- Title: USA: Report on underground market for adopted children
- Date: 12th September 2013
- Summary: APPLETON, WISCONSIN, UNITED STATES (RECENT) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) GLENNA MUELLER, ADOPTIVE PARENT, SAYING: "In hindsight, it was all wrong. I shouldn't have done it that way, but I did."
- Embargoed: 27th September 2013 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Usa
- Country: USA
- Topics: Crime
- Reuters ID: LVAEIEYDBHOXVJC1LE70CDLE5UZ3
- Story Text: Todd and Melissa Puchalla struggled for more than two years to raise Quita, the troubled teenager they'd adopted from Liberia. When they decided to give her up, they found new parents to take her in less than two days - by posting an ad on the Internet.
Nicole and Calvin Eason, an Illinois couple in their 30s, saw the ad and a picture of the smiling 16-year-old. They were eager to take Quita, even though the ad warned that she had been diagnosed with severe health and behavioral problems. In e-mails, Nicole Eason assured Melissa Puchalla that she could handle the girl.
During an interview with Reuters, Melissa Puchalla said she had trouble with Quita's violent behavior.
"There is something about looking in your child's eyes and knowing they want to hurt you. And you just love them. And she's attacked us many times and we had learned how to hold her. So you just sit and hold her so that she wouldn't hurt us or her or the other kids," she said.
A few weeks later, on October 4, 2008, the Puchallas drove six hours from their Wisconsin home to Westville, Illinois. The handoff took place at the Country Aire Mobile Home Park, where the Easons lived in a trailer.
"I just remember her being real friendly and kind and asking questions about her like, 'What's her favorite color?' and 'What is this?'. Like she really cared and I think that that's what I liked better than the other people that were interested was she cared, she seemed to have the exact situation that we were looking for," added Puchalla.
"They seemed wonderful. I mean maybe a red light should have went off, like too good to be true. I don't know, but I think at that point I was walking in such a fog."
No attorneys or child welfare officials came with them. The Puchallas simply signed a notarized statement declaring these virtual strangers to be Quita's guardians. The visit lasted just a few hours. It was the first and the last time the couples would meet.
Had she vetted them more closely, she might have discovered what Reuters would learn: Child welfare authorities had taken away both of Nicole Eason's biological children years earlier. After a sheriff's deputy helped remove the Easons' second child, a newborn baby boy, the deputy wrote in his report that the "parents have severe psychiatric problems as well with violent tendencies."
The Easons each had been accused by children they were babysitting of sexual abuse, police reports show. They say they did nothing wrong, and neither was charged.
On Quita's first night with the Easons, her new guardians told her to join them in their bed, Quita says today. Nicole slept naked, she says.
Within a few days, the Easons stopped responding to Melissa Puchalla's attempts to check on Quita, Puchalla says, "So then I called the number and no one answered. Then I e-mailed again and I think it was like a day or two and then I called the school and I said, 'Is my daughter there? Can I talk to her?' And they said she never showed up. And I said, 'What do you mean she never showed up? Where is she?'"
Quita wasn't at the trailer park, either. The Easons had packed up their purple Chevy truck and driven off with her, leaving behind a pile of trash, a pair of blue mattresses and two puppies chained in their yard, authorities later found.
The Puchallas had rescued Quita from an orphanage in Liberia, brought her to America and then signed her over to a couple they barely knew. Days later, they had no idea what had become of her.
The teenager had been tossed into America's underground market for adopted children, a loose Internet network where desperate parents seek new homes for kids they regret adopting. Like Quita, these children are often the casualties of international adoptions gone sour.
Today, Quita Puchalla, now 21, lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She says she still cannot reconcile why the parents who adopted her from Liberia gave her away. "How would you give me up when you brought me to be yours?" she asks.
Through Yahoo and Facebook groups, parents and others advertise the unwanted children and then pass them to strangers with little or no government scrutiny, sometimes illegally, a Reuters investigation has found. It is a largely lawless marketplace. Often, the children are treated as chattel, and the needs of parents are put ahead of the welfare of the orphans they brought to America.
The practice is called "private re-homing," a term typically used by owners seeking new homes for their pets. Based on solicitations posted on one of eight similar online bulletin boards, the parallels are striking.
A woman who said she is from Nebraska offered an 11-year-old boy she had adopted from Guatemala. "I am totally ashamed to say it but we do truly hate this boy!" she wrote in a July 2012 post.
Another parent advertised a child days after bringing her to America. "We adopted an 8-year-old girl from China Unfortunately, We are now struggling having been home for 5 days." The parent asked that others share the ad "with anyone you think may be interested."
Reuters analyzed 5,029 posts from a five-year period on one Internet message board, a Yahoo group. On average, a child was advertised for re-homing there once a week. Most of the children ranged in age from 6 to 14 and had been adopted from abroad - from countries such as Russia and China, Ethiopia and Ukraine. The youngest was 10 months old.
After learning what Reuters found, Yahoo acted swiftly. Within hours, it began shutting down Adopting-from-Disruption, the six-year-old bulletin board. A spokeswoman said the activity in the group violated the company's terms-of-service agreement. The company subsequently took down five other groups that Reuters brought to its attention.
A similar forum on Facebook, Way Stations of Love, remains active. A Facebook spokeswoman says the page shows "that the Internet is a reflection of society, and people are using it for all kinds of communications and to tackle all sorts of problems, including very complicated issues such as this one."
Giving away a child in America can be surprisingly easy. Legal adoptions must be handled through the courts, and prospective parents must be vetted. But there are ways around such oversight. Children can be sent to new families quickly through a basic "power of attorney" document - a notarized statement declaring the child to be in the care of another adult.
Parents who offer their children on the Internet say they have limited options. Residential treatment centers can be expensive, and some parents say social services won't help them; if they do contact authorities, they fear being investigated for abuse or neglect.
The story of the Easons and the girls and boys they have taken through re-homing illustrates the many ways in which the U.S. government fails to protect children of adoptions gone awry. It shows how virtually anyone determined to get a child can do so with ease, and how children brought to America can be abruptly discarded and recycled.
In the summer of 2006, two years before meeting Quita, Nicole Eason was living away from her husband, Calvin, was surfing the Internet with and 41-year old Randy Winslow.
On July 14, 2006, Eason connected online with Glenna Mueller, a Wisconsin mother ready to give up a 10-year-old boy she had adopted. She had taken the 10-year-old about three years earlier. Now, his tantrums were too much, Mueller told Eason.
That's when Mueller turned to ConsideringDisruptinganAdoption, a Yahoo group for parents struggling to raise the children they adopted.
"I was desperate and sick to death of it. So that's when I went on the internet and was looking at these different places. And I just said I am in the same boat as all of you people, I have this child I can't deal with. I don't know where to turn, what to do," said Mueller.
Glenna Mueller handed over her troubled son on the same day she connected online with Nicole.
Several months passed before the boy's caseworker in Wisconsin learned that Mueller had given the child to a couple in Illinois. Mueller says the caseworker insisted she take the the boy back. When the boy returned to Wisconsin in late 2006, he mentioned that he spent most of his time with Winslow, not with Nicole.
When authorities searched Winslow's home and took his computer, the warrant allowed them to look only for items related to the sending and receiving of child-exploitation images and the chats and e-mails between Winslow and the undercover agent. Nicole Eason was no longer living with Winslow.
In February 2008, Winslow pleaded guilty in his criminal case and was convicted of sending and receiving child pornography from June 2006 through May 2007. The span includes the months that the 10-year-old spent with Winslow and Eason. Serving a 20-year sentence at a federal prison in Elkton, Ohio, Winslow declined requests for an interview.
"In hindsight, it was all wrong. I shouldn't have done it that way," Mueller says. "But I did, you know."
The boy turned 18 a few days ago.
Americans have adopted about 243,000 children from other countries since the late 1990s.
No authority tracks what happens after a child is brought to America, so no one knows how often international adoptions fail. The U.S. government estimates that domestic adoptions fail at a rate ranging from "about 10 to 25 percent." If international adoptions fail with about the same frequency, then more than 24,000 foreign adoptees are no longer with the parents who brought them to the United States. Some experts say the percentage could be higher given the lack of support for those parents. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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