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you’ll have to forgive me if I’m a bit remiss in responding to asks & fanmail or anything
my international for-profit adoption agency is trying to get in touch with me personally with regards to my “birth mother and additional information about my background.”
which is funny because aside from the orphanages I was in and a necklace (yes I do have an orphan trinket, no I am not a TV trope), there has never been a scrap of background information to begin with. They won’t even say don’t even know where I was “abandoned” or how I was “found.”
I’ve cut off contact with those who should be cut off, changed my name, and travel around so much that the fact these White Savior(tm) wheelers & dealers have even managed to make me aware of their efforts is almost impressive. seriously what a fucking mindjob. my partner is lovely but bio spawned and cannot begin to grasp any of this.
I have never ever heard of an international adoptee being actively sought out by a major agency — it is ALWAYS the other way around. Someone PLEASE tell me if they’ve ever heard otherwise because I don’t know what the fuck is going on and what kind of shit these child peddlers may be trying to pull. But I am sure to be letting yall Bastards know soon as I find out…
Til then I guess. Stay glorious and eternally Ungrateful.
X
5 notes
[TRIGGER WARNING: child abuse & humiliation, sensory & food deprivation, torture, ableism]
“By taking away control, I mean taking away the right to decide anything: what to do, what to eat, when to go to bed, what to wear — everything!”
“Only when the child gives in to the idea that control belongs to the adult, can healing begin. If you cannot take away the control, you might as well give up. One of the foster mothers I recently worked with established the number-one rule in her home as, “I am the boss and your job is to learn to love it.”
”[…]When a new set of foster caregivers took [the boy] in, I had them take everything away right down to the bare mattress on the floor and a bucket to sit on. His caregivers picked out what he would eat, what he could do and what he could wear. He had to ask permission to talk or to use the bathroom.”
— Catherine S. Cain, Attachment Disorders: Treatment Strategies for Traumatized Children (2006)
“The rule of thumb when dealing with an unattached child in the classroom or elsewhere, is Believe the parents, not the child.”
“The adoptive mother often becomes the target of rage that would be more appropriately directed at the birth mother.”
“One parent purposely allowed a child to become lost in a mall, but kept an eye on her as her distress level increased before being ‘found’… a recreation of the early distress/relief bonding cycle.”
— Foster Cline, Can This Child Be Saved? Solutions for Adoptive and Foster Families (1999)
“These children need a different kind of love — the type that forces them to love others.”
“Intrusive therapy involves physical holding and sometimes verbally provocative techniques that bring on expressions and feelings of loss, pain, rage, helplessness, and finally hopelessness — the process through which a person must go to form attachment.”
“God used intrusive techniques himself.”
“This six-hour session [of a 150-lb. mother sitting on her prone 8-year-old son, as described by therapist Milton Erickson] would be illegal in some states.”
— Foster Cline, Conscienceless Acts (1995)
“Not only do many religions emphasize that accepting suffering is beneficial, many prescribe specific ordeals such as fasting, rigorous prayer rituals and ‘turning the other cheek’ to create both an intellectual acceptance as well as emotional and behavioral acceptance of the belief system.”
“The child needs to be confronted, ‘manipulated’ if necessary through paradoxical and other interventions, some of which may have the appearance of ‘ordeals,’ in order to achieve the greater good of maintaining the placement by quickly bringing about change.”
“‘Ordeals’ are stressful, trying, troubling, difficult and make people miserable and uncomfortable. Using paradoxical techniques can often be perceived then as undesirable and torturous, with no rationale.”
Deborah Hage, “Paradoxical Techniques” Foster Care & Adoptive Community Training Program (2005 - 2013)
“Many therapeutic philosophies argue that when children have been physically or sexually abused they have a heightened need for boundaries to be respected. These theories maintain that to touch an abused child is to re-traumatize the child. Holding therapists would be philosophically opposed to that line of reasoning. Rather, they would argue that child who have been touched in abusive ways need to be touched and have the touch followed by a loving, positive, resolution. They need to be held close through a high state of arousal, thus duplicating the high state of arousal which occurs during the height of the abuse.”“Generally, the best course of action is to let the adoptive parents decide which child/children they have been able to achieve some sort of attachment with and then remove from the home the child/children they consider to be less functional.”
— Deborah Hage, For What It’s Worth: Philosophical and Theological Musings (1999)
“Parents must take complete control[…] Often, this also requires therapeutic holds. There are Sequence One and Sequence Two holds which may seem scary and even barbaric at first.”
“More often than not, the child will resist. At this point, one parent applies gentle but firm pressure on the shoulder in a small “pinch” manner. (Remember Mr. Spock’s famous Vulcan shoulder grip from Star Trek? Think of this.) […] Next, you instruct the child to go to his or her knees and ultimately lie face down on the floor.”
“If a pillow, jacket, or towel is available, place it under the child’s face because it is very important for the child to lie face down during the therapeutic hold to prevent spitting, biting or direct eye contact. It is often overwhelming and guilt-inducing for the parents when direct eye contact occurs with the child. In order to avoid the tendency to abandon the holding time technique, make sure the child is lying face down.“While one of you jockeys your weight over the child’s buttocks and lower legs (thus straddling the child), the other parent lies across the child’s upper torso and pins the child’s arms down by the sides of the body[…]”
“Total Adults Only. Isolation from any type of activity, friend or other sibling. Early bedtime, no talking to others, no television, play or any type of recreational activity. No hiding out in their room which is often preferred. Must stay in immediate sight and close proximity of parents or responsible adult at all times. Hard labor activities occupying any and all free time.”
— Ronald Federici, Help for the Hopeless Child: A Guide for Families, With Special Discussion for Assessing and Treating the Post-Institutionalized Child (2003)
Programs founded and/or propagated by Cain, Cline, Hage, Federici & co. have collectively received millions in taxpayer subsidies, with their published works often promoted as “bibles” in adoptive and foster parent circles. Some states have officially required the recommended treatments as a condition of adoption.
Excepts posted per request.
23 notes
Making this rebloggable and divvying up the “recommendations” of sorts among my responses to this ask and your subsequent one.
As I stated earlier, one cannot get a sense of the adoption industry’s inner workings and consequences via text without including the books and manuals officially issued by federal and state organizations that set the standards for treatment of both international adoptees and domestic foster children.
The tricky part is that these documents happen to be ones that any literate, humane, and scientifically-minded person will eschew.
My next post will contain selections of direct quotes from figures commonly cited as experts on international adoption and/or foster care.
4 notes
“These children need a different kind of love — the type that forces them to love others[…] it is the therapist’s job to disturb the disturbed.”
— Foster Cline, Conscienceless Acts“In the beginning, your child should learn to ask for everything. They must ask to go to the bathroom, to…
Jesus.
Our whole adoption complex is so fucked. Why is it so hard to grasp the concept of only adopting a kid so you can love/support them and let them grow into their own person? If I had been adopted rather than raised by my biological parents, I would have been diagnosed with some bullshit attachment disorder (because it just wasn’t my style to attach to anyone as a kid) and probably killed or at the very least traumatized by some bullshit corrective therapy.
If you were adopted rather than bio spawned, you’d be diagnosed with attachment disorder REGARDLESS of your real behavior and/or “style.”
All adoptees are stigmatized from the get go. This is why even East Asian adoptees (widely branded as the most docile variety) are automatically likened to Lord Voldemort.
Attachment Disorder’s “symptoms” are purposefully catch-all inclusive. Are you quiet and withdrawn? Then you’re “empty-eyed” and “not affectionate on parent’s terms.” Are you affectionate and playful? Then you’re “superficially engaging and charming” and just waiting for an opportunity to poison your family’s water supply with strychnine or some shit.
Oh, and then there’s our supposed “inability to feel pain” whilst being “overly sensitive to touch.”
I can’t even begin to go into detail on what happens when disability enters the picture, or when we come from different cultures than the oppressive one we’re adopted into.
Attachment theory worships eye contact as a bonding benchmark, utterly failing to realize that many of the non-Eurocentric (and far less violent) cultures that comprise the adoption industry’s “supply regions” traditionally teach children to avoid directly looking at adults as a SIGN OF RESPECT.
I’ve worked on a lawsuit with another adoptee who is congenitally blind. She was diagnosed as dangerously attachment disordered by one of the leading adoption experts in all of Europe for failing to memorize Braille characters that she had not yet been taught.
I heard all of this as a domestic adoptee. This attitude took a small child with a limited capacity to love and made her into a psuedo-sociopath with their “therapies” and “love”. Well, guess what? I didn’t want any role in their love. They want to see a sociopath, well then you can have one. I have love. It just wasn’t for them.
^ Direct & verbatim quote from the APA APSAC (American Psychological Association & American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children) Task Force that debunked such pseudoscientific, abusive attitudes and practices for what they are.
(Hell, there’s not even any scientific support for the rampant notion that adoptees have lifelong ‘attachment problems’, but that’s another post.)
I don’t know you from my birth mother (har), but what is known is that no living being on earth can EVER live up to the impossible and contradictory standards systemically imposed upon adoptees. These quacks literally pathologize us as burgeoning serial killers if we’re not “respectful, responsible, and fun to be around” 24/7 even as small children.
[TRIGGER WARNING: above link contains torture, sadism, ableism]
Just a few things to keep in mind the next time you feel that your capacity to love somehow doesn’t measure up or something. Take care and stay gloriously ungrateful. X
20 notes (via bastardplanet & brandx)
The Sioux Tribes of South Dakota and their NGO allies, including the Lakota People’s Law Project, have been successful in persuading the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to fulfill its promise to Congress for a summit on Native foster care. The historic meeting, to be held May 15-17 in Rapid City, is called the “Great Plains Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) Summit: Bringing Our Children Home and Keeping Our Families Strong” and will be supplemented by a Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Information Center.
(Source: lakotapeopleslawproject)
103 notes (via bastardplanet & lakotapeopleslawproject)
Newly released data from the National Household Survey suggest that, of the approximately 30,000 children in care in Canada in 2011, 14,225 were aboriginal.
Adoption as a Tool of Genocide
(aka there are far more Native children taken from their families today than there were at the HEIGHT of the residential school system)
41 notes (via sikssaapo-p)
All [we] see of the ‘sending countries’ (Haiti, Ethiopia, and Vietnam) are images of run down surroundings inhabited by destitute, ‘third world’ people of color who clearly are not equipped to take care of their children, let alone themselves. The brown children, held ‘captive’ and ‘caged’ in decrepit institutions that turn kids into ‘creatures’, need to be ‘saved’ by white adoptive parents who have the love, money, connections, and power that these third world children’s parents and countries lack.
These brown children, under the watchful eyes of white adoptive parents, grow up to be well-adjusted, educated, happy, funny, super cute kids and teenagers living the American dream. How dare the government and the Hague Convention slow down the international adoption process by supporting a broken system that keeps “10 million children” from a “forever family” in The United States of America, the greatest and most prosperous country in the world[…]
Stuck is propaganda, and leading the propaganda is Juntunen. While careful to disassociate himself from the Christian conservative base that champions him, he is every bit the Evangelical politician that many have come to distrust.
”(Source: brandx)
10 notes
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/provide-every-adopted-person-copy-their-original-birth-certificate-and-undue-75-years-ancestricide/41h4DSwk
—-
For the past 75 years, 7,000,000+ ADOPTED ADULTS’ LIVES HAVE BEEN KEEP LOCKED UP IN VITAL STAT OFFICES ALL OVER THE U.S.It is time for the U.S. Federal Government to stand up and take responsibility for allowing federal agencies in HRS to continue this inhumane practice.
It’s an atrocity and an abomination that in these United States, every person is not permitted to know their heritage, culture, medical history and genetic family because their records were sealed FOREVER.
To strip a person of their original identity and history is both dangerous and inhumane. No one deserves to die simply because they were adopted and forced to live without vital medical information.
It’s time to bring this injustice to an end by assuring every adoptee a copy of their original birth certificate!—-
100K signatures needed by may 28th 2013
Sign petition here :
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/provide-every-adopted-person-copy-their-original-birth-certificate-and-undue-75-years-ancestricide/41h4DSwk(text post adapted from original petition authors by yours truly.)
Please reblog!
25 notes (via bastardplanet & fairyonacidbanging)
“These children need a different kind of love — the type that forces them to love others[…] it is the therapist’s job to disturb the disturbed.”
— Foster Cline, Conscienceless Acts“In the beginning, your child should learn to ask for everything. They must ask to go to the bathroom, to…
Jesus.
Our whole adoption complex is so fucked. Why is it so hard to grasp the concept of only adopting a kid so you can love/support them and let them grow into their own person? If I had been adopted rather than raised by my biological parents, I would have been diagnosed with some bullshit attachment disorder (because it just wasn’t my style to attach to anyone as a kid) and probably killed or at the very least traumatized by some bullshit corrective therapy.
If you were adopted rather than bio spawned, you’d be diagnosed with attachment disorder REGARDLESS of your real behavior and/or “style.”
All adoptees are stigmatized from the get go. This is why even East Asian adoptees (widely branded as the most docile variety) are automatically likened to Lord Voldemort.
Attachment Disorder’s “symptoms” are purposefully catch-all inclusive. Are you quiet and withdrawn? Then you’re “empty-eyed” and “not affectionate on parent’s terms.” Are you affectionate and playful? Then you’re “superficially engaging and charming” and just waiting for an opportunity to poison your family’s water supply with strychnine or some shit.
Oh, and then there’s our supposed “inability to feel pain” whilst being “overly sensitive to touch.”
I can’t even begin to go into detail on what happens when disability enters the picture, or when we come from different cultures than the oppressive one we’re adopted into.
Attachment theory worships eye contact as a bonding benchmark, utterly failing to realize that many of the non-Eurocentric (and far less violent) cultures that comprise the adoption industry’s “supply regions” traditionally teach children to avoid directly looking at adults as a SIGN OF RESPECT.
I’ve worked on a lawsuit with another adoptee who is congenitally blind. She was diagnosed as dangerously attachment disordered by one of the leading adoption experts in all of Europe for failing to memorize Braille characters that she had not yet been taught.
20 notes (via verbonme & brandx)
i bought kathryn joyce’s book (the child catchers) and am kind of regretting it now. i paid full price ($30) when i could’ve just waited a few days for amazon to ship it. so i’ll prob return it and then order it online. (pathetic post is pathetic.)
i still don’t know how i feel about her or how the book is being received. i feel like a lot of well meaning liberals would look at this expose and do nothing when it comes to examining their own fucked up views of adoption (ie. those fundies are just cuh-razy!) and that’s a giant problem.
plus my lip kinda curled when i saw that jessica valenti’s endorsement was on the back cover. joyce seems to be in that online white feminist circle and during an interview with jill filiwhatever, the question of whether or not this was a feminist issue just had to be asked. like, oh shit, you’re just now connecting the dots that women are affected by this institution? and not the ones who are infertile, shelling out gobs and gobs of money?
i get that a lot of this info is new for a lot of ppl, but i can’t help but side eye the author’s own astonishment that adoption corruption could actually be a thing.
fellow adoptees, have any of you read this yet?
have yet to read it. been keeping a pretty close watch on the press and interviews surrounding its release… thanks for posting this so i didn’t shell out for what (surprise surprise) is apparently nothing more than remedial white feminist apologism that conveniently absolves Western liberals by putting ALL the blame on evangelicals & conservatives
bc rly how can one begin to take the billion dollar child trafficking biz to task without calling out white feminism and their “Third World solidarity” lethal bullshit? short answer: aint no fing way.
does it even MENTION the white savior industrial complex?
welcome back btw. X xx
6 notes (via dustoffvarnya)
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