Posted on 04/09/2010 3:05:56 PM PDT by SmartInsight
A 7-year-old Russian boy adopted by an American family last year was put on a return flight to Moscow this week because of violent and psychotic behavior, according to a Tennessee grandmother.
Once the child learned enough English, he told his new family about the horrors of his previous life, including being beaten at the orphanage after his mother abandoned him, she said.
He also told of an incident in which he burned down a building near the orphanage, she said.
Hansen said the child had a "hit list" of people he was targeting, including her daughter, who he said he "wanted to kill for the house." He threatened to kill her grandson for a videogame, she said.
The final incident that convinced Hansen she should send the boy back to Russia was when she caught him starting a fire with papers in his bedroom last Monday, she said. She feared the child might burn down the house and kill her family, she said.
(Excerpt) Read more at edition.cnn.com ...
Earlier articles did not mention any of this:
Russia furious over adopted boy sent back from US
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2490049/posts
Unwanted Adopted Boy Sent Back To Russia
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2489922/posts
Might be just as they said. But no sympathy here. An adopted kid isn’t just a VCR you send to the returns dept. You do like any parent and call Child protective service,, mental health inpatient programs, etc. Just like you do with your natural child gone nuts.
I can’t just put my kid on United Airlines with a note pinned to ‘em.
He can’t be too bad.
The plane didn’t go down in flames on the way back to Russia.
“...Hansen said the child had a “hit list” of people he was targeting, including her daughter, who he said he “wanted to kill for the house.” He threatened to kill her grandson for a videogame, she said...”
Hey, sounds like he has some boy in him. This sounds just like typical family stuff.
Granny did all the planning, made all the decisions, talks about her ability to parent the child, did the deed. What is really going on here? There is more to this story than meets the eye.
No surprise that the Russians are dumping their problems on desperate people who want to adopt.
I agree 100%. This is a child, not a defective TV. There were many routes this family could have taken to help themselves and the child. If he had issues before, what kind of issues will he have NOW?
There was a policy for dissolving the adoption. That should have been followed instead of pending a note to him. The first place they should have called was the adoption agency that facilitated the adoption. Since he was caught starting a fire in the home, I think social services should have been called to protect the others in the home.
Parents that adopt older children really do need to count the cost before they take the child. It is hard to know what these children have been through and what kind of problems they have.
pending = pinning
Don’t know how I made that mistake. :)
Understand, but not sure I would keep him around - not when he is a threat to the rest of the family. It’s nice to be open minded about trying to help him, but not at the expense of his open threats.
He may be a human being, but as flawed as he seemed to be and dangerous to the rest of the family - they probably did the right thing. Singles may take the chance, but not to the point of risking others...
I had a feeling the boy really was a danger to himself and others. There have been more than this incident documented regarding these children.
A friend adopted a Russian child and the conditions they observed, in the orphanage, were guaranteed to damage any child.
It isn’t anyone’s fault, as I believe there are too many children given up by druggie mothers (story of my friend’s adopted son), and not enough caretakers. The children have little or no close human contact, no cuddling, and it is very sad.
Because of the main reason these children are dumped into the Russian system is probably drugs, I would expect most of them to suffer from other problems. The one I know was adopted when he was quite young, and has learning disabilities, but I think he was removed from the system early enough that he did not develop the hostility that the boy in the article obviously had.
The Russian government knows full well what they are doing to these children and to the adopted parents. I believe that no longer can parents view a video of the child before they arrive to meet him, and in my friend’s case, they were shown pictures of cute little kids, but as soon as they chose one, they could not view any more children and unless the one they went to Russia to pick up was actually ill, they had to take that one, or none at all.
By the time they reached the point of actually seeing the child, they had made an enormous financial investment in him - it is not something that many people can afford to undertake more than once.
This is not to excuse what happened to the returned child, but there is a lot more to the story than we will probably know.
I sympathize with em, but if i find my my kid lighting a fire in the bedroom, i have have very few good options, but there sure ain’t no return policy. Unless theres some clause in an adoption contract i don’t know about, but i’m pretty sure adoption is actually like being a regular parent. A parent, with all the good and bad that might entail.
There are far better mental health services here than there are in Russia, including “secure institutions” for children criminally inclined. Again, the family had options, and maybe they did explore them, but I haven’t heard of it if they did.
I’d like to know where the adoptive parents are? Why is the Grandmother in control? There’s more to this story than meets the eye.
She actually did a bit more than just stick the boy on a plane with a “note” pinned to him. She made prior arrangements with a “tour guide” in Russia to meet him at the airport and deliver him to a social services agency, and the person did indeed meet and deliver him. And I don’t know if it’s the same thing as the “note” being referred to, or a second item, but I read that a typed letter to some Russian government Ministry which had been involved in the adoption was sent along with him and delivered to the Ministry.
I won’t condemn this woman without more information about what efforts she’d made to find a better solution. If she made serious attempts to get an appropriate institutional placement here for him, and was turned down, she may really have had no better option. If it’s true that he claimed to have burned down a building near his orphanage in Russia, and that the adoptive mother found him starting a fire with a pile of papers in his bedroom (after a long string of violent threats and acts), sticking on a plane to send him back doesn’t look so unreasonable.
DesertRhino: There have been some awful cases in the US, including some involving people’s biological children, where the courts and social services simply refused to do anything beyond arranging weekly therapy sessions for a dangerously out-of-control child, until AFTER the child killed or maimed someone. It’s not reasonable to expect a parent to just keep waiting when they see all the warning signs that the child is really intent on killing somebody, or on burning the house down without caring if it kills somebody. Back in the “good old days”, parents had quite a bit of freedom to forcibly control their own children, but nowadays, locking a kid in a padded room will get a parent arrested and charged with criminal child abuse, regardless of the circumstances. Only government-licensed “professionals” are allowed to do this, and if you can’t a court or social service agency to place your child in an institutional setting, you’re at the end of the road UNTIL the child actually commits arson, murder, attempted murder, etc.
Tough titties. You adopt a child, you deal with the consequences, whether they be counseling, medication, whatever.
I think the real point is that the orphanage did NOT disclose the serious behavioral problems the boy had:
“When her daughter, Torry Hansen, adopted the boy from a Russian orphanage last year, she asked the doctor there if he had any physical or mental problems, Nancy Hansen said.
The doctor answered “’He’s healthy,’ and turned and left,” she said.
Once the child learned enough English, he told his new family about the horrors of his previous life, including being beaten at the orphanage after his mother abandoned him, she said.
He also told of an incident in which he burned down a building near the orphanage, she said.”
That doesn’t mean the woman who adopted the boy should have done what she did — she should have pursued some legal option, but she must have started to be afraid of what the kid might do in the meantime, so she took the desperate step she did.
Did they not observe such ill behavior before the boy learned enough English to speak to them?
Absolutely there’s more to this story. I want to know where the daughter/mother is.
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