In case you haven’t heard the wide reporting on this story (here for one U.S. missionaries charged with kidnapping in Haiti - CNN.com) 10 American missionaries tried to take 33 Haitian children out of the country to settle them with a Dominican Republic orphanage. The problems started when it was found that they didn’t have the correct paperwork to remove the children from the county. They were all arrested for kidnapping. Recently it has been determined that many of the children weren’t even orphans, they were just children whose parents couldn’t take care of them for the time in the chaos after the earthquake.
I have mixed feelings about this case. On the one hand, it appears the broke the law on purpose, hoping that the post-quake chaos would shield them from detection. On the other hand, it doesn’t appear they had any nefarious intent for these children. They wanted to take them somewhere that they would be better cared for. I’ve read that real child traffickers have descended on Haiti to snatch up kids to force them to be prostitutes or slaves. These missionaries are clearly not like that.
Is what they did really that wrong? How strict should their sentence be? Please discuss.
There was a similar case on NPR a few years ago about a missionary outfit that took kids from some islands in the S. Pacific from their parents with similar claims, and then gave them to US families looking to adopt. Eventually, one of the families found out that their adopted daughters folks were looking her, putting themselves and all of the other well meaning adopters in the awkward position of basically having unknowingly kidnapped their children, and having to decide whether to return them to their old families.
(sorry for vague details, hopefully somoene with a better memory can fill in the story)
In anycase, the OP’s story generally just seems fishy. Is there a shortage of real orphans in Haiti such that the missionaries have to fill their orphanage with kids that have living parents?
I disagree - permanently separating children from their parents without clear consent is pretty darn “nefarious” in my book.
I think so.
The fact they weren’t intending to make these children slaves or whores doesn’t make what they did OK. They intended to permanently break up a family through deceiving the parents. That’s wrong. Period.
I’ve been following this pretty closely. They seemed to have lied to just about everyone. They told people that the children didn’t have parents, which turned out not to be the case. They told the parents that the kids were just going to a school in the Dominican Republic, while it seems clear they planned to get many adopted.
The leader seems quite a flake. The Times reports that her business (advice on buying) has a hard time paying its employees, and has been sued several times. The home she bought as an orphanage has been foreclosed. People familiar with her say she is not good on planning, and changes the business model depending on which investor she spoke to last.
Most of them seem to be easily led boobs (but they are Baptists) and probably should just get kicked out of Haiti, but some serious jail time for her seems warranted. Good for the US State Department for not making a big fuss.
And I wonder how much of this is to save the souls of the little heathen children - they’re Catholic, for God’s sake, not real Christians like them.
It seems that one of the problems was a misunderstanding of Haitian culture. It is common for poor families to give their children to others temporarily until they are at a better place financially. It seems that these missionaries didn’t quite get that and they went into a town and asked the families if anyone wanted to give them their children and lots of them said yes. They even said that more families wanted them to take their children than there was room on the bus. It seems the missionaries thought, “These parents are giving us their children permanently because they know we can find them a better life.” Whereas the parents were thinking, “I’ve found a short term home for the kids while I rebuild our house and get back on my feet, then I’ll go get the kids back.”
You might change your mind about this if you read up about the leader of this group Laura Silbey, (sp?) as she is a thief and con-woman who was doubtlessly going to attenpt to profit from these children somehow, probably by selling them to the highest bidders.
That said, the rest of the group was seemingly misled and lied to by Silbey, and appear to have honestly just wanted to help the Hatian people.
Laura Silbey is a parasite and an opportunist who hides behind Christianity while she swindles her way through life.
20 years in a Hatian prison might just be the perfect way to help her find her path with the Lord…
She is a thief and a parasite, swindling her way through life, hiding behind Christianity while she steals from everyone who has ever extended credit to her.
These Hatian children were going to be her big payday, and she damn near got away with it…
In what culture are the missionaries from where you can just pull up in a big bus and have a bunch of people give you their children with no paperwork and no strings attached? I’m pretty sure that’s not how things work in the US.
And any “missionary” would have persumably studied the culture of the Haitians well enough to know this and would have have been taken the time to honestly explain to the families what they were doing. This wasn’t a cultural misunderstanding. They were using the culture to prey on innocent families.
Private adoption is expensive. Where do you think that money goes? To the biological families of children or their communities? No, lawyers and adoption facilitators get it.
That was a snipe? Might want to take a chill pill, R_W. When that particular poster wants to snipe about anything related to the subject of adoption, you’ll know it.
I’m also curious about the size of the adoption market for impoverished, likely non-English-speaking, thoroughly black children. They appear to outnumber Madonnas and Angelinas by a wide margin.
They were taking them to a place where they’d be brainwashed into ritually consuming blood and flesh and told that they were born with with the burden of evil from their ancestors.
