Many European civil society organizations were established to achieve particular social goals or solve social problems. As such, they represent the interests of citizens or certain groups of citizens, perform their role in advocating changes in policies and legislation, often raise awareness of relevant social issues, and work on projects that directly have a positive impact on communities, such as education, social support programs, economic empowerment, and other initiatives. Some of the organizations represent the interests of children and the young, and their mission is the development of a European society in which all of them will grow up happy, healthy, full of self-confidence, and valued as individuals. This is exactly the goal of the Eurochild network, which has 200 members in 41 European countries, including organizations from Croatia. In 2013, this network launched the “Opening Doors” campaign with the wish that no child grows up in an institution, but that foster care becomes a primary type of alternative care. Further, the campaign promoted the prevention of placement in alternative care due to poverty, disability, or other discriminatory practices and for building strong protection systems that would ensure that no child is harmed. Advocacy of family care for every child is also one of the key areas of UNICEF’s activities in Croatia, intending to reduce the number of children in institutions.
Forms of alternative care
It is not difficult to agree that every child needs a family and that placement in a foster family sounds much nobler and warmer than placement in an institutionalized home. What matters isn’t the place, but the people because every child needs someone to provide understanding, warmth, safety, stability, and support and whom they can trust. In the same way, after everything that a specific child has been through, they need predictability, order, and schedule, allowing them peace instead of the previous chaos. If all of the above matches the word “family”, it represents the right form of alternative care, but in many cases, practice shows that foster care does not guarantee such a community. As a representative of the FICE Croatia, I participated in the Eurochild campaign. I can say that it was a very significant initiative, but also a process that requires time, in which the transition from institutional to family-type care will take place, says Ljiljana Ban, a social worker with twenty years of experience, who has spent the last ten years specifically working with children and youth in the alternative care system.
I would agree that the best place for a child to be raised is the family, but considering the experiences that young, whom I had worked with over the past ten years, shared with me, I conclude that alternative care should be offered in different forms because each child and each case is different. There are specific, that is, diverse needs, so the answers to these needs should be different, and therefore it is good to have more options. In some countries, such as Ireland, they started with this practice many years before, so foster care is the dominant form of alternative care in almost 90 percent of cases. The system is very well developed with a network of support provided by private agencies that deal with the process and state agencies that carry out control, but even in such an advanced system, there are cases of frequent changes of foster families during the child’s upbringing, and even cases of child abuse causing the child to become separated from the foster family so their trauma continues. I met a young person who was physically and sexually abused in a foster family and changed several foster families only to finally arrive at a small group home at a later age, here I mean 17 years old. And only then, for the first time in his life, that young man felt that he was somewhere safe. He told me that he was saved at that moment. I have encountered such examples, that worse things have happened to children and young in foster families than those that caused the separation from their biological families, as in the Netherlands, where foster care is also well-developed. Also, from talking to young people, I can say that a considerable number of them told me that when they turned 15 or 16, they felt that at that moment, placement in a home or accommodation in a small group would be more suitable for them. You also have cases when young people, around the same age, request to be separated from their biological family because they recognize that their environment is not beneficial for them. They contact the Social Welfare Center and ask for separation, preferring to be placed in a home. They say that at their age it is too difficult to pretend that some new family is now their family and that it is easier for them to accept the rules and structure that they and everyone around them have to follow in a home. Therefore, I maintain that there should be more options for providing alternative care to children and young, explained Ljiljana Ban.
Developmental trauma
Separating a child from their family, no matter what kind of family it is, represents a traumatic experience. Considering the child was excluded for significant reasons, such as threats to their health and development, it implies they experienced more traumatic events while growing up until that point, probably several of them, so we can talk about the existence of developmental trauma in most children. It is a trauma that occurs during childhood and the child is exposed to it over a long period by close people, usually, parents, explains Ban. On the other hand, there is another form of trauma due to experiencing large and difficult events that a person feels unable to cope with. I can describe it as the feeling that someone has slipped the ground from under your feet. Such an event can be, for example, an earthquake, car accident, murder, or witnessing a violent event. What such a traumatic experience does to someone, does not have to be the same for others because we do not experience the same events equally. We are not discussing weakness or strength here, but rather a series of other factors that make us more or less resistant. Although it may be a one-time experience, the consequences of that trauma can last quite a long time. When we are adults our brains are developed, and we have a network of people who support us, but we still need time to ‘process’ everything internally, and the traumas we experienced as children remain deep within us. We deal with complicated cases especially when the child is continuously exposed to traumatic experiences from the closest people. A small child has no one in the world more important than the people who take care of them, and these are usually mom and dad. A baby’s life or that of a small child depends on these people, and the child trusts them completely. The child’s love for a parent is immeasurable. Every time I am left speechless and shiver when young people tell me the challenging life experiences they have faced and what they have gone through with their parents, but despite this, they have not given up on them or their love for them. I remember a conversation with a young girl who was 25 years old and who told me how social services came to take her from her mother. She told me: ‘I didn’t want to leave, I thought that where I was represented the very best place in the world for me. Today I look at it differently, but then, as a small child, my mother was everything to me’.
Establishing relationships in the foster family
Arriving in a foster family and creating a relationship with it is a very complex process. Two young girls, back then small children from a Roma settlement in Croatia, were sent to a foster family in 2009. They were not even aware that the circumstances in which they grew up were not good for them, and therefore they did not understand why they were separated from their parents. Together with their younger brother, who was still a baby at the time, they were placed in a new family. They only know that they never felt any closeness with the members of that family with whom they spent more than seven years together. The girls never bonded with anyone so that they could rely on that person, and their mutual quarrels, especially between the younger sister and brother, were always a source of problems for the foster parents, even though they were children who had not yet reached school age. One day, the family returned them to the Social Welfare Center, and to this day they do not know why because no one explained it to them. The younger sister and brother ended up in a home for a few months. Afterward, the sisters were reunited and placed in another foster family. They remained separated from their brother, who until now, when he turned 15, changed five foster families. Every family had problems with his behavior. He was always the one to blame for everything and the same happens today, they tell me. The girls told me how he used to be aggressive and that before sending him to the remand home, they wrote a report on him and his sister predicting their future states and behavior. For me, they wrote that I would suffer from mental illnesses and that my brother would be very violent when he grew up. I was not even 10 then, and he was 8, the girl told me. I found this out a few years later when I was diagnosed with depression, when my foster mother, whom I call my aunt, mentioned this report to a psychologist I was seeing. The older sister explained how the younger started experiencing panic attacks and suffocating at the age of 12 because she started to fear everything, such as a bad grade at school, arguments, and objections from her foster aunt, which usually lasted for hours, or the possible loss of friends, and she also found it hard to bear yelling and screaming. The younger sister often questions whether wouldn’t it be better if one of them had stayed with their brother, explaining that he is the one who needs help and someone who would stand up for him. The two of them, they believe, would manage more easily even apart. They rarely see their brother, and all contact is mainly by phone. They have to listen almost regularly about his negative traits from their aunt as if they too bear part of the blame. The place where they live is certainly not their home, because every time they return from an excursion or trip, they feel pain, not joy. They stay in common areas, such as the living room or the kitchen, only during meals, which are strictly defined. Sometimes it is easier for them to fall asleep without dinner, than to listen to how ungrateful they are because the dinner served is not tasty.
I would say that the adoption process is extremely difficult for both foster parents and children. Most of us can roughly understand how complex choosing someone to live with is if we take selecting a spouse as an example. Even though we are already at a certain age in which we can reason more rationally because we have particular experiences, knowledge, and mental capacities based on which we can evaluate, I believe that everyone would agree that for at least one relationship in our life, we can say that we would be better off without it. To live with someone is not an easy choice, and not every day of that life is easy, especially if to coexistence we add the fact that this is a decision we did not make, a surrounding we did not choose, and people who do not know each other, which is the case with foster care. Even if the children could choose a foster family, it would be hard to know exactly which one to select because children do not have the parameters and experience to facilitate and rationalize that choice. They only know what they lived with until then, and even that was not favorable for them, Ljiljana Ban explains the complexity of the adoption process and adds that there are no rules on whether it is easier to deal with younger or older children. Establishing a relationship with the foster parent’s biological children is also not a one-sided process, which is further complicated by the differences in the foster parent’s behavior toward biological and foster children. Foster children are mostly raised through a system of control and strict rules. Foster parents sometimes justify this with the fact that they have had bad experiences with previous foster children or that the behavior of the children’s biological family makes them cautious because there is certainly a predisposition in children as well. We feel like we’re always being judged and compared, and that’s what they tell us. There is a good justification for everything forbidden to us but allowed to their children. This created a distance that persists to this day, the sisters say about their life with their foster parents’ three children.
And what role do biological parents play in the lives of their children after they have been separated?
Based on real-life cases, we can conclude that there are as many cases as there are different families. Nevertheless, the meetings of children and parents become a rarity for most. In the case of my interlocutors, the older sister especially tries to understand her parents because, as she says, they were children themselves when the three of them were born. The fact that they are in foster care is less painful than the fact that they have been deprived of the possibility to connect with parents in any way because due to very infrequent visits, their parental rights have also been taken away. They told the children they couldn’t visit them because they live in a remote place, don’t have a driver’s license, and can hardly afford public transportation. However, what was difficult for the sisters, especially in their early childhood, was that no one was willing to take them to see their parents, and they asked this from foster parents and social workers. During one of the interviews with the social workers, they asked me if I would like to return to my biological family. I replied that I wouldn’t want to come back permanently, but I would like to visit them, even if only for a few hours. But nothing ever came of it, except a nod of understanding. After the three of them, their parents had five more children who live with them, and the girls say that they understand this because they were older when they had them. Anyway, the girls don’t rely on their biological parents’ support in life, just like they don’t rely on their foster parents either. They are happy to have each other and want to become independent, but they also want to help their brother. They plan to enroll in college and find a student job to not depend on others.
Staying in touch with the biological family is important because it is part of our identity even later in life. From the conversations with young people in alternative care, I realized that they need to close that chapter of their lives, says Ljiljana Ban. There are a lot of unanswered questions and a lot of imagined conversations in the heads of these young people. Some say they would like their parents to see them, to see what they have achieved, finished school and the like. Others would like to tell their parents that they understand them and that now that they are adults they can understand their behavior. Some wanted to ask their parents why they did this to them, why they didn’t take better care so that they could stay together. Some said that they did not want to contact their parents because they did not feel ready for it, but everyone wanted to know who their parents were. The bond with biological parents always remains in us and should not be forcibly severed. It would be good, and this sometimes happens, if experts continue to work with parents and children so that this relationship is maintained and even a good relationship is created in which the child recognizes a certain respect and feels free to express their love and affection for both families, both biological and foster. The worst are those situations, which I experienced while working in a children’s home in Austria, when the mandatory visits bring new traumatic experiences for children and parents, after which the children return to their foster parents unhappy and torn between the sense of loyalty they feel towards their biological family and the love that developed towards the foster family being aware that they are treated well. The feeling of guilt that they are doing well mixed with discomfort and fear that their parents will see that the new family likes them makes them act and pretend that they are not well. It creates real chaos in the little heads that they have a very hard time dealing with and mostly in such cases, foster parents have to return to the point from which they started building a relationship. There are also those wonderful foster care stories when the relationships between foster parents and foster children last for years after the young people start their independent lives, so they keep in touch. Even as adults, they occasionally return to talk, consult, or just be there for their adoptive parents, to whom now in adulthood they can reciprocate their care.
Foster care is therefore a very complex process of alternative care that cannot be theoretically predicted in all its segments and should be observed as such. Therefore, the vision of Eurochild’s campaign, which aims for the complete abolition of institutional care for children in Europe, requires at least a careful and adaptive transformation of the child protection system. This transformation must respect the diversity and specificity of the surroundings and be supported by professional and political agendas. Although their recommendations state that decades of research have shown that institutional care cannot provide care, love, and attention as in one-on-one care, practice shows that even this does not guarantee that the child will be provided with adequate surroundings for healthy and normal development. What is needed for this is growing up in a home, a home not being a form of institutional care, but a place where we feel safe, comfortable, and that we belong, and which must also have an emotional component of being a place where we feel loved. If foster care does not create such a home, then what does the one-on-one system give us in practice, or one-on-two, three, four, and even more?
The publication of this text was supported by the Electronic Media Agency as part of the program to encourage journalistic excellence
