oh, do not even get me STARTED on how utterly fucked up the entire foster care system is, because dealing with that bullshit is currently my entire job.
but put extremely shortly: it is a system that punishes poor people for being poor. it is demonstrably racist and ableist. behaviors that, in poor people, are grounds for having your kids taken away â using drugs, not keeping the house clean, being in DV relationships in front of the children, missing a doctor's appointment â are ignored in rich and middle class people. it is rarely used for cases of outright abuse, and even then, state intervention is no guarantee that the kids will be in a safer situation.
What is the alternative?
Kids can get killed by abusive parents or parents who are struggling with addiction via neglect.
This is obviously horrifying but what can we do?
Well Iâm glad you asked but the honest answer is: listen to adoptees and listen to foster kids and listen to those who aged out because the vast majority of all of them will tell you that the system we currently have in place is actively harmful to the children involved and inherently traumatic to every person it touches.
The other honest answer is that taking the kids away should always be the absolute last option and except in very few cases where their lives will always be in danger, reunification should be the goal even when they are taken away. More of a safety net needs to be provided to people who are clearly struggling. And it should always be considered an unacceptable situation that a child forcibly removed from their parents ages out of the system and is promptly turned out onto the street by whatever program or foster family or housing situation were in as a minor.
My father was forcibly removed from his father. And good riddance, the man was a demon. But what should have happened is that he should have been then given to his mother, not put in a foster home full of people adult and child who terrorized and sodomized him until he ran away and went to find his mother himself. People who filed no missing personâs report, by the way, when he was suddenly missing from their house one day because he walked to the nearest bus station and left without so much as a goodbye. He did find his mom and was raised by her and loved her dearly until her passing a few years ago. That is what should have happened, instead of just plopping him into an uncaring system with zero effort made to find the mother who wanted him.
One of my sisters was going to be forcibly removed from her mother. And, similarly, she actively needed to not be living in that house with that woman or her housemates anymore, yes. But instead of plopping her into a similar system, the state first reached out to her next of kin- my parents, because sheâs my dadâs sisterâs daughter by blood- and my father swore that no family of his would ever touch foster care as long as he had something to say about it. So we took her in. That is what is supposed to happen.
My nephew, that sisterâs son, desperately needed to be removed from the household where he saw his mother getting beaten and battered every day. But so did she. And when my sister was finally admitted to the hospital because her sonâs father beat her so badly he broke her back, the hospital called us to come and get her and make sure the kid was safe too. And they came back home with us, not with that man. That is what needs to be happening.
A friend of mine growing up was an adoptee from a similarly difficult family situation, and her adoptive family literally kicked her out and disowned her the second she turned 18. They no longer wanted anything to do with her. They still had her younger siblings under their care. White parents, black kids. And this is hideously common. Sure, her adoptive parents were nicer than her blood family. They fed her, clothed her, gave her a place to sleep, made sure she got an education. But they did not love her, and they washed their hands of all responsibility for her the week following her 18th birthday. I know this, because she lived in my parentsâ house for a little while, until she found something more stable, because my dad had heard about it and refused to let her languish.
The system that we currently have is god awful and taking the kids neither guarantees them a safe landing nor does it really do anything to fix the situation. My grandfather went on to create more children to abuse and neglect. It took my aunt a very long time to decide to right her wrongs, get sober, and reconnect with her daughter. Just removing my nephew would not have changed my sisterâs situation of getting the shit kicked out of her on a regular basis. And it certainly did not help my friend feel loved and supported by any family, either.
My dad went from being starved and beaten by his father to being starved and beaten by relative strangers calling themselves his family, but this time also coupled with CSA which he at least did not receive from the situation he was taken from with his father. And not a single social worker helped or believed him when he tried to find someone to get him out of that house.
But I also think of Devonte Hart, who was taken from his mother due to drug use, then taken from his aunt due to her leaving the kids temporarily with the mother when she was forced to work another shift she had no childcare coverage for by her boss. Who had his seatbelt superglued shut as his adoptive mothers who beat and starved and neglected him drove the car off the cliff with all of them plus his biological and adopted siblings inside, killing each and every one of them. Now, which do you think was better for him? Staying with his aunt and occasionally being watched by his mother as she was attending rehab and getting sober, or being driven off a cliff by a pair of relative strangers that he kept begging people to take him away from before they killed him?
Addressing the mechanism by which foster care in the US becomes/remains racist and classist, and in some ways can actually perpetuate abuse by parents once their children are removed: it's nothing new or particularly unique if you're familiar with how those -isms manifest in legal and medical matters in the US. First, American Foster Care is structured with fewer checks than you'd probably expect. It's considered a state issue, and therefore there are actually 50 different foster care systems which all have their own standards and procedures, and until I believe the 80s or 90s there wasn't even a formal legal framework for those state systems to talk to one another. That collection of incongruous systems would be bad enough for families that were spread out, but additionally foster care is typically under the executive branch of a state bc The Department of Family and Child Services (DFCS) is technically law enforcement. This means that while a state Congress can provide limits or requirements to their foster care system, policy and procedures are largely up to a single person's discretion, the governor. That's why you can see things like what's happened in Florida where DFCS can become an active and coordinated weapon against people the governor dislikes.
Additionally DFCS has a built-in selection bias in how it receives cases. DFCS largely doesn't have the authority to go and search for abused children, it has to be reported and then that report has to be screened in as needing an investigation. Anyone could make a report, with their name or anonymously, but there are some professions which are what's called "mandated reporters." Where people who hold that position are legally required to report what they believe to be neglect or abuse. DFCS workers are mandated reporters themselves, but that list includes police, teachers, and doctors. Children playing outside might be seen by a police officer as neglect since there's no parent with them, that's a report. A child with natural hair might look unbathed to their teacher, that's a report. A parent might be seen as avoiding medical care because they're asking questions about the treatments a pediatrician is recommending, that's a report. Every disparity in policing, education, and medical treatment funnels kids into foster care. This is also where class comes in. Wealth buys privacy. Domestic violence and child abuse are a spectacle in an apartment or a mobile home, but can be easily hidden in the living room or basement of a three story house. Going back to the previous examples: your child won't be unattended outside if they're at football practice, your child's clothes won't be dirty if you pay someone to do the laundry, your pediatrician won't think the worst if you learned all the correct jargon or just agree to everything because you can afford it. And then at the end of the day, DFCS has to take everything through court, and a rich family can hire a better lawyer than someone who has to apply for a public defender.
And it doesn't stop there. Once the child is removed, DFCS legally must make an attempt at reunification with exceptions for parental death, sexual abuse, etc. The way that reunification happens is by the creation of a case plan and the parent(s) "working" the case plan. They can include parenting classes, therapy, drug rehabilitation programs, anger management classes, maintaining employment, and many other things. In the US those services aren't publicly owned. Private companies and nonprofits run all these services and have contracts with DFCS. DFCS, being the agency that is making these services a legal requirement, has to pay for them most of the time, but because of how the US is structured legally that typically takes weeks while several government departments and companies hand the money to each other. A wealthy family, however, pays for the service up front, is getting service for several weeks, and then gets reimbursed by the time the poor family who has to wait for DFCS to dispense the money directly has begun. And that process repeats for every new or additional service included in the case plan.
This is where abuse can remain even through supposedly protective custody, because while there's an active case plan the parent retains a large suite of rights to the child, since children exist legally somewhere between property and people in the US. Depending on the state, parents can still stipulate how their children dress, what haircuts they may have, what religion they practice, who they're allowed contact with, and have veto power over medical procedures. In some states this explicitly allows faith healing.
To avoid this being an entirely doomer take I will mention that these problems are known to people in the field, and are brought up from the very beginning in the training of new employees, as well as explain one law that's a step in the right direction. That law is ICWA. ICWA is a bit unfortunately named to 21st century ears but it stands for the Indian Child Welfare Act. Some people may remember reading about it when two couples from Texas challenged the law in the supreme court of the United States, but that law basically stipulates that you have to consider an indigenous child's culture when placing them outside their birth family. Where normally DFCS's priorities for placement look something like this:
1) kin
2) "Fictive Kin" not blood related but someone the child knows already
3) foster care
ICWA dictates that for indigenous children it must look more like this
1) kin
2) Fictive kin
3) member of the same nation
4) indigenous person of a different nation approved by the child's nation
5) foster home run by the child's nation
6) foster home approved/recommended by the child's nation
7) other foster home
Among case workers in my state and region there has come an understanding that to avoid children being unnecessarily traumatized in-care a more ICWA-like standard above what's required by law should be followed. A standard my trainer jokingly called blackCWA where a worker spends a little extra time after a child's family members have all been deemed unfit or unwilling to take them to find a member of their community that will care for them before putting them into a system that could see them placed anywhere in the state, as well as taking time to allow the child to see and visit their potential placement before they're forced to move there to empower them to say no. And at a county level some of these are being implemented, but of course nothing with the power of ICWA exists yet.
Tldr: foster care is plugged in to all the infamous racism, ableism, and classism factories of the US, while adding some of its own on top. And it does that in addition to not fully preventing abuse by genuinely bad actors while children are in it due to the legal status of children. There're attempts from within to fix these but the laws remain largely unchanged at a federal level and so care can vary wildly from place to place and even election to election.
Source: I am a foster care case worker.
State foster care systems come across as ad-hoc because they are, btw; the states took on responsibility for child placement etc after it had been the purview of charities well into the 20th century, once it was determined through extensive experimentation that the only way to keep orphans and other minors-without-adult-support off the street, out of institutions, and not being exploited for labor was to farm them out to households that were were paid cash money to cover the childcare costs.
There was a period in the 19th century where the charity people became convinced that the solution to all these awful family situations and homeless orphans was to run charitable orphanages, where the kids could be efficiently reared en masse. This is the period where you see the 'taking kids from unsuitable homes' phenomenon arise--mostly what would happen is the charity ladies got to come inspect your household to see if you deserved charity, and if they disliked what they saw enough they'd call a policeman to take the kids, and the policeman would do it because the class relationship involved was so hierarchical charitable society lady was considered an authority in this situation.
But the mortality rates of these institutions turned out to be appalling and the health results for the survivors also Not Good.
So they turned away from that and started stepping down the orphanage thing, while keeping a lot of the habits such as family separation, and leaned into home placement, relying for legal purposes on a traditional system for surplus children, the contract of indenture. The charity people shipped loads of kids west as farm workers, in particular; the contracts specified a lot about how the kids would be treated, but there wasn't really any method of enforcement. And the farmers were very much in this for the free labor, just like everyone buying kids as household servants has been worldwide for many hundreds of years.
By the 1930s no judge would enforce an externally imposed contract of indenture against a kid who'd run off and gotten a paying job, but also kids younger than their teens were increasingly not allowed to work.
And then state governments started stepping in, because the scale of the work that was called-for on the basis of the last hundred years' of data and modern social mores about children was beyond the means of private charity.
It's also beyond the means of the states most of the time either, but at least they have the necessary funding and administrative infrastructure to have a shot of carrying the thing off.
