Adoption Real Estate

I recently read in the New York Times real estate section that JPMorgan Chase bank has introduced a revolutionary new product which allows adoptive parents to mortgage their home in order to pay the costs of a foreign adoption.

Hop on over to the Chase website which touts the product as "helping adoptive parents finance the most important addition to their home." Nice, catchy, Madison Avenue inspired patter. A handsome white Anglo Saxon family all dressed in white sport a pretty Asian-looking "new addition" to their otherwise "normal" looking (but boy dominated) family.

Adoption-speak phrases like "adoption adventure," "heart and home," "realizing the dream," "traveling to meet your new little one," "heartwarming reality" litter the site. Clearly the product - the loan product at least - is aimed at foreign adoption.

Look a little closer and you see the loan is "endor$ed" by the Dave Thoma$ Foundation. Read the fine print--always important for those embarking on an adoption adventure of Disney-esq proportions and costs--and you find that:

The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption is a nonprofit 501(c)3 public charity dedicated to dramatically increasing the adoptions of the more than 140,000 children in North America's foster care systems waiting to be adopted. Created by Wendy's founder, Dave Thomas, who was adopted as a child, the Foundation spearheads programs such as Wendy's Wonderful Kids, which puts adoption recruiters in 50 states and Canada to find permanent, loving families for children in the foster care system, and Adoption-Friendly Workplace, which encourages employers to offer adoption benefits to their employees. The Foundation also works with adoption advocates and officials to streamline the adoption process and make adoption more affordable for families.

No word of foreign adoption here. Perhaps this redemptive "disclaimer" is designed to help purge this "public charity" from the evil influence of cold hard adoption ca$h.

When I was adopted from foster care in 1965 I don't think my working class adoptive parents were thinking about either an "adoption adventure" or a home loan. They were too busy working hard, paying the bills, and saving money for college. The kindly social worker who helped the process along wasn't motivated by money. She wasn't hawking adoption songs, pendants and poetry (although I did somehow get an adoption scrapbook which I still treasure), the agency wasn't cross marketing with global financial service firms, travel agents and foreign "facilitators," there were no big Washington lobbying groups supporting "the cause."

Yet we now know that most of those sixties foundlings were removed from their gestational carriers under the most coercive of conditions. Fathers did not count for much; despite having an extensive social history of my father his actual name is absent from the records. "Unknown" in social work speak. The young teenage girls who gave birth to the bastard babies were herded into maternity "homes" which were really more like jails or work camps. They were subject to cruelty, degradation and scorn by the social work establishment and religious charity do gooders whose sole mantra seemed to be "labor will set you free."

Perhaps not much has changed. Except the globalization and marketing of adoption as a "service" for waiting families and not children. As many commentors have pointed out in other posts on this blog, "who do you turn to," "who do you tell," "where do you go for help or accountability?"

When you discover that "social work thinking of the 1960s" or "legal standards dictated" or "sociological and cultural shifts resulted in blah blah blah" are used to justify of the "old" ways of thinking, you wonder how will we justify our current ways of thinking, especially as it applies to foreign adoption. Will foreign adoption someday be equated with slavery or child trafficking or cultural colonialism? And what about the hundreds of thousands of domestic children needing homes today? "Our children" as so many slogans tout (when they really mean "not those damaged children over there but these nice clean middle class children over here" or as an ownership assertion really meaning "my children.")

Where is the truth and reconciliation commission to address the old and the new ways of thinking? When will the adoption industry give up on it's endless quest for cash and focus on the difficult, low paying, charity-inspired work of providing real homes for real children in need (in the so called social work speak of "child centered practice)?

And how about home equity loans for single 17 year old moms struggling to keep their baby? Unfortunately their income from flipping burgers at Wendy's probably doesn't allow them to qualify.

"I don't understand why someone is not in jail"

When internationally trafficked children end up in the child welfare system, it's convenient to cover up a bad international adoption story with a good domestic adoption story. After all, the institution of adoption remains sacrosanct. If "guns don't kill people, people kill people," then truly "adoption doesn't harm children, pedophiles harm children." Adoption = good. Pedophiles = bad. Unfortunately pedophiles adopting = a public relations nightmare.

Luckily the Masha Allen International Pedophile Adoption Nightmare happened not in far off lefty Oregon, where the United States Department of State failed in its effort to silence the local prosecutor in the William Peckenpaugh International Pedophile Adoption Nightmare, but in the home town of Bush loyalist United States Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan.

Buchanan, who is often described as a "rising star" in Republican politics, was a high-ranking DOJ official who is apparently angling for a federal judicial appointment or perhaps a shot at political office. She is also playing to her political sponsor Rick Santorum's Republican base by aggressively prosecuting pornographers and considers "enforcing morality" one of her chief responsibilities as a U.S. Attorney. Her career has been carefully incubated in the Bush Justice Department, both under first Attorney General John Ashcroft, and later under Alberto Gonzalez.

Not surprisingly, Ms. Buchanan has a lot of enemies. She also has a full-time press agent -- a novelty to her office -- and has reportedly misused senior staff to ghost-write her speeches and articles, employing taxpayer dollars to further her own career. She has reinforced this impression by making court appearances in high-profile cases in which she has no personal involvement.

Who better to navigate the rocky shoals of Masha's child-trafficking-international-adoption imbroglio than someone who could not and would not say no. Not to the State Department. Not to the Right to Life inspired National Council for Adoption. And not to the god and country child saving adoption industry. Throw in some child porn and Mary Beth Buchanan was uniquely qualified to spin a bad international adoption story into a good domestic adoption story.

After she told CNN's Jonathan Mann about Masha's "very, very wonderful life," he asked her "if the adoption authorities had done a thorough investigation, would they have seen any sign of the horrible things that were to come?" Buchanan's response, "Well. . . I can't really comment on what the adoption agency did in their evaluation of him or in determining whether his home would be an appropriate home for the child."

According to Buchanan, after the FBI rescued Masha from Matthew Mancuso "they then immediately placed the girl in a foster home, and after she was adopted by a family, they moved her out of Pennsylvania."

Masha's metamorphosis from international adoption outcast to domestic adoption success story happened in a mere eleven months, even while the average time to finalize any adoption in Allegheny County was 22 months and the wait was four years for a child Masha's age.

Just days after Masha was placed in a foster home, a veteran employee of Allegheny County's Office of Children, Youth and Families [CYFS] filed a federal whistleblower lawsuit claiming she was fired when she tried to tell the public how seriously children were endangered by the agency's understaffing.

"I have personally experienced the dysfunction of the agency and I have personally experienced our agency putting children in our care at risk," declared Penne Fabian. Among the statistics Fabian uncovered were those showing high caseworker vacancy rates resulting in workers visiting families only 42% of the time they were required to.

A little dysfunction, however, could not and would not stop Masha's domestic adoption juggernaut. As Thomas Atwood, president of NCFA, chortled on CNN when speaking about Masha's case, "think of the children, this is what it's all about." According to Masha's case worker "the folks downtown pushed the adoption, pushed it as a good home and wanted it to happen. They agreed and made it happen fast."

Making it happen fast included maintaining the myth of Masha's Russian abandonment and orphan-ness. In the Child Profile Report for Masha written by Michele A. Cunko, Jeanne Smith of Reaching Out Thru International Adoption and Keith Wallace of Families Thru International Adoption all helped reinforce the presumed futility of Masha's reunification with her real family:

"Masha is presumed to have been in the care of her birth mother for the first four years of her life. Masha's birth mother was reported to have stabbed Masha in the neck when Masha was around four or five years old and Masha bears a scar from this injury. Foster mother advised that she was told Masha was hospitalized after having been stabbed in the neck by her birth mother and that Masha was placed in an orphanage when she was released from the hospital. Masha lived in an orphanage in Russia for about eighteen months while agencies sought an adoptive home for her."

According to Masha's Russian forever-sister-by-birth Oksana, all of this is a lie.

Although Masha told Cunko "that she has an older brother and an older sister and that she once knew their names but they were Russian names and she has forgotten them . . . there [was] no information in the CYFS files regarding Masha's siblings." Most astoundingly, "there are no other reports of any psychological or psychiatric issues or concerns."

With Masha's Russian family forgotten and disposed of, psychological and psychiatric issues and concerns minimized, and a "very, very wonderful life ahead of her," Judge Cheryl Allen, a conservative Republican right to life rising star, made the good adoption happen fast.

Judge Allen, whose outspoken evangelical Christian views including prayer in her courtroom have caused controversy, even borrowed a page from her mentor Mary Beth Buchanan by grabbing a little press along the way. After helping former roommate-turned-Masha's-foster-mother change her name to Allen, Judge Allen literally acquired naming rights in the Masha Allen epos, personally finalizing the adoption even while sitting in the criminal court.

Six months later, the FBI reportedly gave the newly christened Faith and Masha Allen a "fresh start" by moving them out of Pennsylvania. Had those pesky Canadians not intervened, raising the specter of the bad international adoption once again for everyone to see, this sad little story would have been the proverbial ride off into the happy adoption sunset (without anyone knowing any better).

Mere bureaucratic bumbling, (and not a cover-up?), forced Masha's story back onto the front page. Buchanan offered this explanation on June 8, 2005:

"Well, the federal case ended in February of 2004, and it was at that time when the Toronto police released one photo of the child to federal enforcement. The child at the time was of a different age than the child was in the photos that had been part of the federal case, so that's why it was very difficult to make a match between these photos, because the Toronto police only provided a very small sample."

Even though United States Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan "couldn't really comment" about the obvious shortcomings in the international adoption process three years after Masha was removed from Matthew Mancuso, what is clear is that one of the most aggressive federal law enforcement officers in the country utterly failed to indict a single agency or person connected with Masha's international adoption.

During last year's Congressional hearing into Masha's international adoption, Congressman Dr. Michael C. Burgess's summed it up best when he said "I don't understand why someone is not in jail." Perhaps he was asking the wrong person. Mary Beth Buchanan was nowhere to be found.

Child Exploitation Cracks in the Floor

Two years ago, the Masha Allen story sent shock waves through the adoption and child welfare community in the United States and Russia. Since then Masha's story, which is recounted on my blog and elsewhere, has become the case study for not only everything that is wrong with the international adoption system, but everything that is wrong with the domestic adoption system, the child welfare system, the war on child pornography, access to civil justice by child victims, the guardianship and conservatorship system . . .

Masha is the case study for basically everything that is wrong with every system designed to help severely abused and exploited children.

Sadly, very few of the institutions seemingly dedicated to Masha and the countless other internationally trafficked children are even willing to acknowledge the problems let alone begin the fiscally painful task of "reforming the system."

Certainly not the National Council for Adoption which has powerful con$tituencie$ to protect. Immediately after last year's Congressional hearing on Masha Allen's international adoption, I asked the representatives of NCFA who were present to issue a statement in support of Masha and other victims like her. Not surprisingly, over a year later, NCFA has failed to utter one word on this topic.

Then there is the Joint Council on International Children’s Services which was also well-represented at the Congressional hearing. When I filed a formal complaint against the international adoption agency that arranged Masha's adoption, JCICS allowed Reaching Out Thru International Adoption to quickly and quietly resign instead of facing investigation. ROTIA recently changed their name to ChildPromise, Inc. and rejoined JCICS less then six months after my complaint was dismissed. So much for peer oversight.

Jeannene Smith, who Committee Chairman Ed Whitfiled said played a "central role in Mancuso’s adoption of Masha," continues her work in the international adoption field as treasurer of the reform group Focus on Adoption. She continued working at ROTIA even after the Congressional panel called for her to be jailed, brazenly attending the Ethica / Evan B Donaldson Ethics and Accountability conference in October where she was booed once by one person, but otherwise allowed to enjoy the regalement unmolested.

Smith's Congressman, Mike Ferguson, summed up Masha's - and many other child victim's - life best when he intoned that "what is even more frightening, however, is the number of times that her situation was overlooked. . . . No one called to speak to her, no one made sure she was getting along with her new father, no one seemed to really care if she was being taken care of at all."

Perhaps Congressman Dr. Michael C. Burgess said it best when he lamented that "the system failed this child repeatedly for a number of years. . . . but I got a feeling from this panel in front of us, some people are more responsible than others. It is a bad case. I will be surprised if there wasn’t litigation. I don’t understand why someone is not in jail."

Regrettably the only person in jail is Matthew Mancuso, even while "the system" continues to fail Masha repeatedly in ways unimaginable even to those who supposedly know her best.

According to Masha's Russian forever-sister-by-birth Oksana, almost everything about the mythology of Masha's orphan life in Russia is a lie. She was never removed from her mother by state officials. Although heavy drinkers, Masha's parents never abused her. Most shockingly, Masha was not stabbed in the neck, but had a birth mark which was surgically removed at the age of two months leaving a scar.

At the last of then 17 year old Oksana's numerous visits to the orphanage where Masha was staying, she was told that her lucky sister had been adopted by a loving American family with a wife and daughter, that it was "all for the best," and that she should leave Masha alone to enjoy her fabulous new life in America.

Author Peter Sotos, the first person convicted for child pornography in the United States, knowingly contemplates Masha's neck scar in his recently published book Show Adult which contains dozens of pages about what he calls the "child porn star Masha Allen."

Sotos writes, "when I finally found the pictures of her being homeraped by Mr. Mancuso, I had no idea that she had been knifed by her mother when only three years old. I didn't see the scar, I think it would have made an impression but I'm sure I would have thought it was simply some childhood ailment surgery that may have been connected to her crossed eyes and otherwise white slip looks."

Efforts to stop publication of this book were spearheaded by the international adoption parent group Families for Russian and Ukrainian Adoption whose motto is "improving the lives of children." After a great deal of back and forth with someone named Butterfly (ironically the symbol of the international pedophile movement), many FRUA members called for a national boycott of the Sotos book with repeated unanswered calls to Oprah, Fox News and Dr. Laura.

Finally in mid-July, someone called "New Member" suggested that FRUA discontinue its commercial relationship with Amazon, "not that this would hurt Amazon much, but it seems a little strange that FRUA's Book Store is sending customers to a retailer who's selling this book."

A FRUA administrator responded "Ummmm . . . at this point Amazon has not sold this book. Only listed it for sale WHEN it is published. A lot can change between now and then. . . . At such time if Amazon does really offer this book for sale then the FRUA BoD will discuss the matter. . . . So don't condemn Amazon until they have actually done something that may be wrong. The possibility of wrong doing is not cause to drop them at this time. Do continue to put the pressure on them to encourage them, and the others, to do the right thing."

"Encourage them, and the others, to do the right thing" . . . fine words indeed. Even inspiring, high-minded, righteous. Well apparently these words are just that since anyone can easily order Show Adult from the only publisher still carrying the book - Amazon.com. In fact, I just ordered it from the Amazon.com FRUA book store. So much for "improving the lives of children." How about "improving the bottom line of pedophile publishers and authors?" Sadly, not much has "changed between now and then," for Masha or the countless others deserving improvement.

At least FRUA dealt with the issue. When I wrote the Executive Director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute Adam Pertman last spring expressing my concern about the Sotos "picture book of Masha Allen 'child porn star' complete with a novel about her abuse written from the abuser's perspective," Pertman sent polite greetings and then wished me the best with "the important work" I continue to do. He then returned to the apparently much more important work of rallying the adoption community to boycott the Disney movie Meet the Robinsons.

Clearly much of "the system," even when awake and fully oriented in all spheres, has no idea how to handle cases like Masha's. Or maybe they just don't want to. Ignore it and hope it goes away. It's too dark, too negative, too icky for the warm and fuzzy Home-for-the-Holidays-carefully-constructed-adoption-ethos.

When exploitation leads to exploitation upon exploitation the simple answer is to give up, pass the case along, shuffle papers, hope for the best. A little prayer and a little faith, mixed with some CYA and a good dose of public relations, can turn even the nastiest tale into the American dream.

That's clearly what Mary Beth Buchanan, US attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, did when she told CNN on May 14, 2005 that after the FBI rescued Masha from Matthew Mancuso "they then immediately placed the girl in a foster home, and after she was adopted by a family, they moved her out of Pennsylvania."

A few weeks later, on June 8, 2005, Buchanan told CNN Insight's Jonathan Mann that Masha "has been adopted by a very loving family who has changed her name and moved her to another part of the country, where she can make a new start and have a very, very wonderful life ahead of her." Mann's response: "That's astounding!"

Since then Masha's astounding and very, very wonderful life has included five name changes, six schools, and ten addresses across two states and four counties. To date the system has continually failed Masha repeatedly for a number of years. As Masha once said, "you expect me to trust the system after all they've done to me?"

Quite simply "the system" - EVERY system - is unable and unwilling to deal with the incredible needs of internationally trafficked children like Masha.

When kidnapped Austrian girl Natascha Kampusch, who was imprisoned by a pedophile for 8 years, was rescued, she received $665,000 from the Austrian criminal injuries compensation board and all the costs of her medical care including a team of psychiatrists who worked around-the-clock to help her get back to a normal life in a special house where a medical team remained on duty full-time for over a year.

When Masha was rescued, she was placed with a young single foster parent with her own history of sexual abuse, given an unlicensed Christian therapist and a Medicaid card. When the FBI reportedly "moved her to another part of the country" a few months after her adoption, Masha was taken from the only community she knew and her thin support system was shattered. She began an unstable lifestyle which continues to this day. No therapists, no medical team, no house or meaningful compensation. Just a prayer and a press release and a one way ticket to nowhere.

Unfortunately Masha is not alone in this disturbing plight. Right after Masha's story aired on ABC Primetime, William D. Peckenpaugh was sentenced to 30 years in prison for sexually abusing a boy he adopted from Romania. The sexual abuse, which lasted for four years, started within weeks after Peckenpaugh arrived home with the boy in Oregon.

When the State Department found out about Peckenpaugh, they strongly advised the Marion County deputy district attorney to redact any mention of international adoption from all press releases relating to the case. Warnings of vague "international repercussions" were not enough to recast the truth - at least not in this case.

In June 2005, a pastor from St. Paul, Oregon named David Charles Gilmore, was sentenced in Marion County Circuit Court to 19 years for sexually abusing a nine-year-old girl he adopted from Russia. Gilmore, who was married, is a gifted pianist and cellist who sought and received donations from the community to adopt the victim. He also performed concerts of Russian music to raise funds.

Clearly, passing trafficked children from the international adoption system to the law enforcement system to the domestic adoption system is a recipe for disaster. Add criminal sex abuse and pornographic exploitation to this toxic mix and the result is a lifetime of suffering for victims whose emotional problems, like Masha's, often go ignored and untreated for years.

International adoption, child pornography, and human trafficking are multi-billion dollar industries in this country. Until we begin to create a system which honestly and meaningfully deals with the victims of these human rights abuses, children will continue to be exploited with impunity. The well worn chorus of "deny, deflect and defend" can not be allowed to drown out the voices of children who suffer in the name of adoption, privacy, child welfare or anything else.

No well-wishing or hoping or sincerely intentioned desire that some other "system" take care of these victims is adequate. Instead of a Lifetime made-for-television happy ending, victims like Masha don't just fall through the cracks; there are no cracks because there is no floor.

New York Times Censorship?

By now almost everyone has heard about the bizarre saga of renowned reporter Kurt Eichenwald and his New York Times front page rescue of teenage porn huckster Justin Berry. Oddly, over two years after it's debut, the story keeps circulating on the web and in the national news.

What isn't known about the Eichenwald-Berry saga is the curious juxtaposition with the Masha Allen story:

Consider the following statement:

“Viewing images of child porn is not essential when researching the issue," Eichenwald says. He described his research on Masha Allen, who he said at age 8 was adopted from a Russian orphanage by a pedophile, and whose repeated rapes were caught on film for four years. “Now, I haven’t seen any of them because they’re illegal. What I have seen are cropped versions, what I have seen are images where they have the images removed but you can see what’s happened,” he said.”

These “cropped versions” are rare and hard to find - there are maybe two or three on the internet. And it is far from obvious about “what’s happened” in the images. Even as Masha’s lawyer, I have not seen these images, other than those few which are publicly available online.

The time line surrounding Masha and Justin’s story raises many questions. Masha’s “cropped images” first appeared in the media on February 2, 2005 (in Canada only). Her story broke in the United States in late April 2005. After a brief but intense media frenzy the LA Times, in a major scoop engineered by Masha's mother, interviewed “the Disney World Girl” and featured her story on June 18, 2005.

The LA Times reporter, Maggie Farley, immediately moved to option Masha’s life rights. The Masha “story” – she is a much more compelling figure than Justin – quickly evaporated. Any of Eichenwald’s research into her life, including his careful consideration of her “cropped pictures,” became worthless. Not conicidentially, according to Eichenwald, Justin goes from “personal” interest to “major story” weeks later in early July 2005.

The next appearance of Masha on the media scene was December 2, 2005 when ABC Primetime aired a major interview of Masha. A worldwide media frenzy started within minutes of that show, including an eventual appearance on Oprah. Not surprisingly, Justin’s story was rushed into production in the NY Times less than two weeks later.

Is it no coincidence that the NYTimes carries no mention of Masha Allen? Not one word. Was the Masha story suppressed in order to promote Justin? Masha testified in Congress, just like Justin. In Masha’s case a major new federal law resulted. Not so for Justin. Still no word of Masha in the NYTimes even though Eichenwald himself admits that he was researching her story. Clearly they knew about her.

Is this all just a coincidence or perhaps more media favoritism (ie., suppressing the “real news” for sensationalist pseudo-news?) Many more questions, even fewer answers.