‘Rehoming’ Wrong Way To Handle Issue

“Rehoming” has become a new buzz word in Arkansas.

It is a faith-based action of relocating a child from one family to another family to live.

Often, rehoming is without any sort of legal paperwork, court action or notification to the state acknowledging that these former foster children or adopted foster children would be a better fit in another family setting.

The past two weeks have been filled with daily dispatches and updates on a very sad, and, yet, sordid tale of what can happen when circumstances in a rehoming go badly.

The most vulnerable, the most innocent of all — the children — are the victims in this on-going tale.

While the rehoming debate centers around a sitting state representative from Northwest Arkansas, no legal charges have been filed and no administrative wrongs, as far as state laws, rules and regulations were apparently done.

These children were wards of the state, under the care and supervision of the Arkansas Department of Human Services, prior to their placement and adoption into the family which released, or rehomed, them to another family. The state did not assess or approve the rehomed family these children were given to by their adoptive parents.

Already two members of the state House of Representatives have introduced bills halting this procedure in the future.

Let us hope one of these bills gets passed before the 90th General Assembly goes home later this month.

A public outcry rarely seen of this magnitude has risen this past two weeks over the revelation that state Rep. Justin Harris, R-West Fork, and his spouse, Marsha, after legally adopting two young girls, “gave” these children to another nonrelated couple to raise.

The action this couple took is called rehoming. It’s not illegal — yet. But it sure should be. While in the care of this new rehoming family, one of the two young girls was sexually abused by the husband of this new family, court records show.

The abuser, this past November, pled guilty to sexual child abuse in Benton County Circuit Court and has been sentenced to 40 years in the Arkansas Department of Corrections.

The sexual abuse occurred while the girls were still legally the wards of the Harris family, who legally adopted them. Harris and his wife, who were unable to integrate these two little girls satisfactorily into their own family, “gave” them to this new family to raise.

The Harris family has three boys, born of their own union.

Harris is a third-term House member and one of the more conservative members of the 90th General Assembly. He, his wife and their extended family, run a daycare center which receives both state and federal funds. He lists his occupation as a small-business owner of GGK Inc., (Growing God’s Kingdom), a daycare center in West Fork.

The rehoming of these two little girls was done after prayer and deliberations one-on-one with the new family, Harris has said in published accounts.

At no time, Harris has said, did he suspect the new father to these two little girls was a sexual child abuser.

But the Harris family was wrong about their assumption the girls were safe.

Rehoming is basically finding someone else to raise your children.

Sadly, rehoming was and is going on in Arkansas, according to Amy Webb, a spokesperson for the Arkansas Department of Human Services. DHS has nine documented rehoming cases occurring recently in Arkansas.

Rehoming without some type of DHS notification or a third-party legal action, even to a relative, may be the best law we can hope for today.

But rehoming to strangers with no third-party assessment is not only a bad idea.

It ought to be illegal.