The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption Read Online Free Page A

States, commenters fretted about what would happen to children in a country where “survival of the fittest” had replaced the rule of order. The racial dynamics of the prevailing attitude toward the Haitian orphans were stark in their implication that Haiti, a nation birthed by a slave rebellion, had become a sort of animal kingdom from which children must be rescued, lest, Racialicious interpreted, “they won’t even grow up to be human beings.”
    “Those children in five or ten years, what are they going to become?” Pastor Pierre Alexis, director of another Port-au-Prince orphanage, Maison des Enfants de Dieu, asked me. Haiti’s children are the future and the country’s resource, he continued, “But everyone knows when you have a resource and you don’t use it in a proper way, it becomes a problem.” The best option for them, he said, is to get them adopted. “There is no other plan for the children.” As if in response, Haiti’s prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, asked the Wall Street Journal, “How can we rebuild a nation if the only chance that parents have to give their children a future is to part with them?”
    In the US the Adoptees of Color Roundtable, an organization of adult adoptees, released a statement in late January characterizing the adoption rush in Haiti as a colonialist and racist movement that disregarded Haitian family structures in favor of Western parents’ sense of entitlement to developing nations’ children. “For more than fifty years, ‘orphaned children’ have been shipped from areas of war, natural disasters, and poverty to supposedly better lives in Europe and North America,” the Roundtable statement read. “We seek to challenge those who abuse the phrase ‘Every child deserves a family’ to rethink how this phrase is used to justify the removal of children from Haiti.” It was a statement that got at the heart of the conflicts surrounding international childadoption—conflicts that rarely surface in popular American discourse, in which adoption is generally understood as a “win-win” scenario: saintly parents creating their family from the wreckage of another, giving love and a home to a child that has neither. Another critic derided what he termed “the Moment,” the fairytale photo-ops dominating cable news when adoptees first land on US soil, “as if they’ve arrived at the Promised Land.” This narrative of adoption as child rescue usually drowns out the more critical interpretation—that adoption is an industry driven largely by money and Western demand, justified by a misguided savior complex that blinds Americans to orphans’ existing family ties and assumes that tickets to America for a handful of children are an appropriate fix for an entire culture living in poverty. But in Haiti in early 2010, in the midst of this murky old fight, the critics’ side of the story became suddenly, startlingly clear as a sped-up version of the same vigilante child-rescue efforts that have taken place in dozens of other countries unfolded on the public stage. For a brief, unique moment people watching from around the world understood what the other side meant.
    IN THE THICK of the debate over where Haiti’s children should go, on January 29 came news that ten American Baptists from a fledgling Idaho orphan ministry, New Life Children’s Refuge, were caught at the border of the Dominican Republic attempting to transport thirty-three children, ranging from infancy to twelve years old, out of Haiti without permission or documentation. The group was arrested on suspicion of trafficking and kidnapping, and they were eventually charged with kidnapping and criminal conspiracy, leading to a bonanza of headline stories about American Christians “kidnapping for Jesus.”
    Self-declared missionary Laura Silsby, a struggling, forty-year-old entrepreneur from Idaho with a troubled financial past, led the group. She had been CEO of a failed personal shopping business and