Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Promises, Promises!!

Last night's CBS story on Ethiopia brought me a feeling of deja vu, for such stories are found frequently in China's adoption program as well. The following article is taken from our subscription blog, but has been modified to protect the families involved.

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There is one characteristic of parenting common to all of us. It is so strong, that parents will sometimes give up their child in order to fulfill this desire. In poor areas, this impulse is particularly strong.

It is the desire that a child have a better life than its parents.

While much is spoken about the financial payments involved in many orphanage programs, a lessor-known program involves no money, but a simple promise: That a child will be provided a rich family to raise it, that the child will be given a great education, resulting in a successful life. This promise, often combined with promises of a "returning child", is a very strong incentive for any loving parent, but especially a parent that views such "blessings" as impossible to provide themselves.

We recently did a birth parent search in Luoyang City, Henan Province. Luoyang is the largest adopting orphanage in Henan Province, having submitted over a 100 children for adoption in 2008. My wife and I had visited Luoyang in late 2004 to perform finding location research for a group of families, and one family with a child adopted from Luoyang wanted us to return to search for their daughter's birth family.

The orphanage had told the adoptive family that their daughter had been found as a three-week old infant in a local park. Given the age and finding location, it was assumed that locating the birth family would prove difficult, but the adoptive family wanted to proceed anyway. The adoptive family did have the name of their daughter's foster family, who had taken care of their daughter from the time that she arrived in the orphanage until she was adopted at almost four years old.

We decided to begin our research with the foster family. We arranged a meeting, unknown to the orphanage, and started our interview by asking if they had any information about where "Dang Mei Mei" had been found. The foster father looked confused for a second, and then said something that stunned my wife and me:

"She wasn't abandoned; she is our daughter."

"How is that possible?", we asked. We asked them to tell us their story.

When their daughter was three years old (not a few weeks as the adoptive family had been told), the foster father had been approached by a friend of the family, the local Civil Affairs director. He invited the foster father to lunch, and after getting some small-talk out of the way, informed the father that he (the director) had a connection with an orphanage in another city. This orphanage adopted children to the West, and these children were raised by Western families, were given good educations, and were thus insured a happy and prosperous life. "I wanted to tell you, that I can arrange for your daughter to be adopted to the West. Also, once she is grown, she will return to China to find you, and will then take care of you in your old age."

The father didn't know what to say, so he promised his friend he would get back to him. He returned home and told his wife what he had been told. After lengthy discussions, they concluded (against their daughter's maternal grandmother's wishes) to bring their daughter the six hours to Luoyang.

The birth family was very excited when we found them again. When we asked them why they hadn't told the adoptive family the true nature of their relationship before, the father said simply, "Because we knew they would not have adopted our daughter if we had." They also asked when the adoptive family would be able to bring their daughter back to see them. The conversation gave us to believe that the family felt that the adoption arrangement was temporary, and that in reality the girl still belonged to them. They viewed it as they would a grand-parent arrangement so common in China, engaging in it to provide resources and opportunities the parents couldn't provide themselves.

When we told the family that in the vast majority of cases the children will never be able to find their birth family, and that the orphanage had lied to the adoptive family about their daughter's history to prevent the adoptive family from ever finding the birth family, it dawned on the family that they had been deceived. While they are lucky that they were found, most birth families will wait patiently for a day of reunification that will never come.

It is doubtful that adoptive families are prepared to learn that their child's birth family relinquished their child simply to have them raised in an affluent lifestyle, but with no understanding that the birth families are expecting their child to one day leave the adoptive family to return to China and reunify with the birth family. Thus, Luoyang's program also deceives adoptive families, placing an emotional time-bomb into the adoptive family's relationships that will one day detonate into severe trouble and confusion, especially in the adoptive child.

I can't tell you how livid I was to learn of Luoyang's program, and its potentially devastating impact on both biological and adoptive families. More distressing still is the realization that such programs are common, and used by many orphanages to recruit children for their international adoption programs. Consider this story told by one adoptive mother who adopted from an orphanage that has a program similar to Luoyang's:

While in China on their adoption in Jiangxi Province, the adoptive mother asked her guide if orphanages pay for children: "He said that women (families) are told that if they give the child to the SWI they will send the baby to America where she will grow up in a rich family - and when the girl grows up she will be educated and wealthy and she will come looking for her real family. She will come back to China and take care of them. When orphanage directors get together they ask each other if they have put their own granddaughter up for IA - and then they ask if the granddaughter has come back yet to make them rich. Then they all laugh...that was the punchline. This joke has nothing to do with saving children from being left on the side of the road in a box. . . ."

A few months ago we contacted a Jiangxi director about the change in directors at the CCAA, and in the course of that conversation she told us that last August the CCAA began a new program in "one of the Jiangxi orphanages" whereby it was broadcast to local families that if they were poor, or had only a single parent, etc., they could bring their child to the orphanage and she would then be adopted to a Western family. It appears that the CCAA, and the Chinese government, in a desperate attempt to keep the engine of international adoption running, is now removing the risk of abandonment and emotionally coercing birth families to give up their children.

One can see probable examples of this program in orphanages in Guangdong, Jiangxi, Guangxi, and other Provinces. Many orphanages in these areas have seen huge spikes in older-child referrals over the past year. Guangzhou, for example, has seen submissions for older, healthy children increase over 600% in 2008.

To those familiar with the adoption programs in Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Ethiopia, Romania, and the rest, China's issues fall into a pattern seen virtually in every country that adopts internationally. Whether it is the offering of money for children, or the simple offering of promises of a bright future for a child and the financial support Western-educated "Lucky" children in the birth parent's old age, many orphanages are still seeking ways to bring more children into the IA program.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Making a Business Trafficking Babies

The L.A. Times' interview with the primary traffickers at the center of the Hunan scandal brings clarity to what was happening in Hunan, Jiangxi, and other Provinces in late 2005. It is a picture of greed, with orphanage directors competing with cash and gifts to receive the healthy children the Duans and others were offering.

Of particular interest to adoptive families are the following revelations:

1) The orphanage intentionally fabricated finding data of children, ultimately preventing adopted children from ever finding their birth families.

2) Contrary to assertions made by the CCAA to the U.S., Canadian, Spanish and Dutch governments, trafficked children were adopted into those countries. Court records contained the names, addresses and passports of many of those families, yet none were contacted about their children's origins.

3) While Hunan was the focus, children from this trafficking group were also adopted into Jiangxi Province. A director in that Province confirms that orphanages in his area pay substantial sums for children.

4) Contrary to conventional wisdom among the China adoption community, orphanage directors were subject to little or no punishment. In fact, the article states that some of the directors were promoted following the episode.

Interested readers will want to join our subscription blog community, which delves into the specific orphanages that participated in trafficking in 2005, and those that still do so today. It is a problem that refuses to go away.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

A Look At the Provinces: Chongqing

Beginning this month, we will begin a year-long study of the major Provinces involved in the international adoption program in China. We will look at the orphanage statistics from each orphanage, and discuss anomalies and patterns in each. It should prove to be an interesting and enlightening journey.

The first of these installments is now available on our subscription blog. Beginning with this installment on Chongqing, I will be presenting you with an in-depth look at the major Provinces involved in international adoption. We will begin with Chongqing because it is the smallest in terms of orphanages, and will lay the foundation for future Provinces. In the following months we will also look at Guangdong, Guangxi, Hubei, Hunan, and Jiangxi Provinces. Collectively these Provinces contribute the vast majority of all adoptable children in China.

http://www.research-china.org/blogs/index.htm

Monday, December 07, 2009

Why the Wait Time Increase?

There has always been discussions on wait times among waiting families, and every time the wait has increased there have been myriad explanations to what was the root cause -- changing CCAA personnel, Olympics, implementation of the Hague Agreement, the Hunan scandal. Analyzing the data, however, shows that only one of the above explanations has any data to support it, and the others, while possible, have no empirical evidence to back them up.

This article will focus on the wait times between January 2002 and December 2008. The data that will be considered are orphanage submission rates (as compiled from Provincial finding ads), international adoption rates (provided by various country websites), and DTC wait times as retrieved from A-P-C, the Yahoo newsgroup dedicated to waiting families.

The wait time between DTC ("Dossier to China") and referral was thirteen months in January 2002, and ended in December 2002 at fourteen months. For the entire year, the wait time remained basically unchanged, with nearly 10,200 children being referred world-wide.



At the beginning of 2003, the wait time remained at fourteen months. However, beginning in August 2003, wait times began to fall as referrals accelerated. In that month, families who had submitted their dossiers in August 2002 received their referrals, dropping the wait time to 12 months. The following month, September 2003, wait times again decreased to 11 months. October 2003 saw the wait drop to only eight months, where it remained for almost nine months, to June 2004, when it dropped again, reaching a low of six months in September 2004. The wait time remained between six and seven months until November 2005.

Since total adoptions world-wide for 2003 remained basically unchanged from 2002 (10,290), the explanation for the fall in wait times in 2003 can be found on the "supply" side of the equation. 2003 saw dramatic increases in orphanage submission rates. Guangdong Province, for example, saw submissions increase 34% from 2002 to 2003, an increase of 747 files. Hunan Province saw its submissions increase 20%, for a net increase of 439 files. Hubei Province, as another example, saw adoptions increase 37%. In the face of steady international demand, the increased submission rates across China resulted in wait times declining from fourteen months at the beginning of 2003 to eight months by its end.

The increase in orphanage submissions can be attributed to several factors, but a significant portion of it, at least in Hunan Province, can be traced to the introduction of baby-buying programs in at least six orphanages. These six orphanages -- Changning, Hengdong, Hengnan, Hengshan, and Hengyang County -- made contact with a trafficking family from Guangdong Province in December 2002. Although court testimony indicated that these orphanages had incentive programs in place before that time, the Guangdong traffickers added a substantial number of children to these six orphanages. Collectively, the four orphanages doing adoptions in 2002 saw submissions increase from 257 adoptions in 2002 to 406 in 2003, a 58% increase.

In 2004, demand from international countries began to increase, as families began to take notice of the short wait times. Although international demand increased to a little over 13,300 adoptions in 2004 (an increase of 29% over 2003), orphanage submissions flattened, with no significant increase occurring in 2004. Thus, in 2004, like 2002, demand once again approximated the supply submitted by the orphanages, and wait times trended lower, from eight months in January 2004 to six months in December. Interestingly, in 2003 the wait time began to drop in September, when the record number of children submitted in March 2003 were referred. Wait times reached their low in September 2004, again when the children submitted in March 2004 were referred. March was the largest submission month in 2003, 2004 and 2005, and this spike in submissions following Chinese New Years had its impact at the end of 2003 and 2004.

Total adoptions from China increased again in 2005, reaching almost 14,400 in 2005, an 8% increase over 2004. But orphanage submissions began to decline. In seven Provinces (Anhui, Chongqing, Guangdong, Guangxi, Hubei, Hunan, and Jiangxi), total submissions in 2005 fell from over 12,800 in 2004 to 11,318 in 2005, a drop of nearly 12%. With the eight percent increase in demand, and the twelve percent decrease in supply, wait times began to increase in 2005. Starting at six months in January, wait times upticked to seven months in July and was eight months in November 2005.

There is little question that wait times were increasing in the second half of 2005, and it is likely that they would have returned to twelve months sometime in 2006 or 2007. There is also little doubt that at some point an equilibrium would have again been reached, as demand declined in response to the increased wait times. In all likelihood, the program would have returned to a 12-14 month wait, as it saw in 2002.

But November 2005 saw the Hunan scandal break, and the dynamics of the program were irreversibly altered.

There is little question that the Hunan scandal had a dramatic impact on orphanage submissions, not just a result of the closure of Hunan Province from December 2005 until April 2006, but in the fallout from the scandal going forward.

Orphanage submissions fell from 5,400 in the last six months of 2004 to 4,642 in the seven Provinces in this analysis. A significant percentage of that decline can be attributed to the CCAA's decision to shut Hunan Province to new submissions, which effectively reduced that Province's submissions from 1,166 in the last six months of 2005 to only 505 in the first six months of 2006, a decrease of 661 submissions. Thus, a majority (58%) of the decline in submissions in the first half of 2006 can be attributed directly to the Hunan scandal.

That the decline can be specifically pegged to the scandal itself can be seen by looking at the submission rates of the orphanages involved in the scandal. In the weeks leading up to the arrests of the six orphanage directors on November 11, 2005, they submitted an average of over ten files per week. Submissions from these six orphanage all but ended following the scandal, with submissions falling from a combined 534 in 2005 to only seventy-two in 2006, thirty-three in 2007 and thirty-one in 2008.

The effect of removing Hunan from the adoption pool between December 2005 and April 2006 had an immediate and dramatic effect on wait times. In January 2006 the wait time increased to nine months, longer than any month since November 2003. By April, when a majority of Hunan's orphanages were given the green light to resume adoptions (the "Hunan Six" were not allowed to resume submissions until September), the wait time had increased to eleven months. With an increasing number of families submitting files for adoption, and submission rates in the six Hunan orphanages all but gone, China's program sought to find a new equilibrium.

The significant decrease in adoption submissions wasn't isolated to just the six implicated orphanages in Hunan, but were seen in many other orphanages as well. In Hunan Province, for example, Changde, Changsha #1, Huaihua, and Yiyang and many others saw steep declines. A look at their submission rates confirms that these decreases have their origin in the Hunan scandal also.



Whereas Changde, Changsha#1, Huaihua and the Yiyang orphanages had submitted 175 children in the six months between July and December 2005 (9 per week), following the Hunan scandal their numbers dropped to 124 for all of 2006, or 2.4 per week. These numbers declined even further in 2007 to an average of 1.4 per week, or 73 for the entire year.

This pattern is seen in other areas of China as well. Although a deeper analysis of just which orphanages saw dramatic changes following the Hunan scandal is available on our subscription blog, a few examples will illustrate how November 11, 2005 becomes a significant reflection point all across China.

In Guangdong, many orphanages saw their adoption numbers collapse simultaneous with the Hunan scandal. Two orphanages that stand out as having experienced substantial declines between 2005 and 2006 are the Qujiang and Suixi orphanages, which saw adoption numbers decline 79% and 52% respectively. Other orphanages in Guangdong that saw substantial declines include Gaozhou, Huazhou, Maonan, Shaoguan, Sanshui, and Zhanjiang. Collectively, Guangdong's numbers declined from 2,645 submissions in 2005 to 1,889 in 2006.

Jiangxi Province saw similar patterns. Fenyi, Fuzhou, Gao'An, Guangchang, Jianxin, and Nanfeng, among others, saw adoption rates cut almost in half, from 798 adoptions in 2005 to 424 adoptions in 2006. These four orphanages constituted 70% of the decline across Jiangxi Province between 2005 and 2006, when overall submissions fell from 3,027 to 2,494 children.

Upcoming analysis on our subscription blog will detail more fully which orphanages in each Province showed declines, and provide detailed explanations as to why. The first Province to be considered will be Chongqing, followed by Guangdong, Jiangxi, and Hunan.


In summary -- Observations that wait times were increasing in 2005 are correct, but mis-attribute the increase to incorrect assumptions. The increasing popularity experienced by the China program in 2003 and 2004 led to increased submissions into the China program in 2005. Although orphanage submissions hit records in 2003, resulting in wait time declines in late 2003 and early 2004, submissions stabilized in 2004 and 2005. As additional families entered the program in early 2005, demand bumped up against supply so that wait times bottomed in March 2005 and slowly began to increase to historical norms by December 2005.

The Hunan scandal, with its resulting closure of Hunan Province for four months, and the collapse in adoptions from many other orphanages, created the "perfect storm" of high demand and falling supply. This resulted in the stunning rise in wait times seen over the past three years.

Thus, to understand the increase in wait times one must look at the impact of the Hunan scandal on orphanage submissions. All other speculations to explain the increased wait -- from Hague implementation, the Olympics, or any of the many other rumored explanations -- fail to account for the dramatic change in direction that occurred on November 11, 2005.