In a fascinating and disturbing
five-part series (First part here, with links to the rest) Reuters reports in how Americans use the
internet to abandon children adopted from overseas when the kids don’t work out.
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| Quita Puchalla- In a picture used to advertise her |
The series - which is long and took
about an hour and a half to read in total, though it was well worth it - goes
through stories of a dozen mostly foreign children, and some domestic children
with behavior or emotional problems whose adoptive families decided they couldn’t
deal with them anymore. Rather than turn to the State to help, they turned to
the internet and quickly found message boards teeming with folks who were
willing to take kids they no longer wanted to raise. That those who so eagerly
wanted the troubled kids were predators shouldn’t shock anyone. What should
shock is the ease with which this was all done, and the almost total lack of
punishment for those families giving up the kids or the predators who took them
in (save for the one child pornographer who is serving 20 years in Ohio).
Yahoo has shut down one of the largest
message boards after Reuters pointed out what it was doing. Facebook has refused. There are the stories of the naive message
board operators who try to help families and kids in need only to realize that
they are helping predators get children.
There are the stories of truly troubled kids and how they survived,
which while sad, is uplifting in the sense that it shows that the human spirit
can still go on in the face of neglect and evil.
It is well worth the read. It is a corner of the world I was unaware of,
as I think most of us were.
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