by Brian Shilhavy, Health Impact News:
9News out of Denver, Colorado has done some good investigative reporting recently on the status of legal child trafficking in their state, known as the “Child Welfare System.”
With access to both federal funds as well as state funding, it is much more lucrative for the State to place children in foster care and make them available for adoption trafficking than it is to let the child’s own family take care of them.
While this is a problem in every state in the U.S., it is apparently especially bad in Colorado according to a new report published by the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. (Report here.)
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9News in Denver interviewed one local family who exemplifies this problem, as they have tried to adopt their own niece, who has already spent 2 years with them, but the State wants to place their niece with foster parents who are not related to the family instead.
Aunt Lettie and Uncle Ponch are ready and waiting. They’re waiting for their 4-year-old grand niece Juliet to join their family.
“So, we have her room. We’ve had her for two years already,” Lettie said.
We are choosing to protect the full identity of Juliet. Ponch and Lettie are hopeful that she will be allowed to live in the room they’ve decorated with pictures of loved ones. They say their culture is rooted in family.
“It’s a big family,” Lettie said. “We don’t need a reason or a holiday to get together.”
Now, their family is fighting in court for the right to raise their nephew’s daughter.
“She’s our niece and we just want her to come back with her family. She belongs with us,” Lettie said.
Juliet has been in the care of foster parents on and off since birth because her mom is estranged and her father has had problems with the law. The El Paso County Department of Human Services is recommending the foster family gets permanent custody, but Juliet’s father wants his own kin to raise his daughter.
“The system puts guardrails, puts stops and barriers in front of them month after month after month,” Annie Martinez, Ponch and Lettie’s attorney, said.
Martinez stood on the steps of the Capitol Thursday along with representatives from the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform citing data that Colorado uses kinship care at a rate 30% below the national average.
Martinez said more should be done to ensure children remain connected to their culture.
“This child in any of these circumstances does not exist in a vacuum, they are a whole of their history, their culture, their heritage, everything their parents and aunts and uncles bring to the table to make who they are,” Martinez said. (Full article.)
Statistics compiled over the years on the Child Welfare system clearly show that low income families, who are overwhelmingly minorities (Blacks, Natives, and Latinos), have a much higher rate of their children being put into the Child Welfare System than wealthier families, who are also the ones that make up the bulk of foster and adoptive parents, and are overwhelmingly White middle class Christian Conservatives.
85% or more (depending upon the state) of these children are removed from their homes, NOT because they were being abused, but because they were removed under the more broad term of “neglect,” which has a wide range of interpretation, such as “medical neglect” when a parent refuses to comply with a doctor’s opinion for medical services, such as vaccines.
Other published studies have shown that even when the children have “troubled parents”, which the vast majority of the time is defined when the parents are labeled as “drug abusers,” (which almost always means illegal drugs such as marijuana, but NEVER prescription drugs, the choice of drugs for most middle class parents), those children of these “troubled parents” still do MUCH better in their “troubled” homes than they do in Foster Care, which is the nation’s #1 pipeline for child sex trafficking.
Read More @ HealthImpactNews.com
