Suffer the children.
I've still got the follow up to my "Throat-Punching" post saved up, but I'm going to wait a few days for my blood pressure to go down before I try to tackle that subject again.
In the meanwhile, here's a nice, calm, relaxing topic instead:
According to the USDA, which apparently tracks such things in the United States, the typical cost of raising a child from birth to age 18 is a hair short of $125k for the poorest bracket of households and just shy of $250k for the wealthiest. Keep those figure in mind.
The chart on that page actually breaks down the cost year by year, by age, so if you were looking at a hypothetical situation where somebody took on the responsibility of raising a child who had already been born, you could do the math appropriately.
These figures aren't any kind of absolute benchmark for the resources needed to merely keep a human being alive from one age to another, of course... they're based on the amount of money that is spent on children in the country that is sort of the poster child for the First World. It's based on our way of life and our standard of living.
This is how much money we spend on a child, on average. It doesn't include the cost of bringing that child into the world. It doesn't include the cost of post-secondary education.
If an American adopts a child from a country that's impoverished, that's the kind of money that is going to be spent making sure that child has "a good life": making sure they have nutritious food and clean water and education and possibly health care, clothing and shelter and toys to stimulate and educate and entertain and distract.
$7,000 to $14,000 dollars a year to take this one person out of a life of poverty... is that a bad price, to take someone out of those circumstances? It might not be, if our reaction to the sort of desperate circumstances that much of the world exists in is to take one specific human being and remove them from those circumstances.
But with that kind of money... well, the gross capita income in Haiti is $480. (It was, anyway, at the point that chart was made. I think the figure for 2010 might be lower.) Think about how little money it would take to change somebody's life if that's all that they have to get by on to begin with.
You could pick twenty-eight random people and double their income with $7,000 dollars. How many mouths would that feed? How many lives would that change?
You could give clean water to 500-1,000 more people a year, with the amount of money it costs to raise a child in America.
You could send Afghan children to school.
You could invest in infrastructure and education. You could support economic opportunities for disadvantaged women. If you had the money to take on a child from overseas, you could, in short, spend that money... you could even spend a fraction of that kind of money... to change the conditions that we find so horrifying to view from afar that it motivates us to swoop in and "rescue" children from their own families.
...
Now, I don't honestly think anybody reading this right now has an extra hundred grand per year and is thinking to themselves, "Gosh, I can't make up my mind... do I want to adopt a child from overseas or do I want to start a lifetime of philanthropy to try to change things from the ground up?" While it would be great if the above motivates a few donations, the other purpose is to lay the groundwork for what I'm going to say next.
Laura Silsby is, unless the news has been uncharacteristically skewed against a white American Christian lady, a human trafficker. Another word for that is "slave trader".
What's going on in Haiti right now is not that a group of well-meaning people, through their ignorance or lack of judgment or impulsiveness, have been accidentally ensnared by a law meant to curtail an activity that their plan sort of resembled. The law accomplished its purpose.
There's enough coming out in the news that there is room for some semi-informed speculation about Silsby's motives, but I'm not even going to get into that. I'm just talking about what she did.
Her plan involved claiming (both to authorities and her co-congregants, it seems) that she had documents giving her permission to take "100 Haitian children" out of Haiti and into the Dominican Republic, where she'd be able to put them up for adoption. Stop and think about that. 100 children. Not "the following children". Not "the individual children listed below". She was claiming to have permission to pick up 100 children and transport them across the border, where she would make money giving them to people.
She was claiming the right, in other words, to treat the children of Haiti... brown-colored children of a poor, non-Christian, non-American nation... as a commodity. An absolutely interchangeable commodity.
And... though she didn't really think this through... she obviously believed this claim was plausible. Anybody who was working with her who wasn't actually in on the scheme certainly found it perfectly believable. The authorities she dealt with on both sides of the Haitian/Dominican border were less persuaded.
I'm not a lawyer. I'm not an expert on international adoption. Even knowing that there are abuses of the system and there is endemic exploitation and there is commercialization and commoditization of children going on within the legal channels, I doubt very much that any nation which actually tracks such things issues papers that say, in effect, "This document entitles the bearer, A Nice White Lady, to one hundred (100) children." Her imaginary document apparently had no reference to the legal status of these children and put no onus on her to coordinate what she was doing with any kind of authorities who might be tasked with looking after their welfare... again, not just on the Haitian side of the border.
Her whole scheme seemed to hinge on the idea that for any Dominican Republic officials who happened to notice a new orphanage suddenly appearing in a posh resort catering to wealthy white people from overseas, "oh, these are Haitian children" would be sufficient explanation for how they came to be in her (and this really is the right word) possession.
Commodities.
To anybody who thinks that under the circumstances she should be let off with a warning because of some sort of perceived "gray area" or the idea that maybe she really didn't understand the enormity of what she was doing, it turns out she was let off with a warning the first time she tried to steal a busload of kids. And she turned right around and picked up another batch of lil interchangeable commodities to try again.
Given our history in this country... our shameful and not at all distant (150 years is only two, three human lifetimes) history as the last "civilized" nation of western, European-descended folk who thought it was really cool to literally commoditize human beings of another race... we should be way more sensitive about this stuff than we are. We should be way more aware of this.
There should be nobody in the United States who misses the undertones of what was going on here, but of course there are.
Look, we all know there are people who are also trafficking in children for much worse purposes... there are children being trafficked who suffer far worse fates than being adopted by well-to-do foreigners. But that doesn't change what Silsby was doing. She can't claim ignorance of the law when at every turn, she was told by officials on both sides of the border that what she was doing was trafficking and chose to ignore it. Did she think the laws of Haiti wouldn't dare to descend upon her? Did she think that the risk wasn't big enough to outweigh the reward?
I don't know.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for her cohorts. I understand how they might have been sucked in... there are actually numerous scams going on in the United States at any given time that are based on taking advantage of the belief that one's congregation is full of people who are Right With God and who will never lie or deceive you. It's a dangerous belief, and one that's not particularly well-supported by the Bible (I don't recall what number of people the Bible says are righteous, but I think it's smaller than the number it takes to fill a church), and even that speaks to an arrogance, a sort of imperialism: we are the good people and everybody else is bad. Anything WE do is right. Anything they do is suspect.
And of course that leads right into any child is better off with one of US than with one of THEM... the kind of thinking that leads to stolen generations. So, yes, perhaps some of the people involved really wanted nothing more than to improve the lives of some children. They didn't approach that goal from a very pure place, though... and see also: what several thousand dollars a year can really do to improve the lives of children.
Also, whatever they believed about Silsby's plan and the legality of what they were doing, they were evidently lying to the parents, lying to the children... if your plan requires you to lie to children, Jesus may not approve of it as strongly as you think.
There have been other news stories done in the wake of this "scandal" crime with reporters talking to Haitian parents who explain how willing they are to give their children up to families overseas. I worry about this stirring up sympathy for people running schemes like Silsby's. The thing is, these parents are in an impossible situation where there are no good options available to them, and so some of them take the one that seems like the best for their children.
But the key is that this option is contingent on the idea that a foreigner with enough money to care for a child in the American fashion intervenes in their lives in the first place! I'm not going to sit here and condemn everybody who's ever taken part in a foreign adoption (though honestly there are people who will do that, and they have several good points), but I will point out again that this kind of money could be spent on the ground in countries like Haiti to help end the circumstances that will otherwise result in even more children being born and living in the conditions you might "rescue" one single child from.
I could keep going on this forever but I'd just end up repeating myself. Children aren't commodities, no matter how desperate the circumstances they're living in. Adopting a child doesn't "make a difference" in a statistically meaningful sense.
Please Note: The question of "Why should we...?" (spend the money to improve Haiti, get involved, feel any sense of guilt or responsibility) is a separate topic from the one I'm addressing here. It is, for the purposes of this post, The Conversation That Is Not Happening Here. The adoption scheme of Silsby hinged upon the idea that there are already people with money to spend on improving the lives of Haitian children.
Related reading:
Orphans???, a posting from Anthropology Now that partly inspired this.
Also worth reposting, since I know many people don't have money to spare:
The Hunger Site.
Free Rice
In the meanwhile, here's a nice, calm, relaxing topic instead:
According to the USDA, which apparently tracks such things in the United States, the typical cost of raising a child from birth to age 18 is a hair short of $125k for the poorest bracket of households and just shy of $250k for the wealthiest. Keep those figure in mind.
The chart on that page actually breaks down the cost year by year, by age, so if you were looking at a hypothetical situation where somebody took on the responsibility of raising a child who had already been born, you could do the math appropriately.
These figures aren't any kind of absolute benchmark for the resources needed to merely keep a human being alive from one age to another, of course... they're based on the amount of money that is spent on children in the country that is sort of the poster child for the First World. It's based on our way of life and our standard of living.
This is how much money we spend on a child, on average. It doesn't include the cost of bringing that child into the world. It doesn't include the cost of post-secondary education.
If an American adopts a child from a country that's impoverished, that's the kind of money that is going to be spent making sure that child has "a good life": making sure they have nutritious food and clean water and education and possibly health care, clothing and shelter and toys to stimulate and educate and entertain and distract.
$7,000 to $14,000 dollars a year to take this one person out of a life of poverty... is that a bad price, to take someone out of those circumstances? It might not be, if our reaction to the sort of desperate circumstances that much of the world exists in is to take one specific human being and remove them from those circumstances.
But with that kind of money... well, the gross capita income in Haiti is $480. (It was, anyway, at the point that chart was made. I think the figure for 2010 might be lower.) Think about how little money it would take to change somebody's life if that's all that they have to get by on to begin with.
You could pick twenty-eight random people and double their income with $7,000 dollars. How many mouths would that feed? How many lives would that change?
You could give clean water to 500-1,000 more people a year, with the amount of money it costs to raise a child in America.
You could send Afghan children to school.
You could invest in infrastructure and education. You could support economic opportunities for disadvantaged women. If you had the money to take on a child from overseas, you could, in short, spend that money... you could even spend a fraction of that kind of money... to change the conditions that we find so horrifying to view from afar that it motivates us to swoop in and "rescue" children from their own families.
...
Now, I don't honestly think anybody reading this right now has an extra hundred grand per year and is thinking to themselves, "Gosh, I can't make up my mind... do I want to adopt a child from overseas or do I want to start a lifetime of philanthropy to try to change things from the ground up?" While it would be great if the above motivates a few donations, the other purpose is to lay the groundwork for what I'm going to say next.
Laura Silsby is, unless the news has been uncharacteristically skewed against a white American Christian lady, a human trafficker. Another word for that is "slave trader".
What's going on in Haiti right now is not that a group of well-meaning people, through their ignorance or lack of judgment or impulsiveness, have been accidentally ensnared by a law meant to curtail an activity that their plan sort of resembled. The law accomplished its purpose.
There's enough coming out in the news that there is room for some semi-informed speculation about Silsby's motives, but I'm not even going to get into that. I'm just talking about what she did.
Her plan involved claiming (both to authorities and her co-congregants, it seems) that she had documents giving her permission to take "100 Haitian children" out of Haiti and into the Dominican Republic, where she'd be able to put them up for adoption. Stop and think about that. 100 children. Not "the following children". Not "the individual children listed below". She was claiming to have permission to pick up 100 children and transport them across the border, where she would make money giving them to people.
She was claiming the right, in other words, to treat the children of Haiti... brown-colored children of a poor, non-Christian, non-American nation... as a commodity. An absolutely interchangeable commodity.
And... though she didn't really think this through... she obviously believed this claim was plausible. Anybody who was working with her who wasn't actually in on the scheme certainly found it perfectly believable. The authorities she dealt with on both sides of the Haitian/Dominican border were less persuaded.
I'm not a lawyer. I'm not an expert on international adoption. Even knowing that there are abuses of the system and there is endemic exploitation and there is commercialization and commoditization of children going on within the legal channels, I doubt very much that any nation which actually tracks such things issues papers that say, in effect, "This document entitles the bearer, A Nice White Lady, to one hundred (100) children." Her imaginary document apparently had no reference to the legal status of these children and put no onus on her to coordinate what she was doing with any kind of authorities who might be tasked with looking after their welfare... again, not just on the Haitian side of the border.
Her whole scheme seemed to hinge on the idea that for any Dominican Republic officials who happened to notice a new orphanage suddenly appearing in a posh resort catering to wealthy white people from overseas, "oh, these are Haitian children" would be sufficient explanation for how they came to be in her (and this really is the right word) possession.
Commodities.
To anybody who thinks that under the circumstances she should be let off with a warning because of some sort of perceived "gray area" or the idea that maybe she really didn't understand the enormity of what she was doing, it turns out she was let off with a warning the first time she tried to steal a busload of kids. And she turned right around and picked up another batch of lil interchangeable commodities to try again.
Given our history in this country... our shameful and not at all distant (150 years is only two, three human lifetimes) history as the last "civilized" nation of western, European-descended folk who thought it was really cool to literally commoditize human beings of another race... we should be way more sensitive about this stuff than we are. We should be way more aware of this.
There should be nobody in the United States who misses the undertones of what was going on here, but of course there are.
Look, we all know there are people who are also trafficking in children for much worse purposes... there are children being trafficked who suffer far worse fates than being adopted by well-to-do foreigners. But that doesn't change what Silsby was doing. She can't claim ignorance of the law when at every turn, she was told by officials on both sides of the border that what she was doing was trafficking and chose to ignore it. Did she think the laws of Haiti wouldn't dare to descend upon her? Did she think that the risk wasn't big enough to outweigh the reward?
I don't know.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for her cohorts. I understand how they might have been sucked in... there are actually numerous scams going on in the United States at any given time that are based on taking advantage of the belief that one's congregation is full of people who are Right With God and who will never lie or deceive you. It's a dangerous belief, and one that's not particularly well-supported by the Bible (I don't recall what number of people the Bible says are righteous, but I think it's smaller than the number it takes to fill a church), and even that speaks to an arrogance, a sort of imperialism: we are the good people and everybody else is bad. Anything WE do is right. Anything they do is suspect.
And of course that leads right into any child is better off with one of US than with one of THEM... the kind of thinking that leads to stolen generations. So, yes, perhaps some of the people involved really wanted nothing more than to improve the lives of some children. They didn't approach that goal from a very pure place, though... and see also: what several thousand dollars a year can really do to improve the lives of children.
Also, whatever they believed about Silsby's plan and the legality of what they were doing, they were evidently lying to the parents, lying to the children... if your plan requires you to lie to children, Jesus may not approve of it as strongly as you think.
There have been other news stories done in the wake of this "scandal" crime with reporters talking to Haitian parents who explain how willing they are to give their children up to families overseas. I worry about this stirring up sympathy for people running schemes like Silsby's. The thing is, these parents are in an impossible situation where there are no good options available to them, and so some of them take the one that seems like the best for their children.
But the key is that this option is contingent on the idea that a foreigner with enough money to care for a child in the American fashion intervenes in their lives in the first place! I'm not going to sit here and condemn everybody who's ever taken part in a foreign adoption (though honestly there are people who will do that, and they have several good points), but I will point out again that this kind of money could be spent on the ground in countries like Haiti to help end the circumstances that will otherwise result in even more children being born and living in the conditions you might "rescue" one single child from.
I could keep going on this forever but I'd just end up repeating myself. Children aren't commodities, no matter how desperate the circumstances they're living in. Adopting a child doesn't "make a difference" in a statistically meaningful sense.
Please Note: The question of "Why should we...?" (spend the money to improve Haiti, get involved, feel any sense of guilt or responsibility) is a separate topic from the one I'm addressing here. It is, for the purposes of this post, The Conversation That Is Not Happening Here. The adoption scheme of Silsby hinged upon the idea that there are already people with money to spend on improving the lives of Haitian children.
Related reading:
Orphans???, a posting from Anthropology Now that partly inspired this.
Also worth reposting, since I know many people don't have money to spare:
The Hunger Site.
Free Rice