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Click on the image to reach an interactive map with links to information about countries that have had reports of serious irregularities in international adoptions. 

Corruption in
 International Adoptions

"The Lie We Love"

The story of abandoned or orphaned infants and toddlers in developing countries who need to be whisked away to adoring moms and dads in faraway lands is, unfortunately, largely fiction. So writes E.J. Graff, associate director and senior researcher at the Schuster Institute in her award-winning investigative article "The Lie We Love," published in Foreign Policy's Nov./Dec. 2008 issue. The article exposes the myth of a world orphan crisis—and reveals that the disproportionately large amounts of Western money offered in poor or corrupt countries can too often induce unscrupulous middlemen to buy, coerce, defraud, or kidnap children away from families that would have raised them to adulthood. The article has received two prestigious awards: the Society of Professional Journalists’ 2008 Sigma Chi Delta Award in Journalism for the best in magazine investigative reporting; and the 2008 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. 

The result of a year-long investigation into troubling intercountry adoption patterns and practices, “The Lie We Love” was the first in a series of Schuster Institute releases on the topic. This website offers—in addition to some of the documentation of adoption corruption that we found from a variety of countries—a collection of the Schuster Institute’s publications on intercountry adoption.

Many publications, reporters, broadcasters, and bloggers tell stories about what’s right with international adoption. As an investigative reporting institute, we feel an obligation to speak for those whose stories have not been told. As a result, our Institute has been investigating what can happen when things go wrong, and why. Our hope is that this information will be useful to concerned citizens and policymakers.

Debunking the myth of a world orphan crisis:

Celebrity Adoptions and the Real World: "The Seamier Side of International Adoption," The New York Times Opinion Blog, May 10, 2009 

“In trying to adopt a child who already has a family, Madonna is inadvertently exposing the seamier underside of international adoption: the fact that, too often, the amounts of money that Western adoption agencies spend in poor countries is helping to defraud, coerce or kidnap children away from families that wanted to raise them to adulthood.” More>

"The orphan manufacturing chain," The Washington Post, Jan. 11, 2009

“Who wants to buy a baby? Certainly not most people who try to adopt internationally. And yet too often that's how their dollars and euros are being used.” More> 

"The problem with saving the world's 'orphans'," The Boston Globe, Dec. 11, 2008

“By heading to a poor, underdeveloped, or war-torn country to adopt a baby, Westerners can inadvertently achieve the opposite of what they intend. Instead of saving a child, they may create an orphan.” More> 

Personal stories of those affected by corrupt adoption practices:

"The Orphan Trade: A look at families affected by corrupt international adoptions," Slate.com, May 8, 2009

Sometimes the people affected by corrupt adoptions don't seem real; their names are strange, and they live far away, in unimaginably different circumstances. To help imagine their lives, we present pictures of some of these families here.

"Out of Cambodia," The Washington Post, Jan. 11, 2009

In 1999, a child finder was paid $300 to recruit Songkea, a 9 or 10 year-old Cambodian girl, for adoption in the United States. In 2004, she and her adoptive mother made the heartwrenching decision to visit her biological family for the first time in 5 years. Read the story of Songkea—now called Camryn—here.

Where do babies come from?

Over the past two decades, serious irregularities in international adoption have been documented in a variety of publications and broadcasts around the world. Until now, these individual reports and stories have never been pulled together so that prospective parents, adoption industry experts, opinion leaders, and policymakers can look at them in a systematic way.

By clicking on our interactive map, you can find in-depth documentation of adoption abuses in a number of countries, including links to original news reports and academic research. Other research, reader emails, our responses to critiques, and related materials are also listed under Associated Links in the right-hand column.

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