Child Welfare and Youth Services
There are more than half a million children in foster care in the United States. These children comprise one of the most vulnerable groups in society. Most come from families living in poverty; two-thirds are children of color; many were born in disadvantaged neighborhoods, and all share the pain of damaged parental relationships. Children in foster care also share another common trait: their lives are shaped by a complex web of federal, state, and local agencies. As part of its commitment to improving institutions for youth, Vera has worked with several New York City and New York State agencies to produce a large body of research that focuses on how this web affects children involved with the child welfare system and what can be done to fill gaps and improve services.
Children in foster care and the adults who are responsible for them must grapple with the hard truth that many government services are not designed with foster children in mind. When it comes to succeeding in school, for example, foster children face unique challenges and obstacles that often leave them lagging behind their peers. And support for the educational efforts of foster children is often weak; responsibility may be diffused among foster parents, biological parents, caseworkers, and education officials. To help officials and front-line staff with these challenges, Vera produced a kit on how to create positive educational experiences for foster children, a study of, what keeps children in foster care from succeeding in school, and a report on how children's foster care experiences affect their education.
Some child advocates fear that aggressive law enforcement and high rates of incarceration may be pushing kids into foster care. When single parents are incarcerated, foster care may be the only alternative for their children. To study this issue, Vera examined the criminal records of the biological mothers of two cohorts of New York City children entering foster care. We found that only a third of all the mothers had any arrest that led to a conviction; only 11 percent of the mothers had incarceration spells that overlapped with a child's foster care placement; and these overlapping spells almost always started after a child's removal, not before. Our two studies, Hard Data on Hard Times: An Empirical Analysis of Maternal Incarceration, Foster Care, and Visitation and Patterns of Criminal Conviction and Incarceration Among Mothers of Children in Foster Care in New York City are the first studies anywhere that contain this information on a systemwide level.
Youth in foster care sometimes enter the juvenile justice system—and again face challenges not encountered by other youth. Children in care who are arrested for delinquent acts are more likely than other children to be sent to juvenile detention to await their trials, even though they face the same charges as their nonfoster peers. The Vera report Reducing the Foster Care Bias in Juvenile Detention Decisions: The Impact of Project Confirm quantifies the foster care bias in detention decisions and shows that a relatively simple intervention can eliminate it for juveniles with no prior records who are charged with low-level offenses.
Vera continues research and technical assistance in this field. We are currently studying innovations in New York City's status offender system, training child protective workers in ways to ensure their safety, and working with the New York City Department of Legal Services on issues related to oversight and management. For more information, contact Vera's Research Director, Tim Ross.