Hundreds of thousands of children in America are living without permanent families in the foster care system. Every year, these children are removed from dangerous homes in the name of safety, stability and a chance for a better life.
Sadly, behind the closed doors of state and local systems, many of these children have suffered abuse, trauma and permanent abandonment from the very institutions created to rescue them. Nearly half of the youth who “age out” of foster care — between 15,000-20,000 children annually — never receive a permanent family and become homeless within two years. By age 24, fewer than half of them are employed.
Howard Talenfeld, of Plantation, is a co-founder of Justice for Kids. (courtesy, Howard Talenfeld, photography by Downtown Photo)
Currently, 29 states face class-action lawsuits for systematic violations of children’s most fundamental rights to safety, stability and well-being. The evidence is overwhelming: Foster care, as currently structured, is failing America’s children on a massive scale.
This is also still a sad truth in Broward County and throughout Florida. Between 1998 and 2002, Broward County was the site of a grand jury investigation, a foster care class-action lawsuit, and a special congressional field hearing on foster care failures. The lawsuit found evidence of systemic sexual abuse and the dismal shortage of appropriate foster care placements, educational failures and 80 missing children from foster care.
Turning investigations over to the Broward Sheriff’s Office and privatizing by bringing in ChildNet did not solve the systemic abuse of children in care. Recently, we have seen the stabbing death of a foster child in a group home, multiple episodes of sexual abuse, the total shortage of foster care placements, and the sex trafficking of Broward’s foster children. This year, state Sen. Barbara Sharief, D-Miramar, stated to Taylor Hatch during a Senate confirmation hearing for Hatch’s appointment as Secretary of the Department of Children and Families, “I see there is a brokenness to the system in terms of the ability to process families’ cases and reunify those children with their families on a consistent and more fast-paced basis.”
Systemic problems in Broward County foster care include a 55% turnover rate for child protective investigators, even after BSO was replaced by the Florida Legislature; severe staff shortages at ChildNet, including a 30% turnover in caseworkers; children who are trafficked from group homes; and more than 100 children in extended foster care who never received a permanent family, even though parental rights were terminated.
Although the Children’s Services Council of Broward County has done an extraordinary job of shrinking the number of children in ChildNet’s care, Broward is on the precipice of another class-action suit because of the above failures and its decades-long human experiment on the lives of foster children.
ChildNet needs to recover its sense of urgency that each child matters and ensure that there is an appropriate continuum of foster care placements that meet the therapeutic, emotional and disability needs of children in its care and custody. ChildNet needs to understand that each child who leaves foster care and who has had their parental rights terminated and not replaced with a permanent parent or committed adult is a tragic failure. Growing up without committed relationships and successive, destabilizing traumas leads many of these children to end up in correctional facilities, homeless shelters and mental hospitals, facing permanent psychiatric diagnoses.
We must confront an uncomfortable truth: Preventing child abuse means more than removing children from dangerous homes. It means creating systems that actually protect them — systems that provide permanent families, therapeutic supports and genuine family stability. It is time that we insist that every child’s life matters.
Howard Talenfeld, of Plantation, is a co-founder of Justice for Kids, a division of Kelley Kronenberg, P.A., and the founder of Florida’s Children First, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the rights of children who are at-risk, abused and disabled, especially those in or aging out of Florida’s foster care system and those experiencing homelessness.