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It’s annoying, aggravating, frustrating and maddening enough when trashy tabloids and irrelevant hacks hijack international adoption and run it through a contorted wringer designed to crank out Headlines of Eye-Grabbing Horror and column-feet of pulsating pap in attempts to encourage a malignant miasma surrounding every aspect.
It really gets my goat going bonkers (And that’s not good!), though, when a publication that presents itself as a bastion of the respectable press jumps on a bandwagon because it happens to be rolling by.
I am well aware that the British media tends to the hyperbolical by nature, but this article in the Sunday Telegraph comes as a surprise … and a disappointment … nonetheless.
For a reasonably reputable newspaper anywhere in this day and age to headline a story, “US child-snatchers plague Guatemala” is shameful enough in its flagrant use of inflammatory invective, but to follow with such a pitifully weak argument as the story presents in an attempt to validate the statement is contemptible.
I have to wonder if the reporter, one Philip Sherwell, hasn’t been more than a bit caught up in the pre-Presidential election frenzy the country is experiencing, or has otherwise taken on an agenda that motivates him to intentionally manipulate the present adoption picture in Guatemala into a dangerously unfavorable light.
The article is typical of its kind … long on tales of adoptive families paying large sums to bring foreign-born children into America families, and stab-to-the-jugular short on evidence of child stealing.
With a transparently affecting photo of an apparently desperate woman plaintively presenting a picture of a child above a caption reading, “Torn apart: Ana Escobar holds a photograph of her daughter Esther, whom she fears has been sold”, juxtaposed against a happy American dad holding his new son onboard an plane headed for the US, the tone is set for readers to assume a link between the two.
It takes a critical eye to notice that no proof whatsoever is offered in the body of the story to substantiate any such tie.
The anguish suffered by Ana Escobar, 26, is a painful testimony that reports of baby- snatching are more than myth. Her six-month-old daughter Esther was stolen from her by an armed robber in Guatemala City earlier this year.
She believes she was targeted because she regularly took Esther to her work at a shoe store, where she breast-fed her. The attacker bundled Ms Escobar into a cupboard at gunpoint as she pleaded to keep her baby. “I begged like I have never begged before,” she said tearfully, but he barricaded the door and fled with her daughter.
“I’m never going to give up looking for her, but my mother’s instinct tells me that she has already been sold for adoption,” she said sadly, holding her only photograph of Esther.
As we have seen time and time again in countries all over the world, kidnappings happen. It’s a horrible crime, and those involved should be punished to the full extent of the law.
Kidnapping is NOT, however, international adoption, and linking the two in a news item, a self-published anti-adoption book, or on a web group does not make it so. A ‘mother’s instinct’ does not make it so … in fact I’m sure a few years back Guatemalan mothers of kidnapped children would have had an ‘instinct’ that their child had been sold for body parts.
Guatemalan adoptions by US citizens now require two DNA tests from birth mothers to establish maternity and confirm the identity of a relinquished child, but there is no mention of this in the Telegraph’s report.
Poverty, child mortality, malnutrition, a punishing social climate, all are rife in Guatemala, but you wouldn’t get any of that information from reading this article.
This sort of one-sided reporting should be addressed, the reporter and the publication taken to task.
If you would like to tell the Sunday Telegraph what you think of this sham of a news story on Guatemalan adoption, or to pass along some real information that is relevant to the world, the email address to write to is:
sletters@telegraph.co.uk.
I wish they would not write articles like that
Folks are already biased against international adoption enough as it is and they really do not know much about it.
It’s deeply depressing that they overlook stories of poverty, pain and having no choice but to make this painful decision in favour of being exploitative.
Ugh! That article is disgusting. I can’t believe that loser journalist compared babies to BANANAS as an “export”!! How does he sleep at night?
I want to hire a PR firm to represent adoptive families! This article and all the others out here are such unfair slander.
I wrote an e-mail and suggested that a mother in the UK had more to fear from Social Services than a Guatemalan mother had to fear from American kidnappers. Let them pull some weeds in their own yard first!
Rah, Rah, MamaS!
Maybe their own bad press is part of the motivation for this.
A PR firm would be a plus, JA! Let’s see what we can get going in the meantime. Letters, letters and more letters to the Sunday Telegraph and anyone else who puts out pap like this!
I just wrote a long letter to the address Sandra provided! The banana thing really got me going, so I wrote this:
“How absolutely horrible to state that babies are “just below bananas”. Wow. Maybe that’s why Mr. Sherwell expresses no concern about the approximately 13,000 babies who DIE every year in Guatemala due to lack of good nutrition, little to no medical care, etc. – Mr. Sherwell apparently feels that Guatemalan children rate no higher than bananas on his scale.”
I’m now going to write a thank you letter to myfoxstl.com (news station), who have been running thoughtful, sensitive stories on the CQ situation. (You can search for “adoption” on their site to find the stories.)
Just to note, the headline does not mention the U.S. The headline is, “Guatemala’s child-snatching plague.” There might or might not be such a plague, but there certainly are problems with the adoption system there. At the same time, what’s happening with Casa Quivira is not the way to address it. If that woman’s kidnapped child was indeed sold for adoption, it most likely was not through a sanctioned orphanage. My sympathies to the waiting parents, it sounds like a nightmare. –Theresa
This is very, very interesting.
The headline most definately was “US child-snatchers plague Guatemala” when I wrote this blog, as can be proved by Googling that headling and seeing how many references there are that quote it directly and news aggregators that have it as the story from yesterday’s Telegraph, ‘reddit’, for example: http://reddit.com/info/2l0cn/comments
Obviously, the Telegraph CHANGED THE HEADLINE after the fact, and did so with no acknowledgement that they had done so.
SHAMEFUL!!!
Think they’re regretting publlishing such a pitiful piece of trash?
Well that is interesting indeed. The coverage in general has been sensationalized, saying the children didn’t have papers when in fact that has not been proven. If it were a U.S. case & story, the articles would have had to say “allegedly.”
Exactly! And unfortunately typical of this sort of ‘reporting’. The personal anti-adoption agenda of the reporter shines through, while facts are cherry-picked to fit.
“while facts are cherry-picked to fit. “
This pretty much sums up for me the anti-adoption “facts”, anyway.
You’re right, though, S. It is SHAMEFUL to change a headline like that; even more so since there was not public acknowldegement or apology. Ugh. Raggy…..