Gov. Scott Walker Makes Wisconsin First State to Prevent Parents from Giving Up Adopted Children
The bill, signed Wednesday by Gov. Scott Walker, is designed to prevent adoptive parents from "re-homing" children they don't want. Often they use underground networks to find these children new parents.
"With virtually no oversight, children could literally be traded from home to home. In Wisconsin, that is now against the law," Republican Rep. Joel Kleefisch, who sponsored the legislation, said. "Hopefully citizens of the country will follow our lead."
This bill comes to life after hundreds of adoptive parents were found trying to give away their children on social media sites to strangers. Sometimes this caused children to be in harms way of pedophiles and predators.
Currently, there's no federal rules for the "re-homing" process.
Because many children put up for adoption are from foreign countries, adoptive parents don't always know their histories. Some of the children are too much for the parents to handle and they seek a way to get rid of these unwanted children. One of those ways is through underground online networks.
Over a five-year period, Reuters analyzed a Yahoo message board. It found 261 kids were offered for "re-homing" on the website. Most of these kids were from other countries.
From this message board, a mother gave her nine-year-old adopted son to a pedophile in a motel parking lot.
"The Reuters reports outlined massive pratfalls in current law that allowed children to be advertised on social networks on the Internet," Kleefisch said.
Following the Reuters findings, Yahoo took down the message board titled "Adopting-from-Disruption" and five other similar boards. A similar board, that is still active, was found on Facebook.
If found breaking the new law, violators face up to nine months in jail or up to $10,000 in fines.
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