I have been debating about whether I wanted to blog on a certain dilemma that is going on in my family for the last month because there are a lot of legal ramifications surrounding it and also because I didn't want to reveal too much personal information about my baby girl. So, I decided not to disclose too much of the story except to give some meat to the topic so you can understand where I am coming from.
My 16 year old niece is the love of my life, along with my three other heartbeats (as I talked about in an earlier post). Our relationship has had its share of ups and downs, but I have always fought to remain in her life. You see, my brother and her mother were never in a real relationship and her conception was not planned (to say the very least). But I believe that her existence on this earth was no accident, and she was a thought in the heart of God long before she made her debut.
Long story short, she was raised in her mother's household but my mom and I have always tried to provide a second place of respite, a second home for her - so much so that when she was having trouble at home, my mom got guardianship of her last year. For nine months we were in and out of court, fighting against sending her back to her mom because of the drug abuse, domestic violence, and alcoholism taking place in her mom's home. The judge agreed with us and we kept her as long as we could. But then, a CPS worker in the county where her mother lives recommended that the guardianship be terminated and my niece be returned home, although every other authority figure involved felt that it would be a huge mistake.
It was.
My niece and her two sisters were placed in foster care three months after my mom's guardianship was terminated by recommendation of the CPS Worker. They were taken from her mother because of the same reasons we had raised in court - her mother;s lifestyle and her mother giving my niece controlled substances. The CPS Worker that removed my niece from my mom's care was the same one that removed her from her mother's and placed her into foster care. He never informed us of this and we found out four months after the fact that my niece was no longer in her mother's home. We had tried to maintain contact with her, but her mother had intercepted us each time and by the time this took place, we were almost too late. My niece got in touch with us after being bounced from one foster home to the next.
Now, despite the pleas for her return to our care and our interactions with case workers and CPS workers and supervisors, my niece and her sisters still remain in foster care, in the home of strangers. There is more to the story that I cannot get into right now, but one issue that keeps coming up is that we, my niece's extended family, has no rights, and in fact, my brother, who is also demanding for the return of his daughter is being ignored by the foster care system.
It makes me wonder how many other fathers and how many other families are losing or have lost children to the system that really wanted to retain custody of those children. Of course every story is different, but the jist of it is this: the system that is supposed to be all about protecting children and also the reunification of families can also be guilty of destroying families. We were told that my niece's mother picked where her children would be placed with no regard to my brother's rights or the rights of the other fathers/family members that wanted their children with family. And this was okay and permissible.
I have realized that there are many levels of institutional racism and paternal discrimination that are at play in my niece's situation. I do not like to play the "race card" as they say, but it is very obvious that race has probably played a factor in the disregard for my niece's placement. Her mother and the family chosen to house my niece and her sisters are Caucasian. The authority figures deciding if we can even have contact with her (which we have not been allowed to, for no apparent reason) are Caucasian. And my brother unfortunately has played the role of the Black deadbeat father in the past making it easy for decisions to be made without a say-so from him or us, but at this point he is stepping up to rescue his child because his rights may be terminated too if he does not.
Tomorrow we are meeting with a lawyer and also going to a meeting between my brother and the Case Worker assigned to my niece's placement. He does not want his daughter staying with the family her mother chose because there have been many lies told and attempts by this family to keep his daughter from visits and phone calls with him. He wants her to be returned to our family's care. I believe things will be changed. But all of this raised a lot of questions in my mind about the role of the foster care system in destroying families, instead of protecting children.
I have some questions for anyone that reads this post.
How many of you know of children or teens that were placed in the foster care system, in the homes of strangers or unrelated families, when their biological families were readily available to take them?
We were told that my niece and her sisters were placed together, even though they all have different fathers and families that wanted to take them. There is a federal law on the books that CPS has to abide by that states in brief that children should be placed together, even if it means they are placed in the homes of complete strangers and not with family members who want them (if they have to be separated amongst family members). As in the case of my niece and her sisters, children who have different fathers may have to live with complete strangers just to keep them together, and those biological families may risk losing them altogether.
That is the place where we are, and we are fighting with everything within us to keep my baby from rotating through the system. I know so many children that have been in foster care and have not been allowed to see family (family that should have the right to love those children and be in their lives).
There are many stories about children taken from their parents that had families whom wanted to work together to keep the children, perhaps in different houses but still maintaining contact with their siblings. But CPS would not allow that because the children were not physically living in the same house and ended up putting the children in foster homes. There are very few foster homes that can house three or more children and inevitably children are separated anyway - most of the time with foster families and not with biological relatives. What sense does that make?
If you have experienced the loss of children to the system or know of any families that were not granted custody of those children due to the laws that are on the books that dictate that fathers rights may be disregarded for the good of a flawed system, please let me know. I am very concerned that there are:
(1) children that should be with their families but have been placed in foster homes unnecessarily;
(2) fathers rights are being overlooked, disregarded, or trampled on when children are taken from their mothers;
and (3) racism is affecting the placement of children in the foster care system.
My family is prepared to fight for my niece to the fullest extent of the law, and most likely, she will be returned to my family once her mother's rights are completely terminated in February. But truly, children should never be placed in the homes of strangers over the homes of family members simply to fulfill unrealistic laws established by the federal government at all. I know that this law was written with the best of intentions but no law should override what would be in the best interest of children.
