Inequality near and far: Adoption as seen from the Brazilian favelas

Law & Society Review, 2002 by Fonseca, Claudia

Focusing on child circulation among the urban poor in Southern Brazil, this article considers the parallels and divergences between local practice, national legislation, and global policy involved in legal adoption. Following a brief ethnographic account of child circulation among working-class families in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the analysis focuses on adocao a brasileira (clandestine adoption) as one of the ways in which the Brazilian poor bypass legal bureaucratic procedures in order to adjust the State apparatus to their needs. Finally, the comparative analysis of Brazil and North America centers on the evolution of adoption law and policies. Our approach highlights the variant experiences of family and legal consciousness according to class and national identity, while at the same time considering the political inequality implied in the hierarchization of different cultural repertoires.

In a recent book on international adoption, the social worker responsible for describing the situation in Brazil underlines the superior quality of overseas adopters. Brazilian nationals,judging from the number of children returned to the court, "lack a serious attitude toward adoption." The author mentions factors such as poor financial conditions and unstable family structures that may explain this lack of seriousness, but, in her opinion, the real motive (and key to a solution?) lies in the fact that Brazilians don't pay anything for the adopted child: "In contrast, expenses for foreigners are huge, and the adoptive ties turn out to be strong and lasting" (Silva 1995:126).

These comments serve as a springboard for the subject of my article: Brazilian adoption practices, placed within a globalized context. They speak of a problem that is central to my concerns-the so-called "gap" between law and actual behavior.1

However, inverting the question that this social worker implicitly poses ("Why can't Brazilians measure up to international norms of adoption?"), I ask how is it that Brazilian laws, often touted as being on the forefront of progressive international legislation, give so little heed to local values and social dynamics? In fact, in this article, I hope to convince readers that it is no surprise that foreign adopters conform more closely to Brazilian legal directives than do national candidates, since the laws, rather than being based on and adapted to an accurate assessment of local reality, derive from the abstract principles that dominate international debates.

The possibly reprehensible character of this fact derives from two hypotheses. First, these abstract principles are not the neutral product of consensual humanitarian interests. They are, instead, the fruit of ideological power struggles and are inevitably shaped by the hegemonic narratives that reflect, above all, First World contexts and values (Silbey 1997). Following this line of thought, the very popularity of legal adoption that seems to have recently swept the globe from President Clinton's speech in which Americans are urged to adopt the 500,000 children in foster care2 to the Brazilian child welfare services' listing of adoptable children on internet sites-may be considered part of a hegemonic narrative in which this particular form of child placement is presented as the "obvious" remedy for the ills of the world's children. The criticism of hegemonic narratives on adoption having been elaborated elsewhere (see, e.g., Yngvesson 2000; Selman 2000; Fonseca, forthcoming), I will dwell in this article on a second hypothesis, which is that in many countries distinct values and patterns of family organization, including non-mainstream forms of adoption, exist on a widespread basis. To illustrate, I rely on ethnographic research in Brazilian favelas, arguing that to socialize and ensure the survival of younger generations, lower-income families have traditionally resorted to the informal placement of children in different, substitute households, and that the dynamics of this "circulation of children,"3 with its emphasis on extended family networks, have been not only ignored but also disavowed by legislators and social workers alike. Thus, I suggest, adoption laws have evolved in a way that simply does not make sense to a good many people. This supposition not only would explain the "lack of seriousness" of local adopters but also would raise doubts about another fundamental issue in the adoption process: the treatment of birth parents in the legal procedures that render their child available for adoption. Having worked with the sort of poverty-stricken families from which most adoptable children are drawn, I concentrate my aim on this latter element: the understanding and possible misconceptions members of the birth family and, in particular, birth mothers have of the legal adoption process.

My approach is not entirely original. I have drawn inspiration from the abundant literature that points out discrepancies between state law and particular community practices concerning child welfare.4 Commenting on the tendency of Hawaiian state services to remove native children from their clan-like kinship networks to place them in non-Hawaiian (white and Japanese) families with a more mainstream way of life, Judith Modell (1997) furnishes a recent example of how state policies, geared toward middle-class family values, have at times discriminated against minority groups. Her study reveals how Hawaiians, in the name of a distinct cultural heritage,5 seize upon the very weapons offered by the court-Western legal discourse-to protect the right to raise their children in what might seem, according to official state criteria, substandard homes. Native Americans, Canadian Inuits, and Australian aborigines are among the many groups who have likewise proved competent in appropriating the political strategies of modern government to stem the flow of children extracted from their communities, whether by missionaries or adoptive parents, to be raised and educated in another way of life (Fournier & Crey 1997; Slaughter 2000). One could no doubt include many of these examples in what Merry (1997) describes as "legal vernacularisation," a process whereby colonized minorities, in their bid for human rights, reinterpret and transform Western law according to their own legal conceptions.