More than 20 years ago, the journal of the Child Welfare League of America devoted an entire issue to the problem of children removed to foster care or trapped there because their families didn’t have adequate housing. The issue noted that three separate studies found that at least 30% of foster children could be home right now if their families had adequate housing.
A fourth was even more disturbing. If found that child protective caseworkers were, to use one of their own favorite phrases, in denial, concerning the extent of the problem. The study found that workers “may tend to ignore housing as a problem rather than deal with the cognitive dissonance caused by the recognition that they cannot help their clients with this important need.”
Perhaps that’s why, in the Current’s stories on this issue, while I read comment after comment about how it might be a “filthy house” that may lack heat or air conditioning and may have “toddlers crawling around the floor,” never once was such a comment followed by “so we sent in a cleaning crew” or, “so we bought them an air conditioner.” After all, what would be the point if the “real” problem is mental illness or substance abuse?
In fact, odds are the “real” problem is housing, or can be fixed by starting with housing.
Understanding that is vital to children’s well-being; it might even save their lives – because of what we know of the grim reality of foster care.
Study after study finds that in typical cases – which are nothing like the horror stories – children left in their own homes fare better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. The most recent and most alarming such study comes from Sweden. That study found that, by age 20, the foster children were more than four times more likely to have died, most often by suicide.
Another set of studies finds abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes, and the rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse. So it’s obscene to take away a child because their home lacks air conditioning, only to put her or him at such high risk.
All of it is likely worse in Nevada, which tears apart families at a rate well over 40% above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.
How do we know the “real” problem is housing?
For starters, contrary to the common stereotype the overwhelming majority of the unhoused – 78% or more – are not, in fact, mentally ill. Similarly, 82% do not have a problem with substance abuse.
Where these really are issues, some Nevada officials confuse cause and effect. As Ann Braden Johnson wrote her book, Out of Bedlam, “homelessness itself is a state of such unremitting crisis that one would expect it to provoke some kind of emotional or mental disorder, in and of itself.” Or, put more bluntly, “being homeless could drive you crazy.”
As the former head of Missouri’s child welfare agency, Darrell Missey said:
“We know that addiction and mental illness occur in affluent communities just like they do in poorer neighborhoods, but rates of removal among the poor are astronomically higher. If the deprivations of poverty are addressed, people can often address these other problems and keep their families intact.
The double standard is illustrated in microcosm when you consider that affluent “cannamoms” who smoke pot during their children’s playdates can be celebrated in magazine cover stories, but a poor person can be kicked out of a shelter if her partner brings in a marijuana vape pen.
It’s ludicrous to try to fix the “other problems” first and only then address the housing. As one lawyer explained:
“[Y]ou can’t really focus on mental health treatment or substance abuse treatment or education or anything else because your energy is tied up in fundamental basic survival needs.”
Research supports a housing first approach.
One study found that when homeless families simply received housing vouchers, the rate at which they lost children to foster care was cut by half. The very fact that Clark County officials claim family shelters have prevented 1,838 children from being thrown into foster care further illustrates the need to focus on housing first.
But that won’t happen until the people who run child welfare systems in Nevada no longer are in denial.
Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: [email protected].
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Republished with permission from Nevada Current
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