In Florida recently, a 5th-grade boy filed a civil lawsuit to dissolve his birth parents` custody rights. He wants to be heard legally; his choice is to ”divorce” his birth parents and be adopted by his foster parents, who have cared for him for less than one year.
Amid his allegations of abuse, neglect, alcoholism and abandonment by his now-divorced birth parents, the young boy says he no longer wants to be volleyed from parent to parent to foster home to group home at the discretion of his biological parents, a judge or state agency. He wants to pick his parents himself.
The immediate issue appears to be about a child`s right to choose. And it is debatable whether a child is capable of making such a weighty choice. Children can make foolish choices inspired by immediacy or whim.
But the broader issue is less debatable. It is woefully obvious that our spider-web system of substitute care for our country`s foster children is inadequate. It is a system-although held together by sincerely good intentions-that is damned by inadequate staff, budget cuts, hastily gathered information, quick fixes, shortcuts and just plain old-fashioned human error. In Illinois alone, the number of children in need of substitute care
(which includes foster homes, the shelter of relatives` homes or a group home)has jumped close to 22 percent from March 1991 to March 1992, the latest figures available. According to Janet Peters, spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, 28,205 children were in substitute care in Illinois as of March 1992. And despite the increase in need, the DCFS proposed budget for fiscal year 1993 beginning July 1 was cut in half, from $40 million to $20 million.
”It is a huge struggle” to meet even the basic needs of the children in crisis within the system, says Peters. ”We work overtime, consider layoffs, all different kinds of belt-tightening and have a severe shifting of assignments to meet demands,” she says.
In 1990, 407,000 children were in foster care in this country, according to the most recent data collected by the American Public Welfare Association for the Department of Health and Human Services, a federal agency. In four years, that number increased from a total of 281,000 foster care children in this country in 1986.
In 1991, according to an agency official in the Children`s Bureau, $2.3 billion of federal money was spent on the country`s foster children, or approximately $5,653 per child (using 1990 totals). What the government spends on 50 children per year would buy just one 30-second ABC-TV network commercial during ”Roseanne” in the upcoming fall season.
”The system is overwhelmed,” says Joyce Johnson, a spokeswoman for the Child Welfare League of America in Washington, an association with about 700 member agencies in the United States and Canada. In 1991, 2.7 million reports of child abuse came to these member agencies, more than double the 1.2 million reports of abuse only five years earlier. ”At the same time that all these reports are increasing, the resources are decreasing,” she says. Case workers, investigators, judges and agency staff are fallible and often overworked. So mistakes are made.
In a New York state case last year, a 2-year-old girl was placed in foster care by the state Department of Social Services after her mother, Denise Perrigo, called a volunteer hot line with a question about
breastfeeding. Perrigo says she was alarmed that while breastfeeding her young daughter she had become sexually aroused. She wanted to contact a support group to see if this was normal. Instead she was turned over to a rape crisis center and was accused of sexually abusing her daughter. In November, a judge later found there had been no abuse.
In a California case, cerebral palsy victim Tiffany Callo claims that her two healthy boys were taken away from her and placed in foster care because both she and the boys` father use wheelchairs. Her disabilities, she says, were used against her in court.
No one in the foster-care network denies that tragedies are born of this system. But the magnitude of neglect and abuse swallowing today`s children threatens to destroy the system that was created to save them. And unless we have adequate money and manpower, whatever good we mean to do to our country`s children, it is not good enough.
