Starving and Beating Adoptees in Allegheny County: Some Speculations

Has everybody breathed a sigh of relief that the State Department has got everything fixed for Russian adoptees? No more starvation, no more restraint? Great, let’s move along to the Ethiopian children. No Ethiopian Pavel Astrakhov has yet appeared on the scene, but one is needed.

Last  week, adoptive parents of two young Ethiopian children were arrested in Allegheny County, PA (http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2012/10/04/deputy-attorney-general-wife-charged-with-abusing-adopted-children). One child, a boy of 6, was badly malnourished, and an 18-month-old girl had skull fractures that may leave her blind. The children, who were adopted through a church organization, had been since March in the home of the adoptive parents, Douglas and Kristey Barbour. Mr. Barbour is a Pennsylvania deputy attorney general.

What was happening here? Very little has been revealed so far. I’ve seen considerable Internet speculation that the elite adoptive parents were deliberately cruel to the black children, and although I acknowledge that the children’s ethnicity did not stop the parents from abusing them, there are too many cases of “white-on-white” abuse for me to think that the parents were especially motivated to abuse by the children’s skin color.

There are other possible explanations---  and I don’t bring these forward in an attempt to excuse the Barbours, but because understanding these situations can help us to prevent them from occurring again. Neither do I suggest that a single explanation can do the entire job, so more than one possibility needs to be considered here.

1. The first possibility I want to consider is that the Barbours were in fact encouraged to use certain “tools” in dealing with the children, and that this encouragement gave them permission to go much too far. There are groups like the “No Greater Joy” ministries that advise physical punishment for disobedience for children as young as 4 months (yes, months ). There have been some deaths associated with that sort of treatment, but they have involved shock from being whipped severely, rather than the skull fractures in the Barbours’ case. The key to understanding this will be to find out whether the Barbours were committed to the idea that instant cheerful obedience must be obtained at all costs, and failing to achieve this easily, they turned to blows.

In addition to the physical punishment “tool”, there are various sources for the recommendation that a child’s diet be restricted in order to display the authority that these people claim is the cause of emotional attachment (see the beliefs of Nancy Thomas, for instance). I have discussed this before at http://childmyths/blogspot.com/2010/12/federici-v-mercer-story-behind-lawsuit.html.  To the best of my knowledge, practitioners do not advise parents not to feed a child at all, but just as a mild spanking can turn into a beating when an adult feels the need to escalate, so can food restriction become a starvation situation.

2. A second possible explanation for the Barbours’ abusive behavior is the Post Adoption Depression that has recently been discussed on this blog. Depression in many adults involves irritability and shortness of temper as well as the characteristic sadness. Irritability adds to the potential for physical lashing-out against a child whose normal behaviors are found annoying, who perhaps does not go to sleep as instructed or who drops food by accident. Although maternal depression has often been attributed to hormone changes following pregnancy, it’s pretty clear that it can also depend on the challenge of life with young children. (A reader recently pointed out that adoptive parents tend to be older than biological parents and may have life difficulties associated with their greater age--  perhaps responsibility for care for elderly parents rather than a younger person’s expectation that their own parents may be helpful. Adoptive parents may also have very high standards for themselves and feel depressed at their failure to live up to an unrealistic level of performance.)

3. I have no explanation to offer for the battering of the little girl, beyond what I’ve said so far. But I have to wonder whether starving the boy was associated with poor understanding of the eating habits and nutritional needs of children from other cultures. A 6-year-old is old enough to have strong habits and expectations of what food should be like and how you eat it (hands versus forks, plates versus a communal pot). Adults from the United States suddenly shifted to an Ethiopian diet (delicious but spicy by our standards) might well suffer stomachaches and be reluctant to eat. What was this child’s experience? How did he respond? Did the Barbours take his reluctance as disobedience that had to be nipped in the bud? For other adoptive parents dealing with this kind of situation, I’d like to point out the enormous help that the SPOON foundation (www.spoonfoundation.org) can be in understanding what a child’s past diet and eating habits probably were, and how to make a dietary transition and ensure that nutritional needs are met.

I am hoping that information about these points will emerge in the course of the trial. I would not be surprised to find that all the points mentioned above worked together to cause the terrible outcome. If any reader knows more about this case than has so far appeared in the news, I would like to hear from you.