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Abstract:
This chapter addresses the ongoing tension in the area of international adoption between those supporting and those opposing this form of adoption. It describes the history and current trends: increasing numbers of children have been adopted internationally over the last half century, but at the same time many countries have adopted restrictive policies in recent years that either close down international adoption entirely, limit the numbers of children placed, or require that children be held in orphanages for long periods of time prior to being placed out of country. It describes recent legal developments, including the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, and other laws placing a new emphasis on children's interests in being placed in adoption, and also describes the political movement to reject adoption in favor of increased efforts to improve the in-country options for children. It assesses the pros and cons of international adoption and urges agreement on the principle of working toward reforms that would provide children in need with nurturing homes.

International, Adoption

Abstract:
This article is adapted from the introduction to the author's recent book Nobody's Children: Abuse and Neglect, Foster Drift and the Adoption Alternative. It challenges the accepted orthodoxy in the child welfare world that views children as "belonging" in an essential sense to their kinship and their racial groups, and that locks them into inadequate biological and foster homes. It calls for application to abuse and neglect issues, lessons learned from the battered women's movement, and questions why family preservation ideology still reigns supreme when children rather than adult women are involved. It assesses promising new developments in the policy world, and warns of the pitfalls that threaten real progress. It argues that the entire community should take responsibility for all its children, and advocates that we take seriously for the first time in our nation's history the adoption option.

Abstract:
This article discusses the human rights debate at the core of current controversy over international adoption. Many powerful children's human rights organizations, including UNICEF, take the position that such adoption should be restricted if not eliminated, based on ideas about heritage rights and the related significance of keeping children within their country of origin. They have had a major impact on policy in recent years, resulting in the closing down of international adoption from many countries. This article takes the position that children's most important human rights include the right to grow up in a nurturing family, and that international adoption is able to offer significant numbers of children the permanent homes they need and will not find in their countries of origin. It discusses the history and current trends in such adoption, recent legal developments, the politics and policy pros and cons, and reform directions for the future.

Abstract:
A powerful coalition of forces has made what they term “Racial Disproportionality” the central issue in child welfare today. They use this phrase to describe the fact that black children represent a larger percentage of the foster care population than they do of the general population. This coalition is led by the Casey-CSSP Alliance, which includes the foundations that provide virtually all the private funding available for research and advocacy in child welfare. The coalition includes organizations and individuals who with these foundations have played a major role in shaping policy over the past decades.

This Movement uses the term Racial Disproportionality to indicate that there is something wrong with the system that removes black children to foster care, and it identifies the problem as primarily one of racial discrimination by child welfare decision makers. It calls for addressing the problem by reducing the number of black children removed to foster care to achieve what it characterizes as “racial equity” – the removal of black children at the same rate as white children.

The Racial Disproportionality Movement has already had significant impact. Child welfare leaders proclaim that Racial Disproportionality is the major issue of the day. Many states have accepted the Casey-CSSP Alliance’s lead, and are instituting measures designed to reduce the number of black children removed to foster care. Important federal officials and agencies have endorsed the Alliance’s approach, as have leading private child welfare organizations.

This article analyzes the Racial Disproportionality Movement, and the underlying issues. Child Protective Service agencies remove children to foster care, with court approval, based on reports of child maltreatment, and investigations that substantiate that maltreatment has occurred, and that it poses such serious threats to child safety as to justify removal. The goal is to protect children from repeated maltreatment, to provide services to the parents that enable the children to be safely returned home, and to move children on to adoption if the parents prove incapable of rehabilitation. Black children are identified by child protective services as victimized by serious maltreatment, and in need of the protection that removal, foster care and adoption represent, at higher rates than white children. A central question is whether black children are in fact disproportionately victimized by maltreatment, and in need of child protective services, as compared to their general population percentages. If they are, then they should be removed at rates proportionate to their maltreatment rates, which will necessarily be disproportionate to their population percentages. Racial equity for black children would mean providing them with protection against maltreatment equivalent to what white children get. If black children are in fact disproportionately victimized by maltreatment, the Movement’s proposed reform solutions would put black children at risk for being victimized by maltreatment at higher rates than white children.

The evidence indicates that black children are indeed disproportionately victimized by maltreatment. This is to be expected given that black families are disproportionately characterized by the risk factors associated with maltreatment, including severe poverty, serious substance abuse, and single parenting. This is reason for concern and for reform action. And it does represent an important racial problem, even if not the problem identified by the Movement. Children may need the protection provided by removal to foster care, but children who suffer maltreatment and endure lengthy stays in foster care will be hurt by these experiences, and will as a group not do well later in life. Society should act to prevent the maltreatment, and should feel additional pressure to act because this maltreatment disproportionately affects black children. But the form of action should be quite different from that proposed by the Movement. We should expand programs designed to prevent maltreatment from occurring in the first place. We should provide greater support to families at risk of falling into the kind of dysfunction that results in maltreatment. This should in turn result in a reduction in the percentage of black children in foster care, without putting those children at undue risk.

To date there has been no adequate debate on the issues at the heart of the Racial Disproportionality Movement, because the Casey-CSSP Alliance and its allies have overwhelmingly dominated the discourse. This Article is designed to illuminate the issues surrounding the current racial picture of child maltreatment and foster care, so that policy makers can take action that will protect rather than endanger black children.

racial disproportionality, child welfare, race, discrimination, foster care

Abstract:
This article, originally delivered as a speech, sums up problems and progress in four key areas of central importance to dealing with child abuse and neglect. The article focuses on law and policy in the United States, noting that the U.S. seems to be joining the rest of the world in moving, however haltingly, in a more child-friendly direction. We have developed some early home visitation programs, designed to help fragile families at risk for abuse and neglect - programs which have demonstrated impressive success in preventing maltreatment, and are receiving increasing public and private support throughout the nation. We have passed national legislation - the Multiethnic Placement Act or MEPA - designed to eliminate the race matching of children in need of homes with prospective parents, which served to delay and deny adoptive placement for many minority race children. We have passed other national legislation - the Adoption and Safe Families Act or ASFA - designed to facilitate the adoptive placement of children previously held for extended periods in foster care, and to balance the prior emphasis on family preservation with a new emphasis on children's interests in growing up in a nurturing home. We have begun to confront the problem of parental substance abuse, creating family drug courts and initiating other reforms designed to ensure that either parents engage successfully in substance abuse treatment so that they can adequately parent their children, or otherwise the children move on to adoptive placement. The article emphasizes that controversy surrounds all these reform moves, and that progress in a child-friendly direction depends on the energy and commitment of child advocates.

Children's Rights Advocacy, Child Abuse, Child Neglect

Abstract:
Millions of infants and young children worldwide are desperately in need of nurturing homes. Many are living in institutions, and many on the streets, and almost all these children will either die in these situations, or if they survive, will emerge into adulthood so damaged by their childhood experience, and so deprived of parenting, educational and other essential childhood opportunities, that they will be unable to function in the worlds of family and work. International adoption could provide significant numbers of nurturing homes for these children. However current policy restricts international adoption, limiting its ability to provide such homes. Moreover most of the powerful organizations of the world that claim to represent children's rights and interests have joined with other forces opposing international adoption.

This article argues that effective child advocacy is a challenge, given the fact that infants and young children are unable to voice their views or promote their interests, and the related risks that adults will use children to further various adult agendas. True empathy is required to imagine what children would want were they able to think rationally and make informed decisions. But if we were to imagine homeless children capable of making such decisions, then it seems obvious that they would choose international adoption given the horrors of institutional and street life, and the limited options for any kind of adequate home care in their countries of birth. Opposition to international adoption cannot be justified based on any best interest of the child principle, despite the claims of many children's rights organizations. Instead it is grounded in a group of commonly shared but deeply flawed ideas about children and the role of the state, and driven by adult agendas that are not truly informed by children's interests.

Abstract:
This article responds to Martin Guggenheim's book review of Bartholet's book, Nobody's Children: Abuse and Neglect, Foster Drift, and the Adoption Alternative (Beacon Press, 1999). Nobody's Children challenges the family preservation tradition that has dominated child welfare policy, and argues that we should take adoption seriously, for the first time in our history, as an option for abused and neglected children. It describes and critiques various reform moves that child welfare traditionalists are promoting, including family group decision making, community partnerships, and new permanency initiatives such as subsidized guardianships. It also describes reform moves that the author sees as moving in genuinely new and promising directions, which include early intervention in the form of intensive home visitation, and new adoption-friendly programs. Guggenheim in his book review attacks Bartholet's book and defends family preservation, arguing that she is too ready to give up on troubled families, to transfer children from poor black families to more privileged white families, and to sacrifice our nation's traditional respect for parental privacy and autonomy. Bartholet's Reply, in turn, claims that Guggenheim mischaracterizes her arguments and misconceives the evidence and the issues.

Abstract:
This commentary argues that the Multiethnic Placement Act, designed to combat common cultural stereotypes, provides clear guidance to state child welfare agencies and the mental health professionals that serve them, eliminating any regular consideration of race in the foster and adoptive placement of children. Given recent enforcement action by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, those who ignore this guidance act at peril of subjecting state agencies to the significant financial penalties mandated for any violation of the law.

Transracial Adoption, MEPA, Multi-ethnic Placement Act, Adoption

Abstract:
This paper looks at our new technological ability to determine genetic paternity, in the context of legal and social developments related to the family, and tries to come up with some guidelines for figuring out how to decide parentage in the modern era. Many claim that since DNA tests mean we can now easily tell who the genetic father is, we should make that man the legal father and release any other who might be playing that role from parental responsibility. However the trend in law over recent decades has been in the direction of reducing the role that biology plays in determining parentage, with the law giving increasing deference to existing social parenting relationships and to the intent to create such relationships as factors to take into account when parentage is contested. This paper assesses the importance of the genetic link to parenting, considers it in comparison to a variety of other factors relevant to parenting, and sets out some guiding principles for choosing among possible parents, principles designed to serve children's interests in stable, nurturing, parenting relationships.

Abstract:
International adoption is under siege, with the number of children placed dropping each of the last several years, and many countries imposing severe new restrictions. Key forces mounting the attack claim the child human rights mantle, arguing that such adoption denies heritage rights, and often involves abusive practices. Many nations assert rights to hold onto the children born within their borders, and others support these demands citing subsidiarity principles. But children’s most basic human rights, at the heart of the true meaning of subsidiarity, are to grow up in the families that will often be found only in international adoption. These rights should trump any conflicting state sovereignty claims.

adoption, human rights, children, child welfare