Telling The Story of Unwanted Children

Americans adopt hundreds of children from foreign countries each year, but many end up being shuffled from one home to another, unchecked and unaccounted for. Reuters’ Megan Twohey found out why.

Thomson Reuters’ investigative story “The Child Exchange” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2014. In the five-part series, lead journalist Megan Twohey spent 18 months examining the shady underground market in America for exchanging unwanted adopted children. She reviewed thousands of pages of records, built an interactive database, and interviewed the parents and kids involved to shed much-needed light on the world where kids are shuffled from one home to another — lost, abandoned and often abused.

The Story Idea:

Before Reuters, Twohey worked for close to five years at the Chicago Tribune. During her time there, she had written a few local stories on international adoption, a relatively new phenomenon then in the early 2000s. Through her reporting, she discovered that it was a largely unregulated and unchecked process, both on the American side and abroad.

A bigger question always burned in the back of Twohey’s mind however: what happened to the kids once they arrived in the United States? Were they being taken care of? So when the opportunity came to pitch her very first story at Reuters, Twohey decided to dig deeper into the topic.

Research:

Twohey started where almost all modern-day stories do: Google. She read through all the news articles and posts by adoption groups she could find. It didn’t take long before she stumbled upon one of the most critical elements of the entire investigation: online forums.

She found eight forums in total pertaining to international adoption. Inside, there were concerning but harmless posts on the difficulties parents were experiencing with their new adopted child, complaints about unruly behavior, parenting advice and the like. But Twohey also found something else: advertisements. Specifically, adoptive parents posting ads looking for families to take over the foreign child they were struggling to raise and no longer wanted. “Private rehoming” was the term they used.

“It didn’t take long to learn their language. Rehoming, adoption interruption etc. The term rehoming actually originated from pet adoption, but these people were referring to children,” Twohey said.

She was shocked, but also more convinced than ever that she had an important story to tell. The difficulty was in finding the right way to do so to achieve the most impact.

“It wouldn’t be enough to just publish links to the forum posts, although that’d be a good starting point,” Twohey said. “I needed to gain more access. I couldn’t lie about my identity, but I had to find some way to engage with these people, with their world.”

At the same time, Twohey began compiling background material that would inform her story: laws governing adoptions in the U.S., the presence (or lack thereof) of governmental oversight and whether law enforcement agencies were aware of “rehoming” practices.

Defining the Angle:

Twohey decided to hone in on one forum in particular: Adopting-from-Disruption on Yahoo. Collaborating with two of her colleagues who specialize in data analysis, the team spent a month scraping through 5,029 messages posted over a five-year period. They analyzed each one and built an interactive database, both to keep track of the information and to hopefully reveal some sort of pattern.

The analysis revealed some basic demographics, such as the children’s age range and the fact that they were mostly foreign. The team also noticed something else: a pair of names that was mentioned repeatedly: Calvin and Nicole Eason. In numerous messages posted by adoptive parents, there would be warnings against the Easons, saying: “Watch out for these guys. They travel around the country, taking kids, and they’re not who they say they are, and they’re very dangerous.”

Twohey knew then that she’d found the key to her story, the central characters. “I became obsessed with [the Easons]. I wanted to find out who they were, what they were doing and track them down.”

The Easons:

It took Twohey months to track down Calvin and Nicole. She found all of their past addresses on LexisNexis and visited each one of them to little avail because the couple moved around constantly. She located the courthouses and child welfare centers in each of the jurisdictions the Easons lived in in the hopes of finding some official traces of wrongdoing. Twohey described the process as long and cumbersome.

Persistence paid off however. In the end, Twohey was able to find records of theft, documents showing that child welfare authorities had taken away both of the Easons’ biological children, and police reports accusing them of sexual abuse filed by kids they were babysitting.

With those documents, Twohey was able to show that the Easons were dangerous. The next step was proving that they were involved in the underground “rehoming” scene. That was when Twohey encountered a critical hurdle: none of the child welfare departments were willing to talk. Again, she spent several months reaching out to different representatives and imploring them to help. One in particular at the Illinois Department of Child and Family Services, whom Twohey referred to as “Jim,” seemed more receptive than the rest.

After two in-person visits and months of periodic communications, Jim finally gave Twohey what she wanted: documents with records of the Easons’ rehoming activities, the names of adoptive parents, the children and their backgrounds.

“I walked out of the building and just leapt in the air with joy. I was so excited,” Twohey said.

Using those records, Twohey was able to piece together six couples who gave their adopted kids to the Easons.

Twohey also found Nicole in a rough neighborhood in Arizona after months of going from one state to the next, and persuaded her to sit down for an interview.

“I didn’t tell her everything I had already known about her, I wanted to give her a chance to talk. I just said I’m working on a story about rehoming and was aware that she’d taken in some kids from failed adoptions and asked if she’d talk to us about it. She agreed,” Twohey said.

The Parents and the Children:

Concurrent with her search for the Easons, Twohey also began talking to the parents who were giving away their children and the ones taking them, as well as the adopted kids themselves. She examined close to two dozen cases in detail and sought to locate the parents and the kids individually.

“It was real shoe-leather reporting at this stage; just knocking on people’s doors, making cold calls and pushing people to talk,” Twohey said.

To her and many people’s surprise, many of the families were willing to share their story and even go on camera. Twohey said the main reason is because these parents felt like they were the victims. Their adoptions failed and no official channels, whether adoption agencies or the government child welfare systems, were able to help them or listen to their plight. As a result, they turned to the online forums as a last resort.

For Twohey, interviewing the children was the toughest part.

“I was trying to get these kids to talk about extremely traumatic experiences, making them relive it.”

She took her time talking to each one, getting to know them and earning their trust. She made sure to show empathy, respect their space and allow them time to gradually open up. For the ones who were willing to be recorded, Twohey said preparation was key to make sure they knew exactly what questions would be asked so there’d be no surprises.

Some of the kids also started turning to Twohey for advice and help, especially when they were facing another round of rehoming.

“I became one of their resources because they really had no one else. But there’s a line between interviewing victims and advocating for them,” Twohey said. “I had to make sure I stayed within professional boundaries in order to do bullet-proof work. I couldn’t become a parental figure or give them financial aid of any kind.”

A Reporting Tip:

Many readers expressed surprise that Nicole Eason, the families and the children were willing to talk, on record and on camera. Twohey said one reporting skill that helped her get those interviews is not to show all your cards upfront, and to save the hard questions for later.

“I had this sort of strategy where I would take my time leading up to the tougher, more aggressive questions. In the beginning the important part was gaining their trust,” Twohey said.

Final Thoughts:

It took Twohey and her team a year and a half to report and write “The Child Exchange”. It was the longest she’d ever spent on a story. Dealing with an incredibly thorny issue, enormous volumes of documents and real human beings whose lives’ were affected, it was imperative that everything was 100 percent accurate.

It was also her first project at Reuters, which meant she went almost two years after starting the job with nothing to show.

“It was the most psychologically difficult thing I’d ever done.”