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Adopted Boy Sent Back To Russia

iknownothing said:
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But parents, adoptive or otherwise, do need to be held accountable for their parenting.
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This can be addressed in a number of ways that are not punitive.

iknownothing said:
She should simply not have adopted, period. She was at best unprepared and unrealistic, and apparently without any clue as to how to handle a potential problem. By adopting the boy and then returning him, she did more damage than if he'd stayed there in the first place. She took an active part in damaging the child -- if disapproval on internet forums is the worst punishment she gets for that, she's lucky.

That has nothing to do with what is best for him going forward.
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So if you accidentally injure or kill your child, are you a bad person? Could be you were negligent and didn't know a 5 gallon bucket with a little water in it was the most common thing a toddler drowns in. You had the bucket, your child is injured or dies.

We call that a tragedy of ignorance, not on par with locking your child in a car while you party. Yet you could argue a parent owes it to their children to at least learn about basic safety. Are all the parents whose children are injured in 5 gallon buckets bad people? Do they all deserve to be punished? It's pretty basic knowledge.


A parent not competent to take care of a disturbed child can't necessarily be expected to know in advance that when adopting a child, be prepared to be lied to and if you adopt and the child ends up back in an orphanage additional damage will occur. I agree this probably will increase the child's problems. But again, I'm just not willing to put all the blame here on the mother or grandmother.
 
kerikiwi said:
It is not a case of either she takes the reprehensible action she did, or she keeps the child in a toxic environment and abuses him.
The whole point people have been making is that she should have accessed help rather than abandoning the child.

And you seriously don't know that 'institutions', like familes, can be good, bad or ugly?
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There's an assumption here that adequate help or alternatives were available. This is based on the word of the adoption agency that stands to look bad if they didn't offer to help, and the state agency, which again stands to look bad if they didn't offer the resources to help.

I'm not convinced those resources were available. They might have been, but we can't say they were at this point.
 
Checkmite said:
Remote psychoanalysis - by telepathy, even; that's something.
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Oh, please. It doesn't take psychoanalysis to be aware that being rejected by a mother (or mother figure) and having your world overturned is a damaging experience for a 7 year old. You want to pretend that maybe he's totally cool with it?

Skeptic Ginger said:
So if you accidentally injure or kill your child, are you a bad person? Could be you were negligent and didn't know a 5 gallon bucket with a little water in it was the most common thing a toddler drowns in. You had the bucket, your child is injured or dies.
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I don't think this is comparable with an accident. Although I do hold a parent responsible if, say, a small child dies in a car accident while not restrained in any way -- that falls more into the category of things that it is your parental job to be prepared for.
 
A little more about Torry Hansen. Apparently kids aren't the only people she has problems with.

Adoptive mom, neighbors had colorful feud in 2006

SHELBYVILLE, Tenn. — A Bedford County woman who sent her 7-year-old adopted son alone on a plane back to Moscow last week still isn't talking to investigators.

But Torry Hansen said plenty to deputies during a 2006 feud with her neighbor in Chapel Hill, where she lived before Shelbyville. She said in a police affidavit that her neighbor sneaked onto her property as she slept.
"This has been an ongoing problem," she wrote in the affidavit, saying the feud had spanned seven months.

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Hansen's neighbor troubles came to a head at 4:19 a.m. on Oct. 7, 2006, when she looked out an upstairs window of the house she shared with her parents, sister and a young boy. She said she saw neighbor Robert Abbott on her property at 3188 Halls Road in Chapel Hill and had him arrested and charged with criminal trespassing.

Henegar is listed as Abbott's lawyer in court records. The charge eventually was dropped. Abbott and his wife, Dwyne, still live on Halls Road but declined to comment on the arrest.

Bedford County Sheriff Randall Boyce said he vaguely remembers the feud but not what triggered it.

"I remember they were putting cameras on each other," he said.

Boyce said he recalls Dwyne Abbott speaking with him about the case, but he didn't think either side committed a crime.

Fredia Smith, who purchased the 4,300-square-foot Chapel Hill home and 30 acres from the Hansens in 2007 remembers visible evidence of the feud well.

She keeps a picture of a trailer Hansen painted neon orange, green and purple and placed near the road, apparently to irritate her neighbors. It was loaded with video equipment and sensor-activated lighting facing the Abbotts' house. The Hansens insisted on keeping the parcel of land it sat on out of the sale.

"It was like — whoo! — football stadium lights all of sudden in front of their house," Smith said. "I thought it was kind of odd that they would not even think about selling that piece of property to me and they insisted on having that trailer there."

Smith finally told the Hansens she would not buy the property if the trailer was not painted a solid color or removed. They removed it months later, she said.
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Check out the link for a photo of the trailer. It's very ... colorful.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
There's an assumption here that adequate help or alternatives were available. This is based on the word of the adoption agency that stands to look bad if they didn't offer to help, and the state agency, which again stands to look bad if they didn't offer the resources to help.

I'm not convinced those resources were available. They might have been, but we can't say they were at this point.
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It is extremely unlikely that abandoning the child was a better choice than accessing help and alternatives.
So, yes, it is a good bet that there were better choices available, but she chose to abandon the child by sending him unannounced to Russia.

I am trying to imagine what she might have said to him as she packed his bags and waved him through check-in.
Or what she said before she allowed someone else to do those things.
 
iknownothing said:
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I don't think this is comparable with an accident. Although I do hold a parent responsible if, say, a small child dies in a car accident while not restrained in any way -- that falls more into the category of things that it is your parental job to be prepared for.
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Then who is to decide which errors in parental knowledge are evil and which errors are tragic but not immoral?
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
I'm missing the relevance. Lots of people have or are neighbors from Hell. Is there some meaning that is more than coincidence here?
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Dunno. Just some additional data. What do you think? Irrelevant to state of mind or pattern of behavior? Got to admit it isn't a trivial investment, just to piss off a neighbor. Especially when they wanted to keep it up and running even after they moved away.
 
iknownothing said:
Oh, please. It doesn't take psychoanalysis to be aware that being rejected by a mother (or mother figure) and having your world overturned is a damaging experience for a 7 year old. You want to pretend that maybe he's totally cool with it?
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After repeatedly telling her that he wanted to kill her, and trying to set the house on fire? I'd say the child was already pretty damaged, and any further damage that may have been done by the return was negligible in comparison.

Meanwhile, how damaging to the psyche is death by house fire?
 
quadraginta said:
A little more about Torry Hansen. Apparently kids aren't the only people she has problems with.
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Ah, so she's something of a loon. Further suggesting that her not keeping the kid was actually in the kid's best interest, as I've been saying.
 
Checkmite said:
After repeatedly telling her that he wanted to kill her, and trying to set the house on fire? I'd say the child was already pretty damaged, and any further damage that may have been done by the return was negligible in comparison.
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You may of course be right, but this has not been my experience - every percieved betrayal has indeed caused more damage to children with difficult backgrounds. The trauma of being abandoned has also increased with every instance.

I'm not saying that they did not need professional help, or that I'm sure that the boy doesn't need to be in an institution, I really can't say that based only on what we know, I'm only saying that what they did seems to me the worst way of trying to solve the problem. Working together with professionals, whether in an institution or not, would be better. That way, perhaps the boy could be made to feel that he had not once again been abandoned.

And as far as I can tell, the problems they had are not that uncommon. Children do set fire to things, and make the most awful threats when they are upset. It's hard to tell whether this was in any way worse than what you could encounter in a perfectly normal child.
 
DC said:
how would you find out her behavior in sucha case in advance?
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I only have Colorado to go by, and a single adoption agency, but we had to go through a background check, and meet with a social worker numerous times before we wre approved to adopt--and the Feds required a background check before his entry visa was issued..
Such behavior as she exhibited in the past SHOULD raise a flag....
 
rwguinn said:
I only have Colorado to go by, and a single adoption agency, but we had to go through a background check, and meet with a social worker numerous times before we wre approved to adopt--and the Feds required a background check before his entry visa was issued..
Such behavior as she exhibited in the past SHOULD raise a flag....
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ah ok, i didnt know about her behavior before the adoption.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Then who is to decide which errors in parental knowledge are evil and which errors are tragic but not immoral?
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The legal system.

Checkmite said:
After allegedly repeatedly telling her that he wanted to kill her, and allegedly trying to set the house on fire?
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(Red words added by me.)

People are just accepting this based on what? A single note written by a person who we know very little about except that she has poor judgment?

ZirconBlue said:
I don't think it's a question of whether she should have kept the child, but rather questioning the manner in which she got rid of him.
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Exactly! She could have done it in a way that at least showed some consideration for the child. What she did shows none.

rwguinn said:
Agreed.
A major question arises, now, of howinhell she was approved to adopt in the first place!
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I've begun to wonder that myself.
 
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