Child laundering

Child laundering is a scheme whereby intercountry adoptions are effected by illegal and fraudulent means. It may involve the trafficking of children, the acquisition of children through monetary arrangements, deceit and/or force. The children may then be held in sham orphanages while formal international adoption processes are used to send the children to adoptive parents in another country.

Child laundering rings are often expansive with multiple hierarchies of people motivated by large profits from the black markets of intercountry adoptions. With Westerners willing to spend thousands of dollars to adopt a child, enough monetary incentives are created to extend the laundering ring from the middle classes to societies' more affluent groups. These "baby broker" families subsequently forge a new identity for the laundered child, "validating" the child's legal status as an orphan and ensuring the scheme will not be uncovered.

Child laundering is highly controversial; while many argue that these children are being treated as a commodity and stripped of family contact, others argue that, ultimately, the children will live in a more affluent environment and have more opportunities as a result of this adoption.

There is a complex hierarchy within the child laundering business which includes governments, orphanages, intermediaries, birth families, and adoptive families. The people who oversee these child laundering rings are estimated to make $2,000 to $20,000 per overseas adoption. Therefore, it is advantageous for these individuals to have the necessary language and social skills in order to work closely with Western adoption agencies. Intermediaries are crucial in acquiring the child, for their job is to locate extremely impoverished parents who may be willing to relinquish their children out of necessity. Often, the people involved in recruiting and managing the adoption ring are local middle or upper class citizens, and they often have a negative view of the very poor. Therefore, recruiters can rationalize taking these children from the biological family on the grounds that the child will be better reared in the West. Many members of foreign governments are bribed to hasten these illegitimate adoptions, and also to ignore the illegality of these criminal organizations.

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