Outsiders Within 2nd Edition

This book is so chock full of amazing insights and new perspectives that I can hardly get through a chapter without my brain beginning to numb at the implications. In this post I want to share with you a piece that I think EVERY person interested in welfare, children's rights, adoption and foster care should read. When I came across this piece I flipped back to the writer's bios, hoping that Laura Briggs, the author, is an academic who I can go study under. She is an academic and I hope that one day I will be able to be her student.

The piece is called Orphaning the Children of Welfare: "Crack Babies", Race, and Adoption Reform. In it, Laura Briggs gives a detailed history of the foster care system, the public policy that dictates welfare systems, and the theories and perspectives, shaped by politically invested individuals that are the roots beneath the much decayed tree of our current day welfare models. Bear with me, this is dense stuff. I'll try to break it down.

Okay, Briggs says

In the 1960s liberal concepts like the "culture of poverty" and Democratic policy papers like the Moynihan Report identified the cause of poverty as family and childrearing, rather than unemployment or wages...[Get that? The responsibility is removed from society giving the poor equal opportunity and the blame for being impoverished is placed on the individuals, typically male individuals in the ethnic minority.]

...In the 1970s child welfare workers were given vast new powers to remove children from families if they suspected abuse or neglect-with neglect definable as poverty-without a legal case or even having to offer evidence of their suspicions... [Emphasis added. So the government says "it's your own fault for being poor and since you're poor, we can take your children.]

...In the 1980s the War on Drugs identified (implicitly Black) "crack babies" as a new "bio-underclass," destined from birth to be ineducable and unemployable; liberals endeavored to put the children in foster care, while conservatives worked to put their mothers in jail...

...In the 1990s...conservatives and Democrats worked simultaneously to end income supports for impoverished mothers and to move their children not just into foster care but out again, into adoptive families. In 1996 and 1997, the adoption tax credit and the Interethnic Placement Provisions...did just that.

Okay. I love how Briggs starts by giving us a time line. So what happened here? First we begin to believe that there is a "culture of poverty". This paradigm originated with Oscar Lewis. He said (and I quote Laura Briggs, quoting Lewis):

In anthropological usage, [culture] implies, essentially, a design for living which is passed down from generation to generation. in applying this concept of culture to the understanding of poverty, I want to draw attention to the fact that poverty in modern nations is not only a state of economic deprivation, of disorganization, or the absence of something. It is also something positive in the sense that is has a structure, a rationale, and defense mechanisms without with the poor could hardly carry on. In short, it is a way of life, remarkable stable and persistent, passed down from generation to generation along family lines.

Essentially, if you're from a poor family, you can't help but become a poor individual yourself. Briggs points out that the transmission of this culture of poverty happens in the family, making the poor family unit a "doomed" unity.

Enter the concept of the "crack baby". Did you know that the "typical user of both cocaine and crack was a young white male"? Yet what image in conjured by the term "crack baby" (thanks to the racialized media frenzy)? Briggs says that

Between 1985 and 2000, more than 200 women faced criminal prosecution for using cocaine and other drugs during pregnancy, and tens of thousands lost their children to foster care. [emphasis added]

Do you want to know what is sickeningly? It just wasn't true. There was no epidemic. There were no "crack babies". Laura Briggs quotes the Journal of the American Medical Association:

...there was no consistent negative association between prenatal cocaine exposure and physical growth, developmental test scores, or receptive or expressive language.

Briggs writes: "most of the effects once attributed to cocaine turn out to be the effect of things like alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, or environment--including homelessness or domestic violence."

WWWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAA???????????? No crack babies?

And yet,it was just this "epidemic" that paved the way for our current day child welfare system. Briggs says"

The "crack baby" epidemic produced the contemporary foster care and child welfare system. Between 1985 and 1988, the number of children in out-of-home placement--foster care, psychiatric institutions, and the juvenile justice system--increased by 25 percent.

25%! It was during this time that the movie Losing Isaiah came out... Anyway. Now you've got all these children flooding the foster care system, with little to no hope of being reunited with their parents because of the intense bias against their mothers. A "solution" is necessary. I know, ADOPTION! Briggs says:

...welfare reform and adoption reform were coupled...

Meanwhile Briggs says that neoconservatives were pushing the agenda that providing financial support only to single mothers "caused fatherlessness...hence...introducing a ...disincentive to marry. Fatherlessness, in turn, caused every horror and moral failing known to humans. So welfare causes social pathology."

So you can't help this single mothers financially because that will encourage single motherhood and single motherhood continues the "culture of poverty". Can you see that we're getting in a bind? So the children that are in foster care can't go back to their mothers because their mothers aren't fit to raise them. They can't stay in the foster care system because it is ill-prepared to handle such a load. Briggs says:

The legislation that ultimately came to embody Newt Gingrich's goal of putting the children of welfare mothers in orphanages was the adoption tax credit and a major subsequent piece of legislation...calling for the "Removal of Barriers to Interethnic Adoption."...This linkage made explicit what had been implicit in much of the previous debate; notwithstanding who actually received AFDC, "welfare mother" referred to Black, Latina, and Indian...women, and the placements being sought (after their children were moved to orphanages or group homes) were with white families.

Get this:

Even as welfare reform all but eliminated federal transfer payments to help working-class women raise their own children, the 1996 adoption reform provided a $6000 tax break to (implicitly white) middle-class families who adopted "special needs" children--with nonwhite a subcategory of the definition of special needs. Combined with the 1980 federal Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act that provided subsidies to middle-and upper-class families adopting from foster care, the adoption tax credit meant that the federal government would provide upwards of a $13,000 bonus for middle-class white people to raise the same children taken from families for poverty-related neglect that it wouldn't pay to alleviate. [emphasis added]

Now if that's not institutionalized racism, I don't know what is!

Okay, I know that is a lot to take in. I also think that it is EXTREMELY important that we adoptive parents know where this nice tax credit is coming from. This tax credit that makes our adoptions more "affordable". I've heard Nicole at Paragraphein talk about the adoption tax credit before but it didn't really make sense until I read this.

Recently an email alert arrived from the agency we used when we adopted Small Sun. It was about a possible reduction in the adoption tax credit and a plea to oppose the reduction. Even before reading this article I didn't feel comfortable pushing for more financial assistance for a category of people who (systematically if not in actuality) already have the upper hand. Then, reading this essay really brought it home for me. Again, I know this is a bit more academic than what you typically find here at my blog (because I'm quoting an academic), but for those of you who read through to the end, thank you!

PS- I still stand in the fear and trembling instilled in me in college, of violating copyright law when quoting other authors. Please, you professional writers who read, please let me know if I'm in danger of violations! I just want to share this amazing piece, not steal anything from the author who I so greatly admire.

Comments

[paragraphein]

This was too good. I had to link back to it.

Thank you, Kohana. For taking the time to lay it all out. Thanks.

[Heather]

Wow! Your first sentence says it all - "amazing insight".

[erinthebeekeeper]

This was a GREAT post. thanks for the information. Just another in a LONG line of things that have to be changed in adoption!

[mommyinmaking]

I teach Englsih at the COllege level. I think you did a good job siting. There are a lot of technicalities with siting that you didn't do, but that's all for us stuffy English people, I don't you could get nailed for plagerism.

[mommyinmaking]

oops I mean citing

[cloudscome]

This chapter really hit home for me too. I was living in the city during the "crack baby epidemic" and I saw a lot of sadness and trauma in the families around us. Crack was just the last straw for many people. It is heart-breaking. It really makes me angry to think how our government works for the benefit of the comfortable at the expense of the ones already suffering. It blows me away how much this has effected my own family in so many ways.

[Emmie (Better Make It A Double)]

Very interesting, informative post. Thank you - you made me think.

[turquoise]

I'm a lurker on the agency forum website. I found your post through Paragraphein's log.

I'm finding this article confusing, I'm also wondering when it was written. The author referred to a tax credit but I'm wondering if she was actually referring to an adoption subsidy. A tax credit is a one time credit given as a reimburesement for adoption fees. A subsidy is continuing financial support for families adopting special needs children - which I understand to include children with long term medical or mental health issues, older children or sibling groups. There is no adoption fee for these cases (in my state) so there would be no tax credit.

My understanding was that there were an awful lot of children stuck in foster care because their parents' rights had been terminated but there weren't enough families that could afford to adopt them. This resulted in two major problems: children not being able to have the security of a permanant family (and often ageing out of the system) and a great expense to the state. Providing an adoption subsidy helped families be able to afford adding children and therefore providing foster children a forever family; and it saved the state money because the subsidy is much cheaper than the expense of foster care.

I always thought the tax credit was in response to adoptive parents' protests at the expense of adoption when every one else goes to the hospital to deliver and their insurance company or Medicaid covers almost the complete expense. I don't know where I got that idea or if it's true. The down side of the tax credit, that I've seen, is that adoption agencies immediately raised their adoption fees the same amount as the tax credit, making the credit into a subsidy to adoption agencies.

As a foster parent, I have seen crack babies. I haven't seen any children removed to supply the adoption industry. I haven't seen any child removed for "poverty related neglect". The families' problems are much more severe and complicated to warrant having their children removed. Poverty makes every aspect of life hard, but it doesn't cause people to beat and torture their children, to starve their children (when there's some food available) to sexually abuse their children or to not provide a reasonably clean home (no urine, feces, rotting food, drug use supplies etc. lying around)

I have heard of many babies born with drugs in their systems returned home to parents with supervision and treatment-if the parents are willing to try. (Many of them choose the drugs over their children.) I was told that the majority of cases in foster care (all ages of children) involve crack use by the parents. Unfortunately, the parents become completely involved in their addiction and abandon their parenting responsibilities. In my county, if possible after a referral to protective services (depending on the severity of the abuse or neglect and the chance it will continue), families are given support and intervention services to hopefully prevent foster care. Many of the cases that come into care are heartbreaking because the children should have been removed sooner.

We are definitely seeing long-term effects of crack and other drugs in babies' systems. These are not harmless. The author sounded like it was unfair for parents to be arrested for having babies born addicted to crack. For that to happen, the Mom had to be using for a long time during her pregnancy - knowing that it was harmful. If she gave her child illegal drugs any time after birth, she would be arrested, why not before birth?

Parents who want to get their children back are given help in connecting to financial resources if money is a factor in their ability to parent - food stamps, WIC, medicaid, section 8 housing funding, etc.

Sorry this is long, I just don't see the author's article measuring up to what I'm experiecing in my county/state. Please forgive me if I sound too critical. That's not my intention at all. I love a good discussion. Thanks for bringing up the topic.

[jen]

Wow, if that doesn't tell us all something, I don't know what will. Thanks for sharing this piece.

[music]

very interesting.
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