Spurred by a ProPublica investigation, three organizations that represent children in foster care filed a lawsuit last week in New York State Supreme Court against the state’s Office of Children and Family Services over new regulations that establish a “Host Family Homes” program, charging that they create a shadow system that will deprive children and parents of their rights.
The ProPublica story, published in collaboration with The New York Times Magazine in December, documented how, across the country, caseworkers are diverting children from formal foster care into what some scholars call “shadow foster care,” in which the legal protections of the formal system disappear. Parents who are investigated for allegedly mistreating their children agree, sometimes under coercion, to place their child with a relative, friend or volunteer family as an alternative to government foster care. Child welfare departments then often skirt their legal duty to keep children at home or thoroughly monitor the informal arrangements; the shadow system also strips families of access to free lawyers, judicial oversight and court-mandated services to attempt to reunite families.
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