Intimately Bound: Injustice and the Foster System

Abstract

Political theorists have not paid sustained attention to the foster system or treated it as a political institution. Despite this, scholars in law and the social sciences, as well as a growing number of social movement advocates, have suggested that the U.S. and English foster systems are unjust. This dissertation characterises injustice in the widespread but relatively understudied institution of the foster system, proposes action-guiding ethical and policy principles to address these injustices, and suggests new normative ideals to govern the state’s intervention into intimate life. To properly characterise injustice in the foster system, I argue that we must correct a conceptual oversight about the definitive power of the system and how it is typically employed. The foster system is an institution that engages in coercive relational intervention. More specifically, it enacts violence on our intimate relationships when it exercises its power to remove children from their caregivers. Much of the injustice in the system pertains to the misuse of this power, or, what I call, the capacity to employ relational violence. Chapter one proposes the novel concept of relational violence which provides an ethical framework for evaluating moral harms to intimate relationships. Relational violence occurs when an external party damages an intimate bond by substantially disrupting an intimate relationship. Relational violence, I argue, is generally morally wrong and we have moral reasons to minimise its use where possible. In the foster system, however, poverty, housing insecurity, and racial prejudice can lead to unnecessary relational violence through child removals. The foster system thus emerges as an unjust institution that can compound the existing harms of racial and economic inequality with painful relational injustices. Chapter two expands on how racism in the contemporary foster system damages intimate relationships. I argue that racial ideology specifically targets black parents in their capacities as parents. Racial ideology can suggest that the intimate bonds within black families are worth less than those within other families–or even that black intimate bonds are worth nothing at all. Critics have suggested that the foster system violates a “right to parent” or the family autonomy of black parents and families, and that it can violate a black child’s right to be raised in their racial group. Alternatively, some have even suggested that the system may under-intervene into black families. I show that my account of racial ideology as undervaluing, or totally devaluing, black intimate bonds complements some critiques of racism in the system while also addressing important counterarguments raised against others. In chapter three I argue that despite the system’s purported goal of safeguarding children, the foster system’s demonstrable function–how it effectively operates in social and political life–is in fact a kind of poverty intervention. This poverty intervention can be direct or indirect. By this I mean that the foster system may intervene based on factors that impair parenting capacities but that may be either directly or indirectly caused by poverty. That the demonstrable function of the foster system is poverty intervention is itself concerning for theories of justice since poverty is a form of systemic injustice. But despite our moral obligations to correct for systemic injustice in society, state intervention within the foster system, I argue, should be determined primarily by our obligation to minimise damage to intimate bonds. Finally, chapter four argues that our response to injustice in the foster system requires that the system aim to protect, where possible, the integrity of our intimate relationships. The concept of relational violence implies that we must aim to equally respect the moral value of other’s intimate bonds. This requirement is, I suggest, a necessary condition for the integrity of our intimate relationships. Nevertheless, respecting even this minimal account of intimate integrity requires substantial changes to law, policy, and practice in the foster system. It also demands that we clarify the extent and bounds of coercive relational intervention through the system, and that we work to make decision-making about intervention in the system more democratic. I conclude the chapter and the dissertation with some suggestions about what respect for intimate integrity would demand of the foster system.