e-mail
The big news with the adoption label today has to be about the New York woman arrested in Florida for multiple child abuse charges.
According to the now more than 96 news articles … and counting, as I’m sure by tomorrow the hundred mark will be left in the dust … chasing the story within the past few hours, Judith Leekin adopted 11 children in New York City between 1993 and 1996 from the foster care system, using four different agencies, a slew of different identities and hefty bags full of lies and slime.
At the time of the arrest, five teenagers and four developmentally disabled adults were found in Leekin’s home. They had been bound together, abused and malnourished. Another, an 18-year-old mentally challenged girl, had been abandoned at a shopping center, a circumstance that tipped off officials that there was something amiss … finally.
Leekin has been charged with five counts of aggravated child abuse, false identification, witness tampering and four counts of aggravated abuse on an elderly or disabled adult.
In the same way the story about Bulgarian child trafficking was not about adoption, this one should not be construed to implicate foster adoption, confused with any aspect of adoptive parent care, or implicated to indicate a probably outcome of adoption.
Judith Leekin is a criminal, plain and simple, and like Bulgarian traffickers in human flesh, people to her meant cash on the barrelhead, nothing more.
Even with headlines screaming “Adoption terror”, “Mommy Meanest“, and “Police: Mom Tied Up Adoptees, Collected Money“, these stories are NOT about adoption.
They are not about adoption any more than stories about Andrea Yates are about motherhood.
Yes, bad things can and do happen, but as I said when writing about Bulgarian traffickers: “The error, however … and a dangerous error it is … is giving in to a tendency to shoot the Clydesdales in hopes of getting rid of the drug cartels.”
I’m hard pressed to understand why adoption is getting the rap, at least in the headlines, at all, with this situation being such an obvious failure of social services. The sort of children that can fall through gaps this huge must be a very low priority, which makes me think even more admiringly of the thousands of legitimate adoptive parents that add the same kids so easily forgotten by authorities to their families and care for them year after year.
On their behalf, if for no other reason, it is vital that no tarred brushes are allowed to be used to paint the institute of adoption with the filth of outright criminal intent.
Lessons should be learned, no doubt, and heads should roll. Those who are proved to have been negligent in their duties should be made to pay, and Judith Leekin should suffer a thousand tortures.
What should not happen, however, is adoption getting a bad rap.
Why? Because this is not about adoption; it’s about crime.
In the early 1980’s there was a serial killer on the loose in Atlanta, targeting adolescent black males. There was worldwide publicity about this terrible situation. Russian TV sent a film crew. The Korean government official in charge of adoptions saw the Russian footage and drew the conclusion “Dark-skinned children of single mothers are being murdered in Atlanta and nobody cares.” So this official immediately prohibited adoptions of Korean children by single parents. Bad adoption news rates national coverage. Good adoption stories are local “human interest fillers.”
There are doctors who abuse patients, teachers who abuse students, and sexual predators that prowl the malls of America. That does not mean that we get rid of health insurance, do away with public schooling or pass a law allowing no more than 2 stores to be standing side by side
I don’t think they want to focus on what’s wrong with the system when it’s easier and creates the most attention for them to attack all adoptive parents.
How unfair that misinformation can cause so much pain and agony.