A Broken System

Close your eyes and picture this: you are 10 years old again. Most 10-year-olds in your town enjoy riding their bikes up and down the streets of safe, suburban neighborhoods. They like eating ice cream and watching movies with their families. They like playing sports and running around at recess.

You also would like to ride a bike, but you have never had one. You often dream about living in a safe neighborhood with a family who loves you, eating ice cream and watching movies. You wish you could try soccer or ballet or baseball, but you can’t.

Instead, your childhood looks more like a house cramped with a dozen other kids, most of them bearing scars from their biological homes and sadly, many of them bearing fresh wounds from the U.S. foster care system.

I have heard gut-wrenching, stomach-churning stories about children who are shuffled like cattle in and out of homes in the foster care system. Thankfully, my experiences with the foster care system have been mostly positive. It is through the Bossier K.I.D.S. foster care system in my hometown where I met my younger sister. The work they do is incredible and monumental.

However, Bossier K.I.D.S. cannot house all the children in the American foster care system. The large majority of foster care homes in the U.S. have statistically done far more harm than good for thousands of children.

According to Children’s Rights, on any given day there are approximately 438,000 children in the foster care system. In 2016, more than 687,000 children were placed in foster care homes.

The National Coalition for Child Protection Reform reveals staggering findings from independent researchers concerning the U.S. foster care system. The research shows out of foster care children in Oregon and Washington, nearly one third reported abuse from a foster parent or another adult in the home.

A second study in the city of Atlanta revealed 34 percent of foster care children who were on track for adoption had experienced abuse or other harmful conditions. For children who had been in the system for just a year, 15 percent had already experienced harmful conditions.

Marcia Lowry, the executive director of A Better Childhood recently was quoted saying, “I’ve been doing this work for a long time and represented thousands and thousands of foster children, both in class-action lawsuits and individually, and I have almost never seen a child, boy or girl, who has been in foster care for any length of time who has not been sexually abused in some way.”

How have these thousands of children slipped through the cracks? The issue begins at the root of the system.

The large majority of caseworkers working for foster care agencies are expected to manage caseloads sometimes as large as 70 to 100 children per worker, according to Julia Wasvick, a child-welfare worker in Mississippi. Another child-welfare worker, Janet Atkins, said social workers often have to decide whether to give priority to visiting families and children or completing their paperwork.

I think it is safe to say it is nearly impossible to be an active member in 100 individual children’s lives, never mind constantly keeping track of their personal wellbeing.

A foster care mother in Mississippi told ABC News not only had she been given two baby boys with broken bones prior to being placed in her home, but she also adopted a teenage boy who had been bounced around to 32 different foster homes in a five-year period.

The account of Debbie, a 15-year-old foster child who was moved around to an estimated 11 homes over five years, proves even more evidence of instability within the system: “They would take me out and not tell me where I was going,” Debbie said. “I would get back from school, my bags were packed, I didn’t have the time to say goodbye to anyone. You have to build up a wall so you don’t get close.”

These thousands of children swept up in the system could easily have been you or me, and it is long past due for serious repairs to this broken system.

For the foster care system to become a safe environment for children to flourish in, there must be a change among caseworkers. No caseworker should ever be expected to provide an equal amount of personal attention to 100 different children. It is not fair to the worker or to the children involved.

We need more caseworkers. We need more individuals who will rise up and fight for these children. How many more children will have to face abuse in this system before we say enough is enough?

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