Suppose, hypothetically, a big pharmaceutical firm comes up with what they think will be a miracle drug. They call it, say, Fosterox. They are in a hurry and worry they can’t find enough test subjects for their clinical trials if they seek informed consent. So they use the drug on human subjects without such consent.
The initial trials are inconclusive. The lead researcher tells the company president:
“We don’t know whether Fosterox is a powerful intervention toward the positive or a powerful intervention toward the negative.”
Instead of ending the experiment, the company president demands ever larger trials, all on human subjects, all without their informed consent.
Oh, and all the test subjects for this massive human experiment are children, and they’re disproportionately nonwhite.
If a drug company did that, they could be subject to lawsuits and civil penalties. In at least one state, California, those responsible could be jailed.
Which brings me to something Jill Duerr Berrick, distinguished professor of social welfare at the University of California, Berkeley, said at a meeting of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors in August. Said Berrick of foster care:
“[W]e don’t know whether it’s a powerful intervention toward the positive or a powerful intervention toward the negative.”
In other words, for decades we have been conducting a massive experiment on millions of human test subjects, all of them children, disproportionately nonwhite, without their consent, and we have no idea if we’re doing them a whole lot of good or a whole lot of harm.
Unfortunately, that’s not illegal. But if Berrick is right, “child welfare” as currently practiced in the United States is a fundamentally immoral enterprise.
Two more things make this comment particularly stunning.
First, there’s the matter of who said it: Berrick is no opponent of foster care. While she certainly isn’t satisfied with the system as it exists, at that meeting she cautioned against concluding that foster care is bad for kids. About a decade ago, she devoted a chapter titled “The Oldest Debate in Child Welfare” to suggesting — at least in this reader’s eyes — that if you favor family preservation, you must be less concerned with child safety. In fact, those of us who support family preservation do so because it is the safer option for the overwhelming majority of children, the overwhelming majority of the time.
Courtesy of Richard Wexler
Richard Wexler
And that brings me to the second key point about Berrick’s comment: It doesn’t go nearly far enough.
We know that there are a very few cases in which foster care is, indeed, a powerful intervention toward the positive: They’re the horror story cases that have been exploited to build a child welfare surveillance state so vast that more than one-third of all children and more than half of Black children will be forced to endure the trauma of a child welfare investigation before they turn 18.
We also know most cases are nothing like the horror stories. And in those cases, the evidence keeps piling up that foster care is a powerful intervention toward the negative. For starters, there are all those studies finding extremely high rates of abuse in foster care itself.
That’s compounded by the ever-growing body of research on the inherent trauma of tearing children from everyone they know and love: the studies showing that, even when compared with comparably maltreated children left in their homes, the foster children are more likely to become pregnant as teenagers, more likely to suffer health problems, more likely to be arrested and — in a shocking finding from Sweden — more likely to die by age 20.
So surely it’s time to call the massive experiment to a halt. I don’t mean abolish all foster care. But we need to understand the full toxicity of foster care and act accordingly.
[Related: What back-to-school season reveals about youth in foster care — and the attendance crisis]
- Everyone getting ready to pick up the phone and call a child abuse hotline because a family lacks adequate food or shelter needs to stop and think. They need to ask: Is there a way to be a mandated supporter and help this family instead of the mandated reporter who turns them in?
- Caseworkers deciding whether to remove a child need to consider if helping clean a filthy home is a better option than removing the child from it.
- Every supervisor needs to question their workers’ removal decisions more closely.
- Private foster agencies need to ask: Does this child really need to be here? Then they need to ask again.
- And everyone needs to bolster a family’s “immune system” to protect against a toxic intervention: That means narrowing definitions of neglect and supporting due process protections and high-quality family defense. It also means doing all we can to ensure families and children are getting the basic supports that they need.
We may not be able to take Fosterox off the market, but at least we’d better slap a black box warning on it.
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Richard Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, www.nccpr.org.
