OMG, has anybody read this about the adopted boy sent back?

[tweetymum]

Just saw www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1264744/American-sends-adopted-Russian-boy-behavioural-pr oblems.html this on the news, how can anyone be so callous?

In tears now, as we have an adoption from India going through and dreading what its going to mean for us. Horrible woman!

I suppose it depends what he did really, and how much help was available to her in the US (i.e how much she could afford to pay for without ending up on the streets).

There's no way I could parent a child who tried (for example) to stab me or burn down the house in the middle of the night or mutilate the family pet or rape my baby.

Some of these kids are completely psychotic. It's not their fault, it's the system that has done it to them, but they can't be parented in normal homes.

And in America you need money for everything. If you don't have a substantial amount of money or you're not prepared to sell your house, or don't have a house to sell in order to pay for that child to be treated (normally in residential care where they can't kill anyone), you're stuffed.

I doubt whether she had many options.

Surely though, she should have expected some problems with the poor childs history.

Adopting older children is always going to be more difficult because of what they have gone through beforehand- they remember. Doesn't matter what country they come from. Add in a different language, differnt culture, and an alcoholic mother, there was bound to be issues.

And if you are not prepared to deal with them, then why go the foreign adoption route.

As a Russian student, having visted many times, I am not surprised by this. Not surprised that it is suggested that he was beaten.
There is just not enough screening or understanding . on all sides.
Sad but not unusual, I think.

Look, there's a difference between dealing with 'issues' and dealing with someone who wants to kill you or the other children in your house, and will do it unless you lock away every knife, etc.

Could you parent a child who was molesting your 2 year old, or who wanted your 10 year old dead?

I don't know the statistics on the numbers of failed adoptions in the UK for Romanian kids in the 80s and 90s, but I know there were a significant (maybe even a majority) of failed adoptions where kids ended up in residential care because they were too damaged and too dangerous to be parented in normal homes around other kids.

Milday were you refring to Kewcumber? or someone else ?

I would imagine she tried to hand him over to American Social Services, but hit a brick wall as the kid was a Russian citizen.

Milady

Bobbysmum, no matter how many psychological problems a child has, the adult who has taken on the legal responsibilities of parenting that child, which are the same as if the child was hers biologically, is the responsible party, and instead of doing her utmost with whatever social services or medical contacts she might have had, she put him on a plane on his own to the other side of the world, to be met by a complete stranger at the other end.

It may not have been possible to be a parent to this poor child (and let us remember he is the victim here, not that Hansen woman) but her responsibility to the child, even for his basic welfare, remains. She did the least possible that she was legally responsible for (finding a stranger in the internet to meet him in Moscow) and washed her hands of a little boy in a cold and brutal manner.

When you take a child to the US as an adoptee, the child's citizenship status must be ok'd by the US embassy in the country of origin. He would have either become a US citizen immediately upon adoption or would have been granted permanent resident alien status pending full citizenship. For an adoptee, there are no other options that I am aware of -- no vacation visa, student visa, refugee or asylum seeker or work visa of any kind would be applicable. Same goes for adoption from China to other parts of the world. You go with your newly adopted baby to the embassy or consulate and get the citizenship sorted out before you can re-enter the country.

It's a horrifying story, but as it's written very one-sided. I'm sure the Russian authorities were not clear about the child's problems. And while he most definitely does not deserve to be abandoned and flown back half way round the world, we have no idea of the pressures the adoptive mother was under- we're just guessing. Maybe she had approached the equivalent of US SS, maybe he had done terrible things, maybe she was terrified for the safety of her family. And she was a single parent, she didn't have a partner to help share the burden. I'm not excusing or condoning her actions, but I think there is more to this story than is written.

A close friend is in the process of adopting a school-age child as a single parent here in the UK. And I must admit, I worry about her. She is doing it with the very best of intentions but I am concerned about whether she can cope with parenting a child with a background of abuse and/or physical/mental difficulties. Once the adoption order is signed she has been told there is no ongoing support. Given this, I can see how adoptions do fail. In many ways I think adoption agencies/local authorities are deceiving potential parents by not being clearer about the massive implications of caring for such damaged children and providing more ongoing care.

Fayrazzled, this deluded single parent went shopping for a child and sent him back when he was defective. The only other side of the story is, as you point out, the complete lack of support from agencies. There are no excuses for the actions of the mother and grandmother in this case. Here's the website of the agency that facilitated the adoption of Artyom. They are selling a glossy fairy tale, and alas for the children, there are people wiling to buy.

Oblomov - about the foreign adoption? I don't know the MNers name and am very hazy on the details, may be completely wrong but remember a lovely photo montage about it. Am fairly sure it was a reasonable amount of time spent though.

I can't understand this at all. However, I would like to hear the adoptive mother speak out.

How did this set-up work anyway, the articles say that the adoptive mother was a single dp, so presumably she went out to work, yet it says both dc did not attend school. So the grandmother looked after them at home? Might have helped Artjom had he been at school.

I can imagine if his biological mother was an alcoholic that she was possibly already an alcoholic when she was pregnant, he may have any number of problems not immediately visible when we see his face in a photo. Ift hat is the case, I can imagine a mother who had no idea what to expect and no idea how to cope might have felt overwhelmed or frightened. Why she sent him back rather than get help in the US I don't know. Maybe that avenue was closed to her for some reason

Personally I hope Russia can make the decision to keep her dc. However they do it, with these overseas adoptions despite them any that work out great, the risks of failure are just too big IMO. Keep them and fgs somehow or other look after them.

Yes I think that was probably me Milady - I was in Kazakhstan (Central Asia) for three months but that is fairly unusual. The legal requirement is to visit the child daily in their orphanage for 2 weeks prior to applying to court but in reality it usually ends up being about 3 weeks.

I'm so thankful that these kinds of cases are the monority of adoptions. I think on averahe there is a wider range of quality of preadoption preparation in the US - some truly excellent, some virtually non-existant. I have also heard a story of a home study done over the phone.

Older child adoption are more common in teh US and obviously come with (on the whole) more challenges which need more understanding of the issues.

Although I can quite understand the dificulties that come with a child who has challenging behaviour to whom you are not yet bonded and perhaps when you have had unrealistic expectations of what adopting an older child might be like - but I fail to see how the adoptice parent couldn't have come up with a better interim solution.

It's not particularly helpful to be laying any blame at the door of the Russian institution. Some are truly excellent, a few appalling and the majority in between. We have no way of knowing into which camp this child fell.

Here's an older case in a different US state which apparently received a lot of coverage there, so possibly this mother who sent her ds back to Russia knew of it. The parents face charges and can go to prison if they give up the child, they are scared to have the child in their home and the option of annuling the adoption is beyond their financial means:

video

I'm wondering about the similarity in both children threatening to burn down the house and kill the family.

What the adoptive "mother" did is so horrifyingly callous that I almost feel sorry for her. She seems to have more than a few screws loose, how on earth is she going to parent her biological child?

That clip says 16 Russian children have been murdered by their adoptive parents in the US.

Here's another clip from ZZZenagain's link. The Hansens are apparently a family that lives in a compound shared by several members of the extended family, surrounded by extensive fencing. They had showered the child with toys and gifts and dental work had been provided for him (friends interpret this as signs of affection by the family, the video commentary implies). Neither Artyem nor another child (biologically related to the Hansens) were attending school or registered for home ed. There is something decidedly wacky about these people, and I wonder about the nature of the home study (if any) that was carried out in this case.

It's worth noting that both Torry and her mother Nancy seem to have gone to a lot of trouble to find lawyers for advice before Artyem was sent back to Russia, and are both now represented by lawyers (so we won't hear another word from either of them) -- while there are lawyers who would take on a high profile case like this because of the publicity it offers, most lawyers charge through the nose. So far, no word about their diligence in finding help for the boy (if, in fact, he needed it) but they seem very trigger-happy about calling in the lawyers.

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36367227/ns/us_news-life/
according to this site, Logan would have been a cousin of the adopted Artjom and they played together within that extended family set-up. It says Artjom was enrolled on a home study course and they were planning to send him to school "in he fall" so presumably the idea was to learn English in the family setting, they were obviously doing schoolwork with him since the article mentions clashes about correcting work, and then when his English was up to it and he had settled, he was to attend school.

I think Russia is right to freeze international adoptions. The best thing would be for the children to be adopted within Russia but realistically with the general hardship, few people will be adopting there. I have heard good and I have heard grim accounts of some of the orphanages. If they keep the children in Russia, which frnnkly I would be happier with, they must find a way of ensuring better orphanage set-ups. Poverty, alcohol and drugs seem to be enormous problems there atm - and of course it is the dc who suffer most in the end , being most vulnerable.

I know a lot of families seem to have very successfully given their adopted children a happy, secure childhood and it is hard on them to be critical about it as a system but 16 murdered dc is just horrific, almost unbelievable.

On the other ABC link, (from Mathanxiety's post)it said neither Artyom or his cousin were registered in a school or for home schooling.
And why on earth would you change his name? If he was a baby, sure, but he was 7. Call him Artie if Arytom is too "foreign".
Just another thing about the whole business that bugs me.

So he got angry if he was challenged or denied something. Fairly normal for a small child. Deal with it and teach them that they cant have everything they want.

"If they keep the children in Russia, which frnnkly I would be happier with, they must find a way of ensuring better orphanage set-ups." The Hague convention doesn't agree with you = according to the relevant Hague convention every child (in the world) has the right to a family life. First preference is to stay with birth family, second is to be adopted in the country of birth and last option is adoption in a differnet country. An institution is not a substitute for a family life and the rare and horrific occurances of this kind shouldn't be used to deny thousands of children a loving family for the rest of their life.

I absolutely agree that the Americans need to shape up their standards and make sure all adoptions processes are of a consistently high standard but sadly 16 deaths out of 50,000 adoptions is probably not significantly different to the number of birth childrne killed by their birth family.

I'm guessing that anyone who thinks staying in an institution is preferable to adoption into a different country hasn't spent any significant amount of time in an orphanage.

I would rather DS was adopted by a Martian who loved him rather than spend the rest of his life in an orphanage with nothing to his name - none of his own clothes or toys, no stories at bedtime, no-one who cares about him above all else and who will fight for what he needs to be happy and healthy.

yes kew I rmeember you adopting from Kazakhstan and posting your blog about it. I realise it went well for you and your son and has proved to be a successful adoption. No, I was not brought up in an orphanage and yes, I have seen one Russian orphanage from the inside, just one, and it was a well-run pleasant place on the whole. However the dc leave at quite an early age and then they are on their own. Which is a big problem. I haven't personally seen any of the dreadful orphanages we see on documentaries but I don't doubt they exist atm. Romania springs to mind.

I have seen a lot of documentaries in the past couple of years too on failed international adoption. The head of German youth services (SS) said that he essentially would like to see an end to them. Many of the problems became acute when the dc reached puberty. FRom what I saw, the dc had not landed in dysfunctional homes or with uncaring dp. They were loved, well treated and so on but the dc themselves said they wish they had not been adopted overseas despite loving their adoptive dp. It is a difficult thing.

I don't want to bash all those good people who successfully adopt a dc from overseas and giveh im a loving home but whatever the Hague convention declares, I personally feel international adoptions are not a good thing and we need other solutions for these children.

see what you mean mary

Why have the Americans refused to do the follow up checks the Russian govt has asked for in the past? They do them with internal adoptions so why not with dc adopted from abroard?

DS's orphanage was also a pleasant place and he wasn't done any great harm there. The carers were lovely and tried their best with the resources they had available the ratio of carer to child was good by international standards 1 carer to 6 children. But I still wouldn't like to see any child spend their life in one - though I understand you don't agree, how long did you spend at the orphanage?

Mostly the system is three levels of home - "baby" houses which are for children 0-4 yrs which in Kazakhstan tend to be pretty good, then childrens homes for 4-7 yr olds (variable quality) and then move to 7-16 yr olds which are generally rife with bullying of the younger children even in the better homes.

Any adopted intercountry teenagers (and yes I personally know quite a few) who do express reservations about intercountry adoption don't generally envisage the alternative being staying in an institution for life, they envisage wider birth family or local adoption. A fairer comparison is the problems suffered at puberty between childrne who were adopted intercountry cf with those left in an institution. from memory (and I'm not sure I can find the report now but I'll take a look) the incidence at puberty of children in institutions committing suicide or resorting to petty crime and prostitution is horrific. I'm sure it would be an interesting experiment to leave those childrne in institutions and observe the outcome but perhaps not so interesting for each individual child.

No one understands the drawback to intercountry adoption better than an intercountry adoptive family, it isn't theoretical to us, we live with the difficulties of tryng to keep your child in touch with their birth country/culture, of answering their questions and having an additional overlay to the "normal" adoption issues. Many governments are trying hard to encourage local adoption and to reduce the number of children being relinquished eg Russia, Kazakhstan and CHina and in almost every case local families are given priority over intercountry adopters (in Kaz children have to be on the local registry for 3 months before being freed for intercountry adoption).

I have no doubts that although it was not ideal for DS to be adopted by me, it was the best choice available for him.

There are post placement reports required by the Russian government at 6 months, 12 months 2 and 3 years ( I think). But the quality of these is as variable as the initial homestudy. If an agency doesn;t supply these reports the Russian government suspends them form operation until they are all received.