Hague Evaluation

There are a number of concerns which have arisen from the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption (HCIA) accreditation process in the US. This is a running list rather than a complete list. Some of the issues are as follows:

BOARDS OF DIRECTORS offer financial and administrative policy oversight to organizations. While boards are involved in the evaluation process, there is little guidance for what the board structure should look like. One of the dynamics which has clearly emerged is boards which are populated by family members. So, for instance, board members may be the children, siblings, or a spouse of the agency executive director*. Because the board has oversight of the executive director's job, this issue of nepotism has obvious consequences. While it may be a natural dynamic for a board to begin with a small group of committed people who may be related--as is the case in many small intercountry adoption agencies--it is important for an organization to grow to a more balanced approach of agency management. Currently, the standards used by the Council on Accreditation do not give guidance about board membership and the other issues that emerge under conditions like nepotism.

*Note: State licensure law and resulting administrative policies may prohibit neoptism and that requirement--the more stringent requirement--would be the expectation in states that actually address this issue in agaency licensure standards. This varies state-by-state. 

TRAINING requirements for competence in Hague-related issues, such as the actual prevention of theft and sales of children, is required of agency employees as well as prospective parents. During the agency evaluation process, evidence for training completion is reviewed in employee personnel records and in client case records. Certificates of training completion or other clear documents indicating educational objective content areas are used as evidence in the process. This approach rests on the assumption that the training received meets certain quality expectations, including truly strait-talk about how child theft and sales takes place and how adoption agencies have been complicit or even engaged in this problem in the past. This would require a case study approach to previous examples and an honest dialogue. This dialogue has been a difficult bridge to cross for many and, as a result, some of the behaviors that result in child trafficking have not really been dissected in a way that enables a "lessons learned" approach to future intercountry adoption practice.

SERVICE PLANNING is a component part of human services and is a classic function of case management. However, under US HCIA agency accreditation standards, service planning has not been implemented in this way. Service planning is more informative about what is taking place rather than a tool for practice which is individualized to the family and child's needs. This is an area of improvement.

HOME STUDIES are an integral part of the services that are offered by an agency involved in child placement activities. Unfortunately there is not currently a national agreement on what constitutes a good home study. There is guidance from the governments involved as to what must be present (i.e. criminal and child abuse records check). However, moving from this guidance towards good social work practice that encompasses the multidimensional aspects of a solid assessment has not yet emerged as a standard of practice. Since the US is the most frequent receiving nation in the world, receiving at least half of all children adopted in the past 50 years, we should be able to move towards a national agreement about home study standards and quality improvement. At this time, a number of agencies are only writing home study assessments which meet basic requirements and do not go much further for a number of issues, including the fact that a longer and more hearty assessment costs more money to translate into the second language, such as Spanish or Chinese. Agency accreditation guidelines do not really dig and whole-heartedly into these issues of home study quality and, as a result, an opportunity to move towards a home study gold standard that really evaluates and illustrates a family's readiness to adopt a foreign-born child is lost. Since the HCIA is intended to structure adoption in a manner that is in the "best interests of the child," this is a deficit that needs to be addressed.

THE US A SENDING NATION OF INFANTS? HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE IF THE NATION MUST FIRST ATTEMPT TO PLACE THE CHILD DOMESTICALLY?

When we first posed this question, it was unclear and there were a handful of attorneys/agencies accredited who were in the business of only sending infants overseas to Europe and Canada. Now, under the true  intent of the Convention, this is not possible in the case of the receiving country being a Convention-signatory nation. On the other hand, infants can still be sent to non-Hague nations without the requirement to locate a domestic/US placement first. 

For more information, go to the State Department's information on this subject at

http://www.travel.state.gov/pdf/AdoptionFactSheet_OutgoingCases4-09-08.pdf