What does foster care have to do with health, faith, and ethics?
A year ago the Center received an unusual request. The Inspector General of the Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) of the State of Illinois called, saying she needed help resolving conflicts that too often ended up in the headlines: beatings, massive injuries, and even death of children in the foster care system. She was convinced that such tragic cases were, at heart, unresolved ethical dilemmas, and she wondered whether better handling of moral issues would improve the lot of vulnerable children and head off tragedy. Thus began a state-wide collaboration between the Center and DCFS.
Illinois' foster care system has experienced a dramatic increase in the number of children it handles and a shift toward using private agencies to place and monitor children. The immediate consequences of these changes have included reduced oversight, heavy caseloads, inadequately trained staff, and poor communication. Child welfare professionals are increasingly inexperienced, overworked, isolated, and must manage caseloads more than three times larger than a decade ago. Private agencies, themselves often new to child welfare work, cannot effectively support their staff because they too are without the training and knowledge to recognize and address problems as they arise. Social problems such as drugs, inadequate housing, and hard-to-obtain medical care, fuel the difficulties and uncertainties in the system.
To address these problems, the Center and DCFS have launched an interdisciplinary pilot project to map out the ethical problems that beset the foster care system. Unlike the health care industry, child welfare agencies have not had the opportunity, process, or tools to address ethical issues. Child welfare professionals are not trained to recognize moral problems; indeed, they frequently feel buffeted by overpowering external forces such as highly regulated bureaucracy and the courts.
In addition to process issues, the project group identified substantive ethical problems that afflict welfare children. One constellation of problems concerns placement of foster children. State laws require "reasonable efforts" to reunite a family, but when is enough enough, especially when troubled parents are involved? The federal Interracial Placement Act only confounds issues. To promote quicker placement of minority children, the act mandates—with steep fines for noncompliance—that race not be considered in the placement of children. Yet the foster care system has spent years trying to promote cultural competencies for its workers, believing that race matters for children's well-being.
Other ethical problems include conflicts surrounding reporting requirements and confidentiality. But where in this research are the health and faith aspects that are central to the Park Ridge Center's mission? Many of the private agencies that provide child welfare services are faith-based, such as Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services. Sometimes an agency's policies are consistent with church doctrine but at odds with the goals of the professionals who must carry them out. In addition, agencies must decide how far they should go in accommodating religious diversity that is not their own.
After a year of research on the documented experiences of children, reports in the literature, and interviews, the Center will produce an ethics training program and create a statewide network for child welfare professionals. Such advance preparation, targeted toward developing models for critical thinking about ethical concerns, can dramatically improve the quality of life for children in need.
