I'm going to go with knee-jerk reaction on this one, let her stay in the US. What are the odds that she can even speak her native tongue? She doesn't even know her birth mother and she must consider her adoptive mother to be her real mother.
Holy crap, folks...this one's a doozy...
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This is still advocating for taking the girl away from the only family she's ever known. Regardless of how hard this has been on the biological mother, the daughter and her well being has to come first. Even reintroducing her to her biological mother and culture gradually only to one day drop the bombshell that she's now moving away and will barely see her adoptive family again, if at all, would be extremely traumatic for a child. Like I said, there is no ideal solution here, but anything that results in her living with a mother she's never known in a country she doesn't remember will be worse for the girl than keeping her with her current family. And when it comes right down to it, the girl is the biggest victim in all of this and her welfare should be the only consideration in how this goes. She isn't a piece of property to be squabbled over, and whatever is going to have the least negative emotional and mental impact on her is the way the court needs to rule on this.Raven said:
Does that suck for the biological mother? Absolutely, but the child does have to come first here, and simply giving her back under any circumstance is not going to be the best thing for her.
It is an assumption that the best thing to do is stay with her adopted parents. There isVivi22 said:
no evidence to say the child would prefer this in the long term (which is what the child services will need to consider over the initial feelings. This is something many people in this thread fail to understand about the way child services assess cases).
As Eamar pointed out, the girl actually spent 2 years of her life being "kidnapped", she probably has memories of that experience. So it really isn't the only life she has ever known. At four years old and still living in Guatemala, the child will very likely know some of the language.
I would agree that she will likely have an easier life and a brighter future by being in the US, but that isn't to say that being raised in any other country would fail to provide her the same fulfilment and happiness.
As for the courts, they might not even have the power to keep her, as after all, the adoption was not legal and she was illegally taken from her home country. The Guatemalan government has a responsibility to return the child back to her mother. We all know that if the situation was reversed, the US government would all but invade a foreign country to return a US citizen after being kidnapped and held hostage. It might upset the child in this situation but politics is a messy business and is frequently unpleasant. But this is the way the world works, people need to accept that legalities often trump personal feelings and this case is anything but clear cut.
As a serious point I don't know anything about US child protective services protocol and would be interested to learn if it is different from UK process if you have any direct knowledge.Raven said:
Saying that though, I believe there are many cases amongst social services in the UK where this sort of thing has happened on a local level, such as a child being removed from a family in error due to suspected child abuse that turned out to be something weird like rickets. The point has been made that in all cases where a child has integrated into another family that removing them from that environment and placing them in an alien one does nothing but harm.
It comes down to child development, basically.
Ha! Very good.DumpsterHumper said:
That children are not property is a very recent mode of thought, one that isn't even universal.FelixG said:
Do I think of them as property? Not really. I just acknowledge that in most western societies law's they have the right to an education and a safe upbringing but little else.
Most of what I said about the lack of autonomy are examples from my own childhood, not something a 'sick individual' would inflict upon a child to destroy their life.
What? I'm not saying a bright future can't come from either situations.Raven said:Basically, you and quite a few others don?t seem to understand the time scale of a scenario like this. The girl is 7 years old. It?d be fair to say that by the time she reaches 12 years old she?d have a pretty good grasp on how the internet works...Innegativeion said:
How would you feel if you found out that at a young age you were kidnapped and sold to an adoption agency then whisked away to a foreign country while all the while your real mother campaigned and fought to have you back? Now we can all sit back and say, well she must be having a sweet life in the states and everything is wonderful but nobody here knows that. She might hate it, she might grow up to resent them and vice versa. With all this media attention focused on her case do you really think she will never find out? Do you honestly think that she would turn around and say, you know what? Everything turned out for the best, If that happened to my kid and she was taken against her will to a foreign country, i?d just sit back and think sure that?s fine, the kid will never know and grow up to be smart, beautiful and rich just like me
No...
The best thing to happen is for mother to be reunited with her child and then given the support to help rebuild their lives together. There is no reason to suggest a bright future can?t come from this situation. It won?t be easy, but it?s the right thing to do.
What I AM stating though, which you have actually pointed out, is that all these decisions are based on speculation.
Sure, you COULD take her back to her biological mother, but WHAT if that affects her in a negative way?
You COULD leave her with her foster parents, but she MIGHT be affected negatively by future circumstances.
My entire point is that no one (especially anyone on these forums as we do not have the whole picture) can not make a decision based on this on online articles.
Why?
Because we don't know what her relationship is like with the foster parents, we don't know her opinions, hell we don't even know if she remembers her biological mother.....
What is annoying me is the people who say "SHE MUST DO THIS" or "SHE MUST DO THAT" without even thinking out the situation as a whole.
Just putting her back into her biological mothers care without a second thought is an incredibly stupid idea, as the ramifications might be substantial on her mentally.
This entire situation needs to be handled very delicately. This is a child's mental health at risk. And don't even get me started on how it could affect her in the future.
The difference being that we know that the mother (and her virtually unmentioned father) clearly loved her daughter and are fighting to have her back after she was taken from them.dumbseizure said:
At home is where a child belongs, and with her parents is where a child ought to be.
There is nothing to suggest the biological parents would not provide a suitable loving environment to grow up in.
I would be very interested in knowing how the adoptive parents feel about the situation. I'd bet they feel downright awful learning that the child they adopted had been the victim of a kidnapping and that her real parents have come forward and asked for their child back.
The child, sad is it may be to leave her adopted parents, will probably come to terms with the events eventually. She is still very young however, if she was say 14 years old I think there would be more things that could go wrong. As it stands, the child has barely started to build a family bond with her adopted parents and it certainly isn't too late for her to do the same with her real family.
Life is generally a ***** most of the time. There is nothing ideal about it and there isn't room for a lot of fairness. That the child may suffer some distress over being reunited with her parents is just one of those things. Just the same way that kidnappings happen, and often people don't end up in such a nice place. That the child already has a set of loving parents that are willing to do all that is possible to have their child back their lives (as she always should have been), goes a long way to making the case that a child belongs with their parents.
Please this is easy. What we do is we cut the baby in half and give half to each of them...that satisfies both their claims. If one of the two involved refuse to cut the baby in half and forgoes their claim to half the baby then clearly they did not care enough about the child to want half of it and the baby goes to the one who loved the child enough to keep half of it in the first place.
LOGIC!
LOGIC!
razer17 said:
Children aren't property, it's a whole different set of laws. It's why a mother who's a junkie isn't allowed to care for a daughter she's selling into prostitution and they go into care. If the child was her property then the police would just stick their hands in their pockets and say "Oh well, she's the BIOLOGICAL mother, it's her call"
^ Obviously, extreme example, but it's what complicates things, she's spent 4/7 years in the USA (which seems like more than half to me but not disputing the maths of other posters) so is it the right thing to deport her? Her biological parents have a right to get to know her but the adoptive parents can't just be thrown aside, it's not like they bought a fenced TV.
Speculation, and nothing more.Sixcess said:
The US would certainly fight very hard to get back one of its own citizens. Why? Because that's who they're charged with protecting. They don't have to fight equally hard for someone else's citizenry, and in fact can't. I don't have the right to protect your house from burglars as though it were my house, do I?
But you'll notice they're not against sending the child back. It's just that, because this is outside the coverage of a particular treaty, the State Department can't do it. After all, if we just ran around making exceptions to every treaty's conditions, that would make us an irresponsible, untrustworthy Imperial power.
So, the only people who have said "No" are the State Department. And all they've said is, "No, we don't have the power to do this, in this case." It's like a heart surgeon saying, "Nope, this is a brain problem, it's outside my scope."
There are other legal avenues for pursuing this, and you might notice they are pursuing them. Lots of folks want to boil this down to, "Well the paper work wasn't real, so we all just take a big ol' Mulligan on this one!" The girl isn't a stolen car or TV set. She's a person, and I think maybe some folks don't realize how big a deal it is to put a child through something like this at the age of 7.
This problem goes beyond paperwork now. There's a human being involved, and one who can't really speak for herself. To try and make this some international or inter-parent pissing contest is irresponsible. Hell, we might as well just "King Solomon" the kid in half if we're going to treat the case that way...