Elizabeth Bartholet & David Smolin Debate International Adoption

Fleasbiting is excited to announce a written debate between Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Bartholet and Samford University Law Professor (and our own Fleasbiting blogger) David Smolin.  The debate will comprise a chapter in the upcoming book, "Intercountry Adoption: Policies, Practices, and Outcomes" edited by Judith L. Gibbons (Saint Louis University) and Karen Smith Rotabi (Virginia Commonwealth University) to be published by Ashgate Publishing in June 2012.  

The book can be pre-ordered online for a discount at Ashgate Publishing.  Frankly though, at a discounted cost of $108, it is priced more for serious research and university libraries than for personal or public libraries....which is why we're excited to have permission from the publishers to post the debate on-line where we can all read it.  I'll get to posting the link in a minute.  First things first....

Terms of the Debate:

Professors Bartholet and Smolin were each given the same three questions to answer independently (apart from each other, not knowing what the other's answer would be), and then one opportunity to respond to the other's answers.  Strict space limitations were enforced for both answers and responses.

This strictly controlled debate makes clear the two law professors' starkly different perspectives on the law, policies, and facts relevant to intercountry adoption.

I imagine that most readers of this blog will be familiar with Professor Elizabeth Bartholet.  She remains one of the more active, vocal, and well-known advocates for intercountry adoption (ICA)   Her many writings on intercountryadoption are either cited or else available for free download on her facultyweb page.

Likewise, most readers of this blog are likely familiar with Professor David Smolins' writings on international adoption.  Some can be found here on Fleasbiting; but most of Professor Smolin's writings on intercountry adoption are available for free download on his bepress webpage.

David Smolin says about the debate:  

The debate illustrates my argument that advocates for ICA, such as Prof. Bartholet, unintentionally undermine ICA by denying and minimizing the abuses and resisting necessary regulations on money, intermediaries, and agency accountability that could reduce those abuses.  Some ICA advocates (like Professor Bartholet) also minimize the significance of the losses and difficulties for adoptees of the trans-racial, trans-cultural, and trans-national nature of ICA, as well as the trauma to family and child of the loss of relationship between child and original family.  Although purportedly pro-ICA, I think this approach is contributing to its destruction.
  

By contrast, Prof. Bartholet classifies me with anti-ICA forces whom she sees as destructive of the best interests of children.   She perceives ICA as under assault from such forces.
  

In the midst of this debate are questions about the numbers and characteristics of “unparented” children (or orphans) in “need” of ICA, the extent of abusive practices, the significance and interpretation of the subsidiary principle and of relevant international law, and the nature of interventions short of full adoption.     

I look forward to comments (I hope respectful even if passionate!) on the debate or the issues it raises. 

And so without further ado, here is the link to the debate.  It will take you to the bepress site page for the debate.  To read the debate, click on the button to the left of the photo that says "download."  This will allow you to download the debate file (in pdf form) to your computer where you can read it:

Elizabeth Bartholet & David Smolin Debate International Adoption

Enjoy!  And again, as David said, comments and debate on the issues it raises are welcome.  Please post those comments here as there is nowhere to post comments on the bepress site.

Desiree

"The Debate" between Elizabeth Bartholet and David Smolin, currently pre-published on the internet by permission of the book publisher (see below) at bepress: Selected Works of David Smolin .

"The Debate" by Elizabeth Bartholet and David Smolin, to be a chapter in the upcoming book,

"Intercountry Adoption: Policies, Practices, and Outcomes" edited by Judith L. Gibbons (Saint Louis University) and Karen Smith Rotabi (Virginia Commonwealth University) to be published by Ashgate Publishing in June 2012.  The book is to include chapters by the following, many of whom are well known scholars, thinkers, and stakeholders in the field of adoption:  Peter Selman; Jonathan Dickens; Kathleen Ja Sook Berquist; Karen Smith Rotabi; Cristina Nedelcu and Victor Groza; Kay Johnson; Kelley McCreery Bunkers and Victor Groza; Kelley McCreery Bunkers, Karen Smith Rotabi, and Benyam Dawit Mezmur;  Femmie Juffer and Marinus H. van Ijzendoom; Laurie C. Miller; Monica Dalen; Elizabeth Bartholet and David Smolin; Judith L. Gibbons and Karen Smith Rotabi; Thomas M. Crea; Jesus Palacios; Rhoda Scherman; Hollee McGinnis; and Judith L. Gibbons and Karen Smith Rotabi.  The book is can be ordered online for a discount at Ashgate Publishing. Frankly though, at a discounted price of $108, it is priced more for serious research and university libraries than for personal or public libraries.

Finding the Truth & Returning Stolen Children: Journeying through Schizophrenic Interpretations and Confusing Realities in an Adoption Myth-Saturated Society

This post is a little different from others on Fleasbiting because it deals with a personal question.   One that we get repeatedly these days. 

While we don’t owe the world an explanation, I do think that explaining the situation that we negotiated is instructive for understanding just how difficult these situations are and why reform is necessary both to keep them from continuing to happen to other families and to show the need for better help for families when they do happen.

I’m NOT going to tell our adoption story here on this blog.  For those who don’t know it, the broad outlines of the story can be found in a July 14, 2007 interview withSteve Inskeep at NPR:  “An Adoption GoneWrong.”   The story of how the girls that we adopted ended up in the adoption stream is also here:  “An Indian Adoption Story:  Stolen Children.”  (the story is on several pages, so to keep reading click “next page” at the bottom of each page)

So here, in its latest guise (a comment from our latest post which had nothing to do us & our story but was about Chinese adoptions and the US government), is the question we’re most often asked (Please note that I didn’t called the question a dumb question, but that the asker herself wrote “dumb question.”)

Dana’s Question :

Dumb question:  If you know your girls were stolen, surely they have adoption in India:  why did you not facilitate your girls’ parents adopting their children back?
I don’t get it.  You know they were obtained illegally even though you yourself were innocent of criminal intent.  So your answer to a wrong being done is…to perpetuate the wrong by continuing to keep this couple’s daughters far away from them for most of the year?
It’s like that adoption scandal in Fiji where children were also outright stolen.  As far as I know not one American family who adopted those kids has bothered taking them home and getting the adoption overturned OR paying for the natural family to adopt back their own children.
It’s nice you’re writing a blog about this stuff.  But it’s easy to write a blog.  If a wrong’s been done thought, and you could have fixed it and you didn’t, that’s not OK.

Answer:

Dana,

We did NOT know for sure that the girls were stolen.  It took six years to confirm the fact. 

And as for returning the girls to their parents....by the time the facts were confirmed it couldn't be done.  Even by their younger falsified ages, one was by then a legal adult, and the other was on the cusp of legal adulthood.  Legally and ethically, you cannot return adults to their parents.  Adults are their own persons, who belong to no one and who make their own legal decisions.  And by then, of course, these adults were culturally American and had become accustomed to a lifestyle very different from that of their mother’s rural Indian village, where women are not taught to read, are not schooled, and are married off at 14; these adults had also lost their first language by then.  What we did was take each of the girls to India for a reunion with their family.  The choice of what each did next in regard to their family and their lives was entirely theirs.  As for ourselves, we have remained involved with the girls’ original family since then.

You could still ask why it took six years for their allegations to be confirmed.  I'll try to explain that too.

Because they had been threatened and were told never to tell us the truth, the girls hid the truth from us for the first six weeks they were in our home.

Once we learned of their allegations we immediately contacted our placement agency and requested that they investigate the girls' allegations to confirm or refute them (yes, at first, we naively believed that our agency would be as concerned as we were and that they would investigate).

It took several months for us to realize that the agency felt no great urgency in the matter; soon too there was another Indian adoption scandal and the excuse that it was "too dangerous" to investigate.   Later we’d be told that the truth didn’t matter, but only what the girls believed was the truth.  Our agency over years refused repeated requests to investigate.

Busy that first year and a half with the girls' day to day emotionally disturbed behavior, rage, and terror, we also contacted the local mental health professionals our home study agency recommended (this was the only help we’d get from them).   The mental health professionals told us to come back in a year after the girls were through the "initial adjustment to adoption" and had learned English. 

It became quickly apparent that we were very much alone in analyzing the situation--both in determining the truth of the girls' allegations of being stolen children and also in determining what connection, if any, their emotionally disturbed behavior had to the possibility of them being "stolen children."  Without professional help to find out the truth and to set the girls’ behavior and allegations in a normative context, we had a hard time knowing how to understand both the truth of what the girls said and the meaning of their behavior and attitudes.

We were ALONE and IGNORANT and OVERWHELMED. 

The only ones willing to help us think through these things and make these judgments were other adoptive parents, and the consensus among these other adoptive parents both privately and publicly (on adoption support lists) was that the girls’ allegations were almost certainly NOT true.    

Remember that this was 1998.  Adoption corruption was NOT very much in the news and so the possibility that our daughters were illegally sourced seemed unreal and remote. 

In terms of the girls’ behavior and attitudes, the consensus (indeed, the assumption) was that our daughters’ behavior was at the extreme of the normal range, but normal nonetheless.  (Knowing what I know now, I would beg to differ and see their behavior as indicative of stolen children struggling to come to terms with injustice and a stolen life).   

As new adoptive parents we were very much in the sway of the adoption myth belief system and very much within the fold/peer pressure of adoptive parents who passionately believed in the adoption-myth, the trustworthiness of the international adoption system, and the commitment and competency of the involved governments to adequately regulate and police the adoption system.  

In other words to even entertain the possibility that what the girls alleged was true, one had to doubt or reject a very strong belief system reinforced by a strong community that represented our only help at that point.  1998 was not 2011, or 2008 or even 2005 in this regard.

[Note that almost all adoption corruption--whether coercion of first parents to relinquish, persuading non-infertile folks to become adoptive parents, or persuading the general public or anyone in particular of the absolute goodness of international adoption in spite of facts to the contrary--involves persuading people of a strong belief system (whose foundations have been laid for decades in our popular culture) and then reinforcing that strong belief system.  This belief system  is often at odds with other knowledge, emotions, and values and often requires the suspension of the usual protections of questioning assumptions, and using research and critical thinking to evaluate truth claims.]

I’m not saying that we didn’t seriously entertain the possibility of the girls’ allegations being true and suffer many sleepless nights as a result, just that it was much harder in that context to believe that they could be true without concrete confirmation.   Getting that confirmation or refutation proved to not be easy or even advisable.  Who could confirm or refute it?  Who was willing? 

In the meantime we were told there were many reasons we should NOT believe the girls.  And many other circumstances/contexts that made our quest more difficult if not ill-advised.  

Firstly, we were told that such claims (of being stolen children) were not uncommon among adopted children; the claims represented an inability on the part of the child to accept the truth of her situation and were essentially wishful/magical thinking used to explain away a mother's betrayal. 

Secondly, we were told that the claims might actually be true from the girls' point of view even if they weren't really true, as relinquishing parents sometimes staged scenes to make it appear to children as if the parents didn't have a choice in relinquishment so as to save face in the eyes of the their children. 

Thirdly, if their mother HAD relinquished the girls and gone on to establish a new life and a new identity ditching her children in the process (as we were told was common in India), then we (or anyone who didn't understand the culture enough to make inquiries discretely enough) could actually endanger the mother's health or even her life (outing her past to a new husband who would then beat or even kill her in retaliation).

Fourthly, we were told that the likelihood of the girls' stories being true was low because older children are hard to place and no orphanage director in his right mind would seek out hard to place children, steal them, and then get stuck with them (bad business, we were told).

Fifthly, the girls themselves were ambivalent about us finding their parents.  They refused to tell us why this was so; we could only guess.  My guess now years later is that it had to do avoiding the local custom of being married off a year after puberty (overdue & imminent in their cases). 

Sixthly, in terms of us dropping everything and running off to Indian ourselves to research things (which seemed impossibly difficult and ill-advised), it would have been nearly impossible.  We had no extended family to help us.  We were the parents of 5 biological children ages 2-13.  We were the new adoptive parents to two extremely emotionally disturbed children.  It was literally a full-time job just to keep the girls alive and moving forward.  We also had to earn a living.  There is no way one parent could have done everything while the other went off to India.

Seventh, we needed help in India.  We did not have an address; the name of the village was not on any maps we could find; we did not speak the language.  We did over a number of years ask individuals in the local community with family in the relevant state for help, but always the family members back in India would refuse to do anything.  No middle class Indians we could find wanted to wander around rural India looking for the girls’ parents, knowing that a broader adoption scandal in the state had rendered the situation potentially volatile.   It took us years to find a local Indian census map detailed enough to contain the name of such a small village; it took years to find the activist for the poor willing to go into a poor rural village, and with sensitivity make the right inquiries.   And even then her initial inquiries were rebuffed by those in the village; it took persistence and the right approach on her part to get the people to admit they knew the people involved.    We could have never done this alone. 

Eighth, the girls’ accusations, while extremely serious and deserving of immediate investigation, left a lot of critically-important, unresolved questions:  questions that could only be resolved by finding the family and discretely obtaining the truth.  There was literally no way for white Americans who didn’t speak the language to go to a tiny rural village and discretely make such inquiries, for our very presence in such a place would have created a sensation.  Again, without help of the right kind, we were helpless.   

Finally, perhaps most ironic of all (as I write this to explain why we did NOT immediately hop on a plane and head to India to search for the family) is the fact that there was considerable pressure from the adoption community to NOT take the girls allegations seriously.  We were literally told that continuing to consider the possibility that the girls’ allegations were true meant that we were evidencing a lack of commitment to our new daughters—that we were BAD parents.  We were told that we should simply buckle down and parent these kids.  We were told that there was “no way back for these kids” and therefore the sooner we came to terms with that, the sooner the girls would get beyond their emotional disturbance and settle in.  And so, ironically, for years and years the accusations against us were exactly the opposite of your accusation against us.  We were castigated for taking our daughters’ allegations seriously and—horrors!—the unmentionable, unspoken implication in the back of others’ minds: that we might even consider returning the girls if they had been stolen.    That’s what you call damned if you do and damned if you don’t.   The victims of the crime get blamed more than those responsible for the crime.

We were encouraged  by the adoption community during this early confusing time to interpret what the girls said as the opposite of face value.  If they said they hated us and missed their parents, we were to interpret that to mean that they loved us and really wanted us as parents but were afraid of rejection.

This is one reason why I speak of the adoption myth belief system.   How could anyone judge what is true or false in anything when presented with this kind of double-think?  And how could a child who actually WAS stolen ever be heard when everything she says must be subject to reinterpretation?  And when returning her to her parents is seen as immoral?  Three years into our adoption a psychologist actually told me that she could not be involved in our case if indeed we were to find out the girls were stolen, that returning the girls to their parents was even a remote possibility in my mind.—and I hadn’t even broached the subject.  The psychologist’s mind was just racing along the implications of finding out the truth.

Where is the normative information against which to judge whether particular behaviors and levels of emotional disturbance are outside the normal range and therefore might warrant setting aside reinterpretation strategies?  Are reinterpretation strategies ever correct?  Mostly correct?  Never correct?  Sometimes correct?  Who judges?

Are original families unfit to parent their own children if they live in societies that disrespect women?  Where does one set the bar?  Who’s to judge?  By whose standards?

So, Dana, you see, there were no easy answers.  There were only struggles.  And confusion.  And trying to pick between interpretations when we had little to no basis on which to do so.

If we had received the help we needed in 1998/1999, things would have been very different.  The family should have been found, the truth ascertained, and children returned, right then, at the beginning.

It isn’t easy to write a blog about this stuff.  It’s hard.  It’s about the search for justice when society doesn’t care.  It’s an attempt to get society to CARE by exposing the cruelty and injustice and ugliness of that which tries to pass itself off as good.  It’s an attempt to try to break the hold of the adoption myth on our society.    It’s an attempt to get people to wake up and extend the same human understandings of emotions, of a child’s love for her parents, and a parent’s love for her children to everyone—even and especially to first mothers and their children.    The wrong that was done against the girls’ parents cannot be fixed.  It could only have been fixed in the first year or two. 

Of course, it’s not OK that we didn’t fix it.  We bear the guilt for that even if we aren’t strictly speaking morally culpable (and had no criminal intent in adopting—we didn’t. We were the patsies).  And we live with it every day.  We were ignorant.  We were naïve.   Though we were looking for answers diligently, we didn’t find the answers in time. 

We are dedicated to ensuring that society is no longer naïve and ignorant about these things. 

We are dedicated to learning and understanding more about these things and sharing that knowledge with others.  Truth is an elephant surrounded by blind men.  I want to understand the perspectives of all the blind men and synthesize them into a holistic understanding.  I’m tired of the perspective of one blind man (the adoption industry) being presented as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  And I don’t want to substitute another blind man’s truth for the whole truth either.  I want to listen to all and synthesize them into an ever-evolving, ever-learning, ever-refined, complicated understanding that can then be used to help control this elephant of adoption so that it stops hurting people and is harnessed and trained and modified (and the more I learn the more I think it HAS to modified).

Desiree

Vacuous US Government Assurances Regarding China & Child Laundering: Do They Really Think We’re This Dumb ( Or Are They This Dumb)?

The following notice about adoption from China appeared last August on the US State Department of State's Bureau of Consular Affairs Intercountry Adoption page for China:

China

August 15, 2011

Notice: Concerns About Information on the Background of Children Adopted from China

The press has reported allegations that in 2005 local family planning officials in China, in the name of enforcing the “One Child Policy,” seized children from their birth families and sold them to orphanages. Embassy Beijing has been in touch with China’s Centre for Children’s Welfare and Adoption (CCCWA) about the allegations mentioned in the articles and CCCWA has promised updates on their investigations when they have further information. We are not aware of any intercountry adoption by a U.S. family that has been confirmed to be linked to these alleged actions.

In response to these concerns, we would like to remind adopting parents that verification of a child’s eligibility for intercountry adoption is an integral part of the intercountry adoption process. If there is evidence that documents may have been falsified or are not accurate, then officials at a U.S. Embassy or Consulate conduct an investigation before the visa is approved. If you wish to get more information on your child’s background, we suggest that you contact the adoption service provider that assisted you with the adoption.

If you have any further questions about this notice please contact the Office of Children’s Issues at: 1-888-407-4747 within the United States or 202-501-4444 from outside the United States.

More than 37,000 children were adopted into the United States from China during the boom years of 2000 through 2005. During that time, most (including myself) thought that the Chinese adoption system was almost completely free of child laundering---free of practices that illicitly obtain children through purchase, fraud, or kidnapping. (Of course, there has always been the underlying issue of the role of coercive population control policies as a significant factor in abandonments.) Since then, there has been an unending and growing series of revelations indicating that by 2002, and probably beginning by 2000, there was systematic misconduct in how children were obtained for intercountry adoption. It has now reached the point where these concerns and revelations have become publicized even within China, and where many adoptive parents have become aware of these difficulties.

This places those who adopted from China during these years in an enormously difficult situation, and sets the stage, as this generation of Chinese adoptees grows up, of a generation of Chinese adult adoptees wondering whether they were purchased or stolen children.

In this context, one might have thought that the governments involved would feel some sense of responsibility and ownership, given that every one of these adoptions was approved by both China and the United States. Instead, one sees an enormous face-saving set of denials. Given the authoritarian nature of the Chinese government, one may have expected that in China. For Americans, however, it is embarrassing to see our own government similarly engage in face-saving denial, for it indicates a government more concerned with saving its own reputation than in the best interests of the children and adults whose lives were directly impacted.

Consider the most recent U.S. Government public statement on this issue, posted on the official State Department adoption web site in August 2011, and linked and copied below. Notice the use of meaningless assurances, which one does not have to be a lawyer (as I am) to spot. For example, we are told that various parts of the Chinese government are involved in responding to these allegations and conducting investigations. While it has been true that sometimes the Chinese government conducts face-saving prosecutions that do go so far as to prosecute some individuals, we also know that the Chinese government tends to issue denials that any of the trafficked children ended up being placed overseas for adoption, and tends to minimize the scope of the scandals they investigate, due to their concern with maintaining the positive reputation of their adoption program. Is the United States government really telling us to trust that the Chinese government would tell us if they discovered that large numbers of trafficked children had been adopted into other countries? Do the U.S. government officials who wrote this really themselves believe that the Chinese government would publicize such facts if they discovered them?

Then, the U.S. government tells us that they are “not aware” of any U.S. adoptions which have been “confirmed” to be linked to a specific subset of these wrongs: the seizures of children by population control officials. A key word here is “confirmed.” The reason such has not been confirmed is that the Chinese government would not admit it if they had confirmed such a fact and the United States government does not itself investigate such allegations once the children have arrived in the United States. Without adequate investigation, such cases can never be “confirmed.” You cannot confirm what you do not investigate.

I will use my own experience as an example. We adopted two older girls from India who turned out to be laundered/trafficked children wrongfully taken from their family. We informed the United States government and the government of India. Yet, neither government ever conducted any investigations of these cases. Thus, even though we have done reunions with their family in India and have documented in detail that the children were adopted without consent and with false paperwork, in an official sense, these remain “unconfirmed” cases. And, of course, our own actions in informing the governments involved and conducting our own confirming investigations is relatively rare. In most instances where adoptive families suspect that the children may have been trafficked or laundered, they are far too frightened to either inform the government s involved, or investigate. And even among the minority of families that carry out their own independent investigations and confirm the wrongdoing, only a smaller minority ever informs the governments involved of what they have themselves discovered.

So, in short, it is entirely cynical for the government that fails to conduct the investigations necessary to “confirm” such cases to issue vacuous assurances. It would be like a government claiming that the crime rate is down after they systematically decide not to prosecute crimes.

The state department further assures us:

Verification of a child’s eligibility for intercountry adoption is an integral part of the intercountry adoption process. If there is evidence that documents may have been falsified or are not accurate, then officials at a U.S. Embassy or Consulate conduct an investigation before the visa is approved.

These assurances are similarly misplaced. First, the visa approval processes the government mentions here occurred before the children arrived in the United States; in terms of China before 2005 there were few suspicions that there was any wrongdoing, and hence presumably no such individualized investigations were conducted by the U.S. Embassy or Consulate. Second, in China relinquishment of a child is illegal, and hence adopted children were all officially “abandoned,” generally without any paperwork identifying their original families. This makes any after the fact investigation extremely difficult. Third, the normal processes for intercountry adoption would involve the United States government simply reviewing documentation of the child’s status as adoptable as provided by governments or others in the country of origin. Where the child is obtained through force, fraud, or funds, false paperwork is provided indicating the child was properly abandoned or relinquished, and then everything proceeds based upon a review of the false paperwork. Child laundering scandals in numerous nations, including China, as well as Guatemala, Cambodia, India, Vietnam, Samoa, and others, have indicated that this normal review of documents process is totally ineffective in screening out children who have been illicitly obtained.

So why does the government provide us with these disingenuous set of false but vacuous assurances? Presumably, the government believes that they can get away with it, and can appear to be responding to the publicized scandals in a purportedly responsible way. It is up to the diverse adoption community---adoptees, adoptive families, agencies, scholars, and original families (although usually powerless and voiceless) to let the government know that we are not fooled---nor are we amused---by this verbal sleight of hand.

David

Notice: Concerns About Information on the Background of Children Adopted From China, US Department of State, 15 August 2011

Response to the Christian Adoption and Orphan Care Movement

Law Professor and fellow Fleasbiting blogger David Smolin has recently posted a new article to his collection of adoption related articles at bepress.

"Of Orphans and Adoption, Parents and the Poor, Exploitation and Rescue: A Scriptural and Theological Critique of the Evangelical Christian Adoption and Orphan Care Movement" meets the trendy "Christian adoption and Orphan Care Movement's" arguments head-on in order to respond to them.

The abstract of the article is as follows:

The primary purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that the scriptural and theological analysis undergirding the evangelical adoption and orphan care movement is patently and seriously erroneous. Thus, this essay will demonstrate that, based on the standards, methods, and presuppositions broadly shared by evangelical Christians in analyzing scripture and theology, the evangelical adoption movement’s specific analysis of concepts such as “adoption” and “orphans” has been seriously deficient and has produced conclusions that are demonstrably false. The second purpose of this essay will be to indicate that these errors of scriptural and theological analysis have produced, and are producing, practices that in scriptural and Biblical terms would be called “sinful” and in more secular language can be called exploitative.

The article can be read by clicking on this link and then clicking the "download" button between the article title and the photograph.

Desiree

"Of Orphans and Adoption, Parents and the Poor, Exploitation and Rescue: A Scriptural and Theological Critique of the Evangelical Christian Adoption and Orphan Care Movement" by David Smolin, currently published on the bepress.com site with publication forthcoming in Regent Journal of International law, Vol. 8, No. 2 in Spring 2012. Additional publication of a shortened version of the article is forthcoming in May 2012 in a special Adoption Symposium Issue of The Journal of Christian Legal Thought, published by the Christian Legal Society.

China: 89 Children Rescued from Child Traffickers July 2011

As top headlines in China and around the world proclaimed in July 2011, 89 infants and children were recovered from child traffickers within China during this month.

The 89 children were recovered in two separate operations.

The first, on July 15, recovered 8 infants from a Chinese-Vietnamese cross-border trafficking network.

The second, on July 20, recovered 81 children of various ages from a trafficking network entirely within Chinese borders.

First Recovery Action: July 15, 2011

A Joint Action between China and Vietnam Recovering 8 Trafficked Infants

Earlier reports of children being trafficked to Dongxing City in Guangxi initiated an investigation by local and Chinese central authorities.

Because this investigation centered on cross-border criminal activity, in February 2011, a joint task force was set up between Chinese and Vietnamese officials. This joint task force culminated in a law enforcement campaign (involving more than 300 law enforcement officers) that began on July 15, 2011 with the arrests of 39 child abduction/trafficking suspects and the recovery of 8 trafficked infants.

This joint Chinese-Vietnamese law enforcement campaign, concerned with cross border crime involving the abduction and trafficking of children, is scheduled to continue through September 15, 2011.

Indeed, since the first news report detailing the rescue of these 8 children, further investigation has already revealed that the same trafficking network had smuggled a total of 21 abducted infants from Vietnam to China during the period between June 2, 2011 and the July 15, 2011 raid. This is an additional 13 children beyond the 8 reported as recovered.

Though the 8 recovered infants were first reported to have been ages 7 days to 10 months, subsequent reports have stated that the youngest two, with umbilical cords still attached, were under a week old. Most of the babies were boys.

Details of the elaborate reported abduction, smuggling, and trafficking scheme have since been enumerated by an Liu Ancheng, deputy director of the Criminal Investigation Bureau (of ???). It goes like this:

Vietnamese infants were reportedly abducted in Vietnam by Vietnamese nationals. Allegedly drugged so that they would not cry and call attention to themselves, the infants were then reportedly smuggled across the Beilun River (and the Vietnamese-Chinese border) on bamboo rafts. Subsequently, so as to avoid the border checkpoints, the babies were then reportedly transported by bicycle through the fields bordering the Beilun River and on into nearby Chinese towns. Upon arrival in Dongxing or Fangchenggang, the drugged infants then allegedly continued their journey by bus, arriving first in Nanning, the capital of Guangxi Shuang region, and then in the final leg of their journeys, in either Shanewei or Jieyang in Guangdong. The children’s journeys took an average of 20 hours.

A later article alleged that an obstetrician helped care for the babies while they were awaiting sale. (The report did not say where the obstetrician was located.)

Some news reports put the selling price of the trafficked babies at several thousand yuan to tens of thousands of yuan apiece. However, other news reports put the selling price of the trafficked infants at a reported 40,000 yuan each (about US $6,215).

News reports imply that some of these children had already been sold to Chinese families. There are two clues in the news report that imply that this is so. First, Chinese officials’ commentaries state that the Chinese families who bought these babies will not be allowed to keep them. This clearly implies that at least some recovered children were no longer in transit, nor were they awaiting sale, but that they had already been sold. Secondly, at least one news report includes criticism of removing (at least some? of) these infants from their “adopted famil[es].”

“Separating them from their adopted family may be a second blow to their young minds” (Chen Shiqu)

Obviously, you cannot remove a child from an adopted family and worry about the effect of that removal on the child if the child is not yet with the adoptive family.

(Some readers may object to the use of the word “adoptive” here to describe families who bought trafficked children--especially when those children landed in families through channels that were not sanctioned by the government (not legal). However, I am simply reporting the terminology used by the articles themselves. And after all, to the child, who knows nothing of how he/she came to be with the only family he/she has ever consciously known and to whom he/she has bonded, what is the difference? It is the same conscious experience for the child either way. In fact, this is exactly the point that those who criticized removing the children from the adoptive families, were making. Of course, this kind of point is exactly that often made by adoptive families fighting to retain custody of adoptive children when that custody is challenged by original parents seeking the return of their children. But this argument of not disturbing children who are settled can cut both ways. The same adoptive families who argue that they should retain possession of adoptive children for the sake of continuity for the child (when their own custody is being challenged), do not seem to worry about continuity for the child when it comes to the child’s loss of foster families, first families, etc. with whom the child had bonded--often as the only family he/she had ever known--when the child loses that previous family because an adoption is taking places and the child is to be placed in the adoptive family's arms….. So methinks there is here somewhat of a double standard of worry about the effects on a child of loss of family, and that that double standard has almost everything to do with the adults’ interests in the situation. It is easy to imagine what the best interest of a child is when you as an adult stand to benefit from this decision coming out in your favor. But this is another discussion for another post, and, alas, I have digressed… And within the context of this story, that is not point. It's just that I find it ironic that that idea should pop up here where many might find it objectionable. The world's a funny place, no?)

Upon recovery from traffickers and adoptive families, the 8 infants were taken to local hospitals and health centers for observation. At least one news report asserted that five of the eight children were found to have “serious health issues.” Whether these “health issues” were immediate and temporary and due to transport (for example, the effects of having been drugged) or the stresses of recovery (tiny babies have to be fed regularly to avoid dehydration and other ills) or whether they were suffering from more serious long term issues (for any number of reasons), was not stated.

Officials state that efforts will be made to reunite the infants with their Vietnamese parents, and that DNA testing will be utilized to facilitate this. If, however, officials are unable to properly identify the infants, and efforts to reunite them with their parents are ultimately unsuccessful, the infants, according to current Chinese law, because they lack proper verifiable identification, will NOT be eligible for adoption. Unidentified children not ultimately returned to their original parents, will therefore, at least according to current law, grow up in orphanages. Officials quoted in the article seem to understand that this is a disturbing prospect to many.

In fact, Ji Gang, director of Domestic Adoption of the Chinese Welfare and Adoption Center, is quoted as saying that the possibility of ‘conditional adoption’ (which would allow "children whose parents cannot be found within a specified period of time" to be adopted) is being discussed. (Note that this is the director of Chinese DOMESTIC adoption director speaking and that therefore, he is likely implying that children who can not be properly identified and whose parents are not found, would likely become available for DOMESTIC adoption within China.) This idea is of not letting unidentified children get caught in an institutional limbo where they would be ineligible for adoption is echoed in a quote from Chen Shiqu, Director of the Human Trafficking Office in the Ministry of Public Security:

“We are negotiating with civil affairs departments to improve the laws to allow unidentified children to be adopted”

Second Recovery Action: July 20, 2011

Involving 14 Provinces within China, Recovering 81 Trafficked Children

The second recovery action on July 20 was a much more massive affair, involving more than 2,600 law enforcement officers from no less than 14 Chinese provinces, and resulting in more than 330 arrests. The area involved extends from southwestern China’s province of Fujian to northern China’s province of Hebei.

Although some reports say that the two operations together resulted in the “rescue” of “89 infants,” details in the same reports and others imply that the rescued included, not only infants, but also children well beyond infancy. Indeed, at least one photo shows two of the rescued children; these children are clearly not only not infants, but are beyond puberty; indeed, one of the girls, though relatively young, clearly appears to be pregnant.

Some locations involved the July 20th action, do indeed appear to involved the recovery of nothing but infants. One photo taken in the city of Handan shows a line of smiling policewomen carrying 13 “rescued” infants to safety. Most of the recovered infants in the July 20th action are girls, and they are very young, ranging in age from 10 days to 4 months. Of those infants who had not yet been sold to families, some had been in the care of the traffickers for up to two months. At least one report alleged that those infants found in the traffickers’ care had been being fed low-quality milk powder and had been kept in squalid conditions.

It’s not immediately apparent where the July 20th recovered children came from. News reports note both that abductions by child traffickers of children within China are fairly common, but also note that some Chinese families, especially within rural areas, who prefer sons over daughters, have also been known to sell their infant daughters to traffickers so as to be able to try again for a son. One report states that all of the “rescued” children had been abducted. But all in all, considering all the reports, it remains unclear as to exactly where the children had come from. Given the short period of time that had elapsed since the children were recovered, it is possible that investigators themselves may not have yet known where the children came from.

These children, like the infants rescued earlier on July 15^th, were given medical exams and then taken to orphanages where to be cared for during the process of identification (using DNA and other clues) and attempted reunion with their parents (if they can be found).

That some parent child reunions were already taking place just a few days after the children were recovered is clear from some news report photos. That these reunions could also be emotionally difficult and complicated is also evident. In one photo, a father is shown to have found his twin girls, abducted six years earlier. As I mentioned earlier, though the twins look fairly young, it is also obvious that they are already through puberty, as one of the girls appears to be in an advanced stage of pregnancy. Sadly, the photo caption states that the father was “reluctant” to take his twin girls home again because he “couldn’t accept what [they] had become.” Readers are left to wonder about the father's decision. Did he take his adolescent daughters home or not? One can only begin to imagine the drama of this family's story. Fault--if it was appropriate to assign any--for “what [the girls] had become” in the time they were away from their original family was not almost certainly not their own. How therefore could these girls be rejected by their own father? On the other hand, one has also to identify with the difficulty of the father's situation. The task of rehabilitating adolescents who may have been trafficked for un-named purposes, but purposes that we have to wonder about, would surely not be easy. And the outcome of that rehabilitation, uncertain. The father might very well be taking home virtual strangers whose values might very well differ from his own and his community's, and yet he would become immediately responsible for these adolescents and what happened to them from that time forward. An extremely difficult and complicated assignment for any parent.

Such is one of the problems of older child abduction. Children continue to grow and mature. They become different people than they’d have originally have been if they had never been taken from their families. The abducted children have in some very real sense, ceased to exist; likewise, from the children's point of view the parents have also become odd and foreign to the people they've become. In this way, the harm done to the victims by traffickers who steal children is inestimable. Time which is lost cannot be recovered, but more than that, that which is done can not be undone, influence/culture lost can't be recovered, and influence/culture hijacked by others can't be erased.

What Does This Mean for Supposed “Surplus” of Children Within China and for International Adoption from China?

Speculation is that this, China’s highly publicized and widespread crackdown on child trafficking in July (and for the few months previous to July) is a deliberate move on the part of the Chinese government to convince Chinese citizens, outraged at the government’s past lack of responsiveness to the “growing tide of child kidnapping” and child trafficking within China, that they do indeed care and are taking effective, concrete action.

This growing public outrage is no accident. News reports credit the growing displeasure of citizens with both the rising tide of child abductions and the government’s inaction in regard to them, with the most recent campaign by parents of kidnapped children to raise public awareness and outrage. In particular, a recent Chinese micro-blog campaign by parents of abducted and trafficked children complained about government officials who ignored and hindered parents from finding their abducted children. Parents complained that some law enforcement agencies refused to file reports of missing children, and that law enforcement agencies, even when they did file reports, often failed to act on leads given by parents. The campaign therefore encouraged Chinese citizens to help parents of abducted children recover their missing children by taking photos of children on the street to help facilitate identification of kidnapped children.

The parents of kidnapped and abducted children have, after years of struggle, finally won the attention of not only Chinese citizens, but also of the Chinese state media and the Chinese government officials. The reality of the widespread problem of child abduction and child trafficking within China is now openly acknowledged by both the state media and the government.

Indeed, the state media itself now openly estimates that up to 20,000 children a year are abducted and/or trafficked in China. According to Chen Shinqu, director of the Human Trafficking Office of the Ministry of Public Security:

“Child abductions have entered a phase of high-frequency.”

According to China Daily, Chen sees the "main cause of human trafficking crimes" to be the “existence of a buyer’s market.”

Indeed, many of us who have followed international adoption corruption for a long time, have come to believe that where there is high demand for human children and there is the money to back this demand, entrepreneurs, criminals, and others will arise to ensure that that market demand is met. To believe that it is otherwise is to be naïve.

China's one-child policy is frequently blamed as the cause of this demand for children within China. Under the one child policy most families were allowed only one child. Combined with a cultural and economic preference for sons, in the early years of the one-child policy, this led to the abandonment of many baby girls as families held out for a son. More recently, as the one-child policy has perhaps relaxed somewhat, and the availability of ultrasound machines has proliferated, sex-selective abortion has eliminated baby girls before birth, leading to a highly publicized gender imbalance within China in the younger generations. As the population has grown lop-sided with boys, families have begun to worry about procuring wives for their sons in future years. Some families solve this future problem by buying girl babies, “child brides,” when their sons are young and raising them to be future wives and daughters-in-law.

The shortage of girls has not raised the status of women; instead, girls have become one more rare commodity within a market ready and willing to buy them. Speculation is that far from raising the status of women, a shortage of marriageable women will lead—and indeed may already have led--to greater levels of trafficking of both children and women for sexual purposes and prostitution.

Likewise, as families have been willing to buy a girl child for future purposes, families who desire a son (but are unable to produce one for various reasons) have also become willing to buy one.

Indeed, children, as their numbers have shrunken within Chinese society, are in short supply generally, and so they have become rare commodities capable of fetching high sums.

And as stated before, where the market demands and is willing to pay high prices, suppliers eager to make good money inevitably eventually step in. Thus, child traffickers have increasingly been abducting and trafficking children.

What does all this mean in the international adoption arena? After all, isn’t this a blog primarily about international adoption and international adoption corruption?

Well, perhaps it means that the story peddled for the last twenty years or so by adoption agencies and the popular media, and the story that adoptive parents still hoping to adopt from China—which I STILL hear from acquaintances on the street—tell about China having so many unwanted baby girls that they’re simply there for the picking, (and indeed, we all ought to be lining up to adopt one of them if we were good Christians and cared about children) while it may once have been true, is no longer true. The situation has changed. China may well still have SOME children in need of adoption, but in China, as elsewhere, these children are likely to be seriously handicapped children and much older children. (The advisability of international adoption of much older children will be the subject of other posts.)

China’s domestic demand for healthy, young children—even girls (maybe especially girls)—may well be strong enough to absorb whatever healthy, young children are available.

It also means that the idea that Chinese adoption is, compared to other countries, squeaky clean, is probably also dead. Can we honestly believe that international adoption could remain squeaky clean in a country where child abduction and child trafficking is rampant, where orphanages have been documented to pay people for supplying adoptable young children (yes, this has been documented), where officials have been documented to have forcibly removed children (in excess of the family planning quota) from their parents in order to send them to orphanages, where orphanages gain money for every child they place, and where children are such rare, valuable commodities?

If you believe that one, I know a few other fairy tales that someone would like to tell you, and a few telemarketers and scammers out there that would love to have your name and email address.

Desiree

“China Rescues Dozens of Infants from Human Traffickers” Beijing Newsroom, edited by Alex Richardson and Sui-Lee Wee, Reuters, 27 July 2011

“Human Trafficking Ring Busted” Zheng Caixong and Zhang Yan, China Daily, 27 July 2011

“Chinese police rescue 89 children in two major human trafficking cases” by Chen Zhi, Xinhua News Agency, English.xinhua.com, 27 July 2011

“Authorities to Place Stolen Babies in Care” by Zhang Yan, China Daily, 29 July 2011

“Doctor Helped in Selling of Children to Chinese Families” Financial Times of London (source: Shanghai Daily), 8 August 2011

“China Cracks Down on Child Kidnappings” by Patti Waldmeir, Shanghai, Financial Times of London, 27 July 2011

“Children as young as 10 DAYS old among 89 rescued from clutches of Chinese people traffickers” Daily Mail Online, 27 July 2011

Intercountry Adoption Accountability Project (Part II---Comment and Response)

NOTE: Fleasbiting is having technical issues. Blogspot is malfunctioning and refusing to encode a comment button on our blog--despite our following instructions for fixing the problem. So please know know that is not that we don't want your comments--we do--and not that we don't want to interact with our readers--we do. We hope to have this issue resolved soon. In the meantime, feel free to send your comments to us via email or else save them up until we get this problem fixed. Our apologies.

The following is a comment I received on e-mail; with permission, I am including it here, and will respond immediately below.

Wow what a terrible story. I am sorry for your experience and do not discount it but you seem to be painting all adoptions with the same brush. Our children were not stolen. There is no need to steal children for adoption because there are thousands waiting. We have seen the two orphanages and several others in the country that our children were adopted from and we know that our children were starved for affection and had been that way for some time. It is horrible that someone would steal children for money.
We are the truth. And there are thousands of families who have legitimate stories and legitimate orphans and there are many more waiting. Do not damage their chances of getting out of a hell on earth.

Rebecca Schwindeman (adoptive parent of a child from Russia)

Rebecca’s comments represent, in my view, a common viewpoint, and I appreciate the opportunity to respond. While I will disagree with much of what Rebecca has said, please keep in mind there is nothing personal in this. My response is designed to respond as much to the many people in the adoption community who think in a manner similar to Rebecca, rather than just to Rebecca herself.

First: I have always acknowledged that there are many children adopted who are not stolen children. I would further acknowledge that the problem of stolen/laundered children is not the major problem in Russian adoptions (the country from which Rebecca adopted).

Child laundering has been a serious problem in many sending nations, including Cambodia, China, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Nepal, Samoa, and Vietnam. Further, the reactions to such misconduct have caused many sending nations to sharply reduce, close, or never open to intercountry adoption, including much of Latin America (based on trafficking documented in the 1980s), Cambodia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Nepal, Vietnam, and most of sub-Saharan Africa (which has never opened to IA, in significant part due to concerns with trafficking, corruption, and scandals.)

This is where the blame game comes in. Rebecca asks me not to “damage” the chances of children to be adopted. Since I am an academic, writer, and blogger with no power to directly impact IA or its rules, the implication is that I need to self-censor. I have seen this implied and stated repeatedly---that somehow talking about the things that go wrong is what destroys IA.

My response:

Ignoring abusive adoption practices ensures that the adoption system will never reform; for a system that covers up its mistakes has no incentive to learn from them. Such silence breeds impunity: an impunity which has made IA impervious to reform.

Such an approach would be like running an air traffic system by covering up plane crashes, rather than investigating them and using the information derived to avoid future crashes.

Such an approach also fails to account for the full scope and harm of such abusive adoption practices. Adoption systems in which large numbers of children moved became infected with large-scale and systematic abusive practices impacting substantial numbers of adoptions. Within those systems, even the children who were properly adopted are damaged, because they and their adoptive families must live with the uncertainty about whether or not they were stolen---an uncertainty that is very difficult to resolve. Thus, most adoptive parents and adoptees who were adopted from affected countries have no way of knowing whether their adoptions were tainted by child laundering or other abusive practices. This includes, for example, the 25,000 or so children adopted from Guatemala between 2002 and 2008; the approximately 1500 children adopted from Cambodia between 1997 and 2002; the tens of thousands of children adopted from China between 2002 and 2009; the more than 9,000 children adopted from Ethiopia from 2005 to the present; the more than two thousand children adopted from Vietnam between 2006 and 2009; the more than 300 children adopted from Nepal from 2003 to 2010; and so on….

Systems this seriously broken will eventually break down if not fixed. And they are not fixed in large part because the “don’t talk about it” approach provides a sense of impunity for adoption agencies, facilitators, and government officials. Instead of the adoption community lobbying and pushing to fix broken systems, they lobby to keep broken systems going and open. This leads to a self-replicating cycle of abuse which unfortunately has not yet ended.

Another fundamental point: full orphanages do not mean that adoptions are legitimate or needed. The question is how children got to those orphanages, and whether the children are actually orphans. Illicit child trafficking sucks children out of families and into orphanages. Orphanages in many nations are a kind of boarding school and social safety net for the poor. Thus, the mere existence of large numbers of children in orphanages does not indicate a legitimate need for IA.

What, then, of Russia, where a longstanding practice of institutionalization has victimized large numbers of children? As I have said repeatedly, I agree that child laundering generally is NOT the issue there. I agree (and have said repeatedly in the past) that children held in poor quality institutional care, such as has been the case often in Russia, constitute a serious harm in need of urgent remedy. However, what I said in my first “Accountability Project” post applies specifically to Russian adoptions:

[I]ntercountry adoption has all too often approached the delicate task of transplanting deeply traumatized special needs children across families, languages and cultures with all of the skill, competence and care of a drunk teenager high-jacking a car for a joyride. Consequently, intercountry adoption has also produced a significant degree of wreckage amongst adoptive families.

My rhetoric is deliberately strong; but the underlying realities are worse. The wreckage of the Masha Allen case, the fourteen or more Russian adoptees killed by their adoptive parents, and the Hansen’s family act of returning their seven year old adoptive son to Russia on a plane, are symptoms of the extreme stresses and difficulties in Russian adoptions. Such were finally brought to light to some degree in the popular press by the June 2010 Time Magazine article, “When the Adopted Can’t Adapt; see http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1997439,00.html. As the article documents, a significant percentage of Russian adoptees arrive with severe difficulties for which adoptive parents are poorly prepared; furthermore, there is in practice often very little in the way of practical assistance post-adoption. The harms done to children and families by the low standards of adoption practice are incalculable and severe.

The official announcement of the July 2011 agreement between the United States and Russia in July 2011 notes new provisions “designed to improve post-adoption reporting and monitoring and to ensure that prospective adoptive parents receive more complete information about adoptive children’s social and medical histories and anticipated needs.” See http://adoption.state.gov/country_information/country_specific_alerts_notices.php?alert_notice_type=notices&alert_notice_file=russia_2. This has only occurred, however, after the international incident of the Hansen case, after more than 40,000 children have come to the United States under the prior, deficient system, and after adoptions from Russia have decreased by more than 80% (from 5862 in 2004 to 1079 in 2010). Unfortunately, this latest reform comes very, very late.

Somehow, though, in pointing out such difficulties, I am labeled an enemy of adoption. This “shoot the messenger” mentality creates impunity rather than accountability. We need a better accountability system, where the persons responsible for the harm are held accountable, instead of the messenger who brings news of such harms being the one blamed when adoption systems are closed, limited, decline, or break down.

Unfortunately, we probably won’t get the accountability system we need until adoption advocates like Rebecca demand it. So long as the adoption community minimizes the problems and seeks to silence the messengers, we will have impunity instead of reform. And without reform, adoption systems will continue to break down, again and again and again….

David

An Accountability Project for Intercountry Adoption--Part I

If intercountry adoption were viewed as an industry (a controversial supposition), it would be a declining industry losing market share to higher tech alternatives. The numbers of children coming into the US are down from the 2004 high of almost 23,000, to 11,000 to 12,000 children last year (depending on whether you count the 1,000 or so children paroled in from Haiti). Consequently, the number of U.S. adoption agencies is declining. Adoptions to most other receiving nations are also declining in numbers, so that global intercountry adoptions are down considerably from the high of approximately 45,000 reached around 2004. Some of this “lost market share” is presumably going to various assisted reproductive technologies, the more “tech” orientated competition. (More on these high tech alternatives in later posts….)

If intercountry adoption were viewed as a humanitarian practice (a controversial supposition), it would be one of many such interventions that become mired in unintended consequences, incompetent execution, and ideological controversy. The humanitarian premise of the intercountry adoption movement has been one of providing families for orphans. The reality has too often been one of manufacturing orphans; needlessly separating children from families. Consequently, intercountry adoption has left a trail of needlessly destroyed and separated families sprinkled throughout the developing world. Further, intercountry adoption has all too often approached the delicate task of transplanting deeply traumatized special needs children across families, languages and cultures with all of the skill, competence and care of a drunk teenager high-jacking a car for a joyride. Consequently, intercountry adoption has also produced a significant degree of wreckage amongst adoptive families.

It is important to make the link between the disastrous record of intercountry adoption as a humanitarian intervention, and the declining numbers. A humanitarian intervention (or industry) with a deserved reputation for corruption, incompetence, and scandal will eventually decline.

Amidst these declining numbers and this unnecessary human wreckage, I think it is past time to start an accountability project. Intercountry adoption agencies and “advocates” have for too long gotten away with shifting the blame and maligning the messenger. Yet, it is precisely the adoption agencies and advocates—and the governments that have all too often capitulated to them—that are responsible both for the declining numbers and for this unnecessary human wreckage.

The obstacles to such an accountability project are clear. If you name names, you may get sued. If you name names, you may leave the mistaken impression that the problem is a few bad actors. Because of these limitations, my own work has not been about naming names, but rather about identifying systemic problems with the intercountry adoption system.

Nonetheless, without concentrating on individuals, I think it is essential to lay the blame squarely where it belongs. The worst enemy of the intercountry adoption system has been—and continues to be—the intercountry adoption system itself. Like a spoiled child that has manipulated his/her parents into allowing him/her to eat only sweets with the predictable result of rotten teeth and stunted growth, the adoption industry has been allowed to grow into an indulged, cosseted, undisciplined, and darling, yet self-defeating monster that only succeeds in destroying and harming itself by getting what it wants.

My intent is to never let the people and institutions responsible forget the harm they have done and are doing! And I hope that many of you will continue to join me in this accountability project!

David Smolin