Virgil

Perhaps by now you may have seen this disturbing story.

Russia furious over adopted boy sent back from US

By NATALIYA VASILYEVA and KRISTIN M. HALL, Associated Press Writers Nataliya Vasilyeva And Kristin M. Hall, Associated Press Writers – Sat Apr 10, 2:21 am ET

MOSCOW – Russia threatened to suspend all child adoptions by U.S. families Friday after a 7-year-old boy adopted by a woman from Tennessee was sent alone on a one-way flight back to Moscow with a note saying he was violent and had severe psychological problems.
The boy, Artyom Savelyev, was put on a plane by his adopted grandmother, Nancy Hansen of Shelbyville.

“He drew a picture of our house burning down and he’ll tell anybody that he’s going to burn our house down with us in it,” she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “It got to be where you feared for your safety. It was terrible.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called the actions by the grandmother “the last straw” in a string of U.S. adoptions gone wrong, including three in which Russian children had died in the U.S.

In an exclusive interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, Dmitry Medvedev said the boy “fell into a very bad family.”
[Snip]

You can read the rest of the story here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_russia_adopted_boy

There are also a few video clips from various news media which are worth watching:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfu54T6A__c

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzUOU6usHAk

Now this is disconcerting to begin with, but given that I’m in the middle of an adoption process, you can understand why this story concerns my wife and me. It’s hard to tell what’s the truth here, but I suspect both the child and the parents are somewhat dysfunctional. The article briefly mentions that the mother is a single parent. That in itself is problem one. Two, the child is seven years old and probably has either had a dysfunctional birth family or has spent his entire childhood in an orphanage. It is hard (not impossible) for children to get the proper socialization at those critical ages when they are in an relatively unsupervised orphanage. This is why we have insisted on wanting infant. Three, the adopting mother obviously is not completely in touch with reality. Even if she wanted to give back a child, you can’t believe that putting him on a plane and sending him back is sufficient.

Russia seems in my opinion over reacting to the concerns with the US. The ABC news video cites that the US adopts 1600 children per year from Russia and that over “several years” there were 15 child abuse concerns. Now I don’t know what “several years” amounts to, but even for one year, that’s less than one percent and over three years less than a third of a percent. Now I would think that child abuse runs at a higher frequency than that for birth parents. The amount of checking they’ve done in our history has been extensive, I can vouch for that. I don’t know what kind of agency this woman used and to what extent her background was checked. But none of the articles mentions any criminal history and while the boy claims (and I believe him) that she pulled his hair, there isn’t any other mention or signs of violence. While I don’t condone her pulling his hair, it doesn’t seem that she was extreme in her discipline. Her real crime was putting him on a plane.

Now Russia’s threat to suspend US adoptions really concerns us. Yes, we are adopting from Kazakhstan and not Russia, but Kazakhstan is a former Soviet satellite and Russia has a particular influence on them. I truly hope this doesn’t affect our adoption or experience in the next few weeks.