I have not been able to get four-year-old Sean Paddock, or 11-year-old Hanna Williams, or 7-year-old Lydia Schatz out of my mind. As Erik Eckholm reported in the New York Times yesterday, and Anderson Cooper discussed on CNN, most recently last week, the three children all died within the past five years, and they had several chilling factors in common.
Each of their deaths were brutal and agonizing: Sean suffocated; Hana, who was found lying naked in the muddy yard, died of hypothermia and malnutrition; Lydia showed signs of a brutal beating. In each case, one or both of their parents has been charged with their murder.
And in each case, those parents are said to have essentially punished their children to death, allegedly because they believed it was God's will. They are said to have been guided by the book To Train Up A Child, by Michael and Debi Pearl, which advocates beating children with rubber tubing, leaving them outside in the cold, and witholding food for days at a time in keeping with Biblical teachings. (No, I am not linking to it, out of sympathy with those who are petitioning sites like Amazon not to sell this particular book, which does not directly advocate the level of abuse that killed these children, but that appears to have been misinterpreted and misused by at least some of the parents who stand accused.)
Much attention has been paid to the religious pieces of a this tale. Less noted is that each of these children joined these families through adoption. Sean was born in the US, as were his five adopted siblings. Hana was from Ethiopia, as was her adopted brother (their parents had six biological children as well), and Lydia was from Liberia (there were two other adopted siblings among the family's nine children.)
Is this merely grisly coincidence? Or is there something about the adoption dynamic that makes violent abuse more likely?
One possibility is that adoptive children -- particularly those who spend their earliest years in an orphanage or shuttling from one foster caregiver to the next -- are more likely to suffer reactive attachment disorder, which are essentially the inability not only to bond, but to feel. The effects are not just psychological, but also physical, with evidence these children can have elevated levels of the hormone cortisol, which increases their tolerance for pain. Some speculate that spanking a child with Reactive Attachment Disorder can spiral out of control quickly, because it takes abusive levels of pain before the child actually feels it and responds.
This cycle is the talk of a handful of adoptive parenting websites, and, in particular, it has been discussed often on Why Not Train a Child, which is dedicated to warning parents about the dangers of the Pearls' book. There an anonymous commenter there, who describes him or herself as knowing the parents of Hana Williams personally, speculates:
Initially, I think their intentions for adopting were "good" (although I am uncomfortable with the idea of adopting children solely because you are religiously motivated to "rescue" them). I don't think they adopted Hana and her brother so that they could have some children to torture and abuse. However,I believe they made a huge assumption that these kids would respond to their methods just like their own biological children did. They expected Hana and her little brother to assimilate into their family, and most likely ignored their culture, how they had grown up (customs, beliefs, etc), and most importantly, the trauma that Hana and her brother had gone through in their childhoods. These kids just weren't acting like their biological children. Instead of taking a step back and getting professional help, they decided that they would continue to follow the Pearl method, but continued to up the ante, because these kids were NOT succumbing to being "broken".
Adoption can save a child and create a family. It can also come with complications that biological parents are far less likely to face. All children are vulnerable, but adopted children are more so, because the very fact of their adoption tells of a shakier start in life. They deserve more of our protection. In at least three cases they did not receive it.
This isn't about blood or bonding, but unrealistic expectations.
In fact, to say the children don't feel pain is simply another way of stating that the speaker feels they are alien, not human, even in some way demonic--- and thus that desperate measures may be required to control them.
Belkin's statement about "not feeling" is a logical possibility, but it's essential to realize that there is nothing to support it. It's also a logical possibility that adoptive parents harm children because THEY do not feel, but I doubt that that's the case either. There's nothing to be gained for adoptive families by oversimplifying the situation.
Surely absence of kinship increases the risk of sexual abuse and there are no taboos against sex with an unrelated person in your home, despite taboos and laws against pedophilia. Adopted children are at risk for sexual abuse from parents as well as siblings. Yet no one is admitting these risk factors or researching their prevalence.
There are two reasons we turn a blind eye to these abuses that are glaring in our face once again with the headlines about Jerry Sandowsky - adoptive father of six and foster parents to untold others.
The first reason is one that a publisher told me when rejecting The Dark Side. he said that adoption is society's fall back position and we do not want to see any flaws in it.
The other reasons is that it is a mega billion dollar industry and like all such money-makers has lobbyists who convince lawmakers to keep passing legislation to make it easier to adopt and provide incentives and benefits such as huge tax credits, most of which goes to international adoption despite being presented as a way to help the foster child population be adopted.
We just keep looking away and ignoring....
Mirah Riben, author, THE STORK MARKET: America's Multi-Billion Dollar Unregulated Adoption Industry
More than 226 children MURDERED by adoptive or foster parent abuse are identified here: http://poundpuplegacy.org/node/20813#comment-16769
Yet we call them anomalies. And these are just those who actually died as a result of being beaten, caged, starved, tortured, beaten...Many more have survived such torment including sexual abuse.
In my 1988 book "shedding light on the Dark Side of Adoption" I first called attention to this phenomenon and called for research into the question you pose here. After all, it is a known fact that sexual and other abuses are far more common in foster families than the general populace. You have identified one of the pieces of the puzzle of why people who go out of their way to be parents, who pay huge fees to adopt in some cases, and are alleged to be motivated...why they would harm children trusted to them. The other part of the puzzle is the reason identified for abuse in foster homes: absence of kinship.
Children born into their families often act out. However, there is the ability to see some of oneself or relative in their independence, defiance or rebelliousness and even admire that spark. In unrelated children there is a fear of what it might lead to. Did the child inherit "bad blood"? What is he capable of? There is fear of the unknown possibilities with a child who is, after all, your flesh and blood.
Continued...
They might have had in their church community at least one like-minded licensed social worker who could have done the vetting (i.e., home study) to process the adoption through the state courts. That's probably where the vetting process fails. (This church group was apparently very naive, though, about immigration law, and would never have gotten the children into the U.S.)
Also, when the writer says adoption, she means "adopting an older child". None of what she says would apply to adopting a newborn, or in fact, any child under the age of 1.
To add and perhaps clarify one point in your piece, there is a valid reason that much attention has been paid to the religious aspects of these three murder cases. All three of the families involved were headed by adoptive parents, yes, that is true. But weren't they also participants in the current right wing fundamental Christian agenda that stresses adoption as some sort of advisory order from a God who is under attack in this nation? Did the adoptions of these horribly abused children originally take place as a misguided effort to rescue them from a godless world and to help build some spiritual army of Christian soldiers, bent on taking back the world for God?
I honestly think that your analysis might be better directed toward an examination of such conservative evangelical adoptions, in which potential parents are even advised to adopt rather than foster, simply because there are laws against corporal punishment as a method of discipline when parents take in a foster child. With adoption, there are no such protections for children.
As for the intention of the parents, I would argue that most abusive parents cloak their actions under the guise of "discipline". The ones who weren't disciplining their child to death will try to pass the horror off as an "accident" or "mistake". I am betting few if any woke up that morning and consciously admitted they were going to kill their child.