Response to the JCICS Standards of Practice

The long awaited JCICS standards have been published and ASPs now have a short period of time in which to act as signatories or not.

 

What Is JCICS? In short, Join Council on International Children’s Services is a membership group for adoption service providers (adoption agencies), social services groups and other licensed non-profit advocacy groups. It exists in order to advocate on behalf of children in need of families. From their website, JCICS:

 

…promotes ethical child welfare practices, strengthens professional standards and educates adoptive families, social service professionals and government representatives throughout the world.

 

A Standards of Practice Primer: The Standards of Practice (SoP) were borne out of the Vietnam Adoption Summit that JCICS hosted in November 2007. Member and non-member ASPs and government officials as well as a few advocacy organizations were invited to attend. During this Summit participants agreed that a Standard of Practice for ASPs in Vietnam would be beneficial to the integrity and future of the Vietnam adoption program. During the following 3 months these Standards were further developed with input from a variety of sources and finally released on Feb 14, 2008.

 

The SoP contains many guidelines for practice that advocacy groups, blogs such as VVAI and parents have long since been asking for. You can read the detailed SoP here:

 

My Response: I am happy with the core base of the SoP. Many of the comments and suggestions given by Ethica and PEAR as well as others were taken into account and integrated in whole or in part in the final SoP. However, I see lots of potential loopholes that I’m sure unscrupulous agencies will quickly make use of. I think the wording in several places is far too broad.

 

Just one example is in Article IV Section 4.01 referring to the referral process. The SoP outlines are great but I think they should also include the requirement that ASPs include detailed medicals and photographs at the time of referral. All too often parents are given a referral with no medical information from which to make a fully educated decision and then pressured to move quickly with a promise that everything is fine with the health of the child and the medicals will be forthcoming. A child without medicals should be considered a “soft referral and those medicals, when they are finalized, should be translated as well.

 

This is just one example of the SoP not being specific or exacting enough. 

But most concerning to me, the actual implementation is voluntary and not a condition of membership in the JCICS.

 

As it stands, agencies can (and do) opt not to be JCICS members. 17 of the 42 ASPs licensed in Vietnam are not JCICS members and thus unaffected by these standards.

 

Among the remaining 25 JCICS member ASPs, any one of them can opt not to be a signatory but still remain a listed JCICS member, as far as I understand.

 Finally, of the signatory agencies, there is actually no recourse for non-compliance other than “arbitration”. These are not laws, they are not even mandates for JCICS membership. They are just suggestions. This leaves it up to the good intentions of each agency to abide by this agreement. If a given agency had good intentions to begin with, the agency would already be doing all of the outlined practices. If an agency has not been following these SoPs, would being a signatory on a membership organization’s voluntary agreement be compelling enough to truly change it’s method of operations? 

I will say that I believe the most positive thing to come out of these standards is education. PAPs who read and know about these standards can have a higher level of understanding about what kind of practices to expect from their agencies, they can hold them accountable whether they are signatories or not. Education is always a good thing.

 

The Future of the SoP: I would like to see the terminology more exacting in order to eliminate some of the more obvious loopholes. I’d like to see JCICS membership for Vietnam ASPs require mandatory agreement to the SoP. I’d like to see these standards, tweaked and modified a bit, used as part of the MOU so that they are the closest thing to law that we are likely to see, thus forcing compliance across the board and at a higher level than the JCICS has the muscle to enforce.

 It is my hope that JCICS will publish a list of signatory agencies by Feb 26, 2008.  

I applaud JCICS for undertaking this huge project and for the roles that PEAR and Ethica had in formulating these standards. It is a step in the right direction for transparency in adoption. But it is only the first step. Let’s keep on stepping!