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Opinion

Foster care system needs overhaul

Jesse Singh
Opinion Columnist

Foster care has been around since the middle 1500s, an institution then bent on putting homeless children in indentured service until they came of age. Back then, abuse and exploitation were permitted toward these children. The situation today is not much different. Today, abuse and exploitation are against the law, but happen behind closed doors. 

These days, foster families receive government money to spend on the children they foster. However, oftentimes, money goes elsewhere instead. Because of their age, children are incredibly vulnerable to worldly experiences such as suffering from physical, sexual and ultimately, emotional abuse. Treated as nothing more than tools, these children go on to lead tortured lives, their problems manifesting in many different ways from early, horror-filled foster care experiences. In too many instances, the institution of foster care in the United States has detrimental effects on children's social, emotional and cognitive growth.

Foster care has been used to place the displaced in temporary homes until more suitable accommodation can be found. Displaced children can come from many backgrounds such as dumpster babies, those given away at birth, disowned or runaways. Many of these children have grown up without forming the loving attachment many children form during the early stages of life and take for granted later.

If, by some extraordinary feat, a child manages to be placed in a loving home and forms a loving attachment to his caregiver, it is only temporary. The child will have the love and compassion never before received violently ripped away, only to be placed in another stranger's home. This process kills children emotionally, shutting them off to the rest of the world. 

Defense mechanisms are employed to protect from the eventual harm of losing a potential loving relationship by never forming a relationship from day one. The best-case scenario a child can encounter is a family who loves them and will adopt the child so he or she will not have to suffer the pain of losing a loving attachment. Sundering such a tie is the worst possible act to befall the child, though it is debatable with a situation of abuse.

Few families decide to foster children purely out of benevolence or altruism. The child, in most instances, is viewed as a means to an end, a tool for subsidy checks. Money is "awarded" to foster families based on the state, the child's age and even the child's stability and needs. Most families who do this are already impoverished and receive low incomes. Even though screening for potential foster families has gotten better, the number of children needing homes is increasing. 

In essence, beggars cannot be choosers and by no choice of their own, children are placed with counterproductive families. These children become similar to a welfare check, except a welfare check cannot do all of your manual labor. A welfare check cannot be beaten or yelled at or molested in any way and a welfare check cannot suffer in already substandard accommodations. 

PBS reported that in 2000, approximately 2.8 million reports of abuse or neglect were reported to child welfare agencies nationwide. Of those, about 60 percent, or 1.7 million cases, met the standards for further investigation or assessment.

This report is more than five years old, but conditions have not gotten better for children in foster care. A common problem is that these maltreatments go overlooked. Social workers are in great demand and are usually overworked and have more cases than they can handle on their own. 

There are most likely millions of other cases that go unreported because children do not speak up about all the atrocities that occur. Many are forced into silence through fear of more mistreatment or become so habituated to the abuse that it is not out of the ordinary. Some children may even feel that being molested by a caregiver makes them special because no one ever presumed to "care" about them before. There was a special case that happened in the 1970s.

A 13-year-old girl was found in her parent's house, locked in her room and tied to a potty chair. She never received physical or social interaction. If she ever made a noise, her father would beat her into silence. For 13 years, she sat in a room with nothing to look at, day in and day out, for 13 years. Upon her finding, her father committed suicide and her mother was charged.

Scientists tried their best to "rehabilitate" this girl they named Genie. They tried reintegrating Genie into society and their main focus was teaching Genie the English language. They loved and cared for her, taught her how to express her ideas through sign language, but never fully reached the point where her verbal communication was sufficient for her age. She was in the care of scientists for four years, until her mother was acquitted of all charges and regained custody of her. 

You would think this wouldn't happen in our day and age that our court system would be fair and would deal out just punishment to those who hurt others. You would be wrong. This happens all the time.

Genie's mother found her daughter too difficult to deal with and released care of her, ultimately putting her in a foster home. Even in this new home, she was so severely abused that all she had learned was undone. She was beaten for throwing up and forced to swallow whatever went into her mouth. 

She was put through six more foster homes after this one, each one yielding a more broken and battered little girl. When Genie was in the care of the scientists, she was under their care, foster care. When the scientists' government grant ran out, they followed suit, thus breaking the strong four-year attachment Genie had formed with them. This case is simply a tragedy, to make an understatement. What can we learn from these mistakes?

Children are put into foster care in order to find a temporary home and to relieve some of the tension that shelters and adoption homes suffer under. Money is given to families who foster these children. It seems as though the money would be better spent improving the care of these shelters so that children could receive an education and therapy and maybe learn the skills they need to survive in this life. 

Children who are not cared for are put out on the streets at the age of 18 to fend for themselves with no real parental guidance or any real idea of what a family is. There is no model transition or guide for children "aging out" of foster care. They are forced to go from one horror to the next. Children who have suffered abuse in foster homes are more prone to violence, substance abuse and even tolerating or committing the same kind of horrors they were subjected to. 

Foster care does not hurt just one child, or confine its trouble within a single vessel. It becomes a vicious cycle of pain, torment and hurt, injuring all within its path.

Singh, an opinion columnist for The Daily Cougar, 
can be reached at jmsingh@uh.edu.