User:ChloeCBlaskiewicz/sandbox

Child Laundering Child laundering is the illegal acquisition of children through monetary transactions, deceit, or force. The child laundering rings are often expansive with multiple levels of people involved and their primary motivation is the large amounts of money to be gained through an overseas adoption. Westerners spend thousands of dollars to adopt one child, and this provides enough incentive to these rings, often involving people who extend from the higher classes of society to the middle classes. These ‘baby brokers’ then forge a new identity for the laundered child in order to validate the child’s legal status as an orphan, and to ensure that their scheme will not be uncovered. The issue of child laundering is highly controversial, as there are some who argue that although these children are being treated as a commodity and are stripped of contact with their families, ultimately the child will live in a more affluent environment and will have more opportunities as a result of this overseas adoption.

Hierarchy of Involvement in Child Laundering

There is a hierarchy of involvement in the process of child laundering that includes governments, orphanages, intermediaries, birth families, and adopted families. The person who heads these child laundering rings make $2,000-$20,000 per adoption in placing these children overseas, therefore it is necessary for this individual to have the language and social skills to work closely with adoption agencies in the Western world. They use intermediaries to acquire the children, who are sent out to find children whose parents are some of the poorest in the society, and who might be more willing to relinquish their child. The people involved in recruiting and managing the adoption ring are most often in the upper or middle class in their country, and have a negative view of the very poor. Therefore the recruiters are able to rationalize taking these children from their biological families due to the notion that the child will be better off growing up in the West The government is also involved in that many officials are bribed in order to speedily approve these illegitimate adoptions, and also to ignore the fact that this criminal organization is operating outside of the law

Process of Illegal Adoptions

The illegal adoptions associated with child laundering practices involve a hierarchy of people as described above, who manipulate the legal adoptions system in order to profit. Firstly, recruiters gain physical custody of children through various means, then children are taken to the orphanages that arrange the adoptions, where they are severely mistreated. Finally, after a forgery of documents to falsify a child’s identity, the child is sent to the West to be united with his or her adoptive parents.

Child Acquisition

There are several different ways by which “orphans” are acquired to be essentially sold into the adoption system. Sending nations are always poor, and in most places, these countries have a system by which parents who temporarily cannot afford to take care of their children place them in institutions such as orphanages, hostels, or schools. This community childcare provides poor children with care, housing, and food until the family is in a more favorable economic situation. In these cases, the parent is not by any means intending on severing their parental rights and are not abandoning the children. However, these institutions sometimes take advantage of their physical custody of the child to earn a profit by putting them up for adoption overseas, making thousands of dollars per adoption Another instance by which children are wrongly deemed to be orphans are times where a child may become lost or separated from their family. By law, it is required that institutions make an effort to locate the family, but there is no way to assess whether they actually do this, or to what extent and effort the family should be sought after. If these efforts to find the family fail, or are declared to have failed, the institution then has the opportunity to capitalize on the child and begin the adoption process Another way by which “orphans” are acquired is through an outright purchase of the child. The recruiters for these adoption rings seek out poor women who are pregnant and offer to pay for the child Most of the time, the parent is led to believe that they will still be able to be in contact with the child and will continue to receive financial support from the adoptive parents, and are also told that they will eventually be able to immigrate to the West to be with their child once he/she is grown. Through any of these methods, the recruiters lead the birth parents to believe they are providing a better future for their child

Treatment of Children in Orphanages

United States ICE agents have visited several of the orphanages in other countries associated with the business of child laundering, with shocking findings. The conditions of the babies was inhumane; the children were unwashed and unclothed, unprotected from malaria lying in rusty cribs (Smolin: Child Laundering 139). Additionally, there was no experienced nurse caring for the children, and the investigator termed it a “stash house.” With the thousands of dollars that these orphanages receive for each adoption, the conditions children are kept in could be vastly improved for just a fraction of the racketeers’ profits.

Overseas Adoption

The United States is responsible for most of the overseas adoptions in the world: 20,000 out of the total 30,000 orphans adopted annually (Virtual Land of the Baby Broker Business). The Westerners who adopt from developing nations pay thousands of dollars in order for the paperwork of one child to be processed. This provides a lucrative incentive for those who are willing to be involved in the process In many of these situations, the prospective adoptive parents are motivated through a sense of altruism, coupled with their desire to overcome infertility and fulfill the Western standard of the nuclear family. These adoptive parents have a demand for healthy infants that will be able to assimilate into their new home and cut off ties to their birthplace and culture of origin Prospective adoptive parents are placed with the “orphans” through adoption agencies, brokers, or advertising agencies online. Due to the fact that most of the children adopted overseas are so young, they will not have any memories of their birth families. Without a paper trail and without any input from the child, it makes it near impossible to detect whether a child is truly an orphan.

International Legislation

Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption

The Hague Convention was called for on the basis that the international adoption system was completely unregulated, and so the Convention sought to establish certain rules that the individual countries must enforce in order to prevent child laundering. They sought to establish an indirect solution to these abuses. Unfortunately, the Hague Convention fails to require any effort to preserve the family before turning to international adoption, and therefore the Convention mostly represents an anti-trafficking treaty. In 2000, the U.S. Congress enacted the Intercountry Adoption Act in order to implement the ideas of the Hague Convention. However, this act is limited in the fact that the U.S. cannot enforce any measures against the sending country in the event that corruption in the adoption process is discovered.

Stance of the United States

The U.S. State Department does not consider child laundering to be a form of human trafficking, as it is a non-exploitative result. Further, it is seen as a humanitarian act, regardless of the circumstances surrounding the acquisition of the child. Further, the adoption agencies in the West are operating within a completely legitimate sphere, and have no way of knowing that they are a party to this human rights violation. Therefore, the United States does not have the jurisdiction to prosecute these agencies working in the developing countries.

Case Studies

The issue of child laundering is a global issue, and there have been highly publicized cases in the past decade. Guatemala, China, and Cambodia highly exemplify the problems associated with intercountry adoptions.

Guatemala

From 1999-2011 there have been: • 29,731 adoptions of Guatemalan children • 15,691 females and 14,040 males • 20,829 of these adoptions have been children under 1 year of age • 6,557 children 1-2 years of age • 2,749 children aged 3-18 years of age Previous to Guatemala’s adoption of the Hague Convention in 2007, child laundering was a widespread and notorious issue in Guatemala. The recruiters are called jaladoras or buscadoras, and these individuals often work with medical personell who give the recruiters information about where vulnerable women can be located. For every child procured, the buscadora earns anywhere from $5,000 to $8,000, making any unscrupulous methods employed worth the risks and implications in their minds. Some of the methods included women being told their baby did not survive childbirth, or the outright purchase of a child.These women never received much in compensation for their child, as most of the bribes went to the “baby brokers,” who process most of the paperwork in the adoption process Since the signing of the Hague Convention, new laws passed by Guatemala have created new standards for the adoptions process. All adoption agencies have to be accredited and be accountable for their actions, as well as keep detailed and accurate financial records. Additionally, foster caregiving now has much more accountability to the oversight of the Secretaria de Binestar Social (SBS). The Central Authority (CA) was also established in order to ensure Guatemala’s compliance with Hague Convention rules; children who have been legally approved for adoptions (by a judge) are matched with a prospective adoptive family by a team made up of a CA social worker and a psychologist. Following the restructuring of the Guatemalan government, Guatemala had ceased all foreign adoptions. In 2011, however, they announced that the government will be reviewing cases that had been in the works in 2007, but were not going to accept any more cases. At the present time, the United States is no longer processing adoptions from Guatemala, finally following suit with the number of other countries who placed moratoriums on Guatemalan adoptions.

China

From 1999-2011 there have been: • 66,630 adoptions of Chinese children • 60,431 females and 6,199 males • 25,605 of these adoptions have been children under 1 year of age • 33,566 children 1-2 years of age • 6,904 children aged 3-18 years of age China has experienced rampant child laundering in past decades, although now they are considered to be better off than most other sending countries. China reports about 10,000 kidnappings per year, although the true numbers are considered to be much higher. The official statistics are only based on those that are resolved, but it is very difficult to prove that a child has been kidnapped and then laundered. Most of these children are from poor families in the rural areas, and are taken as a result of the profits to be made from Western families. The Hunan scandal brought many of these issues to light, as orphanages sent intermediaries into rural areas to acquire children that are then moved around Hunan and given fraudulent documents in order to cover up the situation. Some argue that the issue of child laundering in China stems from the one-child policy, which created what was once a surplus of children to be adopted. However, since the demand for Chinese children has increased, institutions resort to methods like kidnapping in order to meet the demand and make a profit. This has been criticized due to the fact that the system of international adoptions has created a system where poor families in China are abused in order to satiate the Western demand for children. Additionally, the ethnocentric justifications for these behaviors suggest that the child will have a better life without any connection to the biological family in the West, but some believe that the family should be preserved at all costs.

Cambodia

From 1999-2011 there have been: • 2,355 adoptions of Guatemalan children • 1,369 females and 986 males • 1,370 of these adoptions have been children under 1 year of age • 677 children 1-2 years of age • 308 children aged 3-18 years of age While most instances of intercountry adoption take two or more years to process, Cambodia has made a policy of expediting this process, often in as few as three months. Human rights activists consider Cambodia to be one of the countries with the most corruption involved in intercountry adoption. Licadho, a Cambodian human rights group, has expressed that recruiters target poor families and women in their efforts to gain access to young children. Tactics such as the outright purchase of babies for as little as $20 USD or deception of birthparents into relinquishing physical custody are systematically employed. One particular case that gained media attention focused on a child laundering scheme run by an American woman named Lauryn Galindo. Galindo was prosecuted in the US and convicted of “material misrepresentations as to the orphan status and identities” of infant adoptees over the period of 1997 through 2001. Galindo was charged with 18 months in prison, a fine, and required community service.. Currently, the United States, formerly one of the most common destinations for Cambodian adoptees, is no longer processing adoptions from Cambodia.

Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption International Adoption Child Trafficking List of International Adoption Scandals