Children in Families First Act of 2013
A BILL
To realign structures and reallocate resources in the Federal Government, in keeping with the core American belief that families are the best protection for children and the bedrock of any society, to bolster United States diplomacy and assistance targeted at ensuring that every child can grow up in a permanent, safe, nurturing, and loving family, and to strengthen intercountry adoption to the United States and around the world and ensure that it becomes a viable and fully developed option for providing families for children in need, and for other purposes.
Sec. 2 Findings; purposes
Findings— Congress makes the following findings:
The people of the United States recognize and believe that children must grow up in permanent, safe, and nurturing families in order to develop and thrive.
Science now proves conclusively that children suffer immediate, lasting, and in many cases irreversible damage from time spent living in institutions or outside of families, including reduced brain activity, reduced IQ, smaller brain size, and inability to form emotional bonds with others.
Governments in other countries seek models that promote the placement of children who are living outside family care in permanent, safe, and nurturing families, rather than in foster care or institutions, but many governments lack the resources or infrastructure to adequately address this need.
Despite the good efforts of countless governments and nongovernmental organizations, millions of children remain uncounted and outside of the protection, nurturing care, permanence, safety, and love of a family. Without the care of a family, these children are forced to live on the streets, in institutions, in paid foster care, in child-headed households, in group homes, or as household servants.
No reliable data currently exists to define and document the number and needs of children in the world currently living without families, but available evidence demonstrates that there are millions of children in this situation needing immediate help.
The December 2012 Action Plan for Children in Adversity commits the United States Government to achieving a world in which all children grow up within protective family care and free from deprivation, exploitation, and danger. To effectively and efficiently accomplish this goal, it is necessary to realign the United States Government’s current operational system for assisting orphans and vulnerable children, and processing intercountry adoptions.
All options for providing appropriate, protective, and permanent family care to children living without families must be considered concurrently and permanent solutions must be put in place as quickly as possible. Solutions include family preservation and reunification, kinship care, guardianship, domestic and intercountry adoption, and other culturally acceptable forms of care that will result in appropriate, protective, and permanent family care. Preference should be given to options that optimize child best interests, which generally means options which provide children with fully protected legal status and parents with full legal status as parents, including full parental rights and responsibilities. The principle of subsidiarity, which gives preference to in-country solutions, should be implemented within the context of a concurrent planning strategy, exploring in- and out-of-country options simultaneously. If an in-country placement serving the child’s best interest and providing appropriate, protective, and permanent care is not quickly available, and such an international home is available, the child should be placed in that international home without delay.
Significant resources are already dedicated to international assistance for orphans and vulnerable children, and a relatively small portion of these resources can be reallocated to achieve more timely, effective, nurturing, and permanent familial solutions for children living without families, resulting in fewer children worldwide living in institutions or on the streets, more families preserved or reunified, and increased domestic and international adoptions.
Purposes— The purposes of this Act are—
to support the core American value that families are the bedrock of any society;
to protect the fundamental human right of all children to grow up within the loving care of permanent, safe, and nurturing families;
to address a critical gap in United States foreign policy implementation by adjusting the Federal Government’s international policy and operational structures so that seeking permanent families for children living without families receives more prominence, focus, and resources (through the reallocation of existing personnel and resources);
to harness the diplomatic and operational power of the United States Government in the international sphere by helping to identify and implement timely, permanent, safe, and nurturing familial solutions for children living without families, including refugee or stateless children;
to ensure that intercountry adoption by United States citizens becomes a viable and fully developed option for creating permanent families for children who need them;
to protect against abuses of children, birth families, and adoptive parents involved in intercountry adoptions, and to ensure that such adoptions are in the individual child’s best interests; and
to harmonize and strengthen existing intercountry adoption processes under United States law—
by ensuring that the same set of procedures and criteria govern suitability and eligibility determinations for prospective adoptive parents seeking to complete intercountry adoptions, whether or not the child is from a foreign state that is a party to the Hague Adoption Convention; and
by aligning the definitions of eligible child for Convention adoptions and non-Convention adoptions to the maximum extent possible.
Sec. 3 Definitions
In this Act:
Action plan for children in adversity— The term Action Plan for Children in Adversity means the policy document entitled United States Government Action Plan on Children in Adversity: A Framework for International Assistance: 2012–2017, released on December 19, 2012.
Appropriate, protective, and permanent family care— The term appropriate, protective, and permanent family care means a nurturing, lifelong, commitment to a child by an adult, or adults with parental roles and responsibilities that—
provides physical and emotional support;
provides the child with a sense of belonging; and
generally involves full legal recognition of the child’s status as child of the parents and of the parents’ rights and responsibilities regarding the child.
Central authority— The term central authority has the meaning given the term in section 3 of the Intercountry Adoption Act of 2000 (42 U.S.C. 14902).
Children in adversity— The term children in adversity means children living inside or outside of family care who are deprived, excluded, vulnerable, or at risk for violence, abuse, exploitation, or neglect.
Convention adoption— The term Convention adoption has the meaning given the term in section 3 of the Intercountry Adoption Act of 2000 (42 U.S.C. 14902).
Convention country— The term Convention country has the meaning given the term in section 3 of the Intercountry Adoption Act of 2000 (42 U.S.C. 14902) and for which the Hague Adoption Convention has entered into force.
Guardianship— The term guardianship means a permanent legal relationship between an adult and a child, whereby the adult is lawfully invested with the power, and charged with the duty, of taking care of the child. While some forms of guardianship are not truly permanent, the form of guardianship referred to and supported under this Act is permanent guardianship. A Kefala order issued by a country that follows traditional Islamic law does not qualify as an adoption under United States law, but may be a form of guardianship in some circumstances.
Habitual residence determination— The term habitual residence determination means a factual determination of where a prospective adoptive parent (or parents) resides and where the child resides for purposes of an intercountry adoption case.
Hague adoption convention— The term Hague Adoption Convention means the Convention of Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption, concluded at the Hague May 29, 1993.
Kinship care— The term kinship care means the full time care, nurturing, and protection of children by relatives, members of their tribes or clans, godparents, stepparents, or any adult who has a kinship bond with a child, so long as those persons have the capacity and commitment to function as true parents for the child on a permanent basis. It does not include paid kinship foster care.
Non-convention adoption— The term non-Convention adoption means—
an adoption by United States parents of a child from a non-Convention country in accordance with subparagraph (F) of section 101(b)(1) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1101(b)(1));
an adoption by United States parents of a child under the laws of the child’s country of origin (generally when the parents are living in the child’s country of origin and therefore able legally to complete a domestic adoption); or
in certain circumstances (generally with respect to relative adoptions or adoptions by dual national parents), an adoption by United States parents of a child from a Convention country if that country allows legal and valid adoptions to take place outside the scope of the Convention.
Non-convention country— The term non-Convention country means a country in which the Hague Adoption Convention has not entered into force, regardless of whether or not that country has signed the Convention.
Unparented children— The term unparented children means children lacking the legal, permanent, safe, and nurturing care of a parental figure or figures, either inside their country of origin, in the country of their habitual residence, or elsewhere, regardless of their lawful or unlawful immigration status in their current country of residence.
Vulnerable children— The term vulnerable children, consistent with the United States Agency for International Development's definition, means children and youth who are under 18 years whose safety, well-being, growth, and development are at significant risk due to inadequate care, protection, or access to essential services.