Distortions of Truth and Practice: Child Protection System Development Thwarted
Looking at the whole system, the promotion of institutionalization and intercountry adoption is not only damaging to children, families, and communities but can have a profoundly negative effect on attempts to professionalize a child welfare system that promotes family support and preservation.
Intercountry adoption as an endpoint after a thorough exploration of the child's natural supports - including engagement and support of the child's birth family and kinship group - is an ethical imperative consistent with the principles of the Hague Convention. However, when intercountry adoption and the evangelical movement to rescue “orphans” takes hold over the child protection system, institutionalizing a child and sending her abroad often become the first response to a child-and-family crisis rather than recognizing that, according to the Hague Convention, it is a final option after all familial and in-country options are explored.The implications of system subversion are profound when one considers issues of workforce and long-term planning and development of systems of child and family care. Not only do children get pulled into the orphan industrial complex as their families and kinship group are discarded, but social workers and allied professionals become beholden to the system. Researchers have often observed that in such instances, social worker incomes become dependent on external adoption- related monies, and the placing of healthy infants and young children abroad demands most of their time. It is a simple social systems phenomenon: being paid based on children successfully sent abroad undercuts good child protection work oriented toward preserving families. That is, concerted efforts of family support, preservation, and family-child reunification for those children living in institutions are no longer a priority as social workers respond to the international demand for healthy orphans.
This is what is currently happening in Uganda: at an October 2013 alternative care workshop in Kampala, several social workers from area orphanages said that, while they had known that foreigners could adopt Ugandan children, it was the first time they had learned that they had a duty to the subsidiarity principle that posits international adoption should be a last resort to institutionalization. Further, many had not even been aware that Ugandans could adopt (at virtually no cost) within their own country.By spuriously diverting attention to the plight of “orphans” in developing countries, the orphan industrial complex undermines child protection mechanisms for all children and has an exponential risk effect in the greater community. One must therefore question just how many more children have fallen into the orphan industrial complex as a result of this subversion. While Uganda's child protection system is only beginning to experience these sorts of pushes and pulls of intercountry adoption and the distortion of child protection activities, one only needs to look back at other countries like Guatemala and Ethiopia, where the orphan industrial complex - and particularly the emphasis on intercountry adoption - has distorted natural family care strategies and professional child protection and social work practice (Bunkers et al. 2012).
8