5 Insane Realities Inside The Foster Care System

We can't tell you what her parents were thinking, but it's probably safe to say they weren't doing it very straight. Like 31 percent of children who enter the foster care system every year in the U.S., Stephanie's family had been torn apart by substance abuse. In the year before that fateful errand run, Stephanie's mother had lost her sister to suicide, started drinking heavily, and separated from her husband. She then "immediately started dating this new guy who was really abusive to me and my siblings," Stephanie says. "We would get into arguments and fights, so my mom signed me over into foster care." Stephanie estimated that she bounced around 20 different foster homes. She was just part of the 20 percent of children in the foster system who move more than 10 times. Only half stay in one place for a single year. And every trip was a surprise.

"Some were a big house or facility where the government's footing the bill," Stephanie says. "There are other places where the people get benefits from the government for taking in needy children. They might have kids of their own, they might have adult kids, they might be childless. They might live in a mansion, they might live in an apartment. You never know until you're on their doorstep."

ErikaWittlieb/Pixabay
"PleasehaveindoorplumbingPleasehaveindoorplumbingPleasehave-"

Being shuffled around so often made Stephanie feel like a worthless bundle of red tape, and in some ways she still lives with it. She has absolutely no attachment to material possessions, even personal things like family photos. "I don't even care. I've posted ads with my address [when I move]," she says. "'My front door's open, come take what you want.'"

On the plus side, that does sound way easier than moving a couch.

It could have been worse, though: "I feel like I stand out because I've never been sexually abused," she says. "Not before foster care, not during, not after. And that's a goddamn miracle." She's not exaggerating. One study found that 7.6 percent of kids enter the system because of sexual abuse, and once you're in the system, you're about four times more likely to be sexually abused than a non-foster child is. Because abuse often comes from your peers, if you live in a group home, you're 28 times more likely to be a victim than that same, stupid, well-adjusted child. It says something pretty profound about the foster system that "I didn't get raped!" counts as an inspirational story.

This actually does have something to do with Stephanie's living situation, so stay with us: When you go through 20 homes in six years, it's basically impossible to discipline you. After all, if you were a teenager and you knew that after a few months you'd probably never see this particular set of substitute parents again, would you strictly observe your bedtime? Of course not, which means that most of Stephanie's free time was spent smoking weed and partying. When you get a bunch of troubled kids partying together, they don't always sing campfire songs and teach each other to break dance.

KatarzynaBialasiewicz / iStock
No campfires, but something was getting lit.

Once Stephanie found herself in a rougher group home, it only got worse, much like how locking a bunch of drug dealers up together for long stretches of time mostly just makes them better at dealing drugs. "There were two incidents in juvenile [detention]," she says. "I got an extra six months for cutting a girl's hair off during arts and crafts. ... I got another 12 months because this girl verbally invited [me and another girl] to fight her, and we took her up on it. It was pretty bad. Charges were pressed. So it was three assault charges. I'm definitely not proud of that."

Thanks to the impossibility of discipline, Stephanie went from a terrified 12-year-old abandoned by her mother, to a 15-year-old with three assault charges on her record. The system works!

In 2013, 4,765.6 of the 238,280 children to leave the American system had "other outcomes," which is a euphemism for "transferred to another social services system, ran away, or died." It's unclear what happened to the other 40 percent of that one kid, but maybe that's a sign we should be keeping a closer fucking eye on them.

That wasn't even the only murder Stephanie would be connected to, because she's apparently the Forrest Gump of Canadian violent crime. In her very first month of foster care, she very nearly became an unwitting accessory to one of the most widely reported and discussed crimes in Canadian history. After some of her fellow foster children had viciously beaten and drowned 14-year-old Reena Virk, a mutual friend and -- you guessed it -- foster child, they came to Stephanie and asked her to hide Reena's sweatshirt and shoes in her closet. Finding that exactly as suspicious as you did, she went to a staff member, who went to the police.

Victoria Times Colonist
Pro Tip: If people start acting like Law & Order guest stars, go to the police.

In one of the worst reunions ever, Stephanie later ended up in the same juvenile detention center as those girls, but the resulting fallout paled in comparison to the initial shock. Just as she had started to come to terms with her mom abandoning her, one of her new friends was murdered and three nice girls she thought were also her friends were among those responsible.

Remember: We're not talking about the plot of some mind-bending thriller movie. This is the real life of a girl whose family just didn't feel like arguing with a teenager.

But at least she got to party with the mom who, uh, sent her into foster care in the first place. She still sees her sometimes today, with mixed results. Stephanie's 31 now, but her mother still refuses to talk about why she sent her away. For those of you who cringe at the political discussions that ruin your family reunions, know that it could always be worse.

"There's a part of me that's never forgiven her. Not just for foster care, but over the years I can't even begin to explain the ways she hasn't been there for me." For one, she says, "I was eight months pregnant and had to pick her up from her DUI, and then I had to go to court for her because she skipped town."

Wavebreakmedia / iStock
Hopefully not by driving.

As you might guess, Stephanie doesn't budget a lot of money for Mother's Day cards. "There's a part of me that loves her because she's my mom, and I recognize her alcoholism as sad. But it's not an excuse for behavior. If I became an alcoholic tomorrow, I wouldn't choose men over my children."

Stephanie has children of her own now, which is kind of hard to navigate when your only role model dropped you on someone's porch like a flaming bag of poop. The government realizes this, which is why after both of her children's births, Stephanie was flagged for a social services investigation.

Shironosov / iStock
Anything that could actually help her was still a good couple of months
of red tape and unanswered voicemails away.

Hey, if you screw up a kid's life with your wildly incompetent and dangerously negligent system, the least you can do is keep an eye on the next generation. That way, if things go south, you can take those kids and put them in that same wildly incompetent and dangerously negligent system. That's what that "Circle Of Life" song was about, right?

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For more insider perspectives, check out 6 Surprises To Expect When Both Of Your Parents Die and 6 Awesome Lessons Teaching Troubled Teens Teaches You.

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