Child laundering is the illegal acquisition of children through monetary transactions, deceit, and/or force. Child laundering rings are often expansive with multiple hierarchies of people whose primary motivations are large profits from the black markets of overseas adoption. With Westerners willing to spend thousands of dollars to adopt one child, enough monetary incentives are created to extend the laundering ring from the middle classes to societies' more affluent groups. These "baby broker" families subsequently forge a new identity for the laundered child, "validating" the child's legal status as an orphan and ensuring the scheme will not be uncovered.
The issue of child laundering is highly controversial; while many argue that these children are being treated as a commodity and stripped of family contact, others argue that, ultimately, the children will live in a more affluent environment and have more opportunities as a result of this adoption.
Read more about Child Laundering: Hierarchy of Involvement, Process of Illegal Adoptions, Case Studies
Famous quotes containing the word child:
“The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.”
—David Elkind (20th century)