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CNN INTERNATIONAL INSIGHT
Where Will South Africa's Children Go?
Aired April 10, 2001 - 17:00:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JONATHAN MANN, INSIGHT (voice-over): Sent away. No one really knows how many orphaned or abandoned children there are in South Africa, but there seem to be too many for their families, their communities and maybe even their country to handle.
(on camera): Hello, and welcome.
The numbers are essentially guesses, but the numbers are very high. Right now, there are said to be hundreds of thousands of orphan children in South Africa who have lost their parents to AIDS. Within the next decade, that number is expected to climb to more than a million, perhaps even two million - orphans that the country will have a hard time raising.
AIDS is only one part of the problem. Poverty is another. And adoption has not been an easy or obvious answer. On our program today - a look at where South Africa's kids will go.
Charlayne Hunter-Gault reports from Johannesburg.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): For some, it's come to this - a hole in the wall where mothers can place babies they can no longer care for or want. The instant a baby is placed inside, a bell goes off, alerting a caretaker inside the Barria (ph) Baptist Mission, and the baby is retrieved.
The hole in the wall is the brainchild of Cheryl Allen, the minister who runs the mission. She says she decided on the hole in the wall after learning that on average some 30 children a month were being dumped in bus terminals, fields and trash bins. Many die.
CHERYL ALLEN, BARRIA BAPTIST MISSION: I thought that if they were going to dump it in the dirt box, rather than being they obviously didn't want to be known, so we wanted to give them the anonymity that they wanted. So we told them to bring it and put it in the bin.
HUNTER-GAULT: Allen, who has received over 56 babies in the past year - eight through the hole in the wall - also had another idea -- advertising the babies on the Internet. Both that and the bin stirred controversy, leading Allen to make some adjustments, but only on the Internet.
She stopped putting the pictures of the babies on the Web, but the page on how to apply for adoptions is still there, along with other general information about the babies available for adoption. Critics accuse Allen of selling babies.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It gives me a very uncomfortable feeling. A baby is not a commodity that one shops for on the Internet.
HUNTER-GAULT: Allen disagrees, saying they make no money in the process. She says they've gotten inquiries from more than 11 countries, and families are screened in their own countries by recognized adoption agencies. Some, like this couple from North Carolina, have made is all the way through the process and are in South Africa getting to know this little girl they're adopting before returning to the United States.
Allen believes such measures are needed to address not only the current situation, but an impending crisis in which millions of children are expected to be orphaned by the AIDS epidemic. But the idea of international adoptions is controversial, too.
Black social workers like Nana Mazibuko and others are adamantly opposed to allowing South African babies to be adopted by people outside the country - partly for cultural reasons, but there's another.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So if you take a small baby to a strange country, there are places where there are so much stresses and how are they going to cope?
HUNTER-GAULT: Since most of the children up for adoption are black, agencies are trying to encourage more blacks to adopt. The rules have even been changed to accommodate people who might not otherwise qualify.
Women like Joyce Clogray (ph), who is 42 years old and single, living in a squatter camp.
JOYCE CLOGRAY: I enjoy my life, but I (inaudible) with one thing. I adore to hear somebody say to me, "Mommy."
Hello, number one.
HUNTER-GAULT: Clogray runs a nursery school out of a container in her backyard. At the moment, she has 35 children in her care, but she has looked after many of the children in the neighborhood.
She says that in order to get more black people to adopt, the government must change not just eligibility but a culture that belittles anyone other than those who've actually given birth.
CLOGRAY: They're afraid of their talking of people, and people are talking funny things, you know? I can say they won't, but they are not brave.
HUNTER-GAULT (on camera): Everyone agrees that more needs to be done if the looming orphan crisis is to be averted or managed. But there's also a debate over who bears the responsibility. The private agencies say it's the government that must do more, both to encourage adoptions and to help agencies involved in the process.
Government has a different view.
BONGILE LEROLE, DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SERVICES: It's both (inaudible) believe that the communities are responsible for their own people. It mustn't be viewed as a government's responsibility.
HUNTER-GAULT: Meanwhile, abandoned little people like this one, number 13 for this social worker, are adding to an already-heavy caseload every day.
For now, government has placed a moratorium on any new facilities for orphan children, saying that most are not full. But critics say that's not the issue. Those who are there are staying longer and longer, waiting for someone to come along and take them home.
Charlayne Hunter-Gault, CNN, Johannesburg.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
MANN: But take them home where? After the break, we'll talk more about whether South Africa can care for all of its children. Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MANN: Welcome back.
Not everyone in South Africa agrees with the picture that we've been painting. We got in touch with a social worker who appeared briefly in Charlayne Hunter-Gault's report. Nana Mazibuko says that many children do need homes, but she says they are finding them.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MAZIBUKO: In our agency, we care for roughly about 30 to 40 babies per month who are abandoned. And we do have adopters who are willing to have those babies (inaudible) at times for the child to be ready for adoption. They are either certain process that has to be followed.
So sometimes we tend to think that those babies are just sitting wherever they are, whether in the children's homes or places of safety.
MANN: Can you tell us - you're suggesting it is, in fact, easy and that the system is working well to place children who need homes?
MAZIBUKO: Not necessarily easy. But we have to go through a certain process before a child can be available for adoption. So if maybe people see children in institutions and think that those children are there because we don't have adopters, they have to get the full information from the relevant institutions who are dealing with those kids.
Like I have said that there are some lengthy processes that have to be followed before a child can be available for adoption. Jonathan.
MANN: Where do those children go? Our correspondent, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, suggests that, in fact, there is difficulty placing them and that they go to homes that previously would not have been considered appropriate. Are they going to the kinds of homes that are best for them?
MAZIBUKO: I don't think that is true because we do have some screening measures to make sure that those babies are placed in appropriate families. You know, we don't just give children to anybody. There is a screening process that has to be followed through.
MANN: We saw in our report a woman who seemed very loving and very eager to have a child, and she has, in fact, adopted one.
MAZIBUKO: Yes.
MANN: But she's a single woman living in a squatter camp. Ordinarily, is that the kind of home that you would want to see orphan children go to?
MAZIBUKO: I mean, we do have children who live in squatter areas who are with loving parents. It doesn't mean just because a person lives in a squatter area, they cannot offer love and warm family for a child. So we look into those cases. It doesn't mean that just because they live in squatter areas, they cannot provide what is needed by the child.
MANN: People will be watching this conversation all around the world - people who hope to adopt children perhaps from South Africa, are you suggesting to them that if they take a child from South Africa they're taking it away from a loving home? Many of these people think an adoption of this kind is an act of generosity. It's an act of love. Are they mistaken?
MAZIBUKO: We would love to see our children placed in very loving families, and I believe that we do have such families here in South Africa. We haven't reached a point whereby we are struggling that much to get adopters.
I just think that we need to explore all the avenues, you know? There are places in other countries where there are orphans of wars, you understand? So I could understand if people can be interested in those countries. But here in South Africa, we haven't reached that point where it is a crisis.
Jonathan.
MANN: Let me ask you more about that because I don't have to tell you about the terrible things that AIDS is doing to families in South Africa. I'm a long way from Johannesburg, but I'm reading that there is already a crisis and that children are losing their parents at a very young age and that people are reluctant to adopt children who've lost their parents to that disease. Is AIDS changing things?
MAZIBUKO: Yes. I mean, I just want to mention one province that is facing such a problem, which is Swaziland Natal. We are seeing a lot of AIDS orphans, and the government has started already trying to persuade the communities to be involved, to reach out to those children rather than shipping those children out to other provinces or outside the country.
So if we can get our communities involved, I think we can manage to help this problem.
MANN: In the report that Charlayne Hunter-Gault prepared, we heard from people who said the government isn't doing enough to help orphaned or abandoned children.
MAZIBUKO: Yes.
MANN: Do you agree?
MAZIBUKO: I think it shouldn't be the government's problem only. We've got some NGOs who are willing to help out. I mean, we also as a community has to help the government somehow. We shouldn't put the blame of everything on the government. We have to do something also.
MANN: What are the obstacles that you face? It's been suggested that people in South Africa don't want to adopt children, that culturally there is an impediment there. What are the problems?
MAZIBUKO: Yes. Previously, we had a problem where like Africans, we are not comfortable in adopting children because they felt it's something that wasn't heard of. But we are trying to desensitize them, you know, to make them aware that we have this problem, we have babies who need homes. And if they don't come forward to help these children, who will?
And the (inaudible) recruitment drive which was done some years back, and we did see the response of the community. It was overwhelming. And as it is, we do have waiting lists of prospective adopters.
MANN: Should people who are watching this understand that South African children don't need their homes in other countries? Is the message you're trying to send to leave South Africans to take care of their young?
MAZIBUKO: Yes, that's my personal opinion. But we have to try to solve our problems, not shift problems to other countries. We have to learn to solve our problems. And like I said earlier on, I don't think it is a crisis as it is. I know that there is an AIDS epidemic.
We have to prepare ourselves to be in a position to deal with it. The first solution shouldn't be to ship those children out of our country.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
MANN: Social worker Nana Mazibuko.
There are international adoption agencies that disagree with some of those conclusions. We'll hear from one in just a moment. Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MANN (voice-over): The world of international adoption was brought into the spotlight recently by one extreme example - the case of the Internet twins. A British couple, Judith and Alan Kilshaw, had acquired American baby girls through an online broker. They paid double the fee of a couple from California that also wanted the twins.
A messy legal battle ensued, and this week a British court ruled that the girls have to be returned to the United States, where their fate is still uncertain.
(on camera): Welcome back.
International Internet adoption has become a big issue in its own right. But even before the Internet, cross-border adoption through conventional agencies was and still is relatively routine. In countries like Russia, China and South Korea, there are too many abandoned or orphaned children to cope with. In the West, there are not enough children to go around because single mothers are keeping their babies much more frequently than they used to.
Tens of thousands of children are adopted by Western parents every year, but are they better off? Susan Orban is director of family services at the Casi Foundation for Children, an international adoption agency. And we mention a personal factor here - three of her own children were adopted from overseas.
Thanks so much for being with us. Let me ask you first of all, is international adoption essentially always a good thing, or do you think it makes sense in particular emergencies, in exceptional cases only?
SUSAN ORBAN, CASI FOUNDATION FOR CHILDREN: Thank you for having me, Jonathan.
I think it's important to realize that there are children in countries all over the world, including the United States, that need families. And the most important thing is that children be placed in loving families.
Of course, the best place is for their birth family, and after that I would agree that it would be the best thing for the child to be placed within their own country. However, if that's not possible, we go back to the first idea, which is that children need to be in families, and we want to do everything we can to expedite that process.
MANN: What do children gain and what do they lose when they leave their home countries?
ORBAN: Well, I know my own children, who are adopted from Korea and the Philippines, they gained a family, and I gained children who I love dearly. However, I think that they do lose - they certainly can lose their language. They can lose some of the cultural importance of being a part of that country.
It's important I think for families to honor the culture and the heritage that their children come from and bring it into their own homes as much as they can.
MANN: Does the age of the children at adoption matter a whole lot? Are younger children easier to integrate than older children?
ORBAN: That's a difficult question. I have - my son, who came when he was 2 years old, integrated more easily than the babies that came. I think that it depends upon the child. I think, though, that everybody would agree that the younger that you get a child, the easier it is for them to integrate into your family and the better it is for the child to be a part of a family at a younger age.
MANN: Do the countries that give up these children give up more than just individuals? Is there some net loss that they should be mindful of, even from the perspective of someone like yourself who's trying to help those children from far away?
ORBAN: Well, I think it's always hard for a country to be placing their children internationally because their children are very precious to them. The people of Russia and China, Philippines, Korea - the love their children. But that's the reason why they do it is because they do love their children, and they want to see those children in families as well.
MANN: Now, you've had a chance to tell us that you don't place children from South Africa.
ORBAN: No.
MANN: But have you, in the course of the work that you do, heard the kinds of things that we've been hearing - people who object to it, who say our country has to hold on to its own people?
ORBAN: Well, I think that there are people that believe that way. I think that the majority of people do want to see the children placed first in the countries that they were born in. The truth is that in Ukraine, Russia, China, these countries, the people of those countries do have first priority to adopt those children. And then, if there aren't enough families, then they look to international adoption.
MANN: Now the assumption in all of this is that in some way it is an arrangement between equals, that both parties know what they're doing and know how to do it. But I think you probably agree that it's not really equal. The couples that come for these children come from affluent countries. They are themselves probably more affluent than the people that they're working with.
And inevitably they're dealing with families and institutions that are impoverished and perhaps in crisis. Do they take advantage of the situation?
ORBAN: Well, you know, I've worked with families that range from people who make very, very moderate incomes to people who are very wealthy. I think that across the board, people really are interested in loving a child, and that's what we're here to do is to help the children.
MANN: How much abuse goes on the other way? Because I have heard, you have heard, many of us have heard of horror stories. People who go and find that they are extorted for money or offered children who are either different than the children they were promised - physically different individuals - or in some way physically or mentally troubled in ways that no one had previously discussed.
ORBAN: Well, you know, I think that that's one reason why we're so happy about the Hague Convention being passed here in the United States and many other countries around the world have ratified the Hague Convention because that is going to bring a standard of practice across adoption agencies throughout the world in order to avoid the situations that are not good when people aren't doing it - doing the adoptions properly.
MANN: You're being very diplomatic in your language. How uneven are the standards now? How much abuse is there of these people who so desperately want children?
ORBAN: Well, I would be remiss in saying that it doesn't exist because, unfortunately, sometimes it does. People do take advantage of the fact that there are people out there who so desperately want a child. That's why you want to work with agencies that are licensed, that do have standards of practices, that you check into references on those organizations so that you don't get involved with an organization that is going to take advantage of you in that way.
MANN: I want to ask you about a particular case you may or may not have been following closely. It wasn't well covered in the press. And that is in the terrible genocide that Rwanda suffered, children were taken from there once their families had been apparently missing and distributed to loving families in many parts of the world - at least in one case, some of the children went to Italy, and the government of Rwanda has asked for them to come back, for them to be returned.
The government of Rwanda believes that children were taken at a time of crisis, when their identities couldn't be established, when their communities were in upheaval and that with time they would have been placed more successfully.
Have you ever heard of governments asking for children to come back once they have already been placed?
ORBAN: Actually, the situation - and I'm sure that what you're saying is correct - it's a very, very rare situation, and it happens - it's just so unusual. When you think of the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of children that have been placed in countries throughout the world, this is such a such a small percentage that it's not that we shouldn't be concerned about it, we should be concerned about it.
But it is a very small percentage of the adoptions that take place.
MANN: It sounds from what you're saying that really isn't much opposition, whether from institutions or from governments around the world. Are there places that simply do not want their children to leave, or is that not really an issue in the kind of work that you do?
ORBAN: Well, certainly there are countries. There are countries that don't want their children to leave, and those countries don't place internationally. But other countries do. I think the countries that really love their children and want to see those children in families, what we don't want to see is children growing up in institutions, and that is not the best for any person.
MANN: We have been talking so much about all of the negative sides of all of this, but you're an example, I suppose, of the positive side. You've done this, and I imagine successfully. What is it like adopting children from overseas?
ORBAN: I have to say it's one of the greatest gifts that I've ever been given. The fact that my children came to me from other countries, I really feel that I am - although I don't look it from the outside - I'm from Norway, as far as my heritage. But I feel like my heart is part Korean and part Filipino. And I believe that this brings our world together and closer together.
Our children are the ones that are leading us.
MANN: On that note, Susan Orban of the Casi Foundation for Children. Thank you so much for being with us.
ORBAN: Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you.
MANN: And that is INSIGHT for this day. I'm Jonathan Mann. The news continues.
END
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