My wife and I were very involvd with the foster care system here in New York City for a number of years (can’t say much more than that on a public message board). I’m familiar with the ins and outs of the system (and, to be sure, it can resemble Brezhnev-era Soviet beaurocracy at times), and its good points and bad points.
New York’s Administration for Children’s Services prioritizes kinship foster care.
This isn’t a terrible thing. It makes sense on a number of levels.
Like any other system, it can be abused, but on the whole, it makes sense.
The author of this book was interviewed on C-SPAN 2, and as the interview progressed, all I could think was, “I just don’t like this woman.” Clicking on her personal website confirmed for me that I probably didn’t want to read her book, either.
Among other things, in the interview, she wore a long-sleeved turtleneck, and on her webpage, she wore a sleeveless mini-dress, and she is tattooed on every visible inch of skin, even her fingers, and she’s had a second apparently fatherless child.
There was a woman in my area who was from a prominent family, and she was always getting stories written about her in the newspaper about how she had (at the time) 5 kids, not all of them with the same father, and she got no child support for any of them. I moved away, and when I came back in 2012, I was hearing a lot less about her, and she stopped breeding with her 9th child. :smack: For a while, she was the leader of a group with a name like “Girls Rock!” and I cannot be the only person who wrote to the paper (asking that the letter/e-mail not be published) stating that I did not consider people like her to be role models and if I had children, I would keep them as far as possible from her. I don’t know where she found all these guys to reproduce with or where they went, but I can pretty safely assume that her kids were just as train-wrecky as she obviously was.
I have a friend who used to be a foster care caseworker, and if a relative was willing and suitable, they always tried to place the children this way if at all possible. I put her in touch with my BFF (they do not know each other and in fact live in different states) when he and his wife expressed interest in foster parenting a few years ago, because it was really obvious to me that they had no idea what they could potentially be getting themselves into. She persuaded him that it would not have been a good idea for them to do it at that time.
About 15 years ago, when their own kids were very young, they took his two of his wife’s cousin’s kids when the cousin got into some kind of trouble. One thing I, and several other people, told them was to make sure they had some kind of guardianship for the kids, for a multitude of reasons.
The Guardian has a feature where they talk about real people and their troubles. Sometimes the people are lovely, intelligent and self aware. We are always meant to feel sympathetic towards them. And sometimes…
There are some factors you might not notice if you don’t know the local areas. But this:
I am lucky that my husband gives me an allowance of £1,000 a month, which I spend on food, petrol, clothes for the girls, hair treatments, days out, books and parties.
Which she gets on top of her £18,000 part-time income. They are mortgage-free.
I’m sure the people in these articles think that people will be sympathetic but, no, we’re not.
And while the paperwork is being processed, they may find themselves having to take the baby to Mexico to vaccinate him, because they can’t put him in their insurance (not their child) and can’t put him in the state’s program for low-income families (not their child and too much income), and doctors won’t take an uninsured kid… Now, that was in 2001 and thankfully the family in question lived very close to Mexico; nowadays I expect that those clinics people call “doc in a box” would be willing to stick the kid, but I still get a headache when I try to understand how can any country get to such a situation in the first place.
There’s a couple situations where Spanish reporters have learned to ask a couple of specific questions before reporting:
multiple dead/wounded at road spot which has long been marked as “notoriously dangerous”. Q: did the driver have a license? Was people properly seated and secured? If the answer is “no, no and they were doing 100km/h when that curve is marked 40”… yeah, forget Munch’s Scream and go full Rottenmeier.
person taken from harbor area by sea during big storm. Q: were they standing on the cordoned-off area? If the answer is “yes”, forget Munch’s Scream and explain that now their families will have to wait several years to have them declared dead, so please do refrain from commiting Suicide by Stupid willya?
I don’t think the kids around here go out to the foster families until that paperwork is completed, and it does include a Medicaid card no matter what the foster parents’ income is, or if they’re able to be insured with them. This is to ensure that the children always have medical coverage.
Other than the docudrama there were no forced confessions. Trial had a friend turn in one guy for bragging he raped a woman in the park that night. He admitted it to the cops later.
That’s the point of much of the story—“admit[ing] it to the cops” is often a forced or false confession, and in this case certainly was. Forced confessions don’t look like they do in the movies of beating somebody until they confess, but other forms of compulsion, such as lying (you’ll go free if you admit what you did; we have proof you did it, so admit it and we’ll take it easy; etc.); intimidation; isolation; violation of civil rights (speaking to counsel, minors have a parent present, etc.).
Making it sound like somebody walked into the police station and said, “hey, I committed that crime” is huge distortion of the facts.
But given that he didn’t actually rape her, and neither did any of the others, doesn’t that make you think there might have been more than a little coercion?
So where do the kids stay in between whatever caused them to need a foster family and actually being sent to one? Do none of them stay with willing relatives or neighbors while the situation is formalized?
