Reuters is running a series about underground adoption networks that is well-worth your time. The gist of it is that people who have adopted children they don't want anymore (often from overseas) are taking to the Internet to find people to give them to:
Without involving government officials, parents transfer unwanted children — often foreign adoptees — to virtual strangers they meet online. No law explicitly covers the practice, a type of "private re-homing." The primary safeguard that does exist is a feeble deterrent — an agreement between U.S. states called the Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children (ICPC).
That's stunning, but it's not the most stunning part. The most stunning part is that here, in the United States, in the year 2013, people seem to think that you can tell if a stranger on the Internet has a kind heart and good intentions when they're offering to take your unwanted child.
I cannot even fathom this. You have a child you can't deal with — about whom you've complained to all your Internet buddies, told them all how terrible the kid is — and someone offers to take the kid off your hands? And then you're surprised when they turn out to be abusers or child pornographers? Who do you think is hanging around looking for kids other people don't give a shit about?
A good portion of the story is devoted to a bunch of people who gave their children to a couple named Nicole and Calvin Eason, and the woman, Megan Exon, who acted as a middleman to help facilitate some of these transfers. That is, until Lynne Banks called her to tell her what kind of people the Easons really were:
Child welfare officials had taken away Nicole Eason's two biological children, a son and a daughter, years earlier. A report by authorities who removed the Easons' newborn son characterized them as having "severe psychiatric problems" and "violent tendencies." And the man Banks had mentioned — the one who had been living with Nicole — had been trading pictures of naked children online.
And everybody is surprised. The parents who gave their kids away are surprised Exon and other middlemen don't vet the potential new parents. The middlemen are surprised that the parents aren't better vetting the people they're giving their kids to.
Of course, there's a Tennessee connection. Tim Stowell, identified as "a 60-year-old father of four adopted children who works at a Tennessee boarding school for boys," runs the Facebook page "Way Stations of Love."
He says he also keeps a private list of people willing to take in children from failed adoptions. But like most go-betweens, Stowell says he leaves the vetting of prospective parents to families offering a child. In some cases, he says, parents meet on the site and exchange private emails to arrange custody transfers. "And then I never know what happens to them," Stowell says of the children. "Some people want the children as far away from them as possible."
This blows my mind. You could be putting a kid right in the hands of a child molester, and this causes you no concern? It doesn't bother you that you never know what happens to these kids?
And there's nothing illegal about the practice in our state: "In Tennessee, no law prevents Stowell from advertising children for adoption, or from helping parents find available children."
Did we as a state learn nothing from Georgia Tann? We stood around and let her give babies to god knows whom for 30 years, and we didn't make any laws that would prevent people from just willy-nilly brokering the exchange of children?
We know how bad this goes and we have nothing in place to stop it.
Unbelievable.
