The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce

adoption can be, which is entitlement” to poorer countries’ children.
    Karen Dubinsky said that the long-standing debate over international adoption is often interpreted in binary terms, seen as either solely rescue or solely kidnapping. The Silsby affair brought these discussions into sharp relief. “Usually things are more subtle than that, but this was one of those moments where the battle lines became incredibly stark,” said Dubinksy. “What they tried to do has been done a million times in human history, especially after disaster. . . . It’s become seamless: disaster happens, and we in the West show up with bottled water, and we’ll take your children.”
    It had happened five years earlier, in Indonesia’s Banda Aceh province after the 2004 tsunami, when the Virginia-based missionary group WorldHelp announced its intention to adopt 300 Muslim tsunami orphans into a US Christian orphanage so the group could “plant Christian principles as early as possible.” And it had happened again in 2007, when a French charity, Zoe’s Ark, was accused of kidnapping 103 children from Chad, children they claimed were Sudanese war orphans when in fact many were local Chadian kids with families. (Group members were initially sentenced to eight years’ hard labor but were later pardoned by Chadian President Idriss Déby. They faced trial in France in December 2012.)
    However, by 2010 the disconnected missions of various Christian ministries had become a cause, and in Haiti the seams of the typically seamless narrative—disaster abroad followed by American adoptions—were unusually visible. With Haiti’s government in a state of sudden and obvious devastation and its sovereignty disputed on all sides, the fate of the country’s children became a line in the sand. “Silsby had the misfortune to arrive on the scene at this particular moment,” Dubinsky said.
    Silsby seemed to recognize this too, appearing indignant in her defense that she was being punished for something so many had done before. In an affidavit she would later file when her ex-husband sued for full custody of their children, Silsby downplayed the scandal, explaining, “We learned ours was only one of many groups bringing children out of Haiti without documentation or incident.”
    In their public statements, though, Silsby and the missionaries maintained that they had been called by God. Silsby’s former live-in nanny, twenty-four-year-old Charisa Coulter, whom Silsby had made codirector of New Life Children’s Refuge, echoed this: “We are 10 Christians whoobeyed God’s calling,” she said. “We went to help the nation of Haiti and their children and for reasons unknown to us, it did not go the way we planned.”
    In the first days after the arrests the missionaries added a mystique of martyrdom when they said simply, “Philippians 1” when television reporters asked them about the allegations against them, a reference to the Apostle Paul’s letter from prison and an implication that they had been jailed for their beliefs. They sang hymns as they were driven back to jail after being formally charged. And when a Time magazine journalist visited them in jail in mid-February, the missionaries told the reporter, “The Philistines won, the Philistines won.”
    The Central Valley and Eastside Baptist Churches in Idaho posted announcements that the team had been “falsely arrested” over a “misunderstanding,” and some Christian groups decried the arrest as persecution for their faith. (Pastor Paul Thompson of Eastside Baptist, one of the jailed missionaries, would later let loose with a series of accusations that UNICEF had orchestrated the arrests as part of a campaign of spiritual warfare, claims that UNICEF tersely denied in full.)
    But most Christian groups kept their distance, and some even rebuked the church culture that inspired Silsby. Fritz Gutwein, a US Baptist minister and adoptive parent with a background in Haiti, wrote a