Suggested Soundtrack: Redemption Song, Bob Marley & The Wailers
There is a real need for child protection. Though most abuse and neglect incidents are, I believe, unintentional and correctable, there are some that are chronic and intractable. This is the kind of family I grew up in. I won’t say home because I never had one. My family moved at least every year for my entire childhood. The exception was 2.5 years in a home during our longest stretch of stability. I actually got to spend two years at one school.
My childhood was characterized by every form of child maltreatment. My father was a violent alcoholic who targeted children, especially me. My mother had unassessed and unaddressed mental health issues, leaving her unfit for parenting for large chunks of time. My sister and I were both sexually abused by our only paternal uncle, who was himself a victim of multiple forms of child maltreatment. Our parents were also victims of childhood maltreatments. CPS never once darkened our door. The flip side of the system’s racism is that white families sometimes aren’t looked at when they should be. Children of all races suffer when racism is the paradigm.
My mother will tell you she put me in foster care, but this is a lie. I am the rare child who was so wounded I asked to go into foster care. It was a summer evening two years after my parents’ divorce and I was in a therapy session. I’d had enough. I had always been the target child, and in the wake of the divorce, even my own mother shifted from protector to targeting to preserve some family order and routine. By the time I asked to go into foster care my parents were separated, and yet my father was still grabbing me so hard he left fingerprint bruises around my arm. My mother was fighting her own battles trying to build a new life while persistently ignoring her own mental health, and pinning the chaos on her children, especially her problem child, lil ole me.
For this act of defiance—for being unwilling to go back into a home where I was constantly picked at and targeted—the State of Kentucky called me Beyond Control. Because of this, for decades afterwards I believed the whole affair was my fault. I already believed all the abuse was my fault because I had been trained through targeting to believe I deserved the abuse I endured. Then I came to believe the traumatic experience of being in foster care was also my fault because I asked for safety. I sat in self-blame for many, many years because I was traumatized by child maltreatment and by the system designed to address my maltreatment. None of it was actually my fault, and I thank God I now know that.
There are 8,760 hours in a year. According to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours rule, I was an expert in foster care by the time I was in it for 14 months. I spent five years, or 43,800 hours in care. Later, as I chose my career path, I would spend 87,600 hours working in mandated Child Welfare systems, for a total of one hundred thirty-one thousand and four hundred (131,400) hours of my life so far engaged with mandated Child Welfare systems in America. I believe I have authority to speak of this system like few in our nation and culture do by virtue of the time I invested and having been on two sides. This is the definition of “lived experience.”
This is what I can tell you: The effects of being a maltreated child last much longer than childhood. And the effects of being a foster child complicate healing on this journey and exacerbate the open wounds on a psyche. These wounds fester. Few are equipped with the reflective abilities and self-awareness necessary to understand how these wounds are informing their everyday choices. Few can afford the kinds of therapy that are required to truly overcome the dual traumas of child maltreatment and time spent in foster care.
The success rates of foster care can be measures in many ways. In some ways, I am a “success story.” I am among the 3% of us who make it through college—though it took me 12 years to get there. I am part of the 60% of us who have not had a CPS case with our own children. I am among the 50-ish percent of us who don’t have criminal histories. I believed when I signed on to work in child welfare that I was going to work for the system that saved me. I could not have been more wrong about this. In some ways, I appreciate the history-correcting aspects of my time working in mandated Child Welfare systems. Without this experience, I could not have come to the place where I realized that nothing could save this broken system and would not have thought to entertain different approaches to child welfare than what we see today.
I derived the story I told myself about being saved though foster care from my experience at a truly special residential treatment facility called Maryhurst, in Louisville, KY. It was this facility and the people who worked there who saved me, not anyone in the mandated Child Welfare system that held my case. I had forgotten all about the disruptive first year of being in care, when I sailed through at least four foster homes, and a couple of group placements before being placed at Maryhurst. I had glossed over being taken to Maryhurst and dropped off, never to see my social worker again until it was time to go, and how impatient he was whenever he was around. I had misremembered that there were months upon months that I didn’t see my own family and never left the facility except for outings. And I was not developed enough to even understand the main problem in my case was my family and the abuse, and neither I nor anything about me had caused the case to happen to begin with. This is just a common story happening throughout America still—mandated Child Welfare systems are so dysfunctional and fail so many kids and families that it is often the behavior of teens that first draw our collective attention to the fact that they were ever abused. And then we blame them for being a huge problem in our systems.
A lot of work has been done in this area. Working with Older Youth is some of the most developed areas of mandated Child Welfare systems because teens can articulate their issues and advocate for themselves in ways younger children and infants can’t. Special laws have been passed based on their needs and advocacy of their issues. I’m not here to improve this one area of mandated Child Welfare. My mission is larger—the protection of all children, and thus eventually all humans. I want global safety and well-being, and I have a vision for how to achieve it.
I’m here to fix the whole thing—after all, it is largely the younger children who are the most vulnerable and most at risk. And after all, it is the entire cohort of abused and neglected children in any given culture and generation that comprise the cohort of adults with the highest needs—and I’m talking about need for adult behavioral interventions related to mental health and domestic violence, as well as drug addiction, and the need to be incarcerated to protect society from them. I’m talking about the sexual predators of your children today and tomorrow, and for however long they live.
Our current failures in mandated Child Welfare systems pose a risk to all of us and will continue to until we deal with that fact and do something about it. The dead babies these systems routinely produce are bad enough, but for the children who live and who are damaged by the underperformance of leadership in mandated Child Welfare systems, what hope is possible? What recovery? What normalcy?
All of the things that keep us all up late at night, all of our boogie men and women—they all come from the same place, the place of unsafety as children. It’s Attachment that can help us to repair and restore most of these children to their families. Only then can we live in a society and culture where we can all see each other as fully human and responsible for each other’s well-being. Currently we are reinforcing the experience in too many children that they are not human—they were something to be abused and now they are something to be stored and housed until some unknown time when a judge who does not know them says they can or can’t go home.