INSTITUTIONALIZED CHILD CARE IN URBAN SOUTH AFRICA

the later part of the twentieth century, close to a million children were placed with
adoptive families via intercountry adoption. (Selman, 2009) In developing countries,
NGOs began to assume the responsibility, previously assigned to governments, to ensure
the survival, protection, and development of developing countries’ youth. (Ferguson,
2010) While humanitarian interest that extended beyond national borders was hardly a
new phenomenon, the intensity at which charitable motivations expanded in the 1990s
was such that it began to depoliticize development and vulnerable population protection,
making it a shared responsibility. (Conran, 2011)
Humanitarian interest became widely linked to the interest of international news
media, responding to events that lent themselves to novel and shocking narratives. Media
culture became intertwined with what Mostafanezhad described as “the geography of
compassion.” (2012) This expanded on earlier critiques that suggested “humanitarianism
means paying moral attention to others who are beyond one’s own immediate sphere of
existence, and therefore it requires and involves an imagination about the world, about
the relationship between the near and the far.” (Tester, 2010) This dynamic was easily
evidenced by Western responses to media stories pertaining to children.
Two examples of the attachment of Western compassion to media sensationalism
came from China and Sub-Saharan Africa. Adoption from East Asian countries grew
particularly popular as Western media began to report on the disproportionate rate of
abandoned girls in China. The one-child policy, coupled with a favoritism for sons led to
the abandonment of an estimated one out of every twenty-five females in the 1990s.
(Chen, et. al., 2015) Between 1989 and 1999, the number of babies adopted by the United
States from China tripled. (Population Reference Bureau, 2003)
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