The foster parent is a saint! The caseworkers are heroes! The birth parents are scum! (Unless they repent in which case they are merely sick.) And none of that is even the worst thing about this documentary.
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| This is a stock photo. This child is not the subject of a documentary about foster care. If he were, no one would show his face. Or would they? |
In its
promotional material for the “documentary” Foster,
(and no, I’m not going to link to it) HBO declares that it “upend[s] some of
the most enduring myths about foster care, going beyond the stereotypes.”
On the
contrary. Foster enshrines enduring myths and stereotypes. Foster is the system the way the system wants to be seen – noble
foster parents and heroic caseworkers rescuing innocent children from parents
who are usually the scum of the earth but occasionally – if they repent –
merely sick. And all that isn’t even the
worst part.
Foster mimics one of the biggest
failures of the system itself. Foster
care, the system, is built to help the helpers – to make the helpers feel good,
even at the expense of the children. Foster, the documentary, does exactly
the same thing. That’s why it’s going to be enormously popular among middle
class professionals in the system, and that’s why none of them is likely to notice
the documentary’s single greatest flaw; a failure not of filmmaking but of
ethics.Wrong from the start
“Confirmed”
is a made-up term, used by those wedded to a take-the-child-and-run approach to
child welfare, to mischaracterize cases. The actual terms “indicated” or “substantiated”
can mean only that a caseworker guessed that it is slightly more likely than
not that some kind of abuse or neglect occurred. And, at no point does Foster even hint that there is a vast difference between the
horrors described by some of the children in the “documentary” and typical
cases; cases that often involve the confusion
of family poverty with “neglect.”
It’s
all downhill from there.
First we meet the foster mother who is essentially the star
of the program. She deserves to be. There is no reason to doubt the portrayal
of this foster parent as someone who has been, sometimes literally, a lifesaver
for the children in her care.
She is a woman possessed of such boundless patience, genuine
love, and enthusiasm that by the end of the program you’ll probably wish your
parents had been accused of child abuse just so you could have the chance to go
live with her. The only other foster
parent who comes close is “Aunt Ti” – and she exists only in a Twilight Zone episode written by the creator of The Waltons.
But such foster parents are no more typical than the ones on
the other extreme – the ones who abuse the children entrusted to their care.
But this isn’t the worst
of it.
Equally unrepresentative are the current and former foster
children - at least in terms of what brought them into foster care. We hear
only from foster children whose parents range from inexcusably neglectful to
unspeakably cruel, often raining down physical and verbal abuse. Again, there is no reason to doubt their
accounts. But the parents they describe are not typical of the parents who lose
children to the system.
Put Foster’s atypical
portrayals of birth parents and foster parents together and viewers are left
wondering why we don’t rush in and “rescue” far more children from horrible
parents, since what could be better for them than a real-life Aunt Ti?
But this isn’t the
worst of it either.
The only good parent is a redeemed parent
But wait, I can hear the producers saying: What about the
parents we did show? – we didn’t portray them as evil.
True, but in the world of Foster, if birth parents aren’t evil they have to be sick! Sick!
Sick! And they must be guided by noble
caseworkers into realizing the error of their ways and repenting! Then and only then do they “deserve” to have
their children back.
Indeed, a guidebook for “watch parties” explicitly calls on
discussion leaders to push a “public There is nothing in Foster to indicate that what’s really needed is a social
justice approach – something that’s been shown effective in study
after study.
health” approach to child welfare.
But in Foster the
only good parent is a parent who has been properly cured – and redeemed. So this is what we see:
A mother uses drugs while pregnant. The infant tests
positive for cocaine. Mom lies about it
– to avoid having the child taken away. Dad has no idea Mom was doing
drugs. The family is reunited but only
after scene after scene in which Mom confesses to how horrible she’s been, and
both parents express undying gratitude to the caseworkers and thank them
profusely. (They’re going to love screening this at social work
schools!)
In fact, there probably is no reason this infant couldn’t
have been left with this loving couple in which the mother made a mistake. It’s likely that all they needed was concrete
help and, possibly, drug treatment for the mother. Or the infant could have been placed in the
sole custody of the father – which is what happened eventually, but only after
the child was placed in foster care and the parents bowed and scraped enough to
persuade the system they were worthy.
Foster, however,
offers no hint that there was any alternative to removal. The explanation from
the caseworker is taken at face value. And only inadvertently do we see how the
system actually put stress on the family that may have driven the parents
apart.
At one point an “investigator” visiting the father suspects
that the infant may have had a seizure.
And that, in turn, might be because of Mom’s drug use. It is only much later in the documentary that
those viewers still around learn that there is no medical evidence that there
was a seizure (though it’s still assumed to have happened) and no evidence that
cocaine use caused the alleged seizure – if there was a seizure.
But by then Dad has become furious at Mom. At a counseling session (of course), with the
mother in the room, he says: “I was pissed off that she did something and it’s
going to reflect on my daughter. Why the hell did you choose to use that
fu----g drug!” To which the counselor
replies “It’s great you were able to get that off your chest … [but] you have
to forgive her.”
At the end of the program, it’s revealed that the couple has
separated.
Reinforcing stereotypes about “drug babies.”
This family isn’t the only one harmed in ways the producers
can’t seem to see.
As
The New York Times explains, one
of the most important lessons of the “crack baby” scare of the 1980s is that
not only were the claims about the effects of prenatal substance abuse grossly
overblown, often it was the very stigma inflicted on the children by the system
that caused the harm.
In Foster we meet
an 18-year-old who is one of the few foster youth to make it into college,
where she is struggling. She beat
enormous odds, both because she was one of those treated horribly by her own
mother, and because she was moved to so many homes she can’t even remember them
all. Anyone who can come so far in spite of so much is a lot of things, such as
resilient, determined and courageous. She
sure isn’t “dumb.”
But she thinks she is.
And she thinks she knows why.
Twice she says it’s because “I was a drug baby.”
Apparently, no one ever told her otherwise. And now, a documentary will reinforce that
belief – for her, and for viewers.
But even this isn’t
the worst thing about Foster.
A massive invasion of privacy
The worst is its massive invasion of children’s privacy.
HBO brags about how the producers of Foster got “unprecedented access.”
That is true. And it’s a travesty.
The most intimate details of a 16-year-old’s life – and his
crimes (he’s already part of the juvenile justice system) -- are discussed on
camera in meetings and at televised court hearings. What is apparently his real first name – an
unusual name – is used throughout and he is seen on camera.
Much younger children also are seen, being interviewed and
interacting with their foster mother. An
autistic eight-year-old is seen breaking down and having a tantrum for fear of
getting onto a school bus. Now, all of
these moments will live on forever.
All because a child protective services agency – the Los
Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) - and a bunch
of other players in the system, traded these children’s privacy for some good
p.r.
I’m sure it was all legal.
I’m sure all the proper forms and releases were signed. But here’s the problem: no one – no one – who has the legal authority to sign away the privacy
of foster children by putting their faces on camera and using their real first
names has the moral right to do
it.
That’s because the moral right to decide whether the
benefits of such exposure outweigh the risks rests only with those who love the children whose privacy is at
risk. Agencies do not love
children. (It’s the same issue that
arises when child welfare agencies allow foster children to be used for clinical
drug trials. Yes, that
does happen.)
These children’s own parents can’t give truly informed
consent for the simple reason that they’re inherently under duress. They may fear that if they don’t sign the
form they might never see the children again.
If the children of the foster mother actually were adopted
before they were put on camera, then their adoptive mother had the right to
make the decision. But except for one of
the children, whose status is seen changing to guardianship (at an on camera
court hearing) they are all portrayed as foster children. It that is accurate than the foster mother,
however well intentioned, lacked the moral right to sign those forms.
Mind-boggling hypocrisy
Even more mind-boggling is the hypocrisy. NCCPR favors open court hearings in child
welfare cases. But whenever there is an
attempt to open court hearings in a new state or locality, it’s almost always
the child welfare agency, or assorted other parts of the system, that scream
and yell about how this should not be done because those sleazy journalists
can’t be trusted to keep children’s identities a secret.
But journalists have an outstanding record of voluntarily
withholding children’s names and other identifying information. That’s one reason why at least 40 percent of
foster children now live in communities where court hearings are open, in many
cases they’ve been open for decades with no problems.
Los Angeles County, however, is not one of them. In fact, when it was tried, an appellate court
stopped it. One of the groups that objected said that opening the hearings “put
the needs and interests of the public and the media ahead of the victims of
child abuse and neglect.”
Yet in Foster, that
same group, and others who had opposed open courts in Los Angeles, are enthusiastic
participants. Various professionals are seen
– sometimes along with their young clients – on camera, in meetings discussing
the most intimate aspects of the lives of children we have gotten to know by
face and first name, in therapy sessions, and in court hearings that have not
only been opened, but opened to cameras.
The benefits of leaving L.A.
It’s hard to blame the producers for all this. They, too,
almost certainly had the best of intentions. But they made one crucial mistake:
They never left Los Angeles. They tapped
into the master narrative that has dominated Los Angeles child welfare, and
coverage of Los Angeles child welfare, for decades. Those thanked in the closing credits include
some of the very people and groups responsible for getting child welfare wrong
all the way back to the McMartin
Preschool hysteria.
And there’s no effective counter-narrative in Los Angeles –
in particular no well-organized, passionate community of family defense
attorneys.
Had the producers decided to do their documentary about
foster care in New York City, odds are they would have told a very different,
and much more complete, story.
