Child laundering is a tactic used in illegal or fraudulent international adoptions. It may involve child trafficking and child acquisition through payment, deceit or force. The children may then be held in sham orphanages while formal adoption processes are used to send them to adoptive parents in another country.
Child laundering rings are often large and involve the black market. With Westerners willing to spend thousands of dollars to adopt a child, there is a monetary incentive to extend the laundering ring from the middle classes to societies' more affluent groups. These "baby broker" families subsequently forge a new identity for the laundered child, "validating" the child's legal status as an orphan and ensuring the scheme will not be uncovered.
There is a complex hierarchy within the child laundering business which includes governments, orphanages, intermediaries, birth families, and adoptive families. The people who oversee these child laundering rings are estimated to make $2,000 to $20,000 per overseas adoption. Intermediaries are crucial because their job is to locate extremely impoverished parents who may be willing to sell their children out of necessity. Often, the people involved in recruiting and managing these rings are local middle or upper class citizens who have a negative view of the impoverished. Therefore, recruiters can rationalize taking these children from the biological family on the grounds that the child will be better off in the West. In some cases, members of foreign governments are bribed to hasten these illegitimate adoptions.
People involved in illegal child laundering adoptions manipulate the legal system for profit. The process begins when recruiters gain physical custody of children, who are then often taken to orphanages which arrange the adoptions, where they are sometimes severely mistreated. Finally, after documents are forged to falsify a child's identity, the child is sent to the West to be united with their adoptive parents.
There are several different ways by which "orphans" are acquired and later sold within the adoption system. Parent nations are almost always poor, and may have a system where impoverished parents can find temporarily care for their children by placing them in orphanages, hostels or schools. This community provides poor children with care, housing, and food until the family is in a better economic situation. In these cases, parents may have no intention to sever their parental rights or abandon their children. However, these institutions may take advantage of the family's economic and social vulnerability to illegally profit by making the child available to overseas adoption markets, netting orphanage owners thousands of dollars per child.
Children who become lost or separated from their families can be wrongly deemed orphans, and although institutions are required by law to make an effort to locate the family, there is virtually no way to assess whether they actually do. If these initial efforts to locate the family fail, or are declared as failures, the institution then has the opportunity to capitalize on this by putting the child up for adoption.
Another way in which "orphans" are acquired is through an outright purchase of the child. The recruiters for these adoption rings seek out poor pregnant women and offer to pay for their child. These parents may be led to believe that they will be able to keep in contact with the child and receive financial support from the adoptive parents. Likewise, they may be told that they will eventually be able to migrate to live with their child once he or she is grown, presumably in a more economically developed nation. Through these methods and more, recruiters lead the birth parents to believe that giving up their child will provide a better future for the child.
After investigations, United States ICE agents observed inhumane conditions in many foreign orphanages involved in child laundering. One investigation found that the children were unwashed and unclothed, unprotected from malaria, and lying in rusty cribs. Additionally, there was no experienced nurse caring for the children, and the investigator termed it a "stash house". As these orphanages receive thousands of dollars for each adoption the conditions the children are kept in could be vastly improved for just a fraction of the racketeers' profits.
The United States is responsible for most intercountry adoptions in the world: 20,000 out of the total 30,000 total annual adoptions. The Westerners who adopt from developing nations pay thousands of dollars to process the paperwork of one child. This provides a lucrative incentive for those involved in the process. In many cases, the prospective adoptive parents are motivated by a sense of altruism, coupled with their desire to overcome infertility and fulfill the Western standard of the nuclear family. These adoptive parents create a demand for healthy infants that will be able to assimilate into their new home, cutting off ties to their birthplace and culture of origin. Prospective adoptive parents are matched with the children through adoption agencies, brokers, or online agencies. As most of the children adopted overseas are very young, they will not have any memories of their birth families; without a paper trail or input from the child, it is nearly impossible to determine whether a child is truly an orphan.
The Hague Adoption Convention has been widely adopted to regulate international adoptions. The Convention seeks to establish certain rules for international adoptions to combat child laundering, as an indirect solution to abuses. However, the Hague Convention fails to require any effort to preserve the family before turning to international adoption, and therefore the Convention mostly represents an anti-trafficking treaty. In 2000, the U.S. Congress enacted the Intercountry Adoption Act in order to implement the ideas of the Hague Convention. However, this Act is limited in the fact that the United States cannot enforce any measures against the country of origin if corruption in the adoption process is discovered.
The US State Department does not consider child laundering to be a form of human trafficking, as it is a non-exploitative result. Furthermore, it is sometimes seen as a humanitarian act, regardless of the circumstances surrounding the acquisition of the child. The adoption agencies in the West are operating within the law, and as they have no way of knowing whether the children are truly orphans, they have no way of knowing whether they are a party in this human rights violation. While the United States does not have the jurisdiction to prosecute agencies working in the developing countries the children come from, the Department of State does caution that international adoption should only be considered when it is in the best interest of a child and domestic adoption options have already been evaluated.
Child laundering is a global issue, and there have been highly publicized cases in the past decade. Guatemala, China, and Cambodia highly exemplify the problems associated with international adoptions.
From 1999 to 2011, there have been:
Before Guatemala's adoption of the Hague Convention in 2007, child laundering was a widespread and notorious issue in Guatemala. The recruiters are called jaladoras or buscadoras, and often work with medical personnel who give them information about the locations of vulnerable women. For every child procured, the buscadora earns anywhere from $5,000 to $8,000. Some of the methods used include telling women that their baby did not survive childbirth, or the outright purchase of a child. These women never receive much compensation for their child, as most of the money goes to the "baby brokers" who process most of the adoption paperwork.
Since signing of the Hague Convention, Guatemala passed laws to create standards for the adoption process. All adoption agencies have to be accredited and accountable for their actions, as well as keep detailed and accurate financial records. Additionally, foster care is now accountable to the Secretaria de Binestar Social, and the Central Authority (CA) was established in order to ensure Guatemala's compliance with Hague Convention rules. Children a judge has legally approved for adoption are matched with a prospective adoptive family by a team made up of a CA social worker and a psychologist.
Following the restructuring of the Guatemalan government, Guatemala ceased all foreign adoptions. In 2011, the government announced that authorities would be reviewing cases started before 2007, but they would not be accepting new applications. As of 2011, the United States was no longer processing adoptions from Guatemala, joining the ranks of countries who had placed moratoriums on Guatemalan adoptions.
From 1999–2011 there have been:
China has experienced rampant child laundering in past decades, although now it is considered to be better regulated than most other originating countries. China reports about 10,000 children kidnapped or sold a year, although demographers consider the true numbers to be much higher. The official statistics are based only on those cases which have been but it is very difficult to prove that any individual child has been kidnapped and then laundered. Most of these children are from poor families in the rural areas, and are taken to sell to Western adoptive families. The Hunan adoption scandal brought many of these issues to light, as orphanages were sending intermediaries into rural areas to acquire children, who were then moved around Hunan and given fraudulent documents in order to cover up their origins.
Some argue that the issue of child laundering in China stems from the one-child policy, which created what was once a surplus of children needing adoption. However, since the demand for Chinese children has increased, institutions have resorted to methods like kidnapping in order to meet customer demand and maintain profitability; the system of international adoptions has created a mechanism whereby poor families in China are exploited in order to feed the Western demand for Chinese children, and the Western ethnocentric view that the child will have a better life in the West, without any connection to their biological family.
From 1999–2011 there have been:
While international adoptions usually take two or more years to process, Cambodia has made a policy of expediting this process, with it often taking as little as three months. Human rights activists consider Cambodia one of the most corrupt countries in regards to international adoption. LICADHO, a Cambodian human rights group, has said that recruiters target poor women and families in their efforts to gain access to young children. Their tactics include purchasing babies, sometimes for as little as US$20, or deceiving parents into relinquishing physical custody. One particular case that gained media attention focused on a child laundering scheme run by American Lauryn Galindo. Galindo was prosecuted in the United States and convicted of "material misrepresentations as to the orphan status and identities" of infant adoptees over the period of 1997 through 2001. Galindo was sentenced to 18 months in prison, a fine, and mandatory community service. The United States, formerly one of the most common destinations for Cambodian adoptees, no longer processes adoptions from Cambodia.
Korea is one of the crucial leading countries in intercountry adoption. Among sending countries of adoptees, it is the country where global 'orphan' adoption practices began.[1] Their 'success' lead to a global adoption system that still violates human and child rights today.
Between 1970 and 2017, 11,000 babies from Sri Lanka were exported to Western Countries, mainly those in Europe, including The Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and Germany. The Netherlands received the most children, including over 4,000 babies. Many Sri Lankan families have been forced to give up their children due to poverty and other social and cultural problems. As the demand for infants was high, many adoption agencies, and their intermediates, started "baby farms" where birth mothers and stolen infants were held. Many hospitals in Sri Lanka, especially those in districts like Ratnapura, Galle, Kandy, Colombo, Kegalle and Kalutara, either stole infants or coerced mothers into putting their children up for adoption. Government officials, tour guides, lawyers, and medical staff have all been implicated in unethical international adoption scandals; the babies were bought for around $30 and then sold to foreign couples for double the amount. Starting in 2000, many babies who were adopted internationally returned to Sri Lanka to meet their biological parents, only to find that the documents used in their adoptions had been falsified and the parents they had hoped to meet did not exist. In 2017, after the Dutch TV program Zembla revealed the adoption fraud, both the Dutch and Sri Lankan governments opened investigations, during which the Sri Lankan Government admitted to the existence of baby farms. Since then, many additional adoptees have gone to court to ask for investigation into their adoption.