Displaying 1 - 10 of 22
This advocacy brief provides an overview of promising practices and lessons learned to end child immigration detention in the U.S. and sets out a range of policy actions needed to scale up efforts to end this form of violence.
This report presents findings from qualitative interviews conducted with English-speaking Latino individuals from the United States who experienced parental deportation between the ages of 6 and 17 years old. They offer suggestions about what they needed following their loss as a child. By understanding what children need in these moments of crisis, practitioners, providers, and others are better prepared to address this form of complex childhood adversity.
Abstract
Experiencing parental deportation during childhood is associated with higher rates of mental health and…
For centuries, Indigenous children were removed from their families and sent to boarding schools or placed in adoptive non-Indigenous families. Hundreds of thousands of American Indian, Alaska Native, Canadian First Nations, Native Hawaiian, and Aboriginal children in Australia were forced to attend Catholic mission schools, where many experienced hunger, violence, forced labor, and sexual abuse. Indigenous parents and children who resisted child-family separation were harshly punished. The goal of forcible removals was to assimilate Indigenous children into Western society, erasing…
The origin story of the Catholic Church in the United States includes a dependency on slave labor and sales to sustain itself and build its institutions. In 1838, a group of America’s most prominent Catholic priests, the Society of Jesuits, sold 272 enslaved people to save Georgetown University, their largest mission project and the first Catholic institution of higher learning in the United States. The sale included the separation of children from parents, a common feature of the slave trade. In the…
Abstract
Background
For children who are not reunified with their biological family members, the child welfare system promotes legal permanence through adoption or guardianship. The intent of adoption and guardianship is a safe home where…
This presentation is by the Children’s Trust Fund Alliance and their colleagues regarding a project they have been working on in partnership with parents to identify alternatives to CPS investigations. Using a participatory action research approach, three foundations (Annie E. Casey, Stand Together, and Aviv Foundation) supported a project to engage with parents as planners, recruiters, and interviewers to reach out to 100 parents across the U.S. who have experienced an initial visit from their local child welfare system.
Ten parents interviewed 100 parents to help better understand their…
“If I Wasn’t Poor, I Wouldn’t Be Unfit”: The Family Separation Crisis in the US Child Welfare System
This report examines removals of children and termination of parental rights by state child welfare systems, focusing primarily on four states: California, New York, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. The number of children removed from their families, the too-often unjust circumstances of removal, and the disproportionate effects on Black and Indigenous families, and those living in poverty, make this a national family separation crisis warranting immediate attention and action. The report finds that child welfare systems too often respond to circumstances of poverty with punishment.
Parents…
Beyond Family: Separation and reunification for young people negotiating transnational relationships
This paper explores perspectives on family reunification and emergent forms of separation among young migrants. These young people lived apart from and later reunited with their migrant parents who moved from the Philippines to Canada for work. The author draws from 15 months of ethnographic, arts-based, and participatory research with ten participants living in Greater Vancouver. While reunification literature and child rights discourse often focus on the process of a mother and child coming back together, this can obscure the relationships that young people form with others in the meantime…
This brief begins to address knowledge gaps of best practices for housing young adults in extended care, the housing options currently available to those young adults, and how those options vary across and within states in the US. It is based on information gathered from a purposive sample of officials from public child welfare agencies in states that have extended federally funded foster care to age 21 and from a group of stakeholders who attended a convening on the topic. After describing the methodology, this paper summarizes what was learned and offers suggestions for future research…
Abstract
A significant amount of attention has been paid to the experiences of young people who have spent time in foster care. Policies and programs have focused on providing independent living services to youth currently in care and services to those who were formerly in foster care but are living independently. The purpose of this study was to describe the receipt of independent living services of youth who were formerly in care and who are currently living independently, while also looking at the skills and resources of youth who are currently in foster care. This study drew from…