Kids: Foster care, homelessness, street life, abuse
After taking a break from writing about the vulnerability of children, I've returned with a critical piece for you to ponder.
This time I would like to discuss how easy it can be to let children slip through the cracks and get caught up in dangerous situations because they cannot be kept safe by their parents or even the systems that were created to be the safety net when a child's parents are either negligent, violent, or are battling their own demons and external difficulties, and do not have the capacity to provide a safe and stable environment for their children to learn and grow into healthy adults.
It breaks my heart that so many factors can lead to a child going through very difficult times without the presence of their parents. These children need the help of government programs as well as the community around them to help provide a roof over their heads, good food in their bellies, good quality education, and caring and attentive adults to treat them with love like their parents should but unfortunately cannot.
An article that struck my attention earlier this year highlighted a widespread issue going on in the United States foster care system. A large number of children are not being checked on as often as they should by care workers. In some cases, support workers are also lacking in training and subsequently in awareness to signs of neglect and abuse of these children in their foster home environments (which is ironic since these children could have come from violent homes and are being placed in similar situations again by government bodies that are supposed to be there to protect them). Because of factors like this, these children end up running away trying to find safer havens to survive in and live their lives in the hope that someday they will be happy and safe from the monsters that used to plague them in time past.
In a lot of cases, however, these children end up living on the street and finding odd spots to lay their heads until another day comes for them. We all know that when a child is not looked after, the dangers of exploitation and various forms of abuse are all too common; so what are we going to do about it? Are we willing to stay complacent to the fact that thousands upon thousands of children are being lead to their soul's and eventually their body's slaughter at the hands of those who just don't care enough or are willing to use children to their advantage?
It boggles my mind how apathetic and callous our world is to let down our most vulnerable population as much as they already do. How much legwork some people have to do to make a difference, and even then, it just seems like it is never enough and the numbers of abuse and exploitation both online and IRL are eclipsing the work of angels on Earth to bring children out of suffering and into environments where they can grow up to be themselves and hone their talents and passions to build a beautiful life and give back to their communities. It's so easy to feel like evil will always prevail, so easy to read endless articles where the statistics are all too dire and the most common sense procedures and actions are not being followed by the people who on their own volition signed up to do the work of caring for and protecting children. It boggles my mind, it depresses me, and as a by-product, stokes the fire within me to keep calling out these injustices and to do all I can to help make a difference in the lives of under-privileged children.
Apart from the article mentioned earlier, I also watched the arresting and still relevant documentary called Streetwise (released in 1984), which spurred me to start writing this piece.
The documentary focuses on the stories of a group of children living on the streets of Seattle, Washington in the early 1980's and the motivations of each of them to want to live out on the street instead of with their families, chronicling the journeys their lives take over the course of a summer. It's an absolute classic; a must-watch especially if you're interested in and appreciate great documentary filmmaking.
Some important sociological highlights that I uncovered while watching the documentary, and in part thanks to an analytical essay I found on YouTube, are as follows (spoilers for the documentary ahead):
Kids use divergent/antisocial actions and behaviour to survive on the streets - this includes crimes such as stealing from stores/restaurant, robbing/pickpocketing, prostitution and drug use/dealing. In order to make it and feel like they have a chance to give themselves something different to what they experience at home, they are encouraged to subject themselves to behaviour that further ostracises them from regular society.
Children run away from home in large part due to physical, emotional, and/or sexual abuse only to be at risk of the same things on the street from either other homeless folk or those who alongside abusing them, also reward them monetarily for performing various illegal acts for them.
With a city like Seattle that was considered the most liveable in the United States at that point in time, to see children living out on the streets, the documentarians put a spotlight on the problem that if it can happen here, it can and most likely does happen everywhere else, so we need to be better at looking out for each other and our children.
Another factor that gets explored in the documentary is the influence/background of the parents of the homeless children. Some are in jail while others work low pay jobs and are plagued by addiction. And some of the kids seemingly having decent families but factors such as family size (number of children) as well as the abusive or negligent treatment of children by their parents, leads them to view living on the streets as the better alternative. A fair few of the parents also seem to be quite relaxed about the lifestyle their children are involved in. If I try to rationalise this, I can only attribute it to them understanding where their child is coming from mentally, and that they feel hopeless to stop it and give their children something better.
In 1993, a televised report was aired as a response to the Streetwise documentary following the adult life of one of the central characters, Erin "Tiny" Blackwell.
It was a heart breaking and touching portrait of Tiny, showing her life's trajectory since the documentary. She continued to experience hardships as addiction continued to keep her in a stronghold, and both the chemical addictions and the force of habit of prostitution and street life affected her three young children. For some time, they were placed in foster care but were then taken in by her aunt while Tiny sought help for her addictions.
The report also covers the physical harm that Tiny inflicted on herself due to the immense pain of being in very difficult and stressful situations. This included continuing prostitution as well as trying to sustain a relationship with the father of one of her children who she wanted to have a family with, but who didn't reciprocate those feelings.
The most touching point in the documentary, for me, was the mention of Tiny as a symbol for children who are neglected and abused, not just in the US but the wider world. It’s an unfortunate fate that Tiny succumbed to because of the extreme dysfunction that went on in her family, living with a single mother who had many of the same problems that Tiny went on to carry herself. The report spotlights that the pain she tried to numb with various drugs and alcohol was largely caused by the unsafe environment and animosity that her mother fostered at home from when she was young. Tiny ended up on the street because she missed her mother, who was also out a lot drinking and looking for men to soothe her pain (some of those men would also pay for the time spent with her mother). Tiny would leave home to look for her mother but along the way she found the sparkle and thrills of being able to earn a fair bit of money through prostitution. Despite the dangers of this kind of lifestyle, Tiny saw it as a means to an end to build her own life, a better life, even if it meant having to live on the street for now.
If you're interested to learn more about Tiny's story, there are a few more follow up docs that were released in the decades since Streetwise came out (some can be found on YouTube), including another feature length doc released in 2016 showing Tiny's life more recently. Another short doc I recommend is about the child who called himself Rat in the Streetwise documentary (this one can also be found on YouTube). Both Tiny and Rat are amazing people and subjects to represent the problem of child neglect and the effects of living on the streets since youth, so please do seek them out if you're interested to learn more.
After going down that rabbit hole, I wanted to delve deeper into the system that is foster care since I'm sure it's not just the children in the United States that are facing issues like this.
What procedures do these agencies follow when taking children out of their family homes and into care facilities or foster homes? What are the considerations at each stage of the process? And how do children fall through the cracks and end up being runaways?
In my investigation, I looked especially into the differences in foster care methodology in Australia, the United States, and Canada.
The Australian foster care system has gone through significant changes in the last 100 years or so with the system first starting out by placing children predominantly in institutions (e.g. orphanages and other government funded care centres) where children would most likely not receive the attention and care that was needed to help them grow up healthy and keep them safe.
From the 1950's, the government changed course and moved towards smaller group care for foster children, and in the 1970's kinship care (a type of care that places a child or young person with a relative or someone they already know, for example a grandparent) and foster care became the dominant methodology for finding safer and less traumatic ways of helping children find stability in their lives until they reached adulthood, and even beyond.
The Australian foster care system, with the help of other government and non-government bodies, found ways of creating programs to help parents of vulnerable children handle their problems of either psychiatric, substance or monetary issues as a level of padding to prevent children from becoming more and more distant from their parents and leading to further instability and removal into out-of-home care.
From there of course, if a child is in direct contact with either a physically, emotionally, or sexually abusive parent (as well as varying levels of substance or psychiatric instability affecting a parent from taking care of their children), it is the responsibility of others in the community and government bodies to remove children from such harm and place them in the care of safe and caring adults. For some time now, the system has opted to try and place children with other family members who are deemed safe or families within the same community/neighbourhood, so as not to uproot a child completely from the environment they're used to.
I can see how some could argue that uprooting a child and moving them into a completely different environment and away from their immediate family and community could be a way to give them a totally different and improved path in life, away from the hardships and situations that children should not be exposed to, but through consultation with cultural minorities as well as the people who were in the foster care system themselves, it became clear that kinship care options along with the option of foster care in case appropriate care could not be found for the child within their family or community, have been found to be the more humane pathways to help children affected by these hardships.
Contemplating it more, I think it's a very grey area in the sense that there are of course outlier situations where children should not and do not want to be in touch with their biological parents and are yearning for a different life which could be more fruitful for them, and I hope that foster care/child care workers are able to think critically and act reasonably when listening to children and their concerns, and finding and monitoring the environments that they get placed in away from their biological family.
If you look at things on the surface, it does seem like the Australian foster care system is on a much better path forward compared to the United States and Canada, where children predominantly get legally assigned as government wards. This way it becomes a lot harder for them to stay connected with their parents and family, they can become placed in either foster homes that have not been vetted or monitored with care, or care facilities where they are just a name and number on a list of many children to take care of at one of the many care centres around the State or the country. And where have we been hearing about more cases of historic mass abuse, targeted displacement and killings of children, runaways, and sex trafficking? The research points to the United States and Canada.
We can do better. And it's time for the countries that have been failing to learn from others about alternative methods that have been more successful through thorough testing and research.
To conclude, the experience of delving into these cases and the systems we have in place to protect children makes me see our young people as both resilient yet so fragile and precious. They are wired to seek safety in adults, and when their own parents cannot provide safety, they seek it elsewhere. The problem is that they don't know how to distinguish true safety from the familiarity of their upbringing, and that's where they can get lost in the fog.
There is an overwhelming number of factors that come into play when trying to raise kids well including helping them be discerning of others' intentions, developing healthy stress coping strategies, and helping them find success in life.
I want to believe there's a path, a manual to guide all God's children to safety and salvation here on Earth. And yet there are things that are handed down by parents and family that cannot be controlled or predicted. And that unknown is scary to think about.
Should we panic or not?
Maybe the only saving grace is that there are resources and people out there who do want to help. Maybe all we have is our attachment to hope to help keep us going. Hope and the power of people in numbers. People who want to do good and improve the lives of others.
Let's keep fighting even if it seems like the tide is too high, because changing one life for the better at a time can lead to change that reverberates and affects many more than you think it could.
Sources:
Hassanein, N. (2023, November 12). States lose track of thousands of foster children each year. Kansas Reflector. Retrieved from https://kansasreflector.com/2023/11/12/states-lose-track-of-thousands-of-foster-children-each-year/
Martin, E. (n.d.). Streetwise: A sociological analysis [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved from:
INODEUX. (1993). Tiny's Story (aka Streetwise in Seattle) [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved from:
Rosenbaum, M. M. (2002). A multi-country comparison of foster care systems (Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Long Beach). ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/openview/80dc21d69686a81a348aceacae21bb1e/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y
How does the foster system work in the United States? Do children in foster care receive any benefits? (n.d.). Quora. Retrieved from https://www.quora.com/How-does-the-foster-system-work-in-the-United-States-Do-children-in-foster-care-receive-any-benefits
What happens to children in Australia and the US that no one wants to foster or adopt? What if the kids have special needs? (n.d.). Quora. Retrieved from https://www.quora.com/What-happens-to-children-in-Australia-and-the-US-that-no-one-wants-to-foster-or-adopt-What-if-the-kids-have-special-needs
Pazzano, C. (n.d.). Foster care in Australia: How does it work? SBS. Retrieved from https://www.sbs.com.au/language/english/en/article/foster-care-in-australia-how-does-it-work/tulp3ywup
Wyndham, S. (2020, June 16). Widening the conversation about adoption and foster care. The University of Sydney. Retrieved from https://www.sydney.edu.au/arts/news-and-events/news/2020/06/16/widening-the-conversation-about-adoption-and-foster-care.html
Life Without Barriers. (n.d.). Eight frequently asked questions about foster care in Australia. Retrieved from https://www.lwb.org.au/news/eight-frequently-asked-questions-about-foster-care-in-australia/
Pregnancy, Birth and Baby. (n.d.). How does foster care work? Healthdirect Australia. Retrieved from https://www.pregnancybirthbaby.org.au/how-does-foster-care-work
Foster care. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster_care
Foster care in Australia. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster_care_in_Australia
Forgotten Australians. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_Australians
Barron, J. (2016, June 30). How do we compare? Looking at foster care systems around the world. Texas Institute for Child & Family Wellbeing. Retrieved from https://txicfw.socialwork.utexas.edu/how-do-we-compare-looking-at-foster-care-systems-around-the-world/