Saturday, August 6, 2011

The Racial and Class Disparities Within Family Unification

Those who aren’t as fortunate to be aided by their community lose their children to an already inundated foster care system. The foster care system is designed to be a temporary solution for children until a permanent placement can be made. Yet statistics from 2009 indicate that there are more than 423,000 children in foster care—some who have been waiting years to be reunified with their families or to be adopted.

Most of the children who face this outcome are African American. Disproportionately, African American children constitute 30 percent of those in foster care despite composing only 15 percent of all children in the United States. According to a report by Jessica Arons, black children are not only four times more likely than white children to be in the child welfare system but are also more prone to languish in foster care for years due to lower rates of adoption and family reunification.

Click here to read the entire story.

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