The Construction of a Crisis

The way UNICEF’s definition inflated orphan numbers led to an outcry about an imminent “orphan crisis” that threatened to overwhelm extended family systems. Following UNICEF, scholars and practitioners began to use the term “orphan crisis” both widely and uncritically (Guest 2003; Roby and Shaw 2006; Drah 2012).

Yet, the “orphan crisis” that UNICEF had predicted early on never actually came to pass, as extended family networks - with the help of strong social protection policies - were largely able to absorb children who had lost their parents. However, as discussed above, UNICEF’s broad definition distorted local definitions by singling out orphaned children as particularly vulnerable (Meintjes and Giese 2006; Sherr et al. 2008). Nonetheless, international responses have tended to focus on the “orphan” in isolation from the extended family and even the broader community. While this elicits a variety of charitable, humanitarian responses out of sympathy for parentless children, inflating orphan numbers to attract scarce resources ultimately does little to remedy the structural issues that lead to orphanhood in the first place (Cheney 2010).

Despite these disjunctures, the notion of an ongoing “orphan crisis” persists, and it has spread beyond the professional development community to be commonly used by charitable organizations. In particular, the “orphan crisis” has been appropriated by the US evangelical community as a justification for widespread congregational encouragement to internationally adopt (Joyce 2013). Arguing that the Bible (specifically James 1:27, which says, “Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble...”) commands Christians to help widows and orphans, the evangelical community is fueling the misappropriation of the term “orphan” to promote a missionary agenda that can actually put children at risk of trafficking.

More and more Western evangelicals are buying into the discourse of orphan rescue, calling on followers to adopt and serve in orphanages as a way to “minister” to millions of orphans around the world through a gospel-centered method called “orphanology” (http://www. orphanologybook.com/). For example, the Christian Alliance for Orphans (CAFO) promotes an annual Orphan Sunday to “defend the cause of the fatherless,” (following Isaiah 1:17). They also hold an annual Orphan Summit, which has “become the national hub for what Christianity Today called, ‘the burgeoning Christian orphan care movement'” (http://www.christianalliancefororphans.org/ summit/). Rather than questioning the definition of orphans or what constitutes an “orphan crisis,” the summit - which caters mainly to prospective adoptive parents and US adoption agencies working worldwide - encourages adoption over family preservation. As alternative care consultant Mark Riley points out, “CAFO are still funded partially by adoption agencies, and adoption agencies need orphans... And the easiest way to need orphans is to make sure that you can categorize as many children as possible as orphans.”

Other Christian organizations like 147 Million Orphans (implying the number of “orphans” in need of “saving”) heed the call by selling merchandise “to raise awareness and ignite discussion about the orphan crisis” (http://www. 147millionorphans.com/About-Us_ep_7.html). 147 Million Orphans also fundraises for orphanage construction and maintenance, “serving trips” by young missionaries to feed children at various orphanages around the world and to help families raise money for their adoption costs. One young missionary even started an “Addicted to Orphans” merchandise line in 2012 to support her mission trip to orphanages in Uganda, so people can now advertise their obsession with orphans and adoption (http://emonamission.blogspot.nl/2012/12/are-you-orphan-addict. html).

Many well-meaning Westerners hoping to ameliorate the circumstances of orphanhood have traveled to poor countries and established orphanages, which are often funded by both soliciting donations and charging foreign tourists to volunteer for several days, weeks, or months.

Such orphan tourism has sparked what Walker and Hartley call “the orphan industrial complex” (http://www. theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/06/cambodias-orphan-industrial-complex/ 276472/), in which orphans and orphanages become tourist attractions. These discourses of orphan rescue also tend to reinscribe children as passive victims, rather than dealing directly with child protection. While many orphan tourists coming from afar think they are offering children the love and attention they deserve, in reality they may be causing serious damage to individual children's development as well as broader child protection systems. The building of orphanages, especially in poor communities, attracts or even entraps children in the institutions, which alienate them from their families and communities, as it solidifies the stigmatizing label of “orphan.” Even for those legitimately placed in institutional care, having many different volunteers stream through for short periods exposes children to repeated abandonment, ultimately making it all the more challenging for them to form attachments to adult caregivers (Richter and Norman 2010). A study of orphan tourism in Ghana found that children quickly formed and broke attachments as they “...are used to constant arrivals and departures of volunteers, seem to get attached quickly, but are very conscious of the fact that there is a leaving date” (Voelkl 2012, p. 36). For children exploited in this manner, relationship formation is distorted, resulting in anxious attachment and superficial relationships.

But the orphan industrial complex actually goes well beyond tourism and orphanage establishment to pushing toward adoption and even child trafficking. Encouraging international adoption thus drives a highly lucrative adoption market that unnecessarily institutionalizes children and even “manufactures” orphans for profit (Smolin 2010; Cheney 2014). For this reason, UNICEF has responded to the pro-adoption community’s appropriation of their orphan estimates with concern; they have made qualifying statements in line with the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption that reemphasize community-based care over institutionalization and international adoption (UNICEF 2007), but this has only earned them pariah status among various adoption proponents who, while using their orphan statistics, also call UNICEF anti-adoption and even anti-child (Bartholet and Smolin 2012).

The pro-adoption lobby has also become very powerful in the USA, which already receives 47% of all internationally adopted children (Selman 2013). In 2013, Senator Landrieu of Louisiana introduced the Children in Families First Act (CHIFF), which unabashedly aims to allocate federal resources “...to strengthen intercountry adoption to the United States..(“Children in Families First Act of 2013” 2013). Premised on the idea that adoptable children are languishing in institutions while US families are waiting to adopt them, the bill ostensibly eliminates unnecessary bureaucratic barriers in order to help settle institutionalized children around the world in American families. Yet CHIFF’s authors minimize recent adoption scandals as they ignore how children end up in orphanages in the first place. Further, CHIFF implies that the USA could link aid to developing countries to adoption policy - a practice explicitly prohibited by the Hague Convention, to which the USA is a signatory.

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Source: Harker C., Horschelmann K. (Eds.). Conflict, Violence and Peace. Springer,2017. — 456 p.. 2017

The Construction of a Crisis

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