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Beware of "women's culture"
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[02/11/00]

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Ida, now in her late 20s, grew up in group and foster homes from the age of 7. "Me and my sister were separated when we got put in the system," she says, "so the family bond is not there. On a personal level, you become very analytical. You push people to find out what makes them tick. You ask yourself, 'What's the worst thing he can do if he gets mad?' You push, you test, you want to know right away if you're going to be betrayed."

Sayyadina, 19, lost touch with most of her siblings -- two brothers and four sisters -- after they were scattered at a young age among various foster and adoptive homes. Because Sayyadina's younger sister was adopted by a friend of the family's, Sayyadina was able to keep track of her over the years. She says she "makes an effort now to keep in contact. The others I didn't have much relationship with past toddler age because they were adopted into families that chose to be reclusive.

"They're people I think about, but they're not close to me," Sayyadina says. "I don't see them; they don't see me. I don't come around; they don't come around. I figure they're probably pretty lonely because they have no blood relations, and they weren't born into the family they live in."

Tiffany, 22, had a different experience. She and her three younger sisters were placed in an unusual group home that accommodated sibling groups. While they did not get the permanence of an adoptive home, they found another kind of security in their ongoing connection to one another.

"People would ask us why we were so emotionally stable," Tiffany recalls. "We always had each other's backs. 'The sisters' -- that's what they called us. People who didn't have their sisters or brothers with them always had more problems than the rest of us. They really didn't have anybody that they could talk to about what was going on with them."

When social workers started talking about adoption for the youngest sister, the girls objected. "If she had been adopted, that would have screwed up my family," Tiffany explains, "because now we are a family.

"When I think about adoption I think about my siblings more than parents for some reason. They're in the same age range, they look at things the same way I do, they were my support. I guess it comes down to morals, to what you feel is important, and for me blood is very important. I always felt like I deserved some kind of tie to my sisters."

For now, there is little room to consider what a child feels she may deserve as she limps through the child welfare system, already without her parents and likely to lose her brothers and sisters. Johnson believes that the ASFA, with its accelerated timetables for termination of parental rights and financial incentives to get more foster children adopted, has made siblings even more vulnerable to permanent separation.

Attorney Dillard, who heads a panel of lawyers in Boston that takes child custody cases, is waiting for a chance to win legal protection of the sibling bond. She and her colleagues are looking for another sibling case, and this time, she plans to challenge the separation right away, at the moment the children enter foster care, when they may be placed separately if there are not enough beds available in a single home.

"There should be litigation right at the beginning," Dillard explains. "The child's attorney should say, 'I want the department of social services to place the children together so that their family relationship is maintained.'

"It's not enough that they have separated the kids for administrative convenience. There should be an obligation on the state to prove by clear and convincing evidence that the children's right to family integrity should be dissolved."

If the right to family integrity is extended to children, it is possible that children will have a rare opportunity to describe their own "best interests." Their feelings -- their instincts -- are not likely to surprise anyone, even adults unfamiliar with the burdens of poverty or domestic disaster.

"Look at your own family," Johnson suggests. "As you grow older, you lose your parents and what you have left are your siblings. If you're stripped of that, you really are alone."
salon.com | Feb. 16, 2000

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