Fly Away Children

Citation

Cairns, G. (2010), "Fly Away Children", Critical Perspectives on International Business, Vol. 6 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/cpoib.2010.29006aaa.002

Fly Away Children

Article Type: Commentary From: critical perspectives on international business, Volume 6, Issue 1

(Reporter: Andrew Geoghegan, Foreign Correspondent, ABC News, Ultimo, NSW, broadcast 15 September 2009)

Ethiopian parents or carers may have been duped into giving up their children through a heartless process called “harvesting” and can’t hope to re-establish contact with them (Andrew Geoghegan, 2009).

On 15 September 2009, Australian ABC News’s Foreign Correspondent program broadcast a harrowing account of a form of international business that they referred to as child “harvesting” (Geoghegan, 2009). In an example of what has become a multi-million dollar annual trade, the transcript of the program (2009) gives an account of how “(t)he crude reality is that children have become a big Ethiopian export. A child welfare agency (t)here estimates international adoptions are generating revenue for the government of around one hundred million dollars a year, and the government is showing now (sic) sign that it is going to jeopardise that income for the sake of the children”. The story illustrates an example of how developed world organisations and individuals work together to turn the children of less-developed countries into, at best, “tradable commodities” and, at worst, “fashion accessories” for the reasonably rich, if not so famous.

In an ABC News web report (Jolley, 2009), Mary Ann Jolley gives an account of her reactions to sitting in a hotel lobby in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa in September 2008, and witnessing “a procession of Americans and Europeans wandering from their rooms across the marble floor to the restaurant or swimming pool with their precious new possessions – babies or infants they’ve just adopted”. Having gone to Ethiopia on that occasion to film an account of the drought induced famine of 2008, Jolley describes how within the confines of the hotel she first saw this scene as “incredibly disturbing”, but then, moving “(o)ut on the street where poverty and hardship prevail, (her) attitude softened”. There, she was confronted by a young girl of about nine or ten, wearing ragged clothing and shoes through which her toes projected, who engaged her in conversation and asked straight out if she would take her back to Australia “so she could go to school” (2009). Thinking that, perhaps, adoption is the answer, Jolley left Ethiopia and spent a year pondering the situation, only to have her interest revived when “Madonna’s controversial adoption of her daughter, Mercy, from Malawi put international adoptions back on the front pages” (2009). ABC News’s Foreign Correspondent report Fly Away Children is the result of that thinking.

Within the program (Geoghegan, 2009) and the associated web article (Jolley, 2009), ABC News points out that there are not only differences in practices between the “producer” countries of children for adoption, but also between the “consumer” market countries for which they are destined. In the former group, Malawi is presented as having higher levels of control over which children can be adopted and the processes by which they are allocated and relocated than does Ethiopia. In relation to the latter group, they highlight, as an example, that there is “a dramatic difference between the international adoption processes in Australia and those in America” (2009). In Australia, the process of adoption is tightly regulated and all proposed adoptions are handled by the Federal Government. The Australian Government works with a sole agent in Ethiopia which deals with processes of matching and allocating to adoptive parents, and dealing with paperwork and formalities that can take up to seven years to complete. In relation to the United States, however,

[…] international adoptions are business. Google “international adoption” and “Ethiopia” and you’ll be inundated with American adoption agencies offering to assist you to adopt a child. Their websites have photos of children available for adoption. You can make your selection and for an average fee of $30,000 adopt the child of your choice. Within twelve months you’ll be jetting across the Atlantic to pick them up, or, if you don’t have the time for that, you can have them delivered to your door (Jolley, 2009).

Having followed up the suggestion that a Google search will elicit information from multiple US adoption agencies on “how to” adopt, I can confirm that there is indeed a plethora of dot-coms making such offers. Foreign Correspondent’s account of the business model adopted by these agencies tells of agency staff touring remote villages in the south of Ethiopia in order to “recruit“ children for adoption in the USA. These children are not necessarily orphans with no family to care for them or to miss them. On the contrary, most in this region are likely to be brought forward to be offered up by their parents. The film shows a female representative of Christian World Adoption (CWA), one of the major players, telling an assembled group of adults and children, “If you want your family to be adopted by a family in America, you may stay. If you do not want your child to go to America, you should take your child away“ (Geoghegan, 2009). Those children that are offered by their parents are then filmed for inclusion in a “DVD catalogue which in turn is shipped out to potential adoptive parents” (2009). ABC News reporter Andrew Geoghegan later visits CWA’s offices in Addis Ababa, using a hidden camera and posing as a prospective adoptive parent. When he asks if the agency asks parents to give up their children for adoption, case worker Aster Hiruye answers, “No, we never do that, never. And we can’t do that”. “That’s illegal is it?”, asks Geoghegan, to which Hiruye replies, “That’s illegal. That’s against the law” (2009).

Running through the program, the ABC News team tell the story of a mother from Janesville, California, looking for a brother for her son – a brother that she is unable to bear for health reasons. Lisa Boe and her husband Frank had previously taken in a foster child who died of SIDS. They have selected a child, Tegegne Bekere, from a CWA DVD catalogue. CWA’s “sales pitch promised a healthy, abandoned child, but that could not have been further from the truth” (2009). Lisa and Frank collect Tegegne, whom they renamed Zane Boe, from a CWA home in Addis Ababa in April 2008. There, Lisa found that the “healthy child she’d been promised by CWA was not. Far from it” (2009). It transpires that Zane suffers from cerebral palsy, microcephaly, a cyst on his brain, seizures, body tremors and a food allergy. Despite these multiple medical conditions, he has been issued with medical certificates that went through court to say that he is perfectly healthy, with no deformities and no neurological deficits.

The doctor who had issued these certificates, confronted by Geoghegan using a hidden camera, says he cannot remember the particular case, but claims that CWA had put pressure on him on various occasions to change records. Geoghegan states in the film that Foreign Correspondent had contacted CWA’s US headquarters “many times” seeking their response to claims that it harvests children and engages in corrupt practices, but that these calls had gone unanswered. In a response to the program, posted on their web site, Christian World Adoption (2009c) acknowledges that they had been contacted, but that having taken “into consideration the amount or resources that would need to be devoted to that process, CWA elected not to participate“.

CWA state that the organisation “works diligently … to ensure that each child placed for adoption meets the legal definition of ‘orphan’” (2009c). On the CWA DVD catalogue from which Tegegne Bekere was selected by the Boes, he is described by a CWA staffer as “a little abandonded child” who “needs a family” (Geoghegan, 2009). However, as Lisa Boe explains, he later points to a photograph of the “kind man and his wife (who) have taken him in” and “he calls her ‘mamma’”. She then states, in a highly emotional state, “I would have never … never brought home a child that has a mum … never” (2009). CWA states that there are “over 140 million orphans in the world today” (Christian World Adoption, 2009a). They also point to their accreditation (Christian World Adoption, 2009b) in line with the Hague Treaty on Intercountry Adoption which states that international adoption should be a solution of last resort, after all attempts at domestic adoption have been exhausted. This begs the question of why they engage in “harvesting” Ethiopian children from their parents. But, as Ethiopian human rights lawyer Mahari Maru explains (Jolley, 2009), although there is in excess of five million legitimate orphans in Ethiopia, most of them will never be considered for international adoptions, since most adoptive parents seek babies or infants, whilst most orphans are older and many have health problems.

Lisa Boe is shown to be struggling to cope with the pressure of looking after young Zane, not just because of the $749US per month medication fees. As she explains, “(t)he prognosis for Zane shortens his life and the thought of burying another child is well beyond what I can do … [very upset] I’m sorry” (Geoghegan, 2009).

In their response to the program, Christian World Adoption (2009c) disputes much of what is claimed in Geoghegan’s report. However, in a subsequent web posted response to CWA’s rebuttals, ABC News (2009) addresses CWA’s points one by one and finishes with the statement, “Foreign Correspondent stands by its story”. Mary Ann Jolley (2009) perhaps best summarises the issues raised by the program from both a human and an international business perspective, in stating that “(n)o one disputes there is a real need for international adoptions, but for the sake of the children and adoptive parents there needs to be some protection from unscrupulous agencies who purport to be driven by humanitarian interests, but in reality are stuffing their pockets with dirty cash”.

Acknowledgements

Transcript available at www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2009/s2686908.htm (accessed 23 September 2009).

George CairnsProfessor of Management, School of Management, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia