In our last blog post we highlighted a film about a family, the Wilson’s, and the director’s commentary about the cycle of violence, poverty, drugs and interaction with the child welfare system intergenerationally and how difficult it is to break that cycle.
Today we’d like to let you know about some of the other stories in the Kids at Risk series for Crosscut. In July the publication kicked off a series titled, The Long Way Home: Inside Foster Care. The series looks in-depth at the state of Washington’s child welfare system and the children and parents caught up in the cycle. Kathryn Hunt, whose film No Place Like Home was discussed in the last blog post, made another film about a Seattle family involved in foster care. Take This Heart features three boys who, despite the abuse they endured in their home and the loving and caring foster parent who cared for them, only wanted to be back with their parents.
This first part in the series lays out the problems – the numbers of children taken into custody by the state because of abuse and neglect; how long they stay in out of home care; and the factors that make some children more vulnerable than others.
According to Crosscult, the series will “look at the people, the programs, the policies and philosophies and, most importantly, the kids and families that the system was invented to help: What’s working? What’s not working? How does the system help families stay together? How does it create healthy homes away from home for those kids whose families fall apart? “Normalize” a foster kid’s life? (It shouldn’t take 48 hours and a judge’s order to go on a sleepover.) What puts kids “at risk?” And what is “at-risk” anyway?”
Read more here.
