human trafficking rings.

In 2011, police across the country rescued 8,660 abducted children and 15,458 women after breaking up 3,195 human trafficking groups.

A DNA database for missing children set up by the Ministry of Public Security has helped over 2,000 abducted kids return home as of February 2012

for remaining article:
http://www.business-standard.com/generalnews/news/chinese-police-bust-child-trafficking-ring/15818/

Guilty Plea In Adoption Fraud Case

SEATTLE - A baby-selling scandal targeted local couples anxious to adopt.

The families thought they were adopting orphans from overseas, but in many cases the babies weren't orphans.

Wednesday, the woman who helped set up the adoptions pleaded guilty.

Lauryn Galindo has claimed all she wanted to do was give poor third world children a loving home. But, federal investigators say she preyed on poor Cambodian families to buy and sell their babies.

http://www.komonews.com/news/archive/4127656.html

Profit-driven adoptions turn children into a commodity

A dramatic rise in foreign adoptions from Africa is ringing alarm bells among child advocates who worry that the soaring numbers are fuelled by financial incentives and a lack of basic safeguards.

The number of African children adopted by foreign families has nearly tripled in the past eight years. Nearly 6,350 children from Africa were adopted by foreigners in 2010, compared to less than 2,240 in 2003, according to a report released on Tuesday.

The rapid growth has been accompanied by a proliferation of adoption agencies and orphanages, even though the vast majority of “orphans” actually have at least one living parent.

Many orphanages in Africa are set up to generate profits for the owners, since they can receive up to $30,000 per adopted child, the report’s author says. “They were created for financial gain,” said David Mugawe, executive director of the African Child Policy Forum, which released the report Tuesday. “A lot is happening under the table.”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/profit-driven-adoptions-turn-children-into-a-commodity/article2447100/

Living with Dead Hearts

http://livingwithdeadhearts.com/

China's Lost Children

Of the Thousands of Children Kidnapped in China, Many Are Adopted by Foreigners

By BETH LOYD

BEIJING, May 12, 2008 —

More than a year ago, Liang Di went missing.

He was 3 years old at the time and shopping at an outdoor food market in Dongguan, China, with his father and 6-year old brother.

The two boys were playing outside while their father was in a hardware store. A man approached the two brothers on the street and offered them sweets. And then the man took little Di away.

His father, Liang Xiangrong, and brother did not see where they went. His parents went to the police but were told that they needed to find more clues before the authorities could do anything to help. The police never launched an investigation. And Liang Xiangrong said trying to solicit help from government officials is useless.

"We didn't tell the local officials what happened to our boy. Even if we told them, who would believe what a poor migrant worker said?" he told ABC News.

All they could do was talk to police and with other families in the area whose children had been kidnapped. The family has not heard anything about the possible whereabouts of their child. The last year has been agony.

"We think of him every day. When we close our eyes in bed at night, we think of him. When we see other people's children, we think of him. We really miss him," Liang said.

There has been a spate of child kidnappings in Dongguan, among other cities in the last few years, mostly targeting the children of poor migrant workers. Now, little Di is a statistic.

The 2007 U.S. State Department Trafficking in Persons report says that domestic trafficking "remains the most significant problem in China." It estimates that there are up to 20,000 victims each year, but because this is an underground practice, it is virtually impossible to track. Some estimates put the number of children kidnapped or sold on the black market closer to 70,000. The Chinese government says the number is more like 10,000.

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China busts enormous child trafficking ring

Police in China have announced they had busted two enormous child trafficking rings, arresting more than 600 suspects and rescuing 178 children.

The black industry of stealing children is big business in China, where desperate families are willing to pay up to £10,000 for a baby boy they can raise as their own.

As many as 70,000 Chinese children are thought to be kidnapped each year, often snatched from rural areas in the north of the country and then funnelled south to families in the provinces of Fujian and Guangdong. Last year, Chinese police managed to rescue some 6,000 of them.

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8939974/China-busts-enormous-child-trafficking-ring.html

Chinese babies reportedly trafficked into adoption

Authorities in China are investigating reports that about 20 babies born in violation of population-control policies were abducted and then trafficked into adoption by officials.

The investigation comes after Caixin magazine reported this week that family planning officials in central China's Hunan province had abducted children and sold them internationally - some to people in the United States and the Netherlands.

Chinese officials do not always enforce the "one child" policy with much vigour and the worst that violators normally expect is a fine.

The case, which is not the first to accuse Chinese family planning officials of abusing population control policies for profit, sheds further light on the uneven implementation of child-population-control policy.

One family claimed they had not broken the law as the child was their first, but family planning "enforcers" nonetheless took the baby away.

"They mistook my daughter for being illegal when my wife and I were working in Shenzhen," migrant worker Yang Libing told the magazine.

Mr Yang said he had tracked down his daughter, now seven years old and living in the United States.
Family planning officials in Longhui county allegedly received $142 for each child handed over to welfare agencies, which in turn received up to $2,760 for each child put up for adoption overseas, it said.

The abductions peaked in the middle of the last decade but had been occurring for 10 years, the magazine said.

Trafficking of women and children remains a serious problem in China, with many sociologists blaming the one child policy for fuelling the crime.

for remaining article:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-05-11/chinese-babies-reportedly-trafficked-into-adoption/2713174

Investigations Find Chinese Babies are Abducted, Sold for Adoption: Canadian Government Challenges C

October 21, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Canadian government has called on China to respond to claims that Chinese babies are being kidnapped from their parents and sold to orphanages so as to be adopted by Canadians and other Westerners, reports Canwest News Service.

The Canadian embassy in Beijing has reportedly requested that an investigation be conducted by the China Centre of Adoption Affairs (CCAA), the Chinese federal agency in charge of the country's international adoption program.

This news follows an investigative report last month in the Los Angeles Times, which revealed horrific stories of babies being kidnapped from their parents by Chinese 'family planning' officials who later sold them through orphanages for a U.S. $3,000 adoption fee.

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http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/archive/ldn/2009/oct/09102205

Chinese baby trafficking leaves farmers forlorn

Children taken under guise of one-child policy and sent to be adopted abroad
Forty-seven year old Yang Li Bing puffs on a cigarette as he shuffles through photos of a daughter he hasn’t seen in seven years.

“After she was taken in 2004, I could hardly sleep and I asked my wife if we could have another. But losing Yang Ling was too difficult," he says. "My wife left me.”

Yang is one of many poor farmers in the remote village of Gao Ping in China's Hunan province, where residents say the family-planning officials who enforce the country's one-child policy have seized at least 20 babies and sent them to orphanages to be adopted abroad.

Yang says he has little faith in the Communist Party’s ability to investigate misconduct by the local officials. After Yang went public with his story, other farmers came forward. The incidents all happened between 2002 and 2005.

At the time, Yang — like many poor farmers — was working far away in a factory in Guangdong province when he received a call from his father.

“As soon as I was told they had taken Yang Ling, I rushed back to Hunan and went to the family planning office. But they told me I was too late. My daughter had been adopted by a family in the United States.”

For remaining story:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/05/15/china-stolen-babies.html

Chinese police target child smugglers and rescue 89 babies

Police in China say they have rescued 89 kidnapped babies during operations to break up child smuggling gangs.

The police told Chinese state media they had arrested more than 300 people in southern provinces.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children go missing in China each year where criminal gangs steal the children and sell them to childless couples.

For remaining article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14317068