Telling About Trafficking
Rumours are rife about trafficking in intercountry adoption, and sadly, fact has overtaken fiction. Across the globe more than a few countries are or have recently been closed to intercountry adoption. Countries that closed because of concerns over coercion of birthparents, trafficking of children and/or gain to adoption agents include Vietnam, Cambodia, Nepal, Guatemala, Romania. China is working to contain corroborated trafficking with the orphanage system discovered in 2006.
Confronted with allegations of trafficking, many adoptive parents have an instinctive reaction of shock, disbelief and a wish not to hear the words that undermine the adoptions they have made in the belief that the adoption was made because the child had a need of family. But – if fact confronts a hope that allegations are simple fiction – what do adoptive do to make the story of their children’s journey to adoption available to the children? Indeed, some might ask, why tell at all?
Telling the Tough Stuff
Adoption experts are adamant that the nurturing role of the adoptive parent encompasses tough stuff. Adoptive parents are parenting in the present, and that encompasses making sense of the past.
Questions Parents ask- why tell at all?
Sometimes adoptive parents question why there should be the need to raise things that happened in their child’s past that surely are ‘best forgotten’. So why on earth add to a child’s story of relinquishment or abandonment that money may have driven the birthparents’ decision? And how on earth tell a child that in their country birthparents may have sold a child rather than lovingly made an adoption plan? Or tell a child that in their country children have been stolen from a loving family to be sold to another family for money? Or were sold by one parent while the other did not concur? Or tell that orphanages were part of the trafficking chain?
How do parents raise with a child that their birth country closed to overseas adoption after they arrived in the adoptive family? How do families talk about trafficking of children to provide families who have the money to pay for a child - with a son or daughter from that country? How raise the question of informal adoption within birthcountry – and discuss with a child whether they’d have preferred to remain in their birthcountry or be adopted abroad? How do families discuss how gender preferences may underline trafficking (the need for a son)? How to discuss pricing of trafficked children? (More for a boy than a girl…). How to discuss children born out of wedlock, and given for informal adoption for money? How discuss family planning practices which lead to children being unable to remain in family? How to discuss how poverty may make a birthfamily feel that sacrificing one child to trafficking or relinquishment/abandonment means money available to feed the rest?
Won’t all these questions confuse a child, add to their pain? And at what age anyway would a parent talk at all?
Why tell?
First of all, parents should tell because it is parents who should be the ones to tell tough stuff to kids. So, if parents don’t have the foresight to tell about the possibilities of trafficking or countries closing, it’s almost certain the child will find out another way. Youtube, My Space, other kids, other kids’ parents…. Trafficking, baby buying, money driven adoption … these are the fodder of poorly written newspaper articles. Parents need to be in control of telling about these issues if they are found within the children’s birthcountry. A child who knows the general facts of adoption and trafficking and knows about their own adoption is empowered by knowing. And thus is in charge of his or her own story.
Second there’s expert thought on telling an adopted child their story. First, even if the child has no linguistic memory of their past, at some level he or she carries sensory memories of all that has happened to them. They KNOW their story. Second, children look to parents to ground their fears and feelings, and to support them in the history of their lives pre-adoption. So, whether or not a child is showing recall of sensory memories, it’s still a parents’ job to give a child (age appropriately) the most truthful account of their past. Where facts are not known, parents need to offer a raft of what-ifs, the possibilities, of the child’s pre-adoption history. This needs to include the situation as represented in the child’s birth country by closure or slow-down or indeed trafficking, although obviously discussion of this won’t be fruitful until the child is of an age to understand that adoption is about loss as well as gain. Understanding of this often begins around age 5. And it is around this age that gentle pebbling can begin about how life ‘is’ in other countries, always returning to the security of the child’s home with adoptive parents.
A releated article by Dr Gregory Keck, who is a therapist specializing in attachment and adoption and an adoptive father, on why the truth is so important to come from a parent. Find his article here. You will find other resources as well on Dr. Keck's site on talking about difficult topics with your child.
Opening the Dialogue
As with many things in adoption, opening the dialogue is sometimes harder for the parent than the child. Adoptive parents want to protect their child, shield them from harsh realities, and want to enfold them in the adoptive family. However, expert thinking suggests that telling the tough stuff is a basic in making an adoptive child feel safe. When the parent talks, the child understands that the parent knows the tough stuff – and contain it FOR the child till the child is ready to contain it themselves.
Tools for Telling
