(DOWNLOAD) "Intercountry Adoption on the Internet (Report)" by Adoption & Fostering # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Intercountry Adoption on the Internet (Report)
- Author : Adoption & Fostering
- Release Date : January 22, 2007
- Genre: Family & Relationships,Books,Nonfiction,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 237 KB
Description
Introduction There has been a sharp increase in the number of intercountry adoptions over the past three decades (Kane, 1993; Selman, 2002) and a parallel decrease in the number of national adoptions of young children (Hoksbergen and Laak, 2005). Offering children for intercountry adoption has been used as a solution to poverty and child abandonment in developing nations and countries undergoing economic transition where there is poor family support and a lack of child welfare services (Browne et al, 2006). However, there has been debate about the appropriateness of this approach. First of all, only four per cent of the children in institutions are 'true' biological orphans with both parents deceased (Browne et al, 2005). The legitimacy of children with living parents and relatives being placed for adoption without a prior attempt to rehabilitate them with their biological families has been questioned, as exemplified by the recent case of young boy in Malawi being adopted by the celebrity Madonna. Even in cases where intercountry adoption is the only option left for a child, other than prolonged institutional care, concerns have been expressed that the needs of the child are not adequately considered or matched appropriately to adopting families (Saclier, 2000; Mulheir et al, 2004). So far, this issue has been flagged up in field observations. Thus, there is an urgent need for scientific and systematic investigations to establish the extent of this problem. One way to explore it is to compare the current intercountry adoption practice against the international legal benchmarks: the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) provides guidelines to ensure the welfare and the rights of the child are upheld, and the Hague Convention is the standard of care for children that have been moved across borders.