Index IntroductionDefinition of DevianceAbstract Harm and Tangible GainSunk CostsDissemination of Responsibility and InformationLegal versus EthicalConclusion IntroductionIt was the late 1970s and the Chinese government was realizing it had a problem. Their population was growing at an enormous rate and they knew that if it continued to grow like this the government would have difficulty taking care of its people. “At the time of the 1982 census there were already more than 1 billion people in China, and if current trends persist, there could be 1.4 billion by the end of the century” (Kane & Choi, 1999, p. 992) . To slow down this massive population growth, the one-child policy was adopted. This policy was first announced in 1979 and was created to curb rapid population growth. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay. Unfortunately, this policy had unintended consequences, many of which were the result of the cultural emphasis that boys were more desirable than girls. Thirty years later, in 2010, the SRB, or the number of males born per 100 females, was 118. When compared to the global average of 105, this number is significantly higher (Shi & Kennedy, 2016, p. 1019). This disparity is due to a number of different factors, including an increase in abortions, an undercount of live births, and children put up for adoption or abandoned in orphanages. According to John M. Darley, organizations “can lurch toward evil in ways not intended by any of the organizational participants” (Darley, 1996, p. 14). In this case, the government decided to implement a policy that limited the number of children its citizens could have to ensure that population growth did not have a negative impact on the country, but did not consider how this might affect the lives of its citizens. its citizens and how they would respond. This has led orphanages to exploit the increase in unwanted children and earn large amounts of money from international adoptions. When the number of abandoned children began to decrease, orphanages began to adopt deviant behavior. Human trafficking is a deviant behavior that can be caused by abstract harm versus tangible gain, sunk costs, and diffusion of responsibility and information. Examining the implementation of the one-child policy in China shows how individuals can be encouraged to commit deviant acts, particularly in relation to human trafficking in orphanages and international adoptions. Defining deviance Before we can discuss deviant behavior and its causes must first be defined. Deviance can be defined as the intentional or unintentional creation of a system that leads to unethical behavior. Ermann and Lundman explain in their book Corporate and Governmental Deviance that “organizational elites can indirectly cause deviant actions by establishing norms, rewards, and punishments that encourage deviance” (Ermann & Lundman, 2002, p. 9). In this case, the punishments took the form of fines and sanctions to prevent families from having more than one child, with a consequent increase in abandoned children. Later, when they started allowing international adoptions, they included a mandatory $3,000 donation to the orphanage from foreign parents. This rewarded orphanages for international adoptions, and was most likely one of the stimuli for the trafficking that occurred later. To better understand the situation inChina, it is important to know the history behind their orphanages and adoption policies. In the early 1990s, orphanages in China were full of abandoned girls due to the one-child policy. “However, legal requirements that adopters be over 35 and have no children severely limited the number of families who could legally adopt children in the 1990s. While this did not prevent unofficial adoption in violation of the restrictions, it kept adopters away from government orphanages, thus increasing the burden on those institutions.” Many of these institutions could barely care for the children they had due to poor funding, lack of resources, and understaffing (Chinese Orphanages: A Sequel, 1996, p.5). Conditions in many locations were terrible and, according to a Human Rights Watch/Asia report, led to astronomically high mortality rates recorded during the period 1988-1992 (Chinese Orphanages: A Follow Up, 1996, p. 2). , “the Chinese government promulgated the China Adoption Law of 1992” to allow international adoptions. Since this decision was made, many of the children adopted by foreigners have ended up in the United States. The number of adoptions of Chinese children by US citizens increased from just over 206 in 1992 to nearly 8,000 in 2005 (US Department of State). Adoption from China was desirable for multiple reasons. This is because "Chinese children are generally healthier than those from other developing countries, as fewer Chinese mothers are alcoholics, drug addicts or infected with HIV", there are fewer "administrative difficulties often encountered in other foreign countries", and “China's intercountry adoption procedures allow individuals and people in their forties or older – who may face eligibility barriers elsewhere – to adopt Chinese children” (Gates, 1999, p. 384). In addition to this, many of the families who adopted were aware of the one-child policy and thought they were helping to save these girls from growing up in a Chinese orphanage. As China has eased restrictions on domestic adoptions and living standards have risen, fewer children have been born. abandoned children who brought less healthy children to orphanages available for international adoption. However, there was still a demand for international adoptions and “orphanages had become accustomed to receiving money for international adoption” (Leland, 2011). Due to increased demand and lack of supply, some orphanages have begun resorting to other means of taking in children, such as trafficking. Abstract Harm and Tangible Gain According to Darley (1996), abstract harm and tangible gain may be a reason why people fall into deviant behavior. Abstract harm is defined by Darley as an action that “is taken that will ultimately result in harm to others” but “initially there is no obvious target of the actions committed, no other salient human beings who are seen as victim of the action” (Darley, 1996, p. 22). Tangible gain, on the other hand, is easy to see and usually comes in the form of things like money, goals, or efficiency. If we look at the situation in Chinese orphanages and the adoption program, we can see some cases where this applies. For example, to facilitate the adoption of children, many orphanages falsified the documents of children purchased from traffickers. By doing so, they caused potential harm to birth parents, adoptive parents, and the children themselves, in favor of the tangible gain of the mandatory donation that adoptive parents had to pay to orphanages. As mentioned above, yesabstract harm occurs when an action causes unintended harm to the victim. In the case of birth parents there is always the possibility that the traffickers simply did not find the children on the side of the road. Children were sometimes kidnapped by traffickers or taken by civil servants for violating the one-child policy. "Once upon a time, if you had an over-quota child, family planning would come into play, and they would demolish your house, or get a pig, or do something. Once the orphanage joined the international adoption program, things are changed, and so now they saw a kind of win-win situation where family planning would step in and take the child who wasn't registered, hand him over to the orphanage, the orphanage would reward the planning family officials, and then adopt that child internationally” (Amazon Studios, 2019) By falsifying details about the children and where they found them, they increased the possibility that the biological parents whose child was taken from them would not be able to find them. In the case of adoptive parents, who have spent a lot of time and money adding a child to their family, the possibility that their new child has actually been stolen from his birth parents is devastating. In addition to the guilt they may feel about the potential being the reason their new child was separated from the parents who actually wanted him or her, if the child was indeed stolen there is the fear that the birth parents may try to take back the child. Finally, a lot of harm is caused to the children involved in all of this. Instead of growing up with their biological parents, they would most likely grow up in a different country thinking that their biological parents didn't want them. If by chance they discover that they were taken as children, it may be too much for them to accept. According to Research-China, an organization that helps parents research orphanages and adopted children in China, it is not uncommon for adopted children to not want to meet or even get to know their birth parents. They already have a life of their own and knowing their birth parents would complicate the situation, especially after years of believing they didn't want them. Orphanages most likely did not purposely try to cause harm to birth parents by adopting parents and adopted children, but it is obvious that they did. Faced with a tangible gain like the money they would receive from the mandatory donation, the potential harm was far from their thoughts. They had no connection to the children and parents they were harming. Abandoned children were very common at the time, and it was much easier to falsify documents than to search for birth parents who may or may not want their child. Sunk Costs Another source of deviant behavior is sunk costs. Darley (1996) defines a sunk cost as “commitments to a course of action generated by an initial decision, often the decision to invest financial or other resources in a course of action” (Darley, 1996, p. 21) . This definition of sunk cost can be seen both in orphanages and in foreign parents who adopt children. Orphanages spend money caring for children in their care, as well as purchasing children from traffickers. They invested this money in the hope that a foreign family would come to adopt the children and pay the mandatory donation to the orphanage. Because of their investment in the children, they committed to giving them up for international adoption instead of searching for their biological parents or allowing a domestic couple who didn't have to donate to adopt them. AlsoParents who adopted Chinese children had incurred costs that influenced their behavior. The adoption process takes a lot of time and money, so when they bring their new baby home they have already invested a lot in him. Perhaps even more important is the amount of love and attention they give to the baby once they bring it home. For all intents and purposes, they believe this is now their baby. When it was discovered that there was a possibility that some of the adopted children had been taken from their birth parents, many parents did not know how to react. They were angry that the orphanages had lied about how they found the children, but they were also afraid of having to give up their adopted child. As a result, many parents became defensive and did not express their suspicions about the incident or allow the organizations that had collected the DNA of the parents whose children had been stolen to contact them. That's what Brian Stuy, the founder of Research-China, said he experienced. “When he was able to contact the birth parents, he said, most were happy to learn that the children were alive, healthy and in good families. “Unfortunately, the reaction of most adoptive parents is to hide,” Mr. Stuy said. 'When they have suspicions, they don't want to come forward.'” (Leland, 2011). His wife, Long Lan, delves into what parents feel. “When I shared the situation with some US adoptive parents, they were completely shocked. They just couldn't take it all in at once and were in total denial. They felt as if adopting their daughter might cause her to be kidnapped from her birth family. They were also worried that their daughter might be forcibly repatriated to China. They were afraid of losing her and immediately cut off contact with us” (Amazon Studios, 2019). This behavior of both orphanages and parents can be traced back to sunk costs. In both cases, time and money were invested in children that could not be returned. Orphanages have reacted unethically by paying for children to get money from international parents, and parents have reacted unethically by not speaking up about the corruption they have witnessed in orphanages. Diffusion of Responsibility and Information “Diffusion of responsibility is another source of organizational responsibility to do harm” (Darley, 1996, p. 18). The adoption process in China "has been touted as the most stable program, the most honest program" by adoption agencies. The possibility of trafficking was rarely mentioned even in the late 2000s, despite previous articles written about traffickers arrested in China for selling children to orphanages. The information was there, but no one seemed to want to put the pieces together to prove that it was a bigger problem. problem than initially thought. Darley (1996) says this about the mindset that leads to diffusion of responsibility: “Responsibility requires knowledge. If I don't know that harm is likely, then I am not responsible for preventing it” (Darley, 1996, p. 17). This concept applies both to parents who adopt and to the actual adoption agencies through which parents go to connect them to orphanages. Many parents who wanted to adopt assumed that the adoption agencies they were applying through had done their research and that the orphanages they had received could be trusted with their children. In fact, many orphanages have falsified children's documents, as in the case of one woman who said: “My daughter from Guangxi was adopted with a group of 11 other children, all more or less the same size..