[1]Wisconsin: Todd and Melissa Puchalla struggled for more than two years to raise Quita, the troubled teenager they’d adopted from Liberia. When they decided to give her up, they found new parents to take her in less than two days – by posting an ad on the Internet.Nicole and Calvin Eason, an Illinois couple in their 30s, saw the ad and a picture of the smiling 16-year-old. They were eager to take Quita, even though the ad warned that she had been diagnosed with severe health and behavioural problems. In emails, Nicole Eason assured Melissa Puchalla that she could handle the girl.“People that are around me think I am awesome with kids,” Eason wrote.A few weeks later, on Oct. 4, 2008, the Puchallas drove six hours from their Wisconsin home to Westville, Illinois. The handoff took place at the Country Aire Mobile Home Park, where the Easons lived in a trailer.No attorneys or child welfare officials came with them. The Puchallas simply signed a notarised statement declaring these virtual strangers to be Quita’s guardians. It was the first and the last time the couples would meet.Later, Quita was lost as the Puchallas couldn’t trace her or the Easons. Through Yahoo and Facebook groups, parents and others advertise the unwanted children and then pass them to stra-ngers with little or no government scrutiny, sometimes illegally, a Reuters investigation has found. It is a largely lawless marketplace. The practice is called “private re-homing,” a term typically used by owners seeking new homes for their pets. Based on solicitations posted on one of eight similar online bulletin boards, the parallels are striking.
Reuters analysed 5,029 posts from a five-year period on one Internet message board, a Yahoo group.On average, a child was advertised for re-homing there once a week. Most of the children ranged in age from 6 to 14 and had been adopted from abroad – from countries such as Russia and China, Ethi-opia and Ukraine. The youngest was 10 months old.
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