Failed Adoptive Parent: Watch Your Language

The invective that’s being hurled at Torry Hansen for returning her adopted son to Russia is sad, but mostly richly deserved.  Cooler heads and kinder people than I am will reasonably resist a rush to judgment, of course.  Caring for a child who has been raised in an institution, in a remarkably different culture, can’t be easy for anyone.  And it could be that the boy, obviously through no fault of his own, has serious behavioral issues that simply overwhelmed this family, particularly the hapless Torry who apparently believes that “disannulled” is a word.  (And yes, I understand that I’m a lawyer and perhaps shouldn’t pick on people who aren’t when it comes to quasi-legal writing.  Regardless, she has an R.N. and access to a dictionary.  If she’s going to officially abandon a child to a bureaucratic office 6000 miles away with a letter, she should at least have someone proofread the damn thing.)Assuming the Hansen’s are being completely truthful (which the Russian government disputes) and the boy was exhibiting homicidal ideation and fire starting, the fact remains that he’s seven.  Without resorting to abusive practices, he’s relatively easy to control physically, and he needs to be monitored- pretty much constantly- anyway.  If the family was that exhausted by him, they had better have sought out every possible means of assistance before returning him like a pet who ended up damaging the carpet and exasperating the owners.Regardless, there is no excuse- none- for putting a child on a 10-hour transatlantic flight and having him scooped up by some guy on the other side, paid $200 to drop him off at a ministry headquarters. I could care less how many “safety references” the Hansen’s claimed they gathered with regard to this courier.  Canadian Press reports that he dropped the child off with his bags and the letter and promptly left.  Everyone involved, most certainly this child, is lucky he didn’t disappear outside of the airport like smoke.  Since a lawyer has now muzzled the family, we probably won’t know until an official inquest why Torry didn’t accompany the child back to Russia upon rejecting him.  My guess is her reasons will involve all sorts of feelings of helplessness and failure that mask the fact that she really just didn’t want to go.  Cost, and the uncertainty of how, exactly, the Russian government might react to her walking away from him surely gave her pause.  Especially cost.  So instead Nancy, the grandmother, accompanied him as far as Dulles.  United Airlines and the hired stranger in one of the developed world’s more dangerous cities had to suffice from there.What prompted me to write, though was less Torry Hansen’s grim and nihilistic response to this boy’s purported difficulties, and more her description of them.  In the letter she wrote to explain her abandonment, she stated that he is “violent and has severe psychopathic issues/behaviors.”  I don’t expect much from this person in terms of competent description anyway, but she is far, far out of bounds in using the term “psychopathic” in any context.  From my work in New York State with civil management/commitment proceedings, I have a fair amount of lay experience with psychopathy.  I have encountered, spoken with, and cross-examined psychopaths.  The diagnostic term describes a terrifying and still only partially understood condition afflicting career criminals, serial killers, and the most repugnant and dangerous people, criminal or not, among us. At this point anyway, it is reserved almost exclusively for adults, with expanding research suggesting that it can be applied to adolescents.  I’ve yet to see it applied to children as young as seven.  I understand she’s attempting to describe behaviors in the letter, but the word “issues” is broader than “behaviors.”  Certainly she’s at least suggesting the child is, in her mind at least, some sort of “budding psychopath,” another term that is tossed about far too much to describe troubled children.   It's obvious she used the word for shock value in an effort to underscore her faultlessness in abandoning him.  The media is pushing these same unfair buttons also, with shocking headlines that focus on the boy's "terrorizing" behavior, as noted in an excellent blog post by Martha Nichols.The Hansen family’s response to this child’s troubles, whatever they truly are, has been destructive, selfish and cruel.  It has further stoked existing tension between the two countries and threatened the entire process that has placed thousands of the over 700,000 children in Russia who are growing up without parents.  Adoption of Russian children by Americans has resulted in some well-publicized horrific failures, but most, according the National Council for Adoption, are  successful.  But this family’s abandonment of one of them confirms the suspicions of many Russians that Americans view adoption from their country with a mentality best described as something between boutique shopping and the fate of an empty coffee cup.