The Child as a Person

Abstract

The child is objectified and commodified when international adoption is seen through the lenses of border policing, protectionism, national pride and cultural fetishism. Unfortunately, this is the approach to international adoption embraced and promoted by the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, the adoption laws of most of its state parties, the policies of UNICEF and the attitudes of many childcare and advocacy groups around the world. To disapprove of their views is not to question their good intentions or seriousness of purpose. The problem, in fact, is deeper, and ultimately rests on muddled conceptions of human rights and the personhood of children. A few examples will suffice to illustrate the point and set the record straight. Conspicuously in Article 1, the Hague Convention announces what will be the emphasis throughout the treaty, ‘to prevent the abduction, the sale of, or traffic in children’. UNICEF’s policy statements on international adoption tend to reinforce this approach to international adoption, denouncing ‘the growth of an industry around adoption, where profit, rather than the best interests of children, takes centre stage’. Unicef’s Children on the Brink 2004: A Joint Report of New Orphan Estimates and a Framework for Action documents the shocking number of 16,200,000 double orphans in Africa, Asia and Latin America alone. Despite that, the 46-page report mentions adoption ⁄ adoptive just twice, and then only in the context of makeshift or half-hearted localonly adoption options: ‘There is a pressing need to ensure that family based care is available for these children, either through support for relatives, foster care, local adoptive placement, or community organizations that are integrally linked to the community’ (p. 15); ‘For children who slip through the extended family safety net, arrangements preferable to traditional institutional care include foster placements, local adoption, surrogate family groups integrated into communities, and smaller-scale group residential care in homelike settings’ (p. 20). In the same report, institutionalization is referred to euphemistically as ‘Center for Orphaned Children’, ‘Community School’, ‘Day Care Center’, ‘Center for Children’ and the like. The historical lineage of the position taken by the Hague Convention and UNICEF is no mystery. From as early as the 15th century, struggles to form and consolidate nation states turned into efforts to create large and replenishable armies and working forces. From the perspective of emerging nation states, the first and most precious natural resource was their population, and the highest policy priority population management. ‘The principal object of my policy’, stated Joseph II in the 18th century, was ‘the preservation and increase of the number of subjects. It is’, he added, ‘from the greatest number of subjects that all the advantages of the state derive’. This view became part of the policy DNA of nation states and, after the Second World War, of their international organization creatures. By the second part of the 20th century, population management ideologies were compounded by the inability or unwillingness to transcend the resilience of localism and culturalism against clear commitment to the universalism of the human rights of the child as a person. No one should think it is easy to honor mandates as important as the individual rights of the child when deeply torn between contradicting values and rationales. On the other hand, in many ways it has never been better to be a child than in our time. The evolution of the legal and moral status of the child has, however, been a slow one. It took millennia for children to progress from being little more than labor and transactional resource for families and reserve and replacement economic and military resource for states. Later, children came to be seen by postcolonial sensibilities as culture carriers. In most parts of the world, only relatively recently have children achieved the legal status of object of protection on the part of families, societies and states. Twenty years ago the arc of this evolution reached the point of considering the child as an independent, self-standing subject of human rights. But the earlier stages of the evolution of the legal and moral status of the child have never been completely replaced. The result is the truncated and ambivalent conception of the *E. Bartholet, (2010) ‘International Adoption: The Human Rights Position’, Global Policy, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 91-100. DOI: 10.1111/ j.1758-5899.2009.00001.x Global Policy Volume 1 . Issue 2 . May 2010