As Los Angeles County mulls the idea of using ride-sharing services to escort foster youth to visitations with biological parents, some child-welfare experts wonder how such a service would be able to grapple with children with significant experiences of trauma and loss.
Children in the county’s foster-care system remain spread out across the vast geographical expanse of Los Angeles County. Trips to court, meetings with social workers or visitations with parents or other family members can take hours in some cases, given distances between parts of the county or traffic conditions.
However, experts suggest that the time foster youth spend shuttling between appointments should be considered more than just a long car ride. Instead, they say, time spent in a ride-share or other transportation could be an opportunity to create a trauma-informed system of care for youth in foster care, an idea that has drawn a response from several ride-sharing companies.
Wendy Smith, an associate dean and clinical associate professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work, said most children in the child-welfare system have experienced some kind of traumatic event or chronic experiences of trauma prior to being placed in out-of-home care, not to mention the traumatic process of being taken away from the familiarity of home and thrust into the system.
If L.A. moves forward in using ride-share companies to offer rides to foster youth, Smith hopes that the county could make sure the services and drivers are taking into account the histories of trauma that most foster youth carry with them.
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