ECPAT-USA’s Alternative Report to the United Nations

As of November 2009, 193 countries have ratified or accepted the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The only countries that have not signed it are Somalia, South Sudan, and the United States of America. While we have not signed the Convention, the United States has signed onto the Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography, which requires countries to prohibit the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. As part of the protocol, the US must report every five years on its progress in preventing and combating child trafficking. The pioneering ECPAT-USA (End Child Prostitution and ...

Advocacy Alert: Adoption Tax Credit

Contact your Congressional Representative and ask them to Co-Sponsor H.R. 4373! If Congress does not act the tax credit as we now know it will expire on December 31, 2012. If the adoption tax credit helped you or someone you know to adopt a child or if it could help you in the future to adopt a child, call your Representative today and urge that he or she cosponsor the bipartisan bill H.R. 4373, the Making Adoption Affordable Act. Action: We are contacting you today to urge you to call your Representative in the U.S. House of Representatives. You can reach your Representative by calling the U.S. Capitol Operator at (202) 225-3121 and asking for ...

International Adoption’s Trafficking Problem

From the Harvard Political Review: International adoptions have an illustrious façade, conjuring images of couples saving a hungry, orphaned child and living happily ever. While imagining international adoptions as a corrupt business is abhorrent, connections to child trafficking have recently arisen. Accordingly, the State Department reports that though Americans adopted 22,991 international children in 2004, the implementation of The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption brought about a precipitous drop to 9,319 adoptions in 2011. Over the past decade, Western investigative journalists led by Scott Carney have published on hidden realities. ...

EFF Joins the Child Exploitation Bandwagon

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is representing the Internet Archive in a fight against a Washington state law designed to prevent child sex trafficking. EFF, which bills itself as "Defending Your Rights in the Digital World, is a Washington, DC special interest group and long-time supporter of near absolute Internet "freedom." This article in the august National Law Journal provides a good overview of the case. What the article doesn't tell you is that the new plaintiff in the Washington litigation (which was brought by cyber-pimp Backpage.com and Village Voice Media Holdings), the Internet Archive, shares a board member with EFF, Brewster ...

Non-abused siblings who remain at home: a dangerous Child Protection Services intersection

A recent study identifies the nation's most dangerous traffic intersection. It’s at Flamingo Road and Pines Boulevard in Pembroke Pines, Florida. The insurance company’s engineer who compiled the report notes that the intersection meets appropriate design standards and is regulated by traffic lights. He said traffic volume and driver error were two important factors in the high number of crashes. One of the most dangerous intersections of every state’s child welfare system is the decision whether to remove or leave non-abused siblings in a home in which another sibling has been abused or neglected. Like the dangerous intersection ...