This series of articles by Reuters investigates the disturbing practice of 'private re-homing' of adopted children in the USA, particularly affecting children adopted from overseas. 'Re-homing' also called 'adoption disruption' refers to adoptive parents abandoning their children and handing them out to other adults, often found through internet and social media fora, without any type of formal vetting or procedures.
The first article tells the story of Quita, a teenage girl adopted from Liberia by American parents who decided to give her up as a result of what they described as her difficult behavior, and who found her new parents to take her in less than two days by posting an ad on the internet. Quita was left in the care of a woman whose biological children had been taken away by child welfare authorities years earlier due to findings of “severe psychiatric problems as well as violent tendencies”.
Reuters’s investigation of 5 years of activities through a Yahoo “adoption” group set up to advertise children or to look for new children to ‘adopt’, found that the majority of children ‘re-homed’ were aged 6 to 14 years old, the youngest was 10 months old, and had been adopted from abroad- from countries such as Russia, China, Ethiopia and Ukraine. The five part series looks at the network and lack of supervision that makes ‘private re-homing’ possible, the dangers including stories of child sex abusers taking children home through this process, the middlemen who facilitates this process, the failure of the laws and authorities to regulate and prevent the practice, and the children and young adults who are the survivors.