handled by the public agency, and for this reason my interactions with them were more limited than with the foster families, social workers, and other service providers involved in the child welfare system. And although I use the term “biological” throughout this book to refer to the parents from whom children are removed in the context of child welfare interventions, it should be noted that not all parents are necessarily “biological” in this context. Children may, of course, be removed from stepparents, adoptive parents, and other legal guardians. Social workers and legal actors commonly used the term “bio parents” to refer to the parents from whom foster children had been initially removed, regardless of the existence of a biological link between parent and child.
My role at Esperanza was complex. When interacting with foster children and families, my role was as a researcher. Though I accompanied Esperanza social workers on their official business, I was careful to make it clear that I was not in any way part of the decision-making processes that would shape the trajectory of any child’s case. In the office, however, I participated as an intern in almost every aspect of social work practice—filing papers, fielding phone calls, typing case notes, organizing files, and preparing trainings and orientation sessions under the guidance of the head Esperanza social worker at the time. My relationship with Corinne, the Esperanza social worker who appears most frequently in the pages that follow, was the most intimate. Although there were five Esperanza employees at the beginning of my most extended research period in 2010, I worked with Corinne through an organizational transition that left her as the only Esperanza employee. She was a Mexican national, and fluent in Spanish and English. Her family had moved back and forth between San Diego and Baja California for years, primarily to enjoy U.S. schooling opportunities for Corinne and her siblings. Corinne had recently graduated from a local university, and was employed at Esperanza on a work visa while preparing to apply to graduate school. Many days I worked across from Corinne, on the edge of her desk, chatting and making our way through office tasks together throughout the day. Corinne left the agency in February 2010 because Esperanza had been merged with a broader social service organization and her new boss did not wish to renew the sponsorship that was necessary for her to maintain her U.S. visa. Alicia, who replaced her, was also the sole Esperanza employee until August 2011, when Esperanza operations were temporarily suspended. These conditions created an opportunity for me to be extremely useful to this small agency, which facilitated the research process in innumerable ways. Although I was initially unsure how eager busy social workers would be to share their experiences with me, and how willing foster and biological parents would be to discuss their intimate, sometimes painful experiences, I found that almost everyone I spoke with was quick to dismiss my concerns and generous in sharing their stories. Most of the individuals I spoke with felt that the foster care process was misunderstood or simply absent from public conversation, and that the problems were vast and needed to be discussed and addressed. Interviews were conducted in both Spanish and English; all translations are my own.
Children’s experiences play a central role in the stories that follow, though their own voices and perspectives are notably, and intentionally, absent. Although many of the older children I spent time with, ranging from five to eight years old, had much to say about their experiences in foster care, the majority of children whose cases I followed were between infancy and five years old. Focusing on this young demographic limited children’s ability to communicate about, and reflect on, their experiences, but also foreclosed the possibility of their being able to actively and willingly commit to participation in a research project. I wrote about children primarily in contexts where social workers were already actively documenting their experiences and during the course of my formal and informal interviews with foster parents. Voices of children are occasionally present in the text, but the majority of my analysis focuses on the way children were positioned as objects of intervention and of protection, rather than as active subjects participating in and shaping the contours of their lives.
A Temporality of Interruptions
I tell the stories of the children, parents, social workers, and legal actors who are introduced in this book through fragmented narratives. The cases themselves weave in and out, and often end abruptly, without resolution. Crucial details of many cases are missing and the end result for each child is often absent in the stories I tell in the pages that follow. In this way, the structure of the book and its stories mirror the experience of families embroiled within the child welfare system. As I recount, the actors and agencies involved often operate with partial information and constrained access. Cases are opened and closed according to the recommendations of social workers and lawyers and the determinations of judges. Decisions are often made based on incomplete case notes, and case files handed from social worker to social worker often go unread by overworked social workers who are regularly operating in crisis mode and constantly pressed for time. Social worker turnover is tremendous and children routinely interact with more than half a dozen case workers over the course of two years in foster care, which, at the time of this writing, is the average time a child spends in the system. Children and parents who have been legally separated often have difficulty locating each other, and obstructing this continued connection may, in some circumstances, be the goal of the child welfare agency, pursued in the name of child protection. Child welfare authorities operate in this realm of partial knowledge—it is a rare case that involves institutional actors who have a clear sense of what feels to them to be the “full story” from beginning to end. As a researcher, my access was similarly partial and fragmented, and there were few stories that I was able to track from start to finish. The gaps and omissions, however, are central to how this system operates, and are part of the story that needs to be told.
The temporality not only of the cases themselves, but also of parenthood and family, constitutes a strand that weaves throughout the text. The normative model of contemporary family formation is based on underlying assumptions about biology, blood, sameness, and permanence. These first three concepts—blood, biology, and sameness—have been thoroughly critiqued and eroded by the emergence of new kinship studies that began to gather force in the early 1990s (Ginsburg and Rapp 1991; Weston 1991; Franklin and McKinnon 2002). Permanence, however, has largely been left unaddressed in the scholarly literature, and temporary families, like foster families, continue to be positioned in popular discourse as “less than” (Wozniak 2001). Parenting, in many ways, is understood in popular discourse to be about both the everyday and the passage of time. Family invokes a sense of permanence; the birth or adoption of a child is understood to make a claim on the rest of that parent’s life. I suggest in the chapters that follow that the experiences of foster families, and of biological families separated by state intervention, erode any easy linkages between experiences of family and assumptions about permanence.
Social workers and legal actors also confront the complexity of temporal limitations. Lawyers and judges, in making determinations about child removal, placement, and custody, must, in essence, predict the future. They ask themselves whether they think children will face future harm if they remain in the care of their natal families, and they must ask themselves whether that potential harm may be more or less impactful than the harm of dislocation, of the severance of kinship ties, of starting over again in a new family setting. Legal actors make these decisions in the context of inordinate caseloads of hundreds of foster children often during bi-annual court hearings that regularly take less than ten minutes from start to finish.
Social workers face similar predictive conundrums as well as a constant pull between short-term and long-term goals. The removal of a child for their short-term protection may be the best immediate solution while also being the intervention that may cause the most long-term damage. As Connolly (2000) reminds us, social services have roots in a charity model—one that expects short-term support to produce lasting consequences. Child Welfare Service interventions rarely offer adequate support to families with deeply rooted, complex problems informed by structural inequalities that shape their access to food, housing, employment, or mental health services (Lee 2016). Social workers routinely hand off cases every six months, a strategy that allows them to specialize in particular phases of the child welfare system, such as the initial investigation process, or the pursuit of an adoptive placement after family reunification has failed. This procedure narrows the
