We need to talk today about a very uncomfortable sticky wicket. This morning my husband was sent a reaction TikTok to a 2016 story on “60 Minutes” Australia on adoption rehoming that was claiming to be recent. So recent that our former hometown newspaper The Culpeper Star-Exponent did an article on the reaction video without doing any journalistic research.

Topic was the rehoming of failed adoptions of children like they are dogs or cats. The clip included the very click baity “Child Auction” that was largely staged for the piece. Rehoming of adoptive children is the huge shameful secret of the Evangelical foreign adoption world.

For many years Facebook and other social media were one of the main marketplaces where children changed hands between potential adoptive parents. This came with zero oversight by any government agency, and sadly many children ended up in the hands of those who should never be allowed around children, those on offender lists, those that manufacture child pornography and abusers. So many sad stories.

Back in 2013 the outcry in the media caused a few states to make it illegal to disrupt an adoption and to rehome the child without involving CPS or other agencies. While Facebook and other media giants initially cooperated by removing the rehoming groups a few of them have crept back into social media spaces. Just a quick search here on Facebook brought me to a group dedicated to rehoming failed adoptions privately. This is an issue that has largely been forced underground, but still lurks around the edges.

Perhaps the time has come to make unsupervised rehoming completely illegal nationwide and to prosecute those that violate as child traffickers, because that’s exactly what this is – child trafficking.

Links below:

The excellent series in 2013 about the problems with rehoming by Reuters – https://www.reuters.com/investigates/adoption/…

Interview with Kathryn Joyce of “The Child Catchers” – https://www.npr.org/…/how-evangelical-christians-are…

The 2016 piece by “60 Minutes” Australia – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zzf72YcftdU&t=1s