Four
Foster Youth1
Trauma in Foster Care
In 2013, the House Ways and Means Committee held a hearing on child sex trafficking and the links to foster care. The context for the hearing included the fact that the same year the FBI had conducted coordinated raids in seventy cities, and found that 60 percent of the children they found being trafficked had been in foster care. A year earlier, Connecticut reported eighty-eight victims of child sex trafficking, eighty-six of whom had been in care or involved with the child welfare system.2
At the hearing, a young woman named Withelma “T” Ortiz Walker Pettigrew testified about why her experience as a foster child prepared her to be trafficked. She said:
I spent, for the most part, the first eighteen years of my life in the foster care system. Seven of those years I was a child being sexually trafficked on the streets, Internet, strip clubs, massage parlors and even in the back of express papers. Many children, like myself, come from various traumas previously to entering into foster care, and many times, are further exposed to trauma throughout their experience in the foster care system. . . . Youth within the system are more vulnerable to becoming sexually exploited because youth accept and normalize the experience of being used as an object of financial gain by people who are supposed to care for us, we experience various people who control our lives, and we lack the opportunity to gain meaningful relationships and attachments. In addition, traffickers/pimps/exploiters have no fear of punishment because they rely on the lack of attention that occurs when these young people go missing. . . . Many children, myself included, who grow up in foster care express how it is common household knowledge that many caregivers take them in primarily for the paycheck in which they are provided for the purpose of caring for the child. . . . These caregivers will make statements like “you’re not my child, I don’t care what’s going on with you, as long as you’re not dead, I’ll continue to get my paycheck.” This “nothing but a paycheck” theory objectifies the youth and the youth begin to normalize the perception that their presence is to be used for financial gain. This creates a mind frame for the youth that their purpose is to bring income into a household. . . . Therefore, when youth are approached by traffickers/pimps/exploiters, they don’t see much difference between their purpose of bringing finances into their foster home and bringing money to traffickers/pimps/exploiters’ “stable.” . . .
Like me, any youth in foster care becomes accustomed to adapting to multiple moves from home to home, which allows us to easily then adapt to when traffickers/pimps/exploiters move us multiple times, from hotel to hotel, city to city, and/or state to state. For myself, as unfortunate as it is to say, the most consistent relationship I ever had in care was with my pimp and his family.3
It’s common to attribute poor outcomes among foster youth to the trauma they experienced prior to entering the system, and in Ms. Walker Pettigrew’s case, there was such trauma, and she was further traumatized while in care. She describes the lack of concern with her whereabouts and well-being from those charged with providing care, because so long as she fulfilled her function of bringing revenue into the household, the relationship was satisfactory for the caregivers. There is also the instability in relationships and physical location that makes adjusting to the life of a trafficked teen easier. But what is most remarkable in her testimony is her description of the manner in which she was prepared for the commodification she experienced when she was trafficked by commodification while in foster care.
The totality of Ms. Walker Pettigrew’s experience with foster care is not representative of all children in care. Many experience stable, loving relationships with foster parents, and most do not spend their entire childhoods in the system. Many individuals working within the system recognize the traumatic effect of being in care, and do their best to minimize it. Nevertheless, the issues she describes—the trauma, abuse, neglect, and commodification—are common enough to be considered features of the system.
Again, our commonsense notion may tell us that removing a child from a situation at home where she is now experiencing trauma or at risk of trauma in the future means that she is at least protected from further trauma. The reality is that the removal itself generally inflicts trauma.4 This is recognized universally within the field, but child protective workers are limited in their responses. They can’t quickly remove the stressors that may increase the likelihood for maltreatment, which include homelessness or housing instability, lack of income, inconsistent or ineffective mental health treatment, lack of childcare, the combination of the lifestyle circumstances imposed by the criminalization of drug abuse and the scarcity of nonpunitive drug treatment, and a myriad of other environmental risk factors. If they could do so, they could vastly reduce the number of children removed for neglect and abuse. This would leave the system better equipped to respond to those remaining cases of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse and severe neglect that warrant removal. A system downsized in this manner would be better able to concentrate resources and attention to minimize the harm that is experienced by children as a result of being removed from their parents—whatever their frailties—and placed in the care of substitute parents. This harm may result from the trauma of removal and also from maltreatment in foster care.
Removal may be preventive, as evidenced by spikes in removals that sometimes occur after a high-profile child abuse fatality. There is a harm that may occur without removal, and workers are unable to risk being held accountable if it does. As a result, they make decisions that ensure that a different harm almost certainly will occur. One worker in Los Angeles County described a case involving children removed after a fatality involving a four-year-old sibling. The death followed an illness and was unexplained, but there was no indication of wrongdoing by any family member. Shortly thereafter, the mother fled with the youngest child and the father agreed to bring the remaining children to live with him in his parents’ house. After six months, despite no evidence the father had done anything wrong, the children were removed from the grandparents and placed in care in several different homes. While with their grandparents, the children had done well in school and displayed typical behavior for their ages. Shortly after their removal and separation:
The children started developing clinical-grade symptoms, such as depressed mood, markedly diminished interest or pleasure in almost all activities, insomnia, recurrent and distressing dreams, intrusive thoughts and images, fatigue or loss of energy, feelings of worthlessness, outbursts of rage, diminished ability to think or concentrate, hyper-vigilance, avoidance behaviors, feeling of detachment, acting or feeling as if the trauma were recurring or crying spells.5
In this case, faced with an unexplained fatality, the system functioned in self-protective mode. If the parent could not be proven to be blameless in causing the sibling’s death, the children would be removed prophylactically, on the chance that something might happen for which the system would be blamed. As a result, the children displayed all the symptoms of post-traumatic stress. If anything, these symptoms would be a barrier to reunification, as the parent would be scrutinized to see if he had the strength and support to deal with children with emotional disturbance.
One thing that is indisputable is that children in foster care need support and care, and careful attention to their mental health as a consequence of what are now described as “adverse childhood experiences.”6 This is the case whether they have experienced trauma before, during, or after removal, or as is typical, multiple traumatic experiences during all three periods in their lives.
While it would be comforting to believe that removal into foster care at the very least is protection against abuse, this is not the case. A study of women who had been in foster care as children found that they were much more likely to report being subjected to sexual abuse during their time in care than prior to placement. They were slightly more likely to have experienced physical abuse or intimidation in foster care than previously.7 Texas’s system was thrown into turmoil when ten children in foster care, out of a foster care population of thirteen thousand, died from homicide in fiscal year 2013, meaning that the rate of fatalities from abuse was far higher for the foster care population than for children at home. The Texas legislature held hearings, but offered no solutions other than increased drug testing for foster parents.8
In 2016 in suburban Suffolk County on Long Island, a foster parent was arrested and indicted for physically and sexually abusing five children in his care. The foster parent had been investigated by police nine times previously, but charges had not been filed. Nevertheless, Suffolk County in 2002 instructed the foster care agency, SCO Family of Services, to stop placing children from Suffolk in the home. SCO also works with children in nearby New York City, and it never told the city’s Administration for Children’s Services about the directive from Suffolk County, although it was legally required to do so. As a result, SCO continued to place children in the home for another fourteen years, with at least a hundred children passing through the home. Once it learned about the arrest, ACS stopped making new placements through SCO, and initiated safety inspections of all homes monitored by SCO, which contained some five hundred children at any given time.9
Foster Care and the Mental Health Marketplace
Professionals seeking to provide support and assistance are limited by the need to conform to the norms of market-driven practice to provide treatment. To obtain Medicaid reimbursement for providing treatment, a provider must apply a diagnostic label from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM. In its current incarnation as the DSM-5, the book is the means by which the American Psychiatric Association maintains its lucrative monopoly on psychiatric “nosology”—the classification of diseases and disorders. Without an appropriate label, treatment is almost certainly unavailable.
One critic of the DSM is Gary Greenberg, a self-described “lunchbucket psychotherapist” and blogger, and the author of a book about the DSM-5 called The Book of Woe. Greenberg relates the story of a Louisiana physician named Samuel Cartwright who, in 1850, defined a new disease he called “drapetomania,” which caused Black slaves to run away. The primary symptom was unhappiness about being a slave. In the modern context, if a child acts out in anger as a result of having experienced poverty, homelessness, and disruption among caregivers, he might be diagnosed with some DSM formulation of conduct disorder. The point Greenberg makes is that being dissatisfied with the social order and one’s place in it is often pathologized because of “invisible prejudices and fallacies.”
Greenberg’s main problem with the DSM is the awesome power it gives to the diagnostician to “give a name to suffering,” and thereby define the diagnosed individual. The point is similar to that of Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, when he discussed the “power of naming.” Freire writes, “To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. . . . Because dialogue is an encounter among women and men who name the world, it must not be a situation where some name on behalf of others. It is an act of creation; it must not serve as a craft instrument for the domination of others.”10
Once properly labeled, treatment can be provided, but treatment is focused not on the child or her suffering, but on the label. The act of diagnosis objectifies the child. Thereafter, the child is not speaking except as a representative of a diagnosis. We should not ascribe malicious motives to those who push the child through the diagnostic mechanisms within the system. Typically, they are seeking help for a child in distress, and the only way to provide support is through diagnosis. Properly documented diagnoses may offer a higher rate of payment for foster parents, which may be important in preventing placements from being disrupted. It may also offer assignment to workers with lower “special needs” caseloads and a greater ability to provide individualized attention and support.
A related phenomenon is the extraordinary rates at which children in foster care are prescribed psychotropic drugs, or drugs intended to affect brain processes and behavior. A 2011 Government Accountability Office report looked at five states (Texas, Michigan, Oregon, Florida, and Massachusetts) and using 2008 data found that children in foster care were substantially more likely to be prescribed psychotropics than non-foster children on Medicaid. In these five states alone, Medicaid spent some $376 million on psychotropic medication for children, and the percentage of children up to age seventeen in foster care prescribed psychotropics varied from about 20 percent to nearly 40 percent. This variation should be troubling, because if these prescribing practices are demonstrably valid, one would expect more or less consistent rates in different states. The study also looked at the percentage of children prescribed five or more psychotropic medications at the same time, the percentage prescribed a dosage exceeding the maximum on the FDA-approved labels, and the percentage of infants less than one year of age prescribed psychotropic drugs. Again, there was tremendous variability from state to state, but there was extraordinary disproportionality in each category for children in foster care.11
Given the very high rates at which children and youth in foster care are being prescribed medication, we shouldn’t be surprised by data indicating that at least half of kids aging out of care have used illegal drugs, nor should we assume that this reflects the influence of birth parents or their home communities rather than the system that took responsibility for raising them.12
Again, we should not assume that psychiatrists and nurse-
practitioners are callously pumping drugs into children without regard to the consequences. They are often placed in the position of being the last person the system turns to when a child’s behavior makes institutionalization or disruption of placement likely. A foster parent desperate for help may turn to a foster care agency, saying that she cannot maintain the child in her home without some kind of intervention. The agency, knowing that another change of foster home may well aggravate the situation or trigger placement in an institutional setting, may turn to prescribing clinicians to solve the problem pharmacologically. The problem is not bad intentions, but the lack of resources and flexibility to address children’s distress in better ways.
“Aging Out”
About twenty-eight thousand young people “age out” of foster care each year. These are the youth who have not achieved the elusive goal of permanency, in that they never left foster care to live with biological or adoptive parents or court-appointed guardians. Instead, they remained in foster care until the maximum age for their state, which can range from eighteen to twenty-one.
A longitudinal study that tracked aged-out youth in Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin found that at age twenty-six, 46.8 percent were unemployed (compared with 20 percent of a demographically representative control group). Of males, 81.8 percent had been arrested at some point in their lives, compared with 41 percent of the control group. The comparable figures for females were 59 percent and 14.8 percent. Some 31 percent had attended a year or more of college, but only 8.2 percent had a two-year degree or higher. Of those who had dropped out of a vocational program or college, 60 percent reported that financial barriers prevented them from continuing. The median annual income for the aged-out youth was $8,950, compared with $27,310 for the control group.13 Data suggests that nearly half of women in foster care report having had at least one pregnancy by age nineteen and nearly three quarters report one or more pregnancy by age twenty-one.14
The problem of preparing aging-out youth for “independence,” the termination of state assistance, is one of the most pressing concerns of the state, nonprofit, and philanthropic establishment administering the foster care system. It is in this area that the rhetoric about “breaking the cycle” achieves the most urgency, as each adolescent remaining in care has an expiration date looming over him or her.
Until 1991, federal funds could not be used to benefit any child beyond age eighteen, but that year Congress allowed states to provide “after-care” services and create the option of allowing a foster youth who is enrolled in school or employed to remain in foster care until age twenty-one. All states are mandated to continue Medicaid eligibility to age twenty-one. The grim statistics cited above indicate that these modest provisions have not been effective in supporting very many youth during the “transition to adulthood” process.
Motivated by an understandable desire to prepare young people for the moment they are cut loose by the state that has taken responsibility for raising them, professionals within the system increasingly regiment the transition process. Various models for imparting “life skills” such as time management, budgeting, interview behavior, and so on, are implemented, studied, and continually revised. Programs aggressively market the idea that college attendance will lead to enhanced earning power, often on the basis of misleading national averages, and march youth in lockstep toward college. The system has a poor record of facilitating success in college, however. According to the American Bar Association’s Center for Foster Care and Education, more than 80 percent of seventeen- and eighteen-
year-old foster youth report a desire to attend college, but only 20 percent actually enroll, and between 2 and 9 percent graduate with a four-year degree.15 Success is often measured by enrollment, and not by completion, and the high percentage of students who drop out after incurring student loan debt is rarely tracked.
Agencies celebrate the heroic success stories of those young people who have “risen above” their family and community background and achieved academic and economic success. Of course the achievements of extraordinary young people should be recognized and praised, but the message underlying the criteria for success is that civic participation means becoming a desirable employee with consumer power and avoiding the failures of their parents.
The regimented transition process mirrors the high-stakes testing and compliance regime that increasingly dominates public education, but it is clear that the looming deadline for achieving independence introduces an additional threat to conform. It also gives those employed within the system no alternative. Under the current system, it is barely possible to imagine a different way of approaching adulthood other than by focusing on the needs of employers, even as the employment outcomes indicate the system is failing to prepare youth for success in the job market.
LGBTQ Youth
A final issue that should be touched on is the relationship of child welfare to oppression based on sexuality and gender identity. The writer Sherry Wolf makes the point that the social organization made possible under capitalism created room for gay consciousness, but that the need of capitalism to enforce a norm of family life and divide the working class led to the construct of gay identity as a threat to family life.16
When Arkansas passed a referendum in 2008 prohibiting gay people from adopting or fostering, it was recognized as a terrible violation of the civil rights of prospective parents. We should also add that it’s an assault on many of the children who enter care, particularly adolescents, because the foster care population includes a significant number of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning) young people.
The rejection of LGBTQ youth by family, and consequent remand to the care of the state, is common enough that such youth form an identifiable segment of the foster care population. What does it say when the state that assumes parental responsibility defines them legally as second-class citizens? How much harder does it make it to find welcoming homes? The problem isn’t just confined to states that codify homophobia in their laws.
Even in New York City, where a recent child welfare commissioner is a married gay man and adoptive parent, the system relies on foster care agencies affiliated with religious institutions that discriminate, and recruiting practices for foster parents often involve such institutions. There is a strong initiative designed to find welcoming homes for youth who already identify as LGBTQ, which is a positive, needed step. Children come into care at different ages and some may identify as LGBTQ at some time in the future. The city takes responsibility for finding them homes, but in doing so may be guaranteeing that some children will experience rejection and oppression from the parents to whom they are handed over.
In the 1980s Catholic foster care agencies in New York City asserted their power by withholding beds—essentially staging a partial shutdown—in order to preserve their right to discriminate against gays in hiring. An artificial crisis was created, and children were warehoused in hospitals, offices, and over-capacity congregate care settings, but the diocese was able to get the city to back away from enforcement of its antidiscrimination laws against publicly funded faith-based foster care agencies.17
The presence of many faith-based organizations in the field of child welfare services is troubling. As such organizations push for “religious freedom” exemptions from nondiscrimination statutes, with renewed impetus after the winning of marriage equality nationally, the system might continue to put LGBTQ youth, whether so identified now or in the future, into the care of organizations that find them unworthy of equal treatment.
Transgender youth face distinct challenges in foster care and child welfare institutions, as they do in the larger society. Unfortunately, they are included in the broader category of LGBTQ youth, so there does not seem to be data indicating the extent to which transgender youth are overrepresented in care. However, given that more than half of transgender youth report family rejection, it is likely that there is such overrepresentation. Very few states have specifically addressed gender identity and crafted protections so that youth have the right to assert their gender identity on assignment to congregate care facilities, in how they are addressed within foster homes, and so on.18 Involvement with child welfare puts transgender youth at risk of placement in facilities where harassment, bullying, and violence may occur. It is important that greater attention be paid to the needs of transgender youth, including protection from harassment and bullying, and that the right to assert their gender identity when in state custody become universal.
Only One Real Family¶
Entering foster care was the worst and angriest experience in my life. I was asleep when a social worker came to the door with several police officers. I heard a knock on the door, but before I could ask who it was, the social worker burst in without my permission. “Grab your things . . . you’re coming with us,” she said. I was fifteen years old.
“Please don’t take him! Please don’t take my baby!” my mom kept repeating with tears running down her face. There were two officers holding her back. She was trying to grab me away but her attempts were futile. The social worker was asking me questions but I didn’t speak a single word until I got into the car. I have never cursed so much in my life. The social worker seemed like a vulture who wanted to devour me.
We drove to the main Children’s Protective Services building in Manhattan. I stayed there for about a week. I thought this was a group home at first. I saw a guy who had a huge scar going across his stomach. I wondered if he got it from being in here. I was glad later on that day I was able to leave even though I wasn’t going home.
Ms. Davis
I was only in my first foster home for about a week. I lived in a few other places over the next year. I never got used to any of them, and I always wanted to be back with my parents. Then, at the beginning of my junior year in high school, I moved to Ms. Davis’s house. Ms. Davis seemed really nice, a respectable lady who had a job at a junior high school. She looked like she was in her early thirties but said she was much older. The house was nice, with three floors and a back yard. I was only her second foster child; before she’d had a baby girl who stayed there for a few months. She had never accepted teens in her home, so this was something new to her as well. She was friendly and lenient most of the time. When she did bug me, she was fair about it. “Kamaal, before you walk out, clean your room. It’ll be easier on the both of us if we cooperate.” She asked me to call her Auntie Fee-Fee, but I wasn’t comfortable doing that. I liked her, but I didn’t want to give her any type of family title. The love from my real mom just felt more genuine, even if she was spanking me; the same thing for my aunts. Asking me to call her Auntie seemed like Ms. Davis was asking me to love her. That didn’t seem possible to do with someone in the system. No matter how long I stayed with her, I knew where I belonged—with my real family.
Everyone I Cared About
In the middle of that December I met Akeisha. I was sixteen and she was fourteen. We were both into poetry and drama and shared views on movies and actors. She was funny, too. We were attracted to each other’s company right away. We started dating, and took it slowly at first. But soon we found it hard to part from each other, and I walked her home every day after school. She lived in the Bronx, which was about two and a half hours away from Ms. Davis’s house in Queens, but I didn’t care because I just wanted to get to know her more. We would sit in front of her building for hours, holding each other close and talking about our views of the world. Akeisha made me feel as if I needed no other.
Although my curfew was 11 p.m., sometimes I wouldn’t get home until three in the morning. Some nights I would crash at Akeisha’s house (in a separate room). Ms. Davis asked if I was sleeping at my girlfriend’s house and I told her the truth. She was pretty cool about that; she just asked me to call if I wasn’t coming home.
Leaving Queens was a wonderful feeling. Being in Queens made me feel isolated. Everyone I cared about was in the Bronx—Akeisha, my friend Daniel, my parents, my five brothers, and my baby sister. I wanted freedom from the system and I felt free when I was with Akeisha.
At this point I was seeing my parents and the rest of my siblings at family meetings every Monday and Wednesday. For the most part the meetings were really fun and heartfelt (except for the caseworker who seemed like a vulture waiting for my parents to mess up). None of us agreed with the reason I went into care—it was something my parents did that I don’t want to talk about except to say it had nothing to do with me and didn’t harm me. We missed each other and wanted to be together again, and we were all devastated when the court terminated their parental rights.
She Tried
After being with my real family, it was hard to go back to Ms. Davis’s, even though she was pretty cool. She did try to keep me happy. She made food that I liked and had video game systems, and for a while I had my own room. But no matter what she did, I couldn’t feel at home in her house. Ms. Davis could never be my mom, my aunt, my sister, or any part of the real family I have outside of the system. She would ask me if I wanted my brothers to visit the house, which was nice, but that didn’t help me accept her as family. But she kept trying. After I had lived there a year and a half, she asked if I wanted to be adopted. I was furious. She was well aware of how badly I wanted to go back to my parents, yet she still had the audacity to ask me if I wanted her to be my official legal guardian. Just because my parents lost their rights didn’t mean I had lost all hope of going back with them. She knew how hard my parents were working to get me back. To be aware of how much my family wanted to be reunited and still ask a question like that felt like a high level of disrespect.
Web of Rebellion
Though she may have meant well, Ms. Davis’s request to adopt me only pushed me further away. I wanted to be with Akeisha all the time, and she began to run away from her home as well. She was younger than me, and I didn’t want her to endanger her home situation. But I wasn’t as strong as I should have been, and I allowed her to get caught in my web of disrespect and rebellion. This got us in the deepest trouble of our lives.
One Saturday afternoon, almost two years into our relationship, I picked Akeisha up at her mom’s house. It was a cold fall day, and we headed to her friend’s building in the projects nearby. But we never made it to the friend’s apartment; instead we got comfortable sitting on some steps in a dark stairwell. The only light was from the signs above the fire doors. We heard heavy footsteps on the floors above and below us. The elevators were going up and down more than seemed normal. Then we heard five or six people coming up the stairs, and suddenly in front of us were a group of police officers in uniform. I told them we were just sitting there, but one replied, “There is a lot of illegal activity going on in these buildings; we have to take you in.” Then they walked us out of the building, cuffed our hands behind our backs, and put us in the back of a big police van.
At the station, they asked me if there was someone they could call for me. I didn’t have my grandmother’s number or my dad’s, but I did have Ms. Davis’s number, so they called her. Then they put me and Akeisha in cells next to each other and told us not to speak. Ms. Davis didn’t come to the station, but she must have said something reassuring, because after four hours they let both of us leave. Akeisha’s mom came to pick her up and I took the subway back to Ms. Davis’s. She asked, “What were you doing that got you in jail?” She didn’t look that worried. It seemed like she was expecting this since I was gone so much. I told her the truth, and she said, “What am I going to do with you?”
Burning Bridges
I didn’t answer. I felt bad about the mess I was putting her through. She never did anything I didn’t like. She was kind, she was cool to talk to, and she was fun.
“Kamaal, I can’t keep doing this with you. Now we are going to have to find some common ground. I’m sure you don’t want to burn your bridges with me or anyone else you deal with because you never know where you will end up.”
I understood everything that she was saying to me; I just had it planted in my head that I didn’t want to see Akeisha any less, and I didn’t want to be forced to call anyone just to tell them I was OK.
“So Kamaal, what will it be? It’s either you stay and try to work this thing out with me or . . . you do the same thing in another home.” I didn’t answer her immediately, but I knew that I didn’t want to live with her anymore.
Not My Mom
There was nothing wrong with Ms. Davis, but I just didn’t want a foster parent. I didn’t want a social worker and a caseworker and legal guardians either. I didn’t want to travel for more than two hours to Queens to see people that I didn’t know or care about. Why should I conform to the rules and regulations of a system that took me away from my family?
I felt somewhat prideful; I felt that I was showing everyone within the agency that I was not afraid to move around. No matter where I was placed, I was going to see the ones I wished to be with the most, whether it was my girlfriend or my family. Leaving Ms. Davis’s felt like a step closer to having control over my own life.
But now, two years later, I look back at how I handled Ms. Davis and I see how selfish I was. I was actually putting people who were trying to help me in a bad position because I couldn’t compromise. It’s not that much to ask that I would call when I was not coming home or coming home late. I just wanted to spend time with someone I was close with and who I chose, unlike Ms. Davis, who was assigned to me. But I realize now that Ms. Davis was actually much better than a lot of foster mothers.
Since leaving Ms. Davis’s home, I’ve taken more responsibility. I live in a foster home where they allow me more time to myself. The same rules apply—call and no AWOLing—but I can live with that now. I realize I owe foster parents some cooperation. If I got put in a sticky situation while in their care, they might not be able to take care of any children anymore. I don’t want to put them in that position. But my foster parents, whoever they are, need to know that they can never be my mom and dad. If I had another shot with Ms. Davis I don’t think I would take it. I would apologize for everything I did, but living with her again? I really can’t see that happening. I don’t want any foster mom–foster son bonding. I can follow the rules of a house as long as there isn’t any confusion between us about who my real parents are.
Mentally Ill, Gay, and Homeless**
I went into foster care when I was eleven. I went through a lot as a kid and have struggled with my emotions. I’ve gotten in a lot of trouble, including fighting, and have done impulsive things. From age sixteen to eighteen I lived in a residential treatment facility (RTF) in Harlem called August Aichhorn. Aichhorn was a locked-down psychiatric facility, so I couldn’t go out when I wanted to. At the time I didn’t like being told what to do, but looking back, the structure helped me learn what I had to do in the real world.
I met with a therapist once a week, and I saw a psychiatrist once a month for medications. My therapist wouldn’t let me leave until we spoke about the disturbing things from my childhood. Talking about my feelings helped me because before (and even now sometimes) I would keep my feelings bottled up inside until I couldn’t take it anymore. Then any little thing would set me off.
Once I started talking about my feelings I grew less angry. I began to learn why I was so angry and how I could cope with strong emotions. I was able to go off medication. But I’m still impulsive and if someone touches me, I might hit them.
Aichhorn was only for people up to age eighteen. When I turned eighteen, I was moved to Aichhorn’s Young Adult Supportive Living program (YASL), six blocks north. It is for people eighteen to twenty-five, charges rent, and is not part of the foster care system, but rather the state mental health care system.
The rent money was taken out of our Social Security Supplemental Security Income (SSI) checks. I receive a total of $796.70 every month because of my mental diagnoses: bipolar, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and anxiety. It seemed odd to pay rent and still have a curfew. Plus, I felt there was favoritism at YASL. I would get locked out of my apartment for being late, whereas a boy who did the same thing was let in. It made me angry, and I hated living there. I had a therapist there, but it was hard to start over with a new person, especially since I only saw her once a month.
Before I moved from Aichhorn to YASL, about a year ago, I met my girlfriend Izzy. She’s twenty-two and has an apartment in a New York/New York III supportive living building. NY/NY III is for people who are chronically homeless, people with mental illnesses, people with HIV/AIDS, and young adults up to twenty-five years old who are leaving or recently left foster care. NY/NY III only allows Izzy to have guests three nights a week. If I were at her apartment more than three nights, it would result in a write-up. Ten write-ups is an automatic eviction. We pushed against that rule, though, and I often stayed there and missed my curfew at YASL.
After I’d been at YASL for a month and a half I told Izzy I wanted to sign myself out. My caseworker did petty, strange things to me: Once she tried to deny me a weekend pass because she said I needed to have my hair done. For one thing, I had gotten it done that week; for another, that’s not a rule. But Izzy didn’t like my plan. “I told you to stay there till you get your own place. I don’t want you to make the same mistakes I did, Yaselin.”
Izzy had also lived at YASL and signed herself out, and at one point she was homeless. She didn’t want me to go through that. She calls me “Miss Bougie” because I like things to be clean and nice. Izzy didn’t think I’d be able to handle the streets.
I signed out of YASL anyway, and then changed my mind and went back. But I still kept missing curfew, maybe because I didn’t really want to be there. Three weeks after I came back, I was kicked out. The director of the program called me into his office and asked me to sign a thirty-day eviction notice because I kept missing curfew. He said, “I will not have people who don’t want to be here. There are plenty of people who are willing to obey the rules who could have your bed.” He continued, “You have thirty days to get your belongings out or they will be given to the Salvation Army as a donation.”
I wasn’t that afraid because I ran the streets when I was younger. But I always had a place to come home to, so I didn’t really know what it would be like.
Although I was being discharged from YASL, I was still in foster care. (In New York, foster care goes up to age twenty-one.) However, things have gotten really confusing. When I went into care, my agency was Catholic Guardian Society and Home Bureau, and I had several caseworkers from there. Then, at Aichhorn someone named Dominic became my caseworker. When I got discharged from Aichhorn, they assigned me an “Intensive Case Manager” named Ms. Rosa. She still gives me carfare and helps me with paperwork, going to the doctor, applying for housing, things like that. We get together once a week.
I don’t even know if Catholic Guardian is still my foster care agency, and I didn’t realize that my being homeless at eighteen was illegal for a foster child until my attorney told me. I tried to help myself by calling the supervisor at Catholic Guardian and informing her that I was homeless, but mostly I got voicemail.
YASL didn’t offer to try to find me a place to stay. I went straight from YASL to a friend’s house and stayed there, but only for a night because I didn’t want to be a burden. In desperation, I became an illegal tenant at Izzy’s home. We got caught and she was threatened with eviction.
Subways and Shelters
I’ll never forget the first night I slept on a train. It was November and I had no blanket, just my coat to cover myself with. I was scared of being robbed, so I left my debit card with Izzy and kept my cash in my bra. I barely slept. I was cold; I was hungry; and worst of all I had to use the bathroom and there was nowhere to go! After three nights, I realized I couldn’t handle this. Then I went to The Door, a drop-in center, and they sent me to an LGBTQ shelter called Sylvia’s Place. I thought sleeping on the subway was the worst, but sleeping at Sylvia’s came close. I had to sleep in the basement on a thin mattress with dirty sheets. The walls are white, like a hospital, except dirty. Everybody was woken up at 6 a.m., and the clothes donated to the shelter were from prior residents.
After one night at Sylvia’s, I went back to Izzys’s, then back to The Door. There I got yet another case manager. I’ve had all these different caseworkers and they don’t all have the same information, so I have to keep telling my story over and over. The Door case manager recommended that I go to the Ali Forney Center, which is emergency housing for LGBTQ youth ages sixteen to twenty-four. Two days later, a bed became available, and I took it.
Ali Forney is way better than Sylvia’s. It does not look like a shelter; it looks like a regular home. The food is home cooked every night, and I don’t have to worry about my bed being taken from me. I have a curfew—9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and midnight on the weekends. Now that I’ve slept in worse places, a curfew doesn’t seem that bad. Since leaving YASL, I keep my belongings at Izzy’s apartment so I don’t have to worry about my things going missing. I don’t carry much with me except my wallet and my phone. Being homeless makes me want to get my life together. I am filing court papers to change my first name; I feel like my old name is keeping me stuck in the past, and I want to move forward. I have a caseworker at Ali Forney, Adrienne, who is helping me with practical things. I also talk to her about my feelings. I like her so far. We started my housing application for supportive housing at New York/New York III.
Being homeless has made me lose momentum in every part of my life. Five months ago, I enrolled in a GED program that also included an internship. The internship was extremely strict—you could only miss three days a month. I missed seven days because I was focused more on where I was going to sleep than on going to school. I would sleep during the day at Izzy’s home till 10 p.m. when I had to leave her apartment. And then, I would wander to a friend’s place or start my long night on the train.
After I lost the internship, I got kicked out of the whole program. It really hurt me. So my plan is to try to get back into the school or to enroll in the GED program at a community college near me. I am job hunting, mostly online. I want to work in culinary arts, a field that I love.
It’s not right that I became homeless at age eighteen. YASL is specifically for people with mental or emotional problems, who are bound to break rules, especially curfew. I think some of the structure of YASL is good, including having the residents get up in the morning and do chores and productive things like school or volunteer services. But if I ran the program, I would punish kids who broke curfew by taking away their weekend passes or giving them a cut in their allowance. I wouldn’t throw them out when they have nowhere else to go.
I would also make emergency and supportive housing for youth in crisis look inviting, instead of dull and scary like at Sylvia’s Place. Ali Forney looks like a home because the walls are painted nice colors. The staff made it feel safe and supportive, and my caseworker is helping me move forward.
Izzy and I are engaged now, and I think that if we obey the rules of her apartment that we eventually can get supportive housing for families with mental illness and live together. I hope by the time I turn twenty-six I’ll be ready for our own apartment—that I’ll have saved up money, hopefully from a job as a chef. I hope to have a solid foundation that would help me from falling back into homelessness.
This experience has made me feel independent in some ways—for example, nobody in my biological family even knows I’ve become homeless. Caseworkers are helping me, but I still feel alone because they won’t be there for me forever. Between ages twenty-one and twenty-six, the safety net gets taken away. I’ve learned that if I don’t make the effort, things won’t come to me.
¶ Reprinted with permission from Represent: The Voice of Youth in Care, see www.representmag.org.
** Reprinted with permission from Represent: The Voice of Youth in Care, see www.representmag.org.