Life
Haiti in process of fixing broken adoption process
“It will mean that the child being adopted needs a new family and that you will know this child has been screened,” Linnarsson said. “There will be some accountability. … The adopting parents will know that their child has not been trafficked or stolen.”
The need for new legislation is acute in Haiti, where an estimated 50,000 children live in orphanages in part because many parents give up their children because they can’t afford to take care of them.
Many orphanages are poorly run and have little oversight. Agencies within Haiti managed to get the government to close one home last year in Carrefour, one of the cities that make up the Haitian capital region, after they noted that several children disappeared and the operators didn’t offer credible explanations for what happened.
It is not entirely known how many Haitian children are trafficked into neighboring Dominican Republic or elsewhere. But UNICEF recently estimated that at least 2,000 children were smuggled across the border in 2009.
The vulnerability of Haiti’s children was dramatized in the weeks after the January 2010 earthquake when Baptist missionaries from Idaho tried to take 33 children they believed were orphans to the Dominican Republic. Police arrested the Americans for lacking the proper documents to take the kids.
Even if the new legislation passes, enforcement may prove tricky. Officials have long complained that child welfare workers lack the resources and training to investigate allegations of criminal behavior.
Over the past year, Villedrouin said, the government has closed 26 orphanages for operating in substandard conditions. She said under the new law, more “sanctions will be taken.”
