Big Lies about Little People: The War Between UNICEF and the Orphanages, Battleground Haiti

HAITI EARTHQUAKE 2010

On day three after the January 12^th 2010 Haiti earthquake the London Evening Standard headline read,

“Up to two million children are feared orphaned or at least separated from their parents in Haiti.”   (London Evening Standard, January 15^th  2010)

That information came from Save the Children’s Emergency Director, Gareth Owen, a 7-year veteran of natural disasters around the world. “This isn’t a safe place.” Owen told Agence France-Presse reporters, “The prison’s collapsed and lone children are vulnerable.” By day 7 the crisis was being widely portrayed as a child-care apocalypse:

Crisis of the one million Haitian orphans as UNICEF warns the devastation has jumped to  unbearable proportions’  (Daily Mail, January 19, 2010)

One Million Orphans in Haiti  (The Daily Beast, January 19, 2010)

One million children left orphans in Haiti horror  (The Express, January 20, 2010)

 There never was anywhere near one million children orphaned or separated from their families. There may not have even been one-hundred. And UNICEF and Save the Children knew it. On March 9th, eight weeks after the earthquake, UNICEF would report that it had only registered 300 lost or separated children. And close scrutiny by organizations such as SOS revealed that most of those had been placed in the orphanages by their own impoverished parents or family members trying to access aid on behalf of the children. Paying people to take their children back, reportedly common after the earthquake, almost certainly encouraged the practice.  And for those children who really were lost or separated, UNICEF wasn’t doing much to help get them home. Ten weeks after the eathquake, UNICEF had only reunified twenty children with their families. Yes, twenty. But the underlying problem, the one that concerns us here, is that UNICEF and the Children protection were outright lying.

On January 19^th, one week after the quake, the CEO for the United Kingdom’s SOS Villages, Andrew Cates, posted a blog pointing out that, “Claims of a million earthquake orphans are clearly false and those making them are being irresponsible.” Cates went on to say that, “Memories it seems are short in the media. Already we have stories of 200,000 dead with a million earthquake orphans.” He noted that final estimates for children orphaned by the Asian tsunami that killed 230,000 people were between five and six thousand children, about 3% of the death toll. And, in a stroke of what would turn out to be near perfect prescience, Cates explained,

The reason I want to remind you about the Asian tsunami is to remind you that ten days afterwards stories were circulating in the media claiming 1.5 million affected children “mostly orphans.” …That claim and the one of ship loads of Thai child snatchers landing on beaches turned out to be part of the myth that arose and disappeared. The cynical among us might say part of an attempt to whip up human emotions in an unfair way.

History was about to repeat itself.

 

CHILD PROTECTION AGENCIES

Ten days after the earthquake, on January 22^nd, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Rupert Colville, stood up at a press conference and announced, “Child enslavement and trafficking is an existing problem and could easily emerge as a serious issue over the coming weeks and months.”  Next to him was Jean Luc Legrand of UNICEF who then took the podium and claimed that child snatching was already underway.  Most media outlets reported Legrand as saying, “We have documented 15 cases of children disappearing from hospitals, and not with their own family at the time.”

Anyone who read Cates of SOS warnings and now listened carefully to Colville and Legrand would have noticed that we were witnessing an exact reconstruction of Tsunami untruths and exaggerations, misrepresentation that had also orginated with UNICEF.  Then too, five years before, the panic had been built on exaggerations, hearsay and second hand account. Just as in Haiti, a year after the tsunami UNICEF’s own reports had shown that the figures on children orphaned in the disaster had been inflated by factors of 100s and 1,000s. Then too, they never produced any evidence to verify the claims of slave hunters. And just as in Haiti, there would be no admission of error; no apologies to donors would be forthcoming.

Indeed, UNICEF acted as if the earlier untruths and exaggerations were historical facts. Legrand likened the situation in Haiti to the aftermath of the tsunami, describing to the press post-tsunami kidnapping and slave networks “springing into action immediately after the disaster and taking advantage of the weakness of local authorities and relief coordination ’to kidnap children and get them out of the country.’” Now, Legrand insisted, it was happening again in Haiti, “This is happening now,” Legrand told UF.journalists. “We are starting to have the first evidence of that. This is unquestionable.”

It was pure bullshit.

Not even Legrand was sure of what he was saying. In making the announcement, many press outlets overlooked that what Legrand had really said was, “Let’s say around 15 cases of children disappearing.”  UFP reporters observed that UNICEF officials “were unable to give details on the missing children or their condition, or clearly connect the anecdotal observations in post-earthquake chaos with trafficking.”  But lack of evidence got in the way of neither UNICEF nor the press. On the contrary, they sounded the alarm. Headlines around the world read:

Children missing from Haiti Hospitals: UNICEF (Agence France Presse, January 22, 2010)

Agencies Fear Traffickers Will Target Haiti’s Displaced Children Trafficking fears as Haiti children go missing  (ABC News, January 23, 2010)

UNICEF fears orphans being sold abroad (Herald News Services, January 23, 2010)

 Aid agencies in Haiti race to save ‘orphans’ from child traffickers (The London Times, January 26, 2010)

Why UNICEF and Save the Children had so inflated the numbers is surely a byproduct of donor-drive frenzy. But why they were willing to distort the crisis of missing children and traffickers had to do with the struggle between the child protection agencies versus the mostly evangelical orphanages that compete with them for donations. To understand UNICEF vs. the Orphanage conflict it is necessary to first understand what author Kathyrn Joyce (2013) has called the ‘contagious call to adopt” among evangelical Christians.

OF ORPHANS AND ORPHANAGES

Adoption has deep roots in US Christian movements but it grew significantly in the past 30 years, becoming what Joyce calls a “perfect storm of a cause for many Christians,” justifying anti-abortion fervor, demonstrating they care for children outside the womb, fulfilling the call to spread the faith and, not least of all, fulfilling that holiest of acts, adopting another human being as God adopts true believers. The movement reached such a feverous pitch in the years leading up to the earthquake that US evangelicals were staging marches to the White House such as “Step Forward for Orphans.” Evangelical organizations like Focus on The Family launched the “Cry of the Orphan” campaign to save the world’s 153 million orphans. The Christian Alliance for Orphans sponsored  “Orphan Sundays.” With it all came an explosion of Christian books bearing titles such as “Called to Adoption: A Christian’s Guide to Answering the Call” and “Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches.”  Adding fuel to the spiritual fire, the movement was buoyed in the US with tax credits, government subsidies, unsecured and no-interest loans, no interest credit cards, tax-deferred savings options, and employee adoption benefits. How it is that Christians began to reach out across international borders and into countries like Haiti to adopt children has to do with the availability of adoptable children.

Critics of adoption in United States have called the early to mid 20^th century the “Baby Scoop era.” The illegality of abortion, scarcity of contraceptives and conservative social values militated against single motherhood, making the unwed mothers likely be branded as immoral or un-Christian. Young women from good families who made the mistake of getting pregnant often found themselves quietly being shipped off to homes for unwed mothers where they were pressured to legally relinquish custody of their newborns and return to “normal lives.”  The unwed mothers’ homes created a steady supply of adoptable babies for barren middle and upperclass Christian families. With fees running into the $1,000s, it also created a lucrative opportunity for those who brokered the transactions. Closed adoptions cinched the deal. Biological parents and their offspring typically knew nothing of one another. Records were sealed or destroyed. Many children never even knew they were adopted.

At the height of the industry it got rather ugly. The most famous US example was the scandal surrounding the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. In the 1920s “the Society” facilitated thousands of private adoptions. Adoptive parents included celebrities such as Joan Crawford—the subject of a 1981 film, Mommie Dearest, about tyrannical motherhood. Among the children adopted and who had no idea where they came from were the famous wrestler Dusty Rhodes and my own, not so famous, grandfather adopted into an elite Southern Baptist family. But in the 1950s, thirty years after they got started, investigators revealed that many of the babies were obtained from mental hospital patients or taken from unwed mothers who were told their babies had died. Records were falsified or destroyed.  Similar highly profitable operations existed throughout the US. Not least of all 10s of thousands of American Indian children who were being removed from their homes at 16 times the rate for non-Indian children. And as racist as much of the US was at the time, even impoverished black Americans were becoming a source of adoptable babies. In 1971, 2,574 Black American children were adopted into White families. And it was not only the United States. The same baby scoop phenomenon was occurring in other developed countries. Britain, Spain, Canada, France, Australia and Argentina all had their version of baby scoop era adoption industries. Socially conservative South Korea has been among the largest sources for international adoptees for half a century and is still in the throes of a baby scoop era. But for most developed countries, a shift began to occur in the 1970s.

Increasing availability of contraceptives, declining fertility levels and, not least of all, the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision in the US and similar laws in other developing countries made abortion legal. Mothers who had relinquished their children began to publish accounts of their anguish. Thousands of adopted children looking for their biological parents published their own accounts of frustration over lost identities. Closed adoption—the concealing of the origins of adopted children–came to be viewed as a type of humanitarian crime against the children, biological parents, and even communities of origin, as with American Indian tribes and black communities. With contraceptives becoming readily available, abortion legal, and insistance on open adoptions in vogue, the domestic availability of babies began to dry up. The rate of relinquishment for unwed mothers in the mid 1970s was 1/5th what it had been in the previous decade and by the 1990s had fallen to 1/10th the 1960 figures. Tribal protests beginning in the 1970s brought a screeching reduction in the number of Native American children available for adoption. Protests from black activists brought the number of black children adopted by whites to almost zero. It was right about that time that hopeful adopting families in developed countries began to notice millions of needy orphans in developing countries.

International adoption to the United States went from  3,100 in 1972 to 5,800 in 1982 and then steadily climbed to a 2004 peak of 22,991 children, one-half of whom were under 1 year of age and 85% of whom were under 4 years of age. Orphanages were popping up all over the developing world. In Haiti for example, 90% of the 723 orphanages in UNICEFs 2014 list were founded after 1970. It seemed the poorer the people, the more troubled the country, and the weaker the State the more likely the international adoption industry was to appear. Paraguay, Brazil, Guatemala, Nepal, Colombia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nepal, Liberia, Ethiopia, Haiti. The orphanages claimed, of course, to be rescuing orphans from war, poverty, and disease. But as in the developed world’s baby scoop era, high profits that came with adoption services were clearly a big draw. They were also ingredients for unscrupulous business practices. A wave of scandals hit the newspapers: cajoling, tricking, misleading, purchasing, and outright lying to parents in efforts to gain custody of their children (see the Schuster Institute for a long list of journalistic accounts from around the world). In Guatemala there were credible reports of babies being stolen, and suspicions that soldiers had killed parents and sold their babies. For at least a decade before the 2010 Haiti earthquake, UNICEF had been going about the globe frantically trying to stamp out the worst of the corruption. Some would say they were trying to stamp out international adoption altogether.

And they were doing a good job. Pressure on receiving countries to impose adoption moratoriums in the wake of scandals and pressure on sending countries to adopt  the Hague Adoption Convention– a list of basic background checks on both children and the parents who would adopt them– helped send the number of international adoptions to the US plummeting from the high of 22,991 children in 2004 to 8,668 in 2012 fiscal [xi] Globally the numbers fell from 45,000 in 2004 to an estimated 25,000 in 2012. The suggestion is that indeed there had been a lot shady adoptions taking place.

Getting back to aftermath of the earthquake, Haiti was not yet one of the Hague Convention signees, and so, for better or worse, UNICEF had a point:  the earthquake, as with the tsunami before it, presented a massive economic opportunity for the orphanage owners and a chance for hopeful adopting parents. With graphic images of disaster, claims of Armageddon level violence and 1 million newly orphaned children, adoption from Haiti had gone from what one evangelical called a “fair trade” to a “rescue mission.”  It unleashed nothing short of a humanitarian stampede. Bethany Christian Adoption Services would receive 20,000 inquiries to adopt Haitian children. Orphan entrepreneurs poured into Haiti. Already with 500 orphanages in the country, in the months following the earthquake another 250 opened their doors. The Catholic Church began planning Operation “Pierre Pan,” modeled after the 1960 “Pedro Pan” airlift of 14,000 orphans out of communist Cuba.

UNICEF and the child protection agencies had been trying to head the orphanages off. That is what we saw earlier with the questionable claims of disappearing children. When UNICEF’s Legrand talked about an “existing problem” and trade networks set up to “to kidnap children and get them out of the country,” he was talking about nothing other than the orphanages. “UNICEF,” Legrand had said, “has been working in Haiti for many years and we know the problem with the trade of children in Haiti that existed already beforehand. Unfortunately many of these trade networks have links with the international adoption ‘market’.” The problem for UNICEF was that the orphanages had been stealing the show. UNICEF’s message was being drowned out in the stampede to save the 1 million plus children, pleas from orphanages themselves, and the heroics of people like then-Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendel. 

THE HEROIC GOVERNOR

On January 18^th, 6 days after the earthquake, the US State Department granted “humanitarian parole” to all Haitian children in the adoption process. That meant reduced restrictions on adoption and instant visas. Whether cause or effect, it was at that point that orphanages throughout Haiti began to be heard sending out distress calls.  One of them was Bresma Orphanage. Since at least day 2 after the earthquake Jamie and Ali McMurtrie, two sisters presented by most newspapers  as owners of the orphanage, had been frantically appealing to Pennsylvania politicians for help. With newspapers reporting their orphanage destroyed and 54 children left sleeping in the street with no food or water, Republican Mary Beth Buchanan, a former US Attorney and aspiring congressional candidate, responded. Buchanan begain organizing a relief mission.  The tension built. So did the publicity. On January 19^th,  two days after the State Department announcement, Bresma tweeted the distress call, “almost out of water.” That’s when Buchanan’s political rivals stepped in, Pennsylvania representative Jason Altmire and Governor Ed Rendell.

Altmire and Rendell scooped Buchanan.  Using contacts in the White House, Homeland Security and the US military, Rendell and his wife, a federal judge, chartered a jet and flew into Haiti’s packed airport[xx]  The rescue mission and the plight of Haitian children went politically viral. The next day, while Rendell, his wife, the McMurtrie sisters and the 53 Haitian orphans were in what the governor described as a “tense standoff” with Haitian officials, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was back home announcing that, “One area we are urgently focused on is the plight of Haitian Orphans,” and that “we will not let red tape stand in the way of helping those in need.” The French president Sarkozy was organizing his own rescue missions as were the Dutch and even Florida Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart.

If anyone had been scrutinizing the situation they would have noticed some problems. The Bresma  orphanage that was SMS’ing for help was not destroyed. None of the children were killed or even hurt. And as those of us in Haiti at the time knew, if they needed food they could have bought it just about anywhere: on the street, at the wholesalers in Petion Ville, or in any of the supermarkets that reopened within a week of the earthquake. It would turn out that all of the orphans had at least one parent, some of whom didn’t even know their children were being taken out of Haiti. No one knew how much money was exchanging hands or bothered to ask, but with total fees reputedly as high as US30,000 per child, it must have been a massive windfall for someone, perhaps the McMutrie sisters who claimed to own the orphanage or, if not them, the Haitian woman, Margarette Saint Fleur, who really did own it.

Something was indeed rotten about the orphan crisis and no one knew better than UNICEF and the child protections agencies that had initially exaggerated the numbers and panicked us all with images of traffickers prowling the rubble. But by the time Rendell had safely landed back in Pennsylvania on January 19^th, politicians from President Obama to his French counter part Nicolas Sarkozy were jumping on the bandwagon. The Haitian Government conceded as well. Restrictions on adoption applications were lifted and orphanages throughout Haiti emptied, sending at least 1,223 children into the waiting arms of overseas adoptive parents, most all of whom were in the US. That made tiny Haiti, population 10 million, the third highest sending country in 2010 after China and Ethiopia. It infuriated UNICEF.  That’s when Legrand and UN High Commissioner Colville turned up the heat by adding  the specter of sexual predators and slave hunters snatching children. 

For the press, it was a bonanza. No matter who was on top—UNICEF or the orphanages–it was all terrific copy. The public ate it up.  As CNN’s Jessica Ravitz aptly summed up,

There’s nothing like images of infants and children in distress to make outsiders yearn to help, which is why the unfolding story of Haiti’s orphans – the most helpless of earthquake victims – has kept people riveted.

UNICEF turned the heat up higher.

 

SEXUAL PREDATORS AND SLAVE HUNTERS

On the 26th of January UNICEF spokesman Kent Page told the New York Times that, “we are concerned that unaccompanied children will be exploited by unscrupulous people who may wish to traffic them for adoption, for the sex trade or for domestic servitude. The very next day, on January 27^th in an interview with TIME and an article headlined, “Human Predators Stalk Haiti’s Vulnerable Kids,”, an unnamed UNICEF spokesperson drove the point home: “Traffickers fish in pools of vulnerability, and we’ve rarely if ever seen one like this.” TIME then gave us the most graphic and perhaps the closest thing to a first hand account of a predator that we saw after the earthquake,

Mia Pean’s heart sank last week when she saw the Toyota pickup truck cruising the debris-cluttered streets of Léogâne, ground zero for the earthquake that has devastated Haiti. Each time the driver saw a child – especially a young teen – he would stick his head out of the window and shout, “Manje, manje,” Creole for “eat.”

It was shoddy and sensationalist journalism. TIME got the story secondhand from Mia Pean, a Haitian-American who doesn’t live in Haiti but had come to work as a consultant for the Andrew Young Foundation.  The TIME article even tells us that Pean encountered the suspicious character  – or good Samaritan, depending on your assumptions — a second time, and she asked him, “What are you doing with all those children?”  The man replied, “Don’t worry, we’re going to put them in safe homes” and then he drove off. That’s it. That was the whole story. No escaped victims, no house of horrors, no international network of child slaves. Yet, TIME Magazine, that American paragon of truth, endorsed Pean’s “suspicion that he was not altruist.” They then took conjecture to an extreme, using a quote from Pean herself to conclude, “I really fear, that most of the kids you see being picked up on the streets in Haiti right now are going to become restaveks or victims of sexual trafficking.” TIME was not alone. Other major newspapers and television networks helped get the word out,

“Haiti Orphans ‘Extremely Vulnerable’: Aid Groups Worry Up To 1 Million Kids without Proper Care At  Risk of Disease, Child Predators”  CBS News, January 27, 2010

 “Traffickers Prey on Hordes of Quake Orphans” The Sun, January 27th, 2010

It was only the first stage in what may have been a carefully orchestrated media campaign against the orphanages. The next step would be to show the public that it was in fact orphanages that were preying on the children. But if we pause here for a moment and look back at sexual predation in the years leading up to the earthquake, the really interesting thing is that, if there were perverts and child snatchers stalking Haitian child after the earthquake, there was good reason to believe that they would have been working for the UN or the Catholic Church.

 

CONVICTED PERVERTS

The year before the earthquake, soldiers working for the UN had been legally accused and indicted for systematic rape and having sex with adolescent Haitian girls. And the Catholic Church – which was at that time proposing project “Pierre Pan” to airlift tens of thousands of children out of Haiti to their Miami Diocese for safe keeping –had a string of embarrassments. In 2007, Canadian Mounties arrested Denis Rochefort and Armand Huard, the latter once called “a veritable Father Teresa,” but known to the Haitian “orphans” he was having sex with as “Papi.” In 2009 Catholic priest John Duarte was charged with sexually abusing nine Haitian boys he was “helping.” Father John would plead guilty to three of the charges. The same year, American Jesuit Douglas Perlitz was arrested for abusing 23 boys while he ran a Catholic-funded “street kids” organization. Brother Perlitz would subsequently plead guilty as well.

It’s a disturbing discovery that those perverts who had been caught in the years before the earthquake were working within the corridors of the very institutions that were exaggerating the crisis – and raking in millions of dollars in donations by doing so. But I don’t want to be misunderstood. This doesn’t mean all the orphanages were innocent. I could share plenty of anecdotes about both foreign and Haitian caregivers having their way with the “orphans” in their charge. Just as with the child protection agencies and the Catholic Church, what better place for wolves than watching over a flock of lambs. And all that is deeply disturbing. But, in trying to get the facts straight and understand what justified the existence of these institutions and where the money to sustain them came from, we have to look to those organizations that we depend on to give us accurate facts: UNICEF and the child protection agencies such as Save the Children. Even before the earthquake they had largely fabricated a phantasm of uncared for orphans, child slavery and slave markets, precisely what was now justifying the panic and rush to save Haitian children and the fabric from which those real predators and opportunists who exploit Haitian children fashion their sheep clothing. There several ways that UNICEF and the press were complicit in enabling them, but the most appalling example was the ‘history of child slavery’ that UNICEF and Save the Children spokespeople kept referring to. It is not slavery but domestic service and what some argue is Haiti’s most important mechanism of social mobility for poor Haitian children seeking to get an education and break out of the cycle of poverty.

 

CHILD SLAVERY IN HAITI

The first rumblings of child slavery in Haiti came from the UNICEF sponsored 1984 and 1990 Conferences on Child Domesticity held in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Participants at the conferences—representatives from UNICEF, Save the Children,  ILO, World Vision, and a host of orphanages–equated child domestic service with “slavery.” They described patterned beatings and sexual abuse. They lumped together every Haitian child between the ages of five and seventeen and not living with their parents in the category of child domestic servant to come up with estimates ranging from 100,000 to 250,000 of them in Haiti. By the early 1990s the figure had, according to UNICEF and the major media outlets, grown to  300,000 to 400,000 of what they would soon begin to refer to as “child slaves.” They also contended that 80% were girls between 4 and 15 years of age.[xxvi] [xxvii]

Journalist picked up on the claims and used reports from UNICEF staff to describe the “slave children” as “trafficked,” “sold,” and “purchased” as if in some kind of market whereupon they began to lead “brutal lives.” The only physical expression of love or affection the slaves received, according to most press accounts, was sexual abuse for which journalists consistently offered the most extreme and horrible examples, such as a case in Pembroke Pines, Florida. In TIME’s coverage of that case, it regaled its readers  with the shocking revelation that the practice of child slavery is “an entrenched Haitian tradition” that had reached the shores of the United States. The article went on illustrate with the story of how, “Florida officials… removed a 12-year-old Haitian girl — filthy, unkempt and in acute abdominal pain from repeated rape.” For the decade before the eathquake, shoddy and exaggerated data from UNICEF and breathless headlines kept the myth growing:

“Of Haitian Bondage,” TIME (2001)

Haiti’s Dark Secret” NPR (2004)

“The Plight of Haiti’s Child Slaves” Telegraph (2007)

“The Brutal Life of Haiti’s Child Slaves BBC (2009)

Child Slavery in Haiti was one more whirlwind of bullshit kicked up by UNICEF and child protection organizations desperate to attract attention and donations and exploited by modern muckraking journalists. The numbers were so exaggerated and truths so twisted that much of what we were hearing bordered on fraud: 300,000 to 400,000 child slaves translated to 12 percent of all Haitian children in this age category.  And contending that 80% were girlsbetween 4 and 15 years of age translated to as much as 25% of the female population in that age category. If the evidence was sound, Haiti was the greatest contemporary slave state in the world, an ironic accolade for the world’s first successful slave revolt and first free black Republic.

But the data was not sound. The most telling moment in the entire campaign to save Haitian slave children came in 2004, when UNICEF, Save the Children, the International Labor Organization (ILO) hired FAFO, arguably the world’s foremost research institution on child labor practices. FAFO was tasked with conducting a massive 7,812 survey of households randomly selected from bothrural and urban areas of Haiti.  What FAFO found should have laid the issue to rest and exposed both the child protection agencies and the press for wanton exaggeration.

The number of Haitian domestic workers between the ages of five and seventeen years was not 14% of the population in this age category–as the agencies had been telling journalists. It was 6.3% (173,000 children).  They also found that, yes, restavek worked more than the biological children of the households in which they lived, but they had a good reason to want to. Many were from the ranks of the then 70% of the Haitian population that lived in rural areas and towns where schools only reach the primary level. If rural children wanted an education they had to get to the towns and cities. There, often with support from their rural parents in the form of a steady supply of rural fruits and vegetables, they performed domestic chores in exchange for board and access to education beyond the level offered in rural primary schools. Moreover, many of the child domestics were not, by Haitian standards, any more abused than biological children of the household. Indeed, on average parents tended to beat their own children more often than they beat the restavek; the restavek had equal or greater sleeping time; and the restavek more often than the biological children of the household had his or her own bed, mattress, or sleeping mat. Moreover, for those who were not from the rural areas and seeking education, there was still good reason to understand the restavek system as one of upward mobility and accessing education. At least 60 percent of restavek were enrolled in school, that’s 6% more than the average 54% percent for rural children in school at the time and exactly the same figure as the then national average. In summary, the average restavek was, in terms of physical well-being, statistically better off than the average Haitian child living with his or her parents.

The child protection agencies would never mention the FAFO study again. Not a single media outlet cited above would mention it. Even official agencies ignored FAFO. In its 2007 report, the U.S. Department of Labor repeated the unsubstantiated UNICEF study (1996/1997) to claim 250,000 to 300,000 restavek in Haiti, saying that 80 percent were girls under fourteen years of age–an absurd figure that as seen earlier places in the status of child servant 25% of all Haitian girls in that age category. They also disregarded other FAFO findings, saying that “most”restavek worked from ten to fourteen hours per day and that “most” were not enrolled in school.

And as if to erase the findings of the FAFO study, in 2009 the US embassy along with FAFO funding agencies UNICEF, Save the Children, the ILO, got together to celebrate with the press the results of a new study funded by USAID, one carried out under the auspices of PADF (Pan American Development Foundation). Dramatically entitling the study, “Lost Childhoods in Haiti,” the authors claimed that it was “the largest field survey on Human Rights violations with an emphasis on child trafficking, abuse, and violence” –it was in fact a 1,480 household survey, less than 1/4th the size of FAFO. When asked about the conclusions, the principal author of the study told me PADF deleted their index, doctored their introduction, and substituted the word “slavery” where he had insisted it be omitted. Notwithstanding, even the authors never mentioned their FAFO precursor. Nor did they mention my own book (Sex, Family and Ferility in Haiti), written largely about child labor in Haiti, the extreme labor demands that all popular class Haitians face and role of child labor in family survival. Yet, with the help of PADF’s selective editing, they conveniently overturned many of Fafo findings. And the press, they were on it. Fox, BBC, ABC, CBS, all had the same  ‘we are shocked!’ reaction. A CNN news report cited the new figure of 225,000 children in “slavery” saying that it was “far more than previously thought”– despite the fact that for more than a decade virtually every article and report had been citing UNICEF’s 1996 figure of 300,000. They also returned to the heavy emphasis on girls, saying that over two thirds of restavek are female and, once again emphasizing abuse as if it were the norm, they told readers that, “mostly young girls…they suffer sexual, psychological and physical abuse while toiling in extreme hardship.” 

I don’t want to be misunderstood. I am not saying that child abuse in Haiti is nonexistent or that the institution of restavek does not give way to cases of severe exploitation. Rather, I am saying is that it has and is being exploited as an institutional mechanism to collect money and sell newspapers. Grabbing on to extraordinary cases such as the Pembroke Pines rape victim, seen earlier, and transforming them into exemplary cases of a Haitian tradition, while at the same time ignoring the importance of the restavek institution as a mechanism of social mobility is also manifest of a deeply disturbing bias.

Getting back to the earthquake, as of January 27, despite all the claims of history of slave trafficking and sexual abuse, there were still no confirmed slave and sex traffickers. Neither UN soldiers nor the Haitian police had apprehended a single one of them. Nor had any of the 1,918 international police and firefighter rescue workers scouring the country for earthquake survivors encountered a child being abducted. Yet, UNICEF and Save the Children continued to insist they were out there. And the press kept publishing their claims. Then it finally happened. They finally caught some ‘predators.’

 

THE IDAHO MISSIONARY-CHILD-TRAFFICKERS

Sixteen days after the earthquake, on January 28, when it was becoming painfully clear that UNICEF and its allies were, as Andrew Cates of SOS had warned, “whipping up human emotions in an unfair way,”  the child protection agencies finally got their big break. The Haitian National Police arrested ten Americans trying to smuggle a bus load of 33 orphans across the border to the Dominican Republic. For journalists and aid workers who had been warning of traffickers, the arrests could not have come at more opportune moment.  The story was to make headlines around the world:

American Arrested Taking Children Out of Haiti  (Reuters, January 30, 2010)

Haiti arrests US nationals over child ‘abductions’  (BBC, January 31, 2010)

10 Americans accused of smuggling Haitian kids The People’s Daily, (February 01, 2010)

It was the proof child protection agencies had been waiting for. Organizations like Stop Child Sex Slavery and God Like Productions kicked off donation drives with blog posts titled, “Pedophiles Scoopin’ Up Haitian Kids.” Even SOS Children’s Villages—who’s CEO Andrew Cates had only nine days before warned the press about fabricating fictive child snatchers–got caught up in the excitement. SOS regional coordinator Patricia Vargas told the New York Times, “This has called the world’s attention because it is the first clear piece of evidence that our fears have come true.”

A sober look at the “smugglers” wasn’t so encouraging, not for those who hoped they now had evidence to support claims of sexual predators and slave hunters. They all came from Meridian, Idaho where they were all bona fide members of the Central Valley Baptist Church. The leader of the group, Laura Silsby, was two years into a church sponsored plan to construct an orphanage for Haitian children in the Dominican Republic. Amongst her team members were two teenagers and a mother-daughter pair. Nobody in the group had ever been convicted or associated with pornography or sexual abuse of children. Moreover, rather than having operated in secret, Silsby had in fact been in touch with the Haitian police before they arrested her. Only days before her arrest she had written to the UN imploring them to help obtain legal paper work from a non-functional Haitian government and declaring that, “We have been sent by the Lord to rescue these children, and if it’s in the Lord’s plan, we will be successful.”  And not to take the side of Silsby—who I think is as dangerous as UNICEF, albeit on a much smaller scale–but anyone who believed press reports about 1 million “orphaned, abandoned, and separated children”  and “slave traffickers” might indeed think it their moral duty to get children out of Haiti. And anyone who believed the US State Department’s claim that  30% of Haitian civil servants had been killed in the earthquake might also wonder just how in hell Silsby was she supposed to get the paperwork to save the children.

No evidence of perversion or slavery existed. Indeed, all the evidence suggested that Silsby and her colleagues had every intention of trying to drop the orphans into the lap of luxury. She had rented an entire resort hotel in the Dominican Republic’s chic beaschside town of Cabarete—where I happened to have lived for four years prior to the earthquake. Within weeks, even the most ardent critics seemed to concede that Silbsy and company were simply naïve evangelicals. The debate and accusations began to take on an entirely different tone. Soon it was an internet cyber-shit storm about “American theocratic arrogance” and “holier than thou missionaries.”  By that point  most commentators seemed to have forgotten all about the original claims of slavery and sex trafficking. They seemed to have forgotten, as all too often happens, about the children themselves. But we should not. We should not forget the human dimension of the story and the plight of those children who really did exist and who really were vulnerable and in need of our help.  One of those children was a boy name Sonson.

SONSON: PART 1

The first report on Sonson came from the Associated Press,

It was three weeks after the earthquake passed before anyone noticed the 3-year-old. Two women saw him playing by himself on top of a destroyed house and assumed his parents were nearby. But after four days and nights, they realized he spent all day on top of the rubble by himself. Then they noticed his belly was getting bigger, a sign of malnutrition. He was picking through the rubble for trash to eat. Associated Press June 22, 2010

The next time Sonson appeared in the media was on a blog from Worldfocus Associate Producer Mohammad Al-Kassim who visited him several weeks after he had been saved. Al-Kassim wrote that,

Sonson is a Haitian boy who was found in a garbage dumpster two weeks after a calamitous earthquake hit his hometown of Port-au-Prince. Salvation Army workers found Sonson and brought him to the University of Miami medical field hospital located near the airport in the Haitian capital. Doctors there treated Sonson for worms, bacteria, and superficial cuts on his foot. Despite the awful conditions he was found in, Sonson is in fairly good shape physically according to medical personnel. 

Sonson was, we were told, a story of salvation and success. The Palm Beach Post (February 5^th) reported:

Despite his circumstances, UNICEF workers and other child advocates actually consider Sonson’s story somewhat of a success. They say the instant loss of his parents and the subsequent time he spent alone could have made him prey to child traffickers who began trying to exploit the most vulnerable of Haiti’s survivors immediately after the tragedy.

Three-year-old Sonson would embark on a journey that would take him through the heart of the Haitian post-earthquake orphan oddessy. Accompanying him part of the way was an American woman named Tamara Palinka, who the Associated Press described as an athletic blond. When the Haiti earthquake hit, Tamara was working as an administrator at a Texas oil refinery. She took a leave of absence to help earthquake survivors, volunteering at a University of Miami field hospital. When Salvation Army workers dropped off Sonson, Tamara was there.

Tamara watched as caretakers took Sonson outside and he grabbed a fistful of dirt and stuffed it in his mouth. She watched in the cafetería when he ate in gulps until he could eat no more. She watched him hide a box of food under a table. She watched and she couldn’t help but feel his desperation and loneliness.  She would recall to AP journalists that the other children in the pediatric ward all had parents nearby. At night, the mothers would crawl into the cots with them. Sonson had no one. At some point Tamara couldn’t take it anymore. One night, “on a whim,” she climbed into the bed and cuddled him up next to her. The next morning she changed him. She bathed him in a plastic laundry tub. She rummaged through the donations flown in from Miami and found him fresh clothes and a playpen.

Sonson was recalcitrant at first. When Tamara spoke to him he looked at his feet. When she tried to clip his toenails, “he pulled in his feet and curled them into little balls.”  But it wasn’t long before Sonson began to respond. At first he gave her furtive glances. Then he began to play with her. He blew on her stomach, making the sound of a motorboat.  By the second week, “Sonson was transformed.” He played drums with a stick and a styrofoam container. He sang and danced. Finally, one morning, she lowered him into his playpen and as she turned to leave Sonson threw up his arms and cried out, “Momma!”

A week later she would write on her Facebook page, “Tamara Palinka wants to take Sonson home! Will start the process tomorrow.”

Sonson, it seemed at the time, would be at least one orphan whose post-earthquake odyssey had a happy ending. But there were forces at work that would sabotage Sonson and Tamara’s emerging dream.

 

HAITI’S ORPHANAGE SCOURGE

As the group of Idaho missionaries entered their second week in Haitian prison, their families back in Idaho were with Senior Pastor Clint Henry, worried sick and praying up a storm over them. Supporters from throughout the United States began to pressure the authorities. Just what did the police have on them?  Where was the evidence? The case was crumbling. That’s when Frantz Thermilus, then-chief of Haiti’s National Judicial Police, called a press conference and gave the child protection agencies and the press corps what they needed to keep the story alive. Chief Thermilus announced that,

There are many so-called orphanages that have opened in the last couple of years that are not really orphanages at all. They are fronts for criminal organizations that take advantage of people who are homeless and hungry. And with the earthquake they see an opportunity to strike in a big way.

The Chief gave no examples of organized criminal activity. Neither police nor journalists had verified any networks of smugglers. Indeed, foreign journalists seemed to have completely missed the fact that when it came to the issue of orphanages and the incarcerated Baptists, most Haitians were not even thinking about sex and slavery. Most Haitians were thinking about organ trafficking. For those who do not know, the ‘organ market and orphans’ is an urban legend that seems to sprout up in any poor country where international adoption becomes common. It has been investigated by most international intelligence agencies and to date no evidence for organized organ harvested from children has been found. Nor, for medical reasons, does it make sense (see endnote).  But it is nevertheless fear #1 for Haitians who generally regard orphanages as an opportunity. Now, seeing the panic that UNICEF and Save the Children had helped unleash, the Haitian public made their own conclusions. When USA Today journalist Ken Dilanian and asked a crowd of people on the street what should be done with the imprisoned smugglers if they were found guilty they responded with shouts of, “Death! If they’re guilty, give them the death penalty,”. And it wasn’t just ordinary Haitians. The day before the missionaires were arrested, Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive had told CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour, “There is organ trafficking for children and other persons also, because they need all types of organs,” A befuddled Amanpour noted that Prime Minister Bellerive “did not give specifics.”

Getting back to the earthquake and the announcement that there were “so-called orphanages” that were really “criminal organizations,” the Chief gave no examples of organized criminal activity. Nor did journalists who would repeat the claims have a single shred of evidence for organized networks of smugglers. Didn’t matter. Headlines the next day read:

Haiti Orphanages often Fronts for Criminal Gangs (The New York Times, February 7, 2010)

Exploitation of Haitian children increases (U.S. News, February 7, 2010)

After quake, fear that orphans are at even greater risk in Haiti  (Boston Globe February 7, 2010)

Orphanages of Haiti offer bleak portrait (The Hindu, February 7, 2010)

Neither journalists nor the Haitian National Police ever found any links to traffickers. None. But now, with the cue from the Chief of police, orphanages in Haiti were inundated with journalists. What they found was not networks of smugglers or perverts raping children. What they found was the Haitian orphanage industry, plain and simple.

In its best form it is an industry where middle class American missionaries take in neglected or abandoned Haitian children, give them attentive care, a solid education, and send them into adulthood. In its ugliest form it’s an industry where children are recruited from impoverished families and, rather than being put to work or raped, they are left to sit around in dirty clothes, sick and underfed, mindlessly doing nothing while the Haitian pastors who “care” for them try to collect donations from naïve church congregations in the US and Europe.  The New York Times reported on the latter,

Many are barely habitable, much less licensed. They have no means to provide real schooling or basic medical care, so children spend their days engaged in mindless activities, and many die from treatable illnesses.

At an orphanage called The Foyer of Patience, the New York Times journalists found “50 children crammed into two bedrooms …. Some of them scampering around in clothes that were either too big or too small, and others wearing no clothes at all.” They interviewed the owner of the orphanage, Enoch Anequaire (sic), who said he opened the center five years ago but had no time to get a license. He told them that he provided an education to the children, “but there was not a single book, piece of paper or pencil in the house.” He said he fed them three meals. But, “several said that they had had nothing to eat.” And there seemed to be little doubt that the children were recruited:

Mr. Anequaire, whose own clothes were pressed and shoes polished, said he had been overwhelmed with new children since the earthquake. He pointed out five boys who arrived last Wednesday and said that an aunt had brought them in because their homes had collapsed, and that their mothers were unable to feed them.

Some of the children, however, said Mr. Anequaire had come looking for them.

“He came to my house and told my mother he needed 10 more kids,” said one of the boys, whose names were withheld from this article to protect them from retribution.

When Wall Street Journal investigators visited Ms. Samedy of the Orphanage Foyer de la Nouvelle Vie (New Life Center) they zeroed in on the motivations for recruiting orphans. Ms. Samedy told them that she collects US$200 per month from hopeful prospective parents for each child in her care and then bills as much as US$25,000 for other oddities such as blood work and birth certificates.  And that’s not including lawyer fees. Those averaged another $10,000 per child. As if tongue in cheek the Wall Street Journal reporters noted that most people in Haiti live on less than US1$ per day. Ms. Samedy admitted, “It’s quite a sum,” and then explained, “But it is because the cost of living is very high in Haiti and we can justify every cent.”

Whatever one might think about orphanages, there is definitely an economic side to them. As mentioned earlier, according to UNICEF, Haiti had 500 orphanages before the earthquake. Within 6 months of the earthquake, that number increased by 40 percent. Humanitarian orphanage-entrepreneurs were responding to humanitarian-market opportunity. Laura Silsby, leader of the Idaho Baptist missionaries was clearly one of them. By late February, it was all but certain that Silsby was neither pervert nor child slave trafficker. But equally clear was that she was an inveterate opportunist. She owned a failed dot.com business that had driven her into debt and she had subsequently gotten caught in the housing bubble and defaulted on her mortgage. An entrepreneurial failure, losing her home and still in debt, she got another chance when God had apparently called her to help Haitian orphans.

And what’s wrong with that?

From the perspective of an impoverished Haitian child one does not need a great deal of imagination to see the material advatanges of going to live with a middle class US family. Kids among them who join new families in America rocket from the diseased and illiterate ranks of the poorest people in the Western hemisphere –where, if we accept accounts from organizations like UNICEF and Save the Children, life is usually short, nasty and brutish–to one of the most privileged and opportunity studded societies that has existed in human history.  And it’s not just adoption. Even when the children make it no farther than a statistically typical orphanage, it’s a huge improvement over material conditions in most Haitian homes. In a 2014 survey that we conducted at the behest of UNICEF and the Haitian Department of Child Welfare (IBESR), I and 20 co-investigators found that children in the average orphanage vs average urban Haitian home were four times more likely to sleep in their own bed, twelve times more likely to have access to a flush toilet, twice as likely to have any toilet at all, fourteen times more likely to have a water source on the premises, more than twice as likely to have electricity, three times more likely to have a television, and 23% more likely to be in school. And that’s comparing the orphanages to urban homes. Forty-five percent of the children in the orphanages were from rural areas where the differences are drastically more extreme and, as seen earlier, opportunities for getting a highschool education non-existent.

Yes, most children love their families, but they are not stupid. They know the difference in opportunity and creature comforts. When we asked a sample of 155 children in 30 randomly selected orphanages if they wanted to go back home, 70% said no. When we asked why, only 6% cited abusive parents; 2% said because their parents wanted them to stay; 8% said they didn’t know why; the remaining 83% said things like “I live good here,” and mentioned clothes, food, school, recreation, and television. When we proposed a hypothetical situation of a child living in the center versus with a non-biological family in a fosterage situation—such as UNICEF is currently proposing for Haitian children– 100% said the child in the center was better off.

The bottom line is that life in a typical Haitian home is hard. The children have to fetch water, clean and cook. For the poorest 20% of them, the future doesn’t hold much more than the specter of more work, harder work, illnesses, poor healthcare. Moreover, harking back to a point I made earlier, Haitian Children themselves are active, they want out. They want to break out of the cycle of poverty and while I’ve tried to make my analysis and commentary as objective as possible here, I know this only to well. I’ve taken in four of them. My own research into cross border child migration extends back to 1998 when I sat and listened to Haitian children, some of whom were as young as 7 years old, explaining strategies and plans to get into Dominican families, to cross the border on their own volition and offer their services in exchange for room and board and education. Regarding the study described above, a tip to how militant UNICEF is about child-family re-unification, the survey was never published nor did they pay the balance owed. Indeed, they were livid.

Getting back to the earthquake, now, with the press sounding the alarm about sexual predators and child snatchers, and Baptist missionary Silsby caught red-handed trying to cross the border with no papers for the children, the child protection agencies had the world’s attention. And they attacked.

UNICEF’s Marie de la Soudiere told TIME, “Our answer, is ‘no’ to orphanages.” UNICEF, she assured journalists, was busy putting processes in place that would, “make people like orphanage directors and clueless missionaries ‘think twice’ before unlawfully scooping up lost or abandoned kids.” The Haitian government was with them. “We had a disaster here,” declared Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, “but we still have laws. We won’t accept people trying to take advantage of this disaster to traffic children.” The Haitian government shut the door on overseas adoptions. And once again, developments at the top had very real and even tragic impact for the actual orphans and those who would care for them at the bottom.

 

SONSON: PART 2

Associated Press Journalists recounted,

The order came from Miami. The rainy season was starting. The hospital needed to downsize.  None of the orphans had medical conditions that required them to stay. Tamara Palinka was tasked with contacting the government to transfer them to orphanages… Within days, the orphans — including Sonson — were registered with the state’s child welfare agency. A 6-minute video shot on a co-worker’s Blackberry phone shows Palinka’s final moments with Sonson before he was taken away. He is sitting on her lap in the backseat of an SUV. He pinches her lips together, like a fish. Then he leans forward and kisses her over and over again. When the SUV pulled away, Palinka waved until the car had driven out of sight. Then she sobbed until she started dry heaving in the hospital’s parking lot.

Instead of keeping him from dank and lonely walls of parentlessness, a new UNICEF supported decree meant that children like Sonson were headed not overseas to eager families, but to the cold corridors of an institution. The AP journalists summed up the situation: “Sonson had become an orphan for a second time.” But all hope was not lost.

 

THE CHRISTIANS STRIKE BACK

The orphanages and their Christian allies hit back. Evangelical bloggers such as Doug Phillips of Rescue Haiti’s Children, published a February 26th blog entitled, “Haiti’s children held hostage by UNICEF’s agenda.”  He accused UNICEF officials of “harassing Christian orphanages”,  of making  “official visits without the authority of the Haitian Government,” of “mounting an international  publicity campaign to shut down international adoptions” for which UNICEF  “teamed  up with the Hollywood actors” and, perhaps most damning of all, Phillips accused UNICEF of, “the emotionally charged claim that adoptions lead to child sex-trafficking,” a thought, Phillips says, “so repugnant that the mere mention of the charge is sometimes enough to shut down debate.”  Yet, “to date, there have been no documented cases of child sex-trafficking connected with American adoptions.”

The orphanage counter-offensive also included the charge that UNICEF and its NGO partners were causing the deaths of injured children. Elizabeth Greig, the field hospital administrator for the University of Miami medical facility, told the New York Times: “At least 10 other children have died or become worse while waiting to be airlifted out of the country. Dozens of children are in critical need of care, and there has been no shortage of American hospitals or pilots willing to take them.”  They cited UNICEF’s own lack of action, Phillips pointing out that while “UNICEF’s plan is now to register and take greater control of Haiti’s orphans” they had, “according to UNICEF’s own spokesman, registered a mere 130 of the nation’s 350,000 plus orphans.” As Phillips mused, “it was not a whopping number.”   Dixie Bickel, director of the high profile God’s Littlest Angels orphanage– which had hosted post-earthquake news crews from CNN, CBC, and ABC – went on Larry King Live and called UNICEF, “the only organization that isn’t working for the good of the children.”

And this was not just a couple of disgruntled rogue missionaries talking. When UNICEF and its partners went after the orphanages, they slammed into an aggregate of organizations arguably as powerful as UNICEF itself. Groups like the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention, a US religious order second in size only to the Catholic Church and with $1.4 billion in annual revenues and $40 billion in property holdings.  Only a few months before the earthquake, the Baptists passed a resolution calling on members to “prayerfully consider whether or not God was calling them to adopt.” There was also the Christian Alliance for Orphans, a pro-adoption coalition of eighty US-based Christian ministries with 6,300 radio facilities in 164 countries speaking 15 languages, and reaching a daily listening audience of 220 million people. In 2010, the Alliance for Ophans had enough spare money on hand to run a 30 second commercial during the Super Bowl.

And it was not just the media that began to listen. The Christians grabbed the attention of politicians like Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu who took the case all the way to the Senate floor, declaring to her fellow lawmakers, “Either UNICEF is going to change or have a very difficult time getting support from the US Congress.”  But back in Port-au-Prince, those children that really were in need of help and had entered the system were stuck in limbo.

 

SONSON: PART 3

Sonson found himself in the Foundation Infant Jesus Orphanage in Port-au-Prince. Associated Press journalists went with Tamara to visit him:

Sonson was sitting apart from the other children.  He stared at the floor. When an orphanage worker asked him, “Who is your momma?” Sonson whispered “Mara.” “Do you miss her?”  Sonson nodded. When Tamara was finally obtained visitation rights, two weeks later, the child case worker led her through the halls.

The other children rushed at her, screaming.

“Where is he?” Tamara asked.

“Don’t you recognize him? That’s him,” said the woman pointing to the child sitting by himself on the floor. Tamara didn’t recognize him. His head had been shaven.

She crouched on her knees. “Sonson?” she said.

He looked up and then away.

She scooped him up in her arms.

Sonson held on tightly. He made no sound, until they tried to pull him away. And then he screamed.

The social worker went to pull him out of her arms.

Sonson turned his face and dug his hands into her clothes. He kicked his legs. He screamed as they carried him away.

Tamara covered her mouth to hold back the sobs.

Sonson had entered what the AP called “the bureaucratic labyrinth of Haiti’s adoption limbo.” Over the next two months, Tamara was allowed to visit Sonson only twice, for 20 minutes each time. She was told that she would have to wait at least six months for him to be declared an orphan. After that, with Tamara paying for his expenses, she and Sonson could expect to wait the customary three years before they would be reunited. That’s almost as long as Sonson had been alive. He would be six years old when he got out of the orphanage. Even the most hardened UNICEF employee would have to agree that something had gone wrong.

The orphan crisis left the media, the general public and wishful adoptive parents confused. We were told by the press and the Child Protection Agencies that we count on for the truth that there were one to two million lost, separated or orphaned Haitian children. Then we were told of an underworld of sex and slave traffickers that was preying on them. Then were told that it was the orphanages who were traffickers and that the orphanages were poorly managed and did not adequately care for children. Then the orphanages hit back with their own accusations of UNICEF and the child protection agencies working against the good of the children. Then we had separated children like Sonson getting thrown into orphanages in the name of family reunification. Something was definitely amiss. Then came another development that left everyone completely confused: It turned out that most of the orphans had parents.

 

ORPHANS WITH PARENTS. 

The first revelation suggesting that most Haitian orphans were not orphans was that all of the 33 children that Silsby and the Idaho Baptists were caught trying to ferry across the border to the Dominican Republic had parents. UNICEF fanned the flames and, acting as if it had not been the organization that defined kids with one parent as orphans in the first place, took every opportunity to point out to the press that it was a fact that 80% of all children in Haitian orphanages had parents, before the earthquake. Further digging revealed that all 53 “orphans” that Pennsylvania governor Rendell airlifted to the United States had at least one parent. All of them. Several were taken without their parents knowing. The famous McMurtrie sisters who had swayed Rendell to come to Haiti and rescue the children, who had been declared by Pittsbugh Magazine as the “Pittsburghers of the Year,” would soon be refusing to talk to the press and would severe all ties with the Bresma orphanage.

The overseas public was disgusted. When asked about whether France would welcome Haiti’s orphans, then-President Nicolas Sarkozy said yes, “As long as they are true orphans and not children who are taken away from their families.”  UNICEFs family reunification message, it seems, had finally sunk in. When Sarkozy sent Arno Klarsfeld, son of famed Nazi hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, into post-earthquake Port-au-Prince to make recommendations on how to properly regulate adoptions. Klarsfeld came away as confused as the rest of us. He came back to Paris and told reporters, “Something here isn’t morally correct. It’s a vicious circle. The more orphanages open, the more parents are tempted to give their kids away.”

It would soon come to light that many poor and middle class Haitian families had been using international adoption to get free education and visas for their children and even for themselves. Many Haitian parents of “orphans” expected foreign adoptee families to help the entire family, to send goods and money. And most adoptee families did help. Wall Street Journal reporters would recount that,

“When David Aitken, an Internet entrepreneur from Provo, Utah, traveled to Haiti last year to meet a girl he was in the process of adopting, he was shocked to find out that her mother worked at the orphanage. “When we learned the mother was there, we thought, ‘We can’t adopt her.’ I couldn’t imagine taking a child from her mother,” he recalls.

But the mother insisted and in the end David was happy to take her.  When he embarked for the airport with the daughter, “Her mom was smiling on the porch waving,” he recalled to the journalists. “It was surreal.” It was in fact, once again, UNICEF that had laid the ground work for what had become a twisted maze of exploitation.

 

UNICEF, AGAIN

Long before the earthquake UNICEF defined a Haitian orphan as a child who had lost not two, but one parent. UNICEF even counted children who didn’t have a legally recognized father because the man refused to take responsibility or the mother could not or would not identify one. Globally it is this stretching of the orphan definition that justified Christian adoption fever rallying cries of “143 million,” meaning 143 million orphans. In Haiti, it was this broad definition that enabled UNICEF to make pre-earthquake claims of 380,000 orphans in Haiti alone. It fed the fever and justified the massive growth of orphanages. By the time of the earthquake Haiti, with 500 orphanages and a population of 10 million, had per capita 5 times as many orphanages as Russia (with 134 million people and 1,344 institutions).

It’s difficult to overlook the fact that twisting the definition of orphan is–like telling us there were 1 million lost or abandoned children–a powerful fund raising technique. But it’s also misleading. To most of us in the developed world an “orphan” is a child whose parents have died.  The term conjures up the image of the unprotected and helpless, as with Little Orphan Annie or Oliver Twist. These are children who are not only poor, they are alone, they face the world without the love and affection of a mother or father, no one to protect them from the hard reality of poverty and the fiends who prey on the vulnerable. But to expand the definition to include children who have lost one parent is a perversion of donor sympathies because people give to orphans precisely because the children have no parents or family. And yet, as UNICEF and the child protection agencies have increasingly come to realize, through material inducements the orphanages were actually encouraging the separation of children from their families. So with their definition of an orphan as a child with one parent, UNICEF had laid the ground work for orphanages to make claims of massive numbers of orphaned children and to get children—80% of whom UNICEF now claims are not orphans at all—into the international adoption process. Moreover, with UNICEFs definition as a base, there was no need for two parental signatures to adopt a child.  If a Haitian mother or father wanted to send their child to the US to live with a family of strangers, and they wanted to do it without the consent of their spouse, they could go right ahead.  A stroke of one parent’s pen and the child became an orphan. Back in the US a similar situation would qualify a child to get his or her picture on the back of milk carton and Mom or Dad a place on INTERPOL’s list of international child snatchers.

 

THE ORPHANAGE OPPORTUNITY 

I have never found an article that succinctly summed up the labyrinth of exploitation and conflict and confusion that swirled around the orphan crisis. But what we were seeing was a very specific mélange of interests and exploitation. On one had there were the two principal parties: Those who want to adopt and those who want to be adopted or want their children to be adopted. For the ones who want to adopt, there may be tax breaks and other material incentives that encourage them, but by and large would be adopting parents in the US are as sincere and sentimental as any group of humans on earth. I’ve met and listened to the stories of dozens of them. They fly in and out of Haiti for years while waiting for the adoption process to be completed. They visit these children they barely know, they pay exorbitant fees to stay in “approved” hostels. They fork over support money every month and they pay inflated medical bills, educational expenses. The internet is replete with their stories. They write of picking the child and the child picking them, of fate and destiny. Typical is an anonymous adopting parent wrote a piece for the New Yorker describing the moment when he was a picture of his Haitian “daughter” for the first time,

“What’s her name?” I asked.

“Rose,” Noah said.

I froze. Rosalie was Lisa’s mother’s name, and that was what we had been planning to call the girl we never had. I knew, gazing at the photograph Noah e-mailed after we hung up, that I was looking at our daughter. Lisa felt the same way: it was fate.

During the long three year average wait to complete the adoption process the adopting parents, their families and friends begin to refer to the children as their own, they write of bringing their children “home.”  And with every $1000 dollars spent the yearning seems to deepen.

On the other side are the the impoverished children themselves and the parents for the more than 80% of Haitian adoptees who have at least one. They desperately want to get their own kids into the care of  middle and upper class evangelical Christians who can afford the adoption process and who, if they don’t help the rest of the family, will at least see their child to an age and competency level where the child can help.

Into this equation steps the orphanage owners. The good ones might collect fees but they earnestly want to get children to hopeful adopting families and as fast as possible. To those truly needy children and the associated adults on both sides of the equation, these orphanage owners are nothing short of saints. But there are also orphanage owners and biological parents that would prefer that the children don’t go anywhere and that instead hopeful adoptive parents continue to pay the fees and support “their” children without ever actually getting possession of the child. And there are corrupt State officials who are more than happy to drag the process out as long as possible and collect all the fees they can. And then come the child protection agencies. They see the worst of it all. They see the orphanages encouraging parents to give up their children, adoptive parents encouraging the orphanages, they see the money, the fees, the greed, and despite their own role in creating the industry through their hype and outright lies—in the zeal increase donations for their own projects– they want it to stop.

There is a rather basic materialist logic to it all. Adopting parents are driven by a want, nothing short of the most powerful human emotion: the desire to care and succor a child. The children and their biological parents are driven by the most basic of needs — to survive, and escape from hunger, disease, and ignorance.  And then there are a series of exploitative individuals and institutions profiting enormously from it. Adoption had become a veritable industry in Haiti. Orphanages were pulling in $1,000’s per child. The government was making millions on paper work. UNICEF seemed to have a point: The whole tangled orphan mess reeked. But UNICEF and the Child Protection Agencies were anything but innocent. Whatever their differences, UNICEF and the orphanages had some powerful things in common. It was in fact UNICEF that, in its own earnst desire to collect donations, had first gotten the ball rolling.

 

UNICEF’S GRAVEST SIN

Long before the earthquake UNICEF defined a Haitian orphan as a child who had lost not two, but one parent, or even children who simply lacked a legally recognized father. It also turned informal Haitian fosterage and hosting school children who did domestic chores into child slavery. But what UNICEF did next is almost unconscionable and, while I’m not a Christian, smacks to me of religious persecution. Citing the worst abuses and generalizing them to other mostly evangelical orphanages, it attacked those who had come to help, arguably doing more harm to children than good. The reason I say this is that for those children who really did need help the most likely place they were going to find it was in a Christian orphanage.

Indeed, the orphanages had spread to such a scale that the institutions had become a mechanism of social mobility and aid for the poor and even for middle class Haitian families that could access the institutions. But now, in the wake of the earthquake, UNICEF was determined to fix the problem. Never mind that many of the children and their families had found a significant mechanism to escape extreme poverty. Never-mind that UNICEF had been in Haiti since 1949, Save the Children since 1976, World Vision since 1959 and Compassion International since 1952 and that, prior to the earthquake, I could not find a single documented case of any of them exposing an orphanage for smuggling children or trafficking in child sex slavery. Never-mind all that. UNICEF was bound and determined to get children out of orphanages, and send them home.

The trouble with that plan was not only that many of the children did not want to go home or that, as seen, many were materially far better off in the orphanages than in at home, UNICEF was and is singly incapable of establishing an effective child reunification program. And they knew it. Even as they continued to slam the orphanages and collect mountains of donations, they knew it.  “In my experience,” Marie de la Soudiere, the head of UNICEF’s Haitian Children Registry Program, told CBS’s 60 Minutes, “95 percent of the families can be found.” But how many had UNICEF, ten weeks after the earthquake and after collecting more $100 million for reuniting children with their families?  “Twenty.” Yes, twenty.   If children could be reunified with their families, it was clear that UNICEF wasn’t going to be the one to do it.

Nevertheless, with the donations pouring in, UNICEF and the other Child Protection Agencies remained hellbent on elminating orphanages. They were talking about massive reunification. something that that they had never been able to achieve before and that was completely anethma to  the interests of the Haitian poor, many of whom saw orphanages and international adoption as a vehicle of social mobility. Just how twisted the entire affair had become can be seen in developments with Sonson.

 

SONSON: PART 4

Sonson it turned out was not an orphan. What had separated him from his family was not the earthquake. It was the Salvation Army aid workers who pulled him from a pile of rubble and never checked to see if it was, in fact, his backyard.  When Sonson was taken away, he had been in the care of his aunt. The “trash heap” on which he was allegedly feeding was next to his house. His mother, very much alive, was in the Haitian countryside getting food from the family farm.

Moreover, it was not UNICEF or Save the Children that discovered that his family was still alive and looking for him.  Nor did employees from the Foundation Infant Jesus Orphanage where Sonson was an inmate locate his family. The orphanage was content to keep Sonson incarcerated and let Tamara continue to pay his room, board and medical bills. It was Tamara Palinka, who located the family. Sonson had been taken away from her. After almost of a year of waiting for a sign the adoption would be processed she had lost hope. Of her own volition, Tamara returned to where Sonson was first picked up. And there she found his family.

Sonson’s story demonstrates the dismal misunderstanding and assumptions of foreigners that underlie the tragic orphan phenomenon. Professional aid workers and many journalists dismissed skepticism, did not heed warnings from organizations such as SOS, did little research into past disasters, and were citing numbers of orphans that were hundreds or thousands of times the real figures. At the same time, disaster experts and aid workers – most of whom had come to Haiti for the very first times in their lives – were convincing themselves that Haiti was home to an underworld of perverts and human traffickers. The journalists who interviewed them spread this myth to the overseas public and Haiti was flooded with overseas heroes such as Governor Rendell and Silbsy. The irony is that Haitian families, like Sonson’s, didn’t need to be fearful that traffickers would snatch their children. There was little to no evidence there ever were any such ghouls lurking in the streets. But there was a very real danger that children could get plucked off the street by someone trying to save them.. Even after Sonson’s family learned he was in an orphanage, it took months to get the orphanage to release him.

 

THE DÉTENTE

The damn had not burst. No one, other than orphanage owners, had yet turned on the child protection agencies and tried to expose them. But the state of confusion had reached a point where none of this was reflecting well on UNICEF and other child protection agencies. They had told the world there were upwards of 1 million orphaned, lost, separated or abandoned children after the quake. They had collected $100s of millions in donations to save them. They attacked the orphanages and in doing so provoked the Christians to hit back with revelations about UNICEF’s failures. The Christians were outraged at the secular NGO world’s hostility toward adoptions and the orphanages associated with the process. And how could they not be outraged. It was UNICEF and the child protection agencies that had claimed that child slavery was rampant in Haiti, that claimed the earthquake had unleashed an apocolyptic orphan crisis. And just what the hell had they been doing about it? Instead of helping, all UNICEF seemed to be doing was railing against would be saviors such as Silsby and the Idaho missionaries. Yet, after months of investigations by journalists and police there was not a shred of evidence that Laura Silsby and her missionary crew were anything other than good-hearted, if naive and opportunistic Christians. Even Bill Clinton stepped in to negotiate on their behalf.

Indeed, the truth about the orphan crisis was poking out through cracks and crevices and seemed to be about to explode into the full view of the public. What if the public were to start asking where the 1 million orphans abandoned and lost children went? What if they were to start asking about all the money? Something had to give.

And it did give. UNICEF changed their rhetoric. By the end of March, UNICEF was no longer talking about “people like orphanage directors and clueless missionaries,” but rather, its “430 partners,” most of which were orphanages.

And so, for the moment, it died quietly, without UNICEF or Save the Children or any of the other child protection agencies ever acknowledging that they had duped the world with their images of 1 million orphans and lost and separated children, sexual predators and slave hunters prowling the rubble. Without the world ever understanding just what the hell was going on with the orphanages.

 

IS UNICEF GUILTY?

Was UNICEF guilty of lying and deceiving donors? Did they know what they were doing? It may be that UNICEF did not claim there were over one million children. Despite the press repeatedly saying so, I could find no case of a UNICEF spokesperson or employee actually having said it. It was Save the Children and the press that said it. But UNICEF did nothing to stop them. They never publicly corrected the claims.

Ten weeks after the earthquake, when it was becoming clear that Andrew Cates of SOS was right and that experts like Gareth Owen had wildly exaggerated the situation in Haiti, CBS’s 60 Minutes asked Marie de la Soudiere, the head of UNICEF’s Haitian Children Registry Program, “How many children are really out there?”

“The answer,” Mme Soudiere replied, “is we don’t know.”

But then Soudiere added, “We feel it’s upwards of 50,000.”

Saying 50,000 was considerably less of an exaggeration than the one million figure that some child protection agents, like Save the Children’s Kate Conradt were still, at that time, claiming had been separated, lost or abandoned because of the earthquake. But it too was a radically irresponsible assessment of the situation. The worst part about that claim is that by that point, 70 days after the earthquake, UNICEF did know better. They had only registered 600 children, one one-hundredth of what Soudiere “felt” was the minimum still out there. And they had only reunified 20 children, despite Soudiere’s assertion that her organization’s experience indicated that “95 percent of the families can be found.”

A year later, when the press was no longer interested in the issue, UNICEF would quietly publish the information that could confirm they had duped us. Specifically, UNICEF’s 2011 annual report claimed that it and its 430 “partners”—not UNICEF but essentially every orphanage and NGO child protection agency in Haiti that claimed to have taken in a seperatd child—had registered 4,948 children who were “orphaned or separated from their parents.” Only 1,265 of those children had been reunited with their families.  That’s about 1/10^th the lost and separated children that Souliere said were in Haiti the year before; and the reunification record is a dismal at 1 in 4 of the children registered. But the biggest disappointment is that even those claims were a type of lie.

Of the 1,265 children reunified, 506 had nothing at all to do with the earthquake. They were separated from their parents before January 12, 2010. Moreover, UNICEF didn’t reveal the exact figures, but it admitted that most of the remainder were also not “lost or orphaned.” They were restaveks, child domestic servants whose parents had “given them away” –the absurd and much exaggerated “child slaves” of UNICEF donor banners.

 

UNICEF ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Did UNICEF and the Child Protection agencies help Haitian children? Did the more than $500 million we gave them improve their lives in any way?

I originally intended, at this point, to craft into this chapter how UNICEF had in fact done some good. I mean, they must have. I retrieved from the internet a UNICEF report released two years after the earthquake entitled “Haiti earthquake: How UNICEF has helped.” I couldn’t find a single point that I could defend.

If we look at what UNICEF claimed to have done in the two years after the earthquake,

Over 120,000 children in nine departments benefit from structured activities and referral networks in 520 Child Friendly Spaces managed by 92 different community-based organisations supported by UNICEF

These were tents with cordoned off areas where for several hours per day children could come to play under the supervision of local UNICEF staff.

All ten departments equipped with psychosocial rehabilitation services specialized in emergency response.

Sounds grandiloquent, “Psychosocial rehabilitation services.” Drawing on our experience UNICEF must referring to Haitian Child Protection Agency (IBESR) agents. We worked with them, or tried to. They do not get paid.  I suppose their capacity to provide “services” means they attended a seminar.

13,440 children living in 336 of the estimated 650 residential care centres have been registered to provide social documentation, improved case management and family reunification where possible

and

care centers have been evaluated with standardized tools and a directory of all Residential Care Centres has been launched by IBESR, with UNICEF support

Again, we worked for UNICEF in 2014. They hired us to do the first ever indepth evaluation of the orphanages so that they would have a statistical profile of the institutions.  They gave us the entire list of 650 care centers. And it was not 650. It was 723.  Thirty percent of the institutions listed by UNICEF did not exist. What the evaluations of the rest meant were, even by UNICEF and IBESR’s own ommisions, anyone’s guess.

18,000 children screened at border points.

I crossed the border at least once a month every month for the first two years after the earthquake. I often did so in groups that included children and I never once saw a UNICEF agent. For the most part border agents ignore children. The Haitian-Dominican mother of my own children had the habit of not bothering to have their passports stamped at all. Indeed, anyone who knows the Haitian border and watched the children wandering back and forth peddling goods would find the claim absurd.

Two years after the earthquake in their list of material contributions.

80,000 children in “temporary schools.

Meaning tents

750,000 children and 15,000 teachers receiving “learning and teaching materials

Meaning pencils pens and chalk boards

1,487,900 children receiving “hygiene materials including soap.

Meaning bars of soap.

So the 291 million dollars we gave UNICEF didn’t buy much.  But it’s when it comes to child reunification that things really begin to stink.

UNICEF claims to have set up the “Separated Children Call Centre.” They claimed to have done “immediately” after the earthquake. If they really did it “immediately” they never told anyone. Not the press, not donors, not anyone in Haiti. It was not until June 16th, six months after the earthquake that we see any evidence or reference to the system, not even on the UNICEF website.

More disturbing to some, not least of all Haiti’s poorest children, is where UNICEF clearly did have an impact.  While I am trying to stay neutral, if you were to ask needy Haitian children and their parents, they would surely say it’s a negative impact. And that was in compelling the controversial bureau of child welfare (IBESR), to limit international adoption of Haitian children to only “closed adoptions.”

What “closed adoption” means for Haitian Children and those with living parents or even biological family is that those who were put up for adoption would now lose contact with their natural families. They could not know their biological identity, not know who their biological parents were, could not contact them, could not send them money to help them cope with poverty, could never petition for visa for their biological parents to come to the United States. Nor could they know their brothers and sisters and help them out of poverty. In short it meant–and this was surely UNICEF’s intention—that there was nothing in it for the biological parents. Fewer of them would agree to give their children up. Voila: reunification. UNICEF was solving their reunification conundrum with a stroke of the legislators pen.

They would subsequently follow up that law with one aimed at criminalizing what they called the “abandonment” of children. An impoverished Haitian parent who left their child in the care of another person and did not follow the guidelines defined by UNICEF would become a criminal.

How did UNICEF prevail on IBESR– a Haitian institution that should have been acting in the interest of Haitians—to close adoptions. They did it by giving IBESR $800,000 per year in support. That’s only 1/363^rd of the donations they brought in after the earthquake but still one heluvalot of money. It’s an especially large sum for IBESR, who’s prior budget, when they received anything at all, was reportedly less than US$100,000. IBESR itself got no public donations after the earthquake.

 

THE SWINDLE

Whatever the intentions it was a massive swindle. The world’s largest child protection agencies– UNICEF, Save the Children, World Vision, Compassion International and others–together with the orphanages and the world’s three largest news services–Agence France-Press, Reuters and the Associated Press–used untruths and exaggerations to precipitate a media hysteria that sustained an avalanche of donations from concerned citizens in almost every country on earth. The success of that swindle is not only the money they brought in. Nor is the success of the swindle limited to the fact that more than 90% of the money went to internal expenses, including pension plans, salaries, school tuitions for the children of UNICEF staff and the staff of those organizations to which UNICEF distributed money. The most outstanding mark of the swindle was that when it was all over, after having never apologized on even publicly acknowledged the duplicity, UNICEF officials were still looking into cameras, gushing with heartfelt sincerity, and asking for more money to help Haitian children.

And they were getting it. The Haiti earthquake helped UNICEF carve out a new niche in the donor market. Moving far beyond once a year trick-or-treating children, four years after the earthquake, American Airlines pilots are still finishing every flight to Haiti with a request that passengers give UNICEF a donation. A flight attendant very conspicuously walks down the middle of the aisle and, similar to church collections at the end of a service, holds a bag out for donations, turning to look at each aisle of passngers. Those that don’t give, they must not love the children.

What about the real Haitian orphans, those forgotten and neglected children who don’t have any family to care for them? What about the ones many donors had in mind, but who, because of their helplessness and vulnerability, do not get a coveted place at the aid table and that most international staff at child protections agencies would unlikely be able to identify even if the child bit one of them in the ass? I can answer the question. But I’ll let someone else do it. There’s one case of a journalist asking the question, not to an aid worker with 3-year desk assignment to Haiti, but to a legitimate expert, anthropologist Gerald F. Murray who speaks Creole and Spanish (and 13 other languages), spent much of the past 40 years living in both Haiti and the neighboring Domincan Republic and studying the respective cultures. It was several months after the earthquake.  Newsweek’s Katie Paul asked Murray, “What will happen to the orphans?” Murray told her, “Just as Haitians themselves had to dig out those buried under the rubble so it will be ordinary Haitians, not their government, that care for children orphaned by the earthquake.”

 

NOTES

The big business of haitian adoption Posted on Tuesday 23 March 2010 Marie-Thérèse Labossière Thomas Transmitted to AlterPresse on March 15, 2010

This is extrapolating from the most recent data I could find:  In 2007 The Southern Baptist Convention brought in $1.4 billion in “gifts” and missions. They owned $40 billion in property.  (Source: BC giving, financial data compiled by Wm. Robert Johnston
last updated 23 November 2008  http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/baptist/sbcdata2.html)

Other advocates include Democrati  Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, senators like Sam Brownback and James Inhofe.

Families for Orphans Act, drafted by the Families for Orphans Coalition, whose executive committee includes DiFilipo, Luwis and Johnson. The bill, which Landrieu’s office will reintroduce this year, would create a special State Department office to oversee adoptions and offer—critics say condition—developmental aid to countries that help obtain permanent parental care for orphans, including through international adoption. In an op-ed published in the Washington Examiner in March 2010, co-sponsors Landrieu and Inhofe dangled the promise that the office could facilitate the placement of tens of thousands more Haitian children with US families.

The Evangelical Adoption Crusade Kathryn Joyce  April 21, 2011  

The following is from Adoption restrictions separate Canadian aid worker from boy. Published: Saturday, June 19, 2010 8:40 p.m. MDT By Rukmini Callimachi, Associated Press

Within a week she aged. Her eyes were hollows. Her face was taut. She carried his toy car in her pocket for comfort.

“I see her, and you don’t even want to ask what’s going on,” says Jen Jasilewicz, the hospital’s chief nursing officer. “It amazes me. You have someone who wants to give her love and all those beautiful things to a child, and she is not being allowed to.”

Haitian officials say they are trying to protect children from possible exploitation.

“International adoption should always be a last resort,” says former Deputy Gerandale Telusma, who headed a committee charged with drafting the country’s new adoption law. “We need to first make sure there is no other family willing to take the child … to make sure they don’t enter into some kind of nightmare.”

• It is a position backed by the United Nations Children’s Fund, which helped create a database for unaccompanied children after the Haiti quake. The aim is to reunite children with their extended families, even if family members say they cannot care for the child.
• Michel Forst, the United Nations’ independent expert on human rights in Haiti, says the adoption freeze is necessary.

“There were lots of people that were coming here and doing whatever the heck they wanted. So it needed to be put on hold so that we could make sure that these adoptions were being done in a legal manner,”

Adoption restrictions separate Canadian aid worker from boy. Published: Saturday, June 19, 2010 8:40 p.m. MDT  By Rukmini Callimachi, Associated Press

Haiti Orphanages Are Overflowing–But Not with Orphans Facilities face closure because 80 percent of ‘orphans’ have at least one living parent.  Melissa Steffan   [ POSTED 12/7/2012 06:48AM ]

Fallout felt from airlift of Haitian orphans January 12, 2011 5:00 AM Mackenzie Carpenter Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The Telegraph, January 28th, “ Haiti Earthquake: Orphans for Sale for $50” or Worldnews.com on the 22nd of February, “Children in Haiti Sold for as Little as One Euro”). “We had orphanages negotiating the US demand for orphans to people overseas who wanted to be their parents, but under a barrage of exorbitant fees way out of synch with real costs.”

Moreover… it’s a definition that, as UNICEF representatives so keenly noted in their post-earthquake attack on the orphanages, doesn’t really make much sense in Haiti. On February 1, UNICEF’s Rebecca Fordham said in an UN Radio interview that, “Prior to the quake, many of the children who were in institutional care already did have living parents.”  And the reason that … they can’t … orphans is that most Haitians–specifically the impoverished majority–don’t share our childrearing system or values. In my doctoral research I found that about one third of children in the 1,586 families we included in a survey were not even raised by their parents. They were raised by other family members, most often the maternal grandmother. Moreover, Haitians have very large families. And although a big family might sound like a burden if you are from developed North American or Western Europe and have been conditioned to think of Haitians as sitting around waiting for the next foodaid shipment while helplessly breeding themselves into a Malthusian nightmare, the fact is that most impoverished adults here in Haiti want children. They want them because they face intense household work regimes such as retrieving wáter, caring for livestock and gardens, handwashing cloths, searching for fire wood, processing and cooking foods. Children help with all these tasks. Even in the city research has found similar trends (see Schwartz 2009, Sex Family and Fertility in Haiti).  In short, high labor demands mean that Haitian adults are eager to take in their nephew, niece, brother sister, or godchild.  This is one reason why most orphanages in Haiti have a hard time even finding true orphans. With half a century in Haiti, UNICEF staff knows this. Well, they should know it. Truth is they don’t seem to know much of anything at all about Haiti and Haitian children.

While it is emphatically not true that orphanages in Haiti readily explain this to donors, whoever wrote the Wikipedia entry for Haitian orphans capture the trend when they wrote that,

Haitians and expatriate childcare professionals are careful to make it clear that Haitian orphanages and children’s homes are not orphanages in the North American sense, but instead shelters for vulnerable children…

In my own research in North West Hatii, I found that irrespective of whether or not parents are alive, 25% of all Haitian children are raised not by their parents but by their grandparents, most often mother’s parents and most particularly the grandmother. Thus, being an orphan in Haiti doesn’t really tell us much about the child’s needs. To be exact, controlling for age, the average Haitian has 10 full and half brothers and sisters; 20 uncles and aunts (including parent’s half siblings); about 35 first cousins (reducing the average lifetime total by a factor of 4); a maximum of 12 living grandparents (4 grandparents and a total posible 8 great grandparents); as many as 40 great uncles and aunts (the siblings and half siblings of his or her grandparents). In addition to these blood relatives, a Haitian child has two fictive mothers and two fictive fathers (godparents).

Meanwhile, many of the neediest children, or the true orphan like Sonson really are lucky if they get in. They don’t have the clout to be an “orphan” or a “sponsored child.”

In short, recipient of children from lower class families, most Hatiains parents who bring their children to the orphanage are emphatically not “giving their kids away” as so commonly stated in the press.  They are most often seeking to further the child’s education.  In the case of the earthquake, the opportunities and the scramble to take advantage of them intensified exponiently.

What I am describing, this Haitian understanding of orphanages and schools as an opportunity to access aid befuddles outsiders. They don’t know about the advantages and most can’t even fathom them. Foreigners who have come to help don’t readily see what is happening. What they see is parents giving away children and it becomes a mindboggling catch 22. When  Arno Klarsfeld, went back to Paris he said “Something here isn’t morally correct. It’s a vicious circle. The more orphanages open, the more parents are tempted to give their kids away.”

Then we found out that UNICEF and the child protection agencies such as Save the Children, already knew all of this. They knew that most Haitian “orphans” have parents. That’s what they had been trying to tell us all along: Orphanages were a racket in which children who were not even really orphans were negotiated to hopeful overseas parents for exorbitant fees. It was a business that separeated children from their parents. It should be stopped. That was the point. A different strategy should be put into effect.  And they–UNICEF, Save the Children, World Vision, and the other child protection agencies that depended on child sponsorship programs– were going to do it. So they said/thought.

Going back tp that original January 22^nd press conference when UNICEF had announced to the world that “let’s say around 15 cases of children,” much of the press corps had missed the point. UNICEF was not just announcing that there was a problem; they were offering the solution,

“it’s better for aid workers to help identify and make the effort to locate those kids’ relatives — and place them in temporary foster-style care with network-monitored and supported families — than to hand them over to orphanages.”

The legal definition, and what most people in the US think of as an orphan, is a child who has lost both parents. But then as legal things go, the issue can get hazy. A child who has lost one parent and the remaining parent cannot care for him or her can be declared an orphan. A child whose father has not recognized him/her and whose mother is unable to care for them can be an orphan. The definition for children born outside the US and seeking immigration status is “a child with a sole or surviving parent who is unable to provide for the child’s basic needs, consistent with the local standards of the foreign sending country, and has, in writing, irrevocably released the child for emigration and adoption.” From US Legal Definitions Web site access  June 9, 2011 http://definitions.uslegal.com/o/orphan/

They did not keep this a secret….On February 1, UNICEF’s Rebecca Fordham said in an UN Radio interview that, “Prior to the quake, many of the children who were in institutional care already did have living parents.”

It’s difficult for most of us to fathom but we’re talking about bridging the span between the poorest people in the western hemisphere and the wealthiest.  We’re talking about the risks of child mortility as high as 20%, were talking about certain malnutrition, illness, semi-literacy, intensive and arduous daily labor regimes. It’s a no-brainer for most poor people and, for them, anyone who would try to interfere could be nothing short of heartless.

UNICEF Call centre responds to needs of separated children in Haitian quake zone http://www.unicef.org/protection/haiti_53986.html

 

For the call center supposedly set up “immediately” after the earthquake see  Summary Report: Lan Timoun— A Six-Month Report on the Triumphs, Challenges and Failures of Providing Services to Children in Haiti http://jointcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Triumphs-Challenges-and-Failures-of-Providing-Services-to-Children-in-Haiti.pdf

UNICEF Ireland Blog 18th June 2010 | by unicef

Call centre responds to needs of separated children in Haitian quake zone

UNICEF Ireland Facebook June 22 2010

Last word from Tamara, posted on ##

It was in June that I decided to look for Sonson’s family on my own since no Haitian organization had attempted this by that point. It was without much effort that i located his family.

From my meeting in Aug with the creche, up to the end of my last trip in Haiti, Jan. 15 2011, not one attempt was made to reunite Sonson with his family. Now I am baffled, if the creche stated that this is their prerogative with me in Aug, then why was no attempt made even though the mother herself made numerous trips to IBESR to have her son released.

I am left now questioning the motives and intentions of the Creche in question, and if they truly have successfully reunited 70 other children with their families, then why is this one so much more complicated when all the ground work has been done for them?

Crèche Enfant Jesus provides care for newborns, infants and children from the ages of birth to six years. These children are provided with international standards of care and quality of life. Foundation Enfant Jesus has in place a multidisciplinary staff that admits each child to the crèche. After the legal time frame and review of each child life plan, the child is placed for adoption within caring families from the United States, Europe or Canada.

The children are accepted into the crèche within the following categories:

1. An abandoned child.
2. An orphaned child of one or both parents.
3. A child whose family is in extreme need and who is seeking to have their child placed for adoption because they cannot provide the basics for them.
4. HIV and special needs children.

 

Description

The story as we know it so far: Bebeto, otherwise known as “Sonson”, a 2.5 year old Haitian boy, was separated from his family after the earthquake in January 2010. Apparently his mother who had 8 children left PaP with 5 of the 8 kids when her and her husband separated. She left the remaining 3 children, one of which is Sonson, with her sister in law. The sister in law, Destan Gabriel, is age 32yrs and already had 2 children of her own. She spends her days making a less than meager living selling at the market. While she is at the market the 5 children are basically on their own, Sonson being the youngest. Sonson and his two older brothers, age 3.5 and 5 were wandering around the street when they were separated.
In the beginning of Feb. Sonson was brought into the Salvation Army on Dalmas 2, by two young local women. The Salvation Army then brought Sonson to the University of Miami-Project Medishare hospital upon noticing his distended stomach and infected foot.
Instantly there was a bond that cannot be explained between Sonson and myself, Tamara Palinka,and within weeks he was calling me “mama”. By Feb. 28 2010 I had my first piece of court stamp papers stating I was eligible to adopt the boy, Sonson.The development of this bond can be read in the Cochrane Eagle links; I wrote a weekly blog while I was on the ground in Haiti.

In June 2010, I went back down for a fast 5 days to see Sonson at the creche he is at: Fondation L’ Enfant Jesus, and with me I brought 100 posters in an attempt to locate a relative. I did not post many posters before a woman proclaimed that she knew the boy, and she could bring us to his family. What I found was a tiny and far less than adequate tent city. Sonson’s cousin and two brothers were there at their “house”, none of which had anything more than a shirt on them. They were all very dirty and extremely slim. I met his aunt, who is the fathers sister, and her and I spoke for a long time. The aunt is not capable of taking care of the kids and she does not want Sonson back; her wish is to sign him over to me and let him have a better life.

My hope is to return to Haiti in the next 5 weeks and have enough funds to relocate Sonson’s family to a decent home and have all the kids sponsored for a year of school.
————————————————————–
Update Jan. 2011

After returning from a 6 week trip to Haiti, the story of Sonson is still unwinding to expose more complications.

The CBC documentary was released Jan. 12 with the latest news up to Oct 2010.

The situation now is that Destan, the aunt, left the home with her brother Eric, the father of Sonson, and took her two children, Rolando and Peterson, along with all the house belongings. when I had returned to Haiti in Oct. I found the mother and children with three new cots my friend dropped off for them, and nothing else in the house but the few clothes they had and a small cooker.

I returned back to Canada to raise some funds for household items and school for the kids. I found myself back in Haiti beginning of Dec-Jan 15 2011.

In that 6 week period, my friend Himler and I sanded, painted, furnished, and supplied basic items for the house. I had enough money to put the two brothers and the two cousins into their first year of school.

It came to my attention that the mother Theresa contacted IBESR on numerous occasions in regards to having her son, Sonson, released into her custody from the creche. By the time I left Haiti, Jan. 12 2011, still no attempt by IBESR or the creche Fondation L’Enfant Jesus had been made to make this happen.

While I was in Haiti, Theresa gave birth to her 9th child, a beautiful little girl named Emanuala. She is now the mother of 9 children 6 of which are of the age that they still require care, and one of the 6 is still in the custody of the creche.

My last meeting with the creche took place in Aug. where Lucien made it aggressively clear that adoption was out of the question and that his intentions were to reunite Sonson with his family regardless of the circumstances.

It was an easy decision for me after getting to know and love all the children and the whole family of Sonson, to help them become a stronger family by assisting them to get on their feet. Theresa cannot do this on her as a single mother of 6 needing children and with no government support available in Haiti. This is where my role has become clear.

By loving Sonson and following that love where ever it could bring me, I now find myself in a position to help him by helping his family.

Aug 2011 will mark the one year line of the 5 year plan:

1)keep all the children in school, including the two cousins who reside back in the tent city from which I initially found them.

2)keep the house rent paid for and continually improve of the life skills

3)put Theresa into school on a part time basis to prepare her for sustaining a home business

4) introduce four sustainable businesses to Theresa with support to help ensure her success

By achieving these goals, Theresa will have a sustainable business allowing her to properly take care of her and her children needs which will in return empower her as a woman and as a parent.

I have spoken to NGO, Rebuild Globally, that focuses on Haitian business and the director is willing to work with Theresa on two small business ventures. This will not be enough revenue in the long run to sustain her home and school, so a couple more business are required. Theresa believes that a used clothing business would be a good solution and one she could do from home, as well as a cold drink stand.

My goal for the next trip down is to help her acquire what she needs to start her businesses. A fridge, used clothing and get her in touch with the other NGO, Rebuild Globally.

I am in the process of establishing a non profit organization that will fill the needs of Theresa and future families like this.

The obstacle: the creche Fondation L’Enfant Jesus has yet to release Sonson to his mother as they claimed was their prerogative. The only way I can see this happening is with the support and awareness of Friends of Sonson.

The Evangelical Adoption Campaign  by Kathryn Joyce

Some ideas and prose for later: In their zeal to save the one million and to put in… the executives … that the child protection agencies had overlooked that fact that these programs exist in name only. They didn’t have any children on child sponsorships and after a collective 260 years in Haiti, none of them had a ## monitoring in place…. ….   I …None of them even know that… how many children or who they are…That’s not how the programs work. That’s how the donation drives work… but the programs are something else…

Some prose I was going to use: The entire sub-economy driven by profit.: bureaucrats who write the laws and who handle the visas, waivers and adoption papers; lawyers who specialize in understanding the bureaucrats and negotiating through their laws and paper work; scouts who locate and recruit orphans; medical practitioners who assure that orphans are healthy; specialized and high priced hotel-apartments and restaurants where hopeful families are contractually obligated to stay when visting their “children”, waiting periods that average 3 years. And lurking behind all of this were orphanages, like profit driven puppy mills they were peddling children to hopeful US and squezzing every dime out of them in the process while the children turned into starry eyed and unhealthy.   The press, scouring for the sex traffickers and, the orphanages and UNICEF had assured us were lurking out there…was in the process of peeling back… and revealing… . The image that most of us held of orphanages as dedicated to saving impoverished, needy, and parentless children was being suppanted with one of an….

UNICEF silence on the issue in fact suggests that many inside the organization knew better or were at least skeptical. And just as damning, they allowed the press and Save the Children to make the claims, to attribute them to UNICEF and they never debunked them.

UNICEF one that 10 weeks after the earthquake had reunited 20 of Haiti’s 1 million lost, abandoned or separated children.” Indeed, so lost was UNICEF that what Soldiere.. had been talking about when she said 50,000 had nothing at all to do…. She could only have been talking about one thing…. was talking about Tim Schwartz (not me…)….. So lost was UNICEF on the issue that despite having collected a quarter of a billion dollars… they were relying on a volunteer from….—As for what that wound up doing with the money, in stead of investing it in ### of which they… They set up child safe… play áreas… and they set them up all over the place… And they gave out a lot of tarps and they gave out a lot of wáter… these were things that they could do… And things that were easy to count.er…And later they would build shelters and houses… In fact, three years… late…

Not a single of the 30 or more foreign agencies or businesses in Haiti had lost more than 1.5 % of it’s staff it’s foreign or its domestic staff. See Timothy Schwartz Open Salon blogs.

 SOS says 2 to 3% of the death toll. I have to admit to finding that intuitively too small a proportion; but even if it were ten times that, the point stands.

 http://www.unicef.ie/NewsMedia/Haiti-earthquake-How-UNICEF-has-helped-72-294.aspx  Haiti earthquake: How UNICEF has helped

 In understanding why UNICEF and the other child protection agencies were attacking the orphanages and suddenly claiming they could track the children, a Haitian friend of mine offers an alternative explanation. He sarcastically calls both the “child collection agencies.”  What my friend means is that UNICEF and the child protections agencies vs. the orphanages was really a battle over the avalanche of money from overseas donors who want to help needy Haitian children. On the one hand is UNICEF and the child protection agencies want the money meant to sponsor the children, meaning that ideally they would act as custodians, leave the children at home, help with their education, help subsidize feed and caring for them. And on the other side are the orphanages that would take the children away, caring for most in ## and transferring others to families overseas.

In their zeal to collect donations neither UNICEF, Save the Children nor any of the other Child Protection agencies could, apparently, bring themselves to do what SOS had done and tell the world that there really was not an orphan crisis. We can surmise that the value of donations flooding in trumped any sense of honesty.

Indeed, in the entire six year following the earthquake, a period when Haiti was innundated with foreign aid workers and journalists to such an extent that there were probably more child protection agents per square foot than any place on the planet, not one of them would document  a single bona fide trafficker. In fact, in the 5 years leading up to the earthquake the only refereence to sexual predators apprehended in Haiti that i can find were from the two most powerful foreign institutions in the counrty, UN Stabilization Mission, soldiers accused of rape and having sex with young adolscents girls (there would also be accused of raping a boy ##), and a string of catholic priests, including the 2007 arrest of Canadians Denis Rochefort and Armand Huard, the latter once called “a veritable Father Teresa,” but known to the Haitian “orphans” he was having sex with as “Papi.” Douglas Perlitz, another Catholic priest from the US. Doug ran a boys home in northern Haiti. He was arrested in September of 2009 for sodomizing 16 boys.  And there is yet another ex-Catholic priest, John Duarte. John was arrested in ##. He is still in jail in Canada and waiting trial.    And as I write this UN soldiers from Uruguay have… raping an 18 year old boy—which most people, if they see the Youtube video will agree was hazing, but not rape. As for the issue of child slavery, it was, as I show in THE following chapter, largely a concoction of the child protection agencies themselves

 

As I write this there is a new case of a Swiss and Gernman… The newpapers are careful to mention that “they could have been exploiting quake… “ But the charges extend back to 2002 and 2003…

 

What we were discovering was a massive institutional fraud concocted, whether deliberately or not, by both the orphanages and the child protection agencies.

 

Now, for those of use who were following closely, what we were discovering is that it wasn’t apocaplytic so much as apocryphal. It was bullshit

There was an underlying logic to what the high Commissioner for the UN and UNICEF were saying.  The logic was that in 2008 the UN had estimated that 29 per cent of Haitian children under 14 were working and that some 300,000 were child domestic servants, many of whom suffered slave like condition, rape of children trafficking them as prostitutes to the neighboring Dominican republic was rampant. At least that’s what they said. And so in the wake of the earthquake UNICEF and other major child protection agencies–such as Save the Children, World Vision and the British Red Cross– were calling for and immediate halt to adoptions not approved before the earthquake.

were still cooing about how great UNICEF was… And Never backed off. Almost every dramatic news release was a radical exaggeration or, in many cases, pure fabrications. They collected over .5 billion dollars doing it and the number of children actually “rescued” or “reunited” with families is, even if we accept their claims, absurdly minor compared to the dimensions of the crisis they told us was occurring in Haiti. There is not now and never has been evidence that were even 1000 orphans, and far fewer ‘lost children’ were reunited with families. It was another post-earthquake product of the media’s scramble for viewers and readers and the NGO scramble for donations that has to this day not been adequately addressed. It was almost addressed. The issue of desperate children so captured the interest of journalists and the overseas public that the truth almost came out.  We almost got a clear example of what’s wrong with disaster relief and how disaster relief experts like Gareth Owen and the organizations that employee them, in this case Save the Children, create a twisted image of that what is occurring during disasters, desperation into funding campaign fodder, and how it has been going on for a long time. But in the end it would fade away without any explanation.

It’s not that sexual predators and traffickers did not exist.  They did But the truly organized institutions are not underground networks…

Once again it is hard to impossible to know the impact on incoming funds. But it was a boon. Save the Children, which could not report how many children on sponsorship were killed in the earthquake, nevertheless,

Dear Mr. Schwartz,

Thank you for contacting Save the Children.

We apologize for the delay on getting these statistics to you.  Below is the information on Save the Children sponsorship coverage in Haiti before and after Haiti Earthquake:

Pre-Earthquake    18,900         Post-Earthquake (as of now)  24,000
Number of children enrolled into sponsorship:   2,400
Number of active sponsorship: 5,000

Please feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns you may have.

We appreciate your generous support to Save the Children, and our programs that create real and lasting change in the lives of children.

Best Regards,

Response Center Team
Donor Services
Save the Children
twebster@savechildren.org
800-728-3843 (calling within US); 203-221-4030 (calling from outside US)
54 Wilton Road, Westport, CT 06880

Save the Children is the leading independent organization creating lasting change for children in need, with programs in 120 countries, including the United States.

[i]http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1964884,00.html#ixzz2TWlpkEGj

[ii]http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1964884,00.html#ixzz2TWlJW373

[iii] UNICEF Seeks to Keep Kids Out of Haiti Orphanages By Tim Padgett and Jessica Desvarieux / Port-au-Prince Thursday, Feb. 18, 2010

i    Haiti children face ongoing disease and trauma Emma Wilkinson Health reporter, BBC News  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8461064.stm

Autralia’s Herald Sun  Children ‘orphaned, petrified, in danger’ after Haitian earthquake From: AFP January 15, 2010 2:36AM

Kiran Randhawa  15 January 2010 Fears for two million children alone in Haiti earthquake wreckage http://www.standard.co.uk/news/fears-for-two-million-children-alone-in-haiti-earthquake-wreckage-6755389.html

[ii] In the week after the earthquake there was an outpouring of sympathy for Haitians orphans.

Pictures of the dead, the mangled and collapsed buildings and a reported death toll that could reach half a million were punctuated with the possibility that as much as 25 to 50% of all Haitian children had been orphaned or lost.  And there was good reaason to believe that it was true and good reason to believe…they needed help.

 

[iii] And for those who think it was quake orphans driving industry growth, note what SOS reported.

 

In the week after the quake, SOS announced on the radio that the orphanage had room for more orphans. The next day, the orphanage nearly doubled in size after staff found around 120 children lined up outside the gate. In the three months since, the orphanage has tripled in size.

But SOS quickly realized that most of the new arrivals were not in fact orphans, said spokeswoman Line Wolf-Nielsen. One mother posed as a stranger dropping off three of her own children, whom she claimed were ‘orphans’ found after the quake. Others sent in their children with neighbors or friends, making it more difficult to find the family. One family instructed three boys to memorize a fictitious last name to complicate efforts to find their real parents.
Organizations helping abandoned children are even offering supplies to families that take back their kids. In the case of the three boys, their family received three sleeping bags, a tent and a one-month supply of food. They were driven back to a muddy alleyway that leads into a maze of tents where children play with kites made by tying a discarded plastic bag to a piece of string.[iii]

There were, of course, desperate and impoverished parents who in the wake of the earthquake couldn’t afford to care for their children. But there’s still something wrong here.

Desperate parents abandon children in Haiti  Associated Press May 9, 2010

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI, Associated Press Writer Rukmini Callimachi, Associated Press Writer  http://thegreatone22.wordpress.com/2010/05/09/

[iv] and many of these were volunteered by hopeful impoverished families trying to get a piece of the aid.

[v] Criminals may be trafficking orphans

Police begin investigation John Aglionby in Jakarta, Jonathan Steele in Colombo and Brian Whitaker The Guardian, Wednesday 5 January 2005

Children and the Tsunami, A Year On A Draft UNICEF Summary of What Worked

November 2005 Yin Yin Nwe  http://www.unicef.org/emerg/disasterinasia/files/WhatWorked.pdf

[vi] UNICEF fears orphans being sold abroad

Herald News Services Published: Saturday, January 23, 2010

The Times  January 23, 2010  Call for halt to Haiti adoptions over traffickers

Martin Fletcher in Port-au-Prince

Save the Children, World Vision and the British Red Cross have called for an immediate halt to adoptions of Haitian children not approved before the earthquake, warning that child traffickers could exploit the lack of regulation.

Nearly 30 agencies helped by the UN peacekeeping mission and the Haitian government are urgently pooling information and resources to counter the threat. They are are touring hospitals and orphanages, broadcasting radio messages, and increasing surveillance of road traffic, the airport and the border with the Dominican Republic.

The scale of the problem is potentially enormous. Haiti is awash with children, with 45 per cent of its population younger than 15. One UN official estimated that between 40,000 and 60,000 children were killed, orphaned or separated from their families by the earthquake, which struck while most were still in school, and anecdotal evidence suggests man

The alarm is particularly acute given Haiti’s dire record of child abuse. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported in 2008 that 29 per cent of children under 14 were already working, and roughly 300,000 were ‘restaveks’ (a creole corruption of ‘rester avec’) whose impoverished parents send them to work for wealthier families in the hope they will receive food and shelter.

Some were cared for and educated, but others were “sexually exploited and physically abused; and are unpaid, undocumented, and unprotected”. When they turn 15, and must by law be paid, many are turned on to the streets to join as many as 3,000 other children who survive on the streets of Port-au-Prince as vendors, beggars or prostitutes.

Even before the earthquake, Haitian children were regularly sent to the Dominican Republic to work in sex tourism, or recruited by armed gangs. A Haitian women’s organisation documented 140 rapes of girls younger than 18 years in the 18 months to June 2008. Haiti’s many orphanages — there are said to be 200 in Port-au-Prince alone — are poorly regulated, and some are mere fronts for international child traffickers.

[vii] http://www2.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=3f7000a8-6c95-4260-9ffd-f9e73be4940b

[viii] The Problem With the Christian Adoption Movement

Posted: 06/02/2013 8:14 am EDT Updated: 08/02/2013 5:12 am EDT

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathryn-joyce/christian-adoption-movement-problems_b_3367223.html

The Evangelical Adoption Campaign  02.06.10  As Bill Clinton works to spring U.S. missionaries charged with kidnapping in Haiti, the case highlights a new evangelical strategy: Adopt Third World babies and convert them.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/02/06/evangelicals-adoption-battlecry.html

[ix] America’s Unseen Export: Children, Most of Them Black by Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza • June 24, 2014 • 4:00 Am

http://www.psmag.com/navigation/politics-and-law/outgoing-adoption-americas-unseen-export-children-black-84084/

Indian Child Welfare Act: More Than 800 Native American Children Were Adopted In 2012. How Many Could Be Affected? By Lisa Mahapatra @lisamahapatra on August 19 2013 1:15 PM

http://www.ibtimes.com/indian-child-welfare-act-more-800-native-american-children-were-adopted-2012-how-many-could-be

[x]  For US statistics see, Office of Children’s Issues (CI), part of the Bureau of Consular Affairs at the U.S. Department of State  http://travel.state.gov/content/adoptionsabroad/en/about-us/statistics.html

[xi] International adoption rates plummet, domestic numbers rise by The Associated Press MAY 10, 2012

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/25/international-adoptions-us-parents-2012_n_2547549.html

Historical statistics on adoption in the United States, plus statistics on child population and welfare

compiled by Wm. Robert Johnston  last updated 22 June 2014

[xii]  International Adoptions By U.S. Parents Fell In 2012, Continuing Multi-Year Decline

Reuters Posted: 01/24/2013 11:38 pm EST Updated: 03/27/2013 5:12 am EDT

http://www.nairaland.com/385977/massive-race-traffick-haitan-children

International adoption rates plummet, domestic numbers rise By The Associated Press MAY 10, 2012  Child Adoption in the United States: Historical Trends and the Determinants of Adoption Demand and Supply, 1951-2002 Raquel Bernal, Universidad de Los Andes Luojia Hu, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Chiaki Moriguchi, Northwestern University & NBER Eva Nagypal, Northwestern University Preliminary and Incomplet

According to the latest research by the National Council for Adoption, private domestic agency adoptions have risen steadily from 14,549 in 1982 to 20,254 in 2007. While domestic adoption continues to grow, international adoption has declined significantly over the past several years, with just 7,092 adoptions in 2013, down from 8,668 in 2012, 9,319 in 2011 and 11,058 in 2010.

In 2010, the countries with the most U.S. adoptions were China (3,401), Ethiopia (2,513) and Russia (1,082).

Adoption Relinquishments by the Numbers   By Claudia Corrigan DArcy | January 30, 2013 | Adoption Research & Statistics, Relinquishment, The Adoption Industry

[xiii] Trafficking fears as Haiti children go missing Updated 24 Jan 2010, 8:36pm  http://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-01-23/trafficking-fears-as-haiti-children-go-missing/1219762

The Massive Race To Traffick Haitan Children ( This Is Not Right ). – Politics – Nairaland 4:47pm On Jan 22, 2010

[xiv]  Pittsburgh Magazine, December 2010 Pittsburghers of the Year: Jamie & Ali McMutrie By Jonathan Wander  http://www.pittsburghmagazine.com/Pittsburgh-Magazine/January-2011/Pittsburghers-of-the-Year-Jamie-amp-Ali-McMutrie/

[xv] Elisabeth Delatour Preval, Haiti’s first lady, got in on the act. “The children of Haiti, unless they get help, they will have lost their childhoods, their innocence.”

[xvi]  For Clinton Press conference see UPI 2010 Clinton pledges to speed Haiti adoptions

Jan. 20, 2010 at 9:27 PM    Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2010/01/20/Clinton-pledges-to-speed-Haiti-adoptions/UPI-98631264038353/#ixzz3GIoDAcBB

[xvii] Kirsten Edmondson Branch, January 17, 2010  Broadcasting the SOS call of the #BRESMA Orphans  of #Haitihttp://open.salon.com/blog/kirsten_edmondson_branch/2010/01/17/broadcasting_the_sos_call_of_the_bresma_orphans_of_haiti

[xviii] The New Yorker May 10, 2010 Issue The Last Babylift Adopting a child in Haiti. Anonymous.

[xix]  Romans Andrew,  January 19, 2010, Ex Attorney Loses in Political Skirmish Over Haitian Orphans  In Main Justice: Politics, Policy, and the Law.

Further inspired to action by pleas from two other Pennsylvania residents, sisters Ali and Emma McMutrie– who later that year Pittsburgh Magazine would name Pittsburghers of the Year for their heroics–Pennsylvania politicians began to fall all over themselves to respond.

[xx] Most of us who were reading about the sisters where thinking ‘orphans’ and ‘sisters’ and concluding that they must have been Catholic Sisters.

[xxi]  U.S. Department of State FY 2010 Annual Report on Intercountry Adoptions December 2010

New York Times, After Haiti Quake, the Chaos of U.S. Adoptions Ginger Thompson

Published: August 3, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/world/americas/04adoption.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

[xxii] the last bona fide case pulled from the rubble exactly on the 27th January, when the cry predators went up

[xxiii] New York Times January 26, 2010  Many Haiti children adrift in earthquake’s wake
http://www.cleveland.com/world/index.ssf/2010/01/many_haiti_children_adrift_in.html

[xxiv] Tim Padgett and Bobby Ghosh

[xxv] TIME provided better evidence of what happened to someone that Haitians thought were trying to prey on their children. In the same article Time reported the only solid case of Haitians reporting someone stalking their children,

In the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Petite Place Cazeau … a crowd of quake survivors living in tents surrounded a pickup truck and beat up the driver, saying he had for several days been trying to kidnap young girls. Bleeding from his nose, mouth and scalp, he managed to get back in his truck and flee. (The angry crowd then threatened to beat up a journalist for even asking questions about child trafficking.)

[xxvi]  25% of the Haitian population is between the ages of 4 and 15 and 32% between the ages of 4 and 18

[xxvii] UNICEF 1993; Dorélien 1982; 1990; Clesca 1984

[xxviii] Youth and Education in Haiti.  Henriette Lunde  FAFO-Paper 2008  ISSN 0804 -5135 http://www.FAFO.no/pub/rapp/10070/10070.pdf

[xxix] Report: 225,000 Haiti children in slavery   12/22/2009   Associated Press USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2009-12-22-haiti-slavery_N.htm

World Haitian kids forced into slavery by poverty Source: Agencies  |   2009-12-24  |     NEWSPAPER EDITION  SHANGHAI DAILY

[xxx] Here is a quick breakdown in the math for proportion of girls in the 4 to 14 year age group who are restavek: Take 80% of the 300,000 restavek estimate (because the supposition is that 80% are female), and then take the ratio of that figure over the total population for the age group=240,000/1,000,000 = 24%.  A clarification about the population data: Haiti had about 8.3 million people in 2003. Up until the earthquake the most common estimate remained at about 8.5 million I notice that since the earthquake there has been a tendency to bump it up to 10 million. But with the high number who have moved in to the Dominican Republic and elsewhere and the clear tendency to inflate numbers since the earthquake, I am sticking here with 8.5 million. One million of those people are girls between the ages of 4 and 15 years.

[xxxi] The U.S. Department of State (2006) went even farther, describing thousands of Haitian children annually “trafficked” across the border to the Dominican Republic making it an international issue of trade in child slaves.  They did this despite a 1998 USAID funded study of which I was part of a three man team of anthropology PhDs from the Univeristy of Florida.  We covered this very topic. We found that yes…. But all the children we encountered had done so either with their families consent and support or, if you can believe it, on their own…. As one child explained to me…. But no one repeated that. )

[xxxii]  Stories on the so-called “crisis” were filtered through the perspectives of foreigners. CNN journalist Elizabeth Cohen reported on the seemingly tragic case of a hospitalized 9-year-old girl through the view of American pediatricians Tina Rezaiyan and Liz Hinez. The doctors did not speak Creole and had never been to Haiti before. According to them, the girl had been separated from her family during the earthquake. An uncle came to the hospital to take the girl home, but she did not want to go with him.

“She was terrified,” one of the doctors recalled. “She’d been holding Liz’s hand, and she clung to it and wouldn’t let go.” They called in a team of Haitian UNICEF social workers who investigated. They determined that it was very unlikely that the uncle or anyone else had been sexually or physically abusing her and that, as with most Haitian children, the girl had to do chores such as washing laundry, dishes, and cleaning the house. When an interpreter her where she would like to live, the girl said the United States. When they asked her about a second choice, she said she wanted to stay in the hospital with the doctors. When she was asked for a third choice, she said she wanted to go home to her mother.

Neither the doctors nor Cohen concluded that poverty is hard and that the girl saw a chance to escape misery by not going back home. Instead, the Cohen expounded at length on sexual abuse, child slavery, and malnourishment, despite the absence of any evidence the girl was suffering from any of those ailments. “I wanted to take her home with me so badly,” one of the doctors concluded, crying. “I’m probably going to think about her every day for the rest of my life.”

[xxxiii] Painful plight of Haiti’s ‘restavec’ children By Elizabeth Cohen, CNN Senior Medical Correspondent January 29, 2010 — Updated 1520 GMT (2320 HKT)

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/01/29/haiti.restavek.sende.sencil/index.html

[xxxiv] http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message976170/pg1  1/28/10

http://stopchildsexslavery.blogspot.com/2010_01_01_archive.html   1/28/10

[xxxv] Wednesday, January 27, 2010 PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – The Associated Press

That same week, the second week after the earthquake, the facts hit the US Senate floor. Senator Mary Landrieu from Louisana declared to her fellow lawmakers that,

Haiti had 380,000 orphans, as defined by UNICEF, before the earthquake. We don’t know if this number has doubled, tripled or potentially quadrupled, but I promise you it has increased.  We are here today to advocate for a more modern model to identify orphans in Haiti and try to reunite them with their families or find them a family somewhere in the world as quickly as possible.

On the 28th Prime Minister Max Bellrive and First Dame Elizabeth Preval added their concern as well.  The first lady said that, “The children, unless they get help, they will have lost their childhoods, their innocence. It is them we must go to first.”

[xxxvi] http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/01/30/us-quake-haiti-arrests-idUSTRE60T23I20100130

Joseph Guyler Delva  Reuters

[xxxvii] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8489738.stm

[xxxviii] http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90777/90852/6884520.html

[xxxix] Bleak Portrait of Haiti Orphanages Raises Fears The N.Y. Times 2/06/10http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/02/07/world/07trafficking_span-CA0/07trafficking_CA0-articleLarge.jpg  Haitian children prepared to eat dinner recently at the Foyer of Patience orphanage in Port-au-Prince. Many such centers are barely habitable.

[xl] Missionary Case Illuminates Plight of Haiti’s Orphans Wall Street Journal February 3, 2010  By DAVID GAUTHIER-VILLARS, JOEL MILLMAN And MIRIAM JORDAN

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704259304575043691704446642.html

Haiti Charges Americans With Child Abduction February 4, 2010, New York Times

By MARC LACEY  Published: February 4, 2010  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/world/americas/05orphans.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Ten U.S. missionaries charged over attempt to kidnap and smuggle Haiti ‘orphans’ The Daily Mail 5 February 2010  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1248671/Ten-U-S-missionaries-charged-attempt-kidnap-smuggle-Haiti-orphans.html#ixzz2SfFe1JfT

US missionaries in Haiti charged with child abduction BBC News Friday, 5 February 2010     http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8499401.stm

[xli]  Haiti Earthquake Appeal: False claims of “million orphans” Jan 19, 2010 02:55 PM  http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/news/previous-emergency-appeals/2010-haiti-earthquake/falseaccounting

 

[xlii] With encouragment from orphanage owners, other journalists immediately raised the stakes. Nick Allen of wrote in the Telegraph that, “The first confirmed case of a child being offered for sale since Haiti was devastated by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake on Jan 12 took place near Gonaives, 150km north of Port-au-Prince.”

 

Haiti earthquake: orphans for sale for $50

The Telegraph  28 Jan 2010

 

Haiti earthquake children sold by their parents for less than

76p each to traffickers, say Unicef

Daily Mail 22 February 2011

 

He’d got the confirmation from non other than Noel Ismonin, a Canadian pastor who claimed to rescue orphans in the area. In fact, Pastor Noel Ismonin had himself been ”scouring camps of Haitians left homeless by the quake for orphans to bring back to Gonaives” but rather he wasn’t having a lot of luck. According to CBC  news he  “found his offers sometimes rejected outright. ‘They’re going to be abused,’ cried one Haitian man at one tent city, to Ismonin’s dismay.”  (CBC Jan 22, 2010 : Haitian children at risk of trafficking: UNICEF). Then, lo and behold,  Pastor Ismonin was approached by a man offering to sell him the boy.

 

Interesting the pastor refused, putting into doubt any claims of “confirmation.”  In fact, Pastor Ismonin claimed that he subsequently got the child for free. So he says. When with his hometown Ottawa news station followed up, the good pastor “refused to directly talk about the incident”.  Nor did Nick Allen and the Telegraph offer any second or third cases of confirmed sales of children. It was more shoddy journalism. Save the Children spokeswoman Kate Conrad was there to back uo the claim when, sounding like a broken record she reminded Allen that “There are an estimated one million unaccompanied or orphaned children, or children who lost one parent. They are extremely vulnerable.”

 

 

 

The Telegraph  28 Jan 2010 Haiti earthquake: orphans for sale for $50  Nick Allen

9:17AM GMT

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/haiti/7086466/Haiti-earthquake-orphans-for-sale-for-50.html

 

Daily Mail By Oliver Pickup  22 February 2011http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1359152/Haiti-earthquake-children-sold-parents-80-PENCE-traffickers.html

 

QMI Agency Jan 28, 2010 Ottawa Pastor Rescues Haitian Orphan From Being Sold Kris Westwood & Kenneth Jackson, http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2010/01/28/12650526-qmi.html

 

[xliii] For Silbsby’s contact with the UN See   Socialist Worker  February 17, 2010 Top of Form Christian Right kidnappers by Nicole Colson http://socialistworker.org/2010/02/17/christian-right-kidnappers

[xliv] The  significant evidence of wrongdoing– indeed the wrongdoing itself–was that the missionaries had been trying to cross the border with children who had no papers. The problem with that accusation, however, was that if we believed the press and organizations such as UNICEF and Save the Children there were 1 million “orphaned, abandoned, and separated children” desperately in need of help. There were also slave traffickers and perverts trying to capture them. The Haitian govenrment was in shambles, 30% of civil servants killed, no one reporting to work. So just how in hell, Silsby defenders wondered, was she supposed to get the paper work to save them. Indeed, anyone who believed the press reports might very well have thought it their moral duty to get as many children out of the country as possible. It’s arguably bizarre that the press and the Haitian government had been making all those claims and then suddenly Haiti “still had laws” and Silby had no right to “flaunt” them.  And while I personally don’t have a lot of empathy for those in the orphan business, the idea of “smuggling” children across the border is just seems like rhetoric to me. Even during the best of times, thousands of Haitians and Dominicans cross the border every day without papers. Children so with little to no scrutiny. After the earthquake their were no Haitian police on the border. None. And the Dominican authorities simply waved through the thousands of do-gooders who had come to help.

 

[xlv] Although not as extreme, similar fears have appeared in various forms in rural Haiti.

[xlvi]  Adoption restrictions separate Canadian aid worker from boy  Published: Saturday, June 19, 2010 8:40 p.m. MDT. By Rukmini Callimachi, Associated Press

[xlvii] A few examples of the 100s of blogs on Silsby

Titus Presler February 4, 2010  Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission brings disgrace to Christian mission http://titusonmission.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/haitian-orphan-rescue-mission-brings-disgrace-to-christian-mission/

Marley Greiner  March 16, 2010 Clueless in Boise: Charisa Coulter Still Doesn’t Get It dontadopthaiti.blogspot.com/…/clueless-in-boise–charisa–coulter–still.htm.

Bryan Schaaf April 14, 2007. HOLIER THAN THOU: MISSIONARIES BEHAVING BADLY http://haitiinnovation.org/en/2007/04/14/holier-thou-missionaries-behaving-badly

C. Jack Shaftoe  6, 2010 Haitian “Orphans” and American Theocratic Arrogance: The Central Valley Baptist Church Initiative http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/26609

Andy Kopsa 2010/02/02 The problem with Baptists and Haiti http://akopsa.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/the-problem-with-baptists-and-haiti/

Akopsa FEBRUARY 2, 2010 11:51AM The trouble with Baptists in Haiti

[liv] So the police chief was not specific about “criminal organizations and orphanages.”  The Prime Minister very specifically singled out the organ market. And people on the street almost unanimously feared that people were taking children to harvest organs. But there was no history and no evidence to back up organ trafficking.  No NGO experts with numbers. And the accusation was so horrible there would have to be proof.  But “slavery” and “sexual predators,” that was something that NGOs and the UN backed up.  It didn’t call for rigorous evidence. And it made sense to the overseas journalists.

[lv] article that concluded an investigation into “hundreds of places that pass as orphanages,”  many of which are “barely habitable.” Entitling

[lvi] Bleak Portrait of Haiti Orphanages Raises Fears By GINGER THOMPSON Published: February 6, 2010

[lvii] Silsby may have needed money but that doesn’t mean she was not a goodhearted Christian. She may have simply seen this as an opportunity to help needy children get homes in the United States while at the same time getting out from under debt. And why not?

[lvii] American families want orphans. We were told in the wake of the earthquake there were at least a million new ones in Haiti and they were in imminent danger. Silsby had lost her job and house. Why not head over to Haiti and help some of those children out? That’s what Pensylvania Governor Ed Rendell did and he was hero for it.