Since the murder of George Floyd 30 states have passed over 140 laws aimed at ending police violence against Black Americans, indicating initial progress on legislative reforms.
However stopping murders in child protection and foster care through legislation hasn’t worked as well.
This suggests that children’s advocates should consider different systems-change strategies.
One possibility is class action lawsuits. Historically, this remedy hasn’t been pursued because of perceived difficulties in connecting casework practices – such as returning children to unsafe settings and poor record-keeping – to harms experienced by individual children. However our conversations with lawyers and adult survivors of abuse suggest that these obstacles might be surmountable, and recent lawsuits brought by kin of children killed in foster care may identify strategies that would also work in class actions. Consequently, we will analyze this potential legal remedy and share our findings in this space.
To hear this e-brief as well as our in-depth commentary, listen to our podcast here.
I was a volunteer Guardian ad Litem in Ramsey County, Minnesota (St. Paul) from 2000 to 2010. During that time period I sometimes noticed an over-emphasis on finding a relative who would assume guardianship of a child who had been removed from his or her parents. In the quest for a relative, often the necessary checks were not done, and the child was moved to a situation that was not much better than the one from whom the child had been removed. At times this arrangement was sought in order to get consent from the birth parent to the loss of custody. Though this may have been the easiest course of action, it was not always in “the best interest of the child.”