Intro to Trauma Informed Care is for YOU! Designed to help you implement a trauma-informed approach throughout your organization, this live webinar provides an introductory understanding, and will equip you with tools you can use right away.
By Catherine Porter and Vjosa Isai, The New York Times, Jan. 4, 2022 The government agreed to a landmark settlement to repair the system and compensate those families harmed by it. It potentially ends many years of litigation. The Canadian government announced Tuesday that it had reached what it called the largest settlement in Canada’s history, paying $31.5 billion to fix the nation’s discriminatory child welfare system and compensate the Indigenous people harmed by it. The agreement in...
By Jane Coaston, title image by Alex Merto, The New York Times, December 18, 2021 In 2006, 3-year-old Marcus Fiesel was murdered by his foster parents near Cincinnati. They left him in a second-floor closet in August wrapped in tape and a blanket in a playpen with no food or water while they went out of town to a family reunion, dog in tow. When they returned home, they took his body to an abandoned chimney, doused it in gasoline and burned it, throwing most of the remains into the Ohio...
This Toolkit from Child Trends is for child welfare staff, supervisors, and administrators who work with and on behalf of children, youth, and families who experience a natural disaster. The information and resources in the Toolkit provide evidence- and trauma-informed guidance for promoting positive outcomes for children and youth who experience natural disasters. Click here to access the toolkit.
This upEND publication by Victoria Copeland and Maya Pendleton, who helmed the Repeal Mandatory Reporting Laws panel during the 2021 How We endUP convening, discusses how the monitoring and subsequent criminalization of Black communities have expanded from the criminal punishment system to social services, education, medical systems, and the family policing system. For more information, read Surveillance of Black Families in the Family Policing System .
By Sara Tiano, Illustration: Christine Ongjoco, The Imprint, December 7, 2021 A s more than 1,000 young adults in Los Angeles are set to age out of foster care on New Year’s Eve, county leaders are scrambling to find them all stable homes. The youth raised in government care who are set to lose basic needs benefits had been granted a reprieve during the pandemic. They turned 21, but did not have to leave the program known as “extended foster care” that provides housing and other government...
An issue brief from Ithaka S+R, Homeless and Foster Youth, Racial Inequity, and Policy Shifts for Systemic Change , highlights the racial disparities inherent in foster care and homelessness and the causes of homelessness and foster system involvement. It illustrates the challenges that youth experiencing foster care and homelessness face in earning a college degree and proposes policy changes for states to address and meet the needs of these youth. There is a disproportionate number of...
A factsheet from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) focuses on the role that child welfare professionals play in prevention, intervention, and service provision with regard to child sex trafficking. Children and youth involved with child welfare have a higher risk of being victims of sex trafficking, and one in six of the children reported missing to NCMEC were likely victims of sex trafficking. It is important that child welfare professionals be properly equipped...
By Barbara Tatem Kelley and Paul A. Haskins, National Institute of Justice Journal, August 10, 2021 Youth who have experienced both the child welfare and juvenile justice systems have complex needs that require collaborative, multipronged interventions. In a perfect world, a push of a button would connect all juvenile court judges and authorized staff to relevant local child welfare files for each young person summoned before the court. The imperfect reality is that in many American juvenile...
The second largest criminal industry worldwide (second only to drug dealing and tied with the illegal arms industry), human trafficking is the fastest growing of all criminal enterprises. The commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) is one form of human trafficking, affecting thousands of children and youth in the United States every year. (Exact numbers are difficult to estimate, given the clandestine nature of the crime.) Although CSEC historically has been under the purview of...
By Julia Hotz, Photo: Getty Images, Scientific American, December 13, 2021 When COVID shut down life as usual in the spring of 2020, most physicians in the U.S. focused on the immediate physical dangers from the novel coronavirus. But soon pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris began thinking of COVID’s longer-term emotional damage and those who would be especially vulnerable: children. “The pandemic is a massive stressor,” explains Burke Harris, who is California’s surgeon general. “Then you have...
By Zoraida Ramirez, Rise Magazine, December 08, 2021 A Hard Decision I left my son with a family friend in 2007 when I was 20 years old and he was one and a half. I had run away from foster care and had nowhere to live and no money for food. I was also dealing with depression and trauma—and an abusive partner. I didn’t have support from my family and felt uncared for and alone. The family friend lived in a cozy, nice home. She suggested that I leave my son with her and write a statement...
By Serita Cox, Illustration: Christine Ongjoco, The Imprint, December 2, 2021 O n Jan. 1, 2022, we estimate that 3,600 California youth will age out of the foster care system. On a single day. The fact that we — those of us working in the child welfare system, and the state system itself — cannot identify the exact number is itself alarming. Behind each case number is a human being, a young person who was removed from their biological home for their own safety and put under the protection of...
The Center for States helps public child welfare organizations and professionals build the capacity necessary to strengthen, implement, and sustain effective child welfare practice and achieve better outcomes for children, youth, and families. Please check out the resources below, supporting the development of prevention-focused systems: The Visioning for Prevention: Protecting Children Through Strengthening Families series can provide agency leaders and managers the information and tools...
By Lizzie Presser, The New York Times, December 1, 2021 When a staph infection killed Molly Cordell’s mother just before Halloween in 2015, Molly felt, almost immediately, as if she were being shoved out of her own life. At 15, she and her sister, Heaven, who was a year younger, had no idea where they would go. Their dad had been in and out of their lives for most of their childhood. His grief, as their mother lay dying, sent him spinning. It seemed to the girls that he was on too much meth,...