From Ethiopia to Iowa, a new trail of tears

In Haiti an adoption scandal has led to a number of Americans being arrested amid concerns that children were being trafficked. But relief organisations like UNICEF are growing increasingly wary of endorsing an adoption system that has long rescued children from poverty and disease but separates them from parents and relatives.

"We do everything in an emergency context to ensure that children and families can remain together," said Susan Bissell, UNICEF's chief of child protection. While UNICEF doesn't rule out international adoptions, she says the agency encourages situations "where children can remain in their communities and their culture."

In truth, the three sisters, Journee, Maree and Meya - were actually much older: 13, 6 and 11.

While their mother was dead, their father was healthy and very much alive. He was living, by local standards, a middle-class life - an extended family able to take care of the girls as middle sister Meya showed us first hand.

"My godmothers, my aunt, those are my mom's friends, my uncles, my dad, my dad's friends, that's my brother," she said.

In the last year adoptions from Ethiopia to the U.S. have skyrocketed - growing faster than any other country in the world. They have risen from 731 in 2006 to more than 2,200 last year. That's nearly six children per day.

Now a Foreign Correspondent/CBS News investigation has discovered that growth has turned Ethiopia into fertile ground for child trafficking - a country in which some American agencies and their staff engage in highly questionable conduct.

 
.Above: Song and dance shogs for prospective adoptors in the US

 The report deals with Ethiopian children who were portrayed to American families as being as young as 7 or 8, destitute and in danger of being pressed into prostitution who were in fact much older. They were actually teenagers who did have a family who could support them at home. 

In another harrowing and cruel dimension - these children unaware that they're on a one way trip to a new family. Many say they were told they'd be returning to Ethiopia.

Last year Foreign Correspondent's story Fly Away Children  triggered an industry investigation in the US and propelled the American media to probe the system. CBS News recently broadcast an investigation into the activities of an American adoption agency at the centre of Fly Away Children.

Fly Away Children drew an extraordinary response and demonstrated a deep concern about the way some international adoption agencies are operating and dramatically affecting the aspirations of many Australians looking to adopt overseas.

The story unearthed a great deal but there was much more to examine and cause for concern and urgent reform.

In this latest report the children speak:

Journee Bradshaw, aged 16: "I didn't know that I'm going to stay here, I mean, they never told me that I'm going to have a family that I'm going to stay with and I'm supposed to be their daughter. They never told me that, I just found out when I got here."

Kate Bradshaw (who adopted Journee) "You can't imagine the depth of her pain. No one will understand the damage, it was seriously as if someone had ripped the soul out of her body and just left her. It was unbelievable, it was absolutely unbelievable."

We meet other families in the same predicament and show how one agency at the centre of the scandal attempts to discredit anyone who questions the process, including adoptive parents and Foreign Correspondent.

Maureen Flatley, Adoption Reform Advocate: "If we don't reign in American adoption agencies and if we don't regulate adoptions, adoption will continue to be a human rights catastrophe."

Haiti scandal exposed a rapacious system of adoption