Black Parents Fight to Keep Their Children: Foster Care Bias Splits Black Families
By Robin D. Stone
FOCUS magazine
September/October 2004
............................................................................................................................
viewing page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | next >
Nicolie Jones is an angry Black woman. And with her children in foster care, that’s a serious problem.
Jones, 39, a single Harlem mother on public assistance, lost custody of her three girls to New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) in 2001. The removal, records show, came after the father of one of the girls hurt the oldest while assaulting their grandmother. Two years and eight months later, the batterer is long gone and her girls are scattered to three separate locations – the 5-year-old in the Bronx, the 7-year-old in Manhattan, and the 9-year-old in another city altogether.
Jones has completed several rounds of requisite psychological evaluations, drug testing, and courses in anger management, domestic violence prevention, and parenting, and she has the certificates to show for them. But she’s still locked in a tug-of-war with the city to get her children back. And in this latest round, with the girls’ foster care agency recommending adoption for all three, the city seems to be playing for keeps.
The children’s caseworkers portray Jones as unfit because of drug abuse and “mental health issues.” But in his recent review of the case, a court-appointed social worker reported that Jones’s drug tests over the last two years were negative, and suggested that her “vague” psychiatric diagnosis of “Intermittent Explosive Disorder” was “quite possibly triggered by the removal of her children.”
That removal has Jones seething: “You goddamn right – I’m pissed off!”
Like thousands of other parents who face allegations of abuse and neglect,
Jones is fighting a system that was once set up to help impoverished children
and their families. But too often, say child welfare experts, the system
tears families apart. Some experts complain that the Adoption and Safe Families
Act of 1997 has shifted the focus from family preservation to the adoption
of children from troubled homes. Critics charge that federal and state policies
now place the onus on birth parents to prove their fitness as parents. The
current system allocates more money to put children in foster homes than
to help them remain in their original homes. And like the Jones girls, vastly
disproportionate numbers of children in child welfare are Black.