ORPHANS OF THE LIVING
By Jennifer Toth
Simon & Shuster, 314 pages, $23
To hear our leaders speak, you might think America loves nothing more than its children. We have endured various Years of the Child, declared this the Decade of the Child, and endorsed the universal Convention on the Rights of the Child, which guarantees social, economic and civil rights, and prohibits their exploitation. Children are at the heart of hot-button legislation such as Megan’s Law and the passionate but unconstitutional Communications Decency Act, which would have censored free speech on the Internet to keep kids away from cyberporn. President Clinton promises children “a computer in every classroom,” Hillary Clinton nurtures them at public events, and Newt Gingrich harks back for a “Boy’s Town” approach to child-rearing today.
Yet despite our professed belief in child care, few of us deeply examine the fate of disadvantaged children after the cameras have stopped rolling and the wheels of state grind away at social reform. After years of social-service cuts, a new welfare-reduction bill and diminished Aid to Families With Dependent Children, America is facing a new generation of children who are increasingly born into poverty, parental dysfunction and despair. Where do these children go?
Investigative journalist Jennifer Toth has tried to confront this question in her new book, “Orphans of the Living,” and the answers she brings us are alarming indeed.
“Orphans of the Living” examines the plight of the half-million children in foster homes or substitute care, which Toth describes as “a chaotic, prisonlike system intended to raise children whose parents and relatives cannot or will not care for them. . . . (A) system that feeds 40 percent of its children onto welfare rolls or into prison.” Toth informs us that, “Former foster kids are three times more likely to become homeless,” and that things will get worse before they get better: “(T)he new welfare reform laws could vastly increase the number of foster children, since AFDC funds have been severely cut back. Already in crisis, the foster care system may well collapse under the strain.”
The author supports these claims, and other disturbing charges of physical and sexual abuse in foster care and group homes (formerly called orphanages), with a variety of local and federal studies, as well as the more consistent surveys of the private Voluntary Cooperative Information System, which, surprisingly, is the only national foster-care database. But what’s even more disturbing than Toth’s statistical overview is the way she presents the case for reform–through the eyes and experiences of a half-dozen children across the country whose sagas provide a frightening first-hand account of the abuse and neglect intrinsic to foster care in America today.
“Orphans of the Living” focuses on four case studies: a family of five siblings in North Carolina who were taken away from their mother after she was charged with neglect; a young girl who was sent to a group home after her mother said she could not deal with her; a young woman in Los Angeles who moved from group homes to a private home and, astonishingly, married her foster-care father and had five children with him who were eventually taken away; and a young man in Chicago who was placed in the system after his mother died of a drug overdose, prompting the father, also a drug addict, to abandon his family.
Toth deftly documents the deep despair and occasional small triumphs of each of the young people. But there are no Hollywood endings. Some go on and are able to get their lives together, despite the odds against them, while the others continue to struggle day to day. Sadly, the reader senses that most will meet a dismal fate.
While all the stories are compelling, the most fascinating case is that of Angel, who has five children with the 73-year-old man who once took her in as a foster child. At first, the reader is appalled that Angel, at age 14 and with the consent of her biological mother, marries Marrion Brown, her foster father whose wife of 48 years has died. Isn’t this sexual exploitation? As Toth delicately describes the situation, “Angel had no one except Mr. Brown, her foster father, who violated (or complicated) that relationship by becoming her husband.” But as the story unfolds, Brown is one of the most sympathetic characters in Angel’s life: He is always there when everyone in the system, and her own family, fails her.
How their children were taken away would almost be laughable if it were not so tragic and repugnant. Angel’s sister had arranged for her to be on Jerry Springer’s Chicago-based daytime-TV talk show as a foil for a segment on “marrying a man who could be her grandfather.” Here, the reader gets an inside view of how these shows’ producers exploit the poor and the ignorant by offering an airline ticket and a night in a hotel room.
Apparently the sister, who also wanted to appear on the show, was told she could not because Angel, Brown and their five children would be enough people. A few weeks before the scheduled taping, child-welfare workers said, they received a complaint that Brown, while rubbing salve on his infant daughter, sexually fondled her. The children were taken away, and later the Browns found out it was Angel’s sister who phoned in the complaint. The motive: now there would be room for her on “The Jerry Springer Show.”
Toth aptly captures Angel’s defiant spirit and child-like disposition. A critic could argue that such a young woman, a child herself, should not be having so many children. But it is a reality, and in Toth’s biting observations, it is the system’s bureaucracy that not only survives but at times thrives on the cycle of poverty.
Notes Toth: “Angel is a product of her upbringing, or lack of it. She is no better or worse than most who have had the same experiences. She is expected to play by the rules that she was never taught and that, as she sees it, were not made for her. They have never helped her. The system that imposes the rules she does not trust, even though she fears it. Just as she has not been able to look past the immediate to build her future, she has never learned how to act responsibly to earn what she wants.”
The horror–and poignancy–of this, and of the other cases, is all the more compelling because of Toth’s considerable skill as an anthropologist, reporter and writer. Her keen observational skills and the clarity of her narrative style leave readers feeling as if they are inside the head of the child, foster parent or other subject she observes and portrays.
For all the volatility and emotion of abuse, exploitation and underfunding in the foster-care system, Toth fortunately does not lose sight of the good intentions of well-meaning foster families or hard-working administrators, such as those at North Carolina’s Oxford Orphanage and the Central Children’s Home, the nations two oldest foster-care centers, which cope symbiotically with children whose lives are lived in the wake of poverty, segregation and neglect. She even cites Central Children’s Home director Mike Alston for coining the title of her book and challenging her to tell the stories of every foster child in America.
Toth has done more to humanize the pressing issue of child care than months of bean-counting debates and empty political rhetoric. The nation’s legislators would be well-advised to consider her findings, and concerned citizens could only become better focused in their compassion for children by reading “Orphans of the Living.” It reveals an alarming world–a world that adults often view with hope but that rarely fulfills the needs of the children themselves.
