Internet photolistings of children waiting for adoptive parents raise challenging ethical issues.

As of September 2000, 75,000 children in foster care were free for adoption - a number that continues to grow each year, placing greater demands on child welfare systems to find adoptive families. State and local agencies have used different strategies to recruit adoptive families-including photolistings, which allow potential adoptive parents to view pictures and read short descriptions of available children.

Since 1994, photolistings have been posted on the Internet, either on individual states' websites or the federally funded website known since 2002 as AdoptUSKids. This national website currently lists 3,000 children in foster care who are available for adoption.

Before the Internet, families interested in adopting children from foster care typically visited child welfare agencies and reviewed photographs and biographies of children who were available for adoption in their own states. Later, agencies partnered with local newspapers and television stations to develop feature articles and television spots such as "Wednesday's Child" to alert the public to the needs of waiting children.

Unlike these earlier approaches, however, the Internet has the capacity to reach millions of people and interest families who may never have been made aware of children in foster care who needed adoptive families. Among its benefits, the Internet offers ready access to information in a cost-efficient manner, and privacy for families who may be in the early stages of considering adoption but not be ready to contact a social service agency.

As child welfare systems have recognized the benefits of this new means of recruiting families for waiting children, practitioners have confronted some ethical issues, particularly regarding the type of information shared about children in the very public venue of the Internet.

Red Flags

In a random downloading of Internet postings, samples of actual photolistings illustrate the types of information posted about children and raise several ethical issues to consider when the Internet is used as a recruiting tool for adoptive families:1

Frequent use of clinical terms to describe children and their behavior or status.

[Isabelle] experienced a chaotic life and as a result has been diagnosed with and receives medication and therapy for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), oppositional defiant disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

These diagnostic terms aren't likely to be clear to the average reader and lack any context that helps the reader understand the how these conditions affect the child.

© Sarah Gerstenzang and Madelyn Freundlich, 2003

Credits: Children's Voice