Homeless While in State Custody

“If they were going to treat me like this, why didn’t they just leave me at home?”

That question was posed to me by my twelve-year-old client after being taken from his parents and moved through several foster homes, only to find himself without any home at all.  Instead, he was spending his days sitting in a chair next to the desk of his caseworker – missing school to do so – and then spending each night and each weekend in a different emergency foster home.  My client needed to be in foster care.  Unlike the vast majority of cases that involve neglect, his was the unusual case where there had been serious abuse.  I knew he did not want to go home to his parents – he knew it was not safe for him – which made his question to me all the more chilling.  

As a young lawyer, I was horrified by my client’s treatment, but even more so by the response of the child welfare agency to the motion I filed to bring them into court to address his situation.  They argued that foster care was by definition impermanent so they had no duty to place him in an ongoing home.  In other words, it was okay that the State could not provide him with a home.

Recently, I was reminded of my case, which happened more than 20 years ago in Massachusetts, after reading a Boston Globe article highlighting the state’s broken foster care system.  The article describes a 14-year-old boy who had been removed from his parent’s custody only to learn that there was no foster home available for him.  He was driven around in his social worker’s car until 4 a.m. when a foster home was finally located.  He was dropped off only to be picked up a few hours later and taken to school (can you imagine?  How was he to function for the day on so little sleep?).  The article also quietly mentions that in other cases, the State can’t find kids home, thus requiring them to sleep in a case worker’s car, hospital waiting room or police station lobby.  Reading the article, all I could think about was my client’s question, and about how in the twenty years since that case, things had not only not gotten better, it seems like they had gotten worse. 

This issue is not confined to Massachusetts, of course.  Across the country children in foster care are sleeping in child welfare offices due to the shortage of foster homes.  Children are also often moved around at extremely high rates.  In Florida’s Miami-Dade and Monroe County foster care “between January 2016 and June 2017, over 400 kids had 10 or more total placements; at least 185 kids lived in 20 or more places; more than 50 children lived at least 50 places; and 27 children were bounced around between 80 and 140 placements during their total time in state care.”  Recently a judge in Kansas ruled that children are moved so frequently that they are effectively “homeless while in state custody”.  

Think about the times in your life that you have moved and how hard each move was, even when it was a positive one.  Can you imagine moving every single night?  Or every few days or weeks?  Changing houses, neighborhoods, communities, schools and even families?  The trauma from multiple moves cannot be overstated.  It affects educational outcomes, ability to form attachments and overall health, and is also a key risk factor for later juvenile justice involvement.  The fact that we are routinely traumatizing our children like this is a national emergency.

The incredible irony is that estimates are that 30% of children (I’ve even seen numbers as high as 50%) are in foster care due to housing problems.  The thought process seems to be that it’s not okay for a child to be homeless with his or her family but that it’s okay for the state to make a child homeless on their own. 

This indefensible treatment – removing children from their family only to not be given a home to live in – is one of the many reasons that we must change our current child welfare system so that we are only separating children from their families when there is no way to keep them safely at home.  Often, the response to the lack of foster homes is that we need to just recruit more foster homes.  While this might be true, (and we need to better support foster parents so that they continue to foster), the reality is that our current system is unsustainable and doing incredible damage to the children that we are claiming to protect.  Instead, why not focus on reducing the number of children unnecessarily entering foster care?  Many of the issues that currently lead to removal can be safely addressed without removing the child from their family and we absolutely must do that in every situation we can.  By not doing so, we are not only profoundly hurting children we profess to be protecting, we are ensuring that there will never be sufficient resources and homes for children like my client from 20 years ago, who need to be in foster care for true safety reasons.