Community- and Systems-Level Factors Contributing to Foster Care Entry: Perspectives from Legal Professionals

Background and purpose: Legal professionals including judges, magistrates, and attorneys play a critical role in foster care placement. However, there is scarce literature about the perspectives that legal professionals have regarding factors that contribute to foster care entry, and the research that does exist primarily focuses on family-level service needs. The purpose of this study was to build on prior work by exploring the perspectives of legal professionals around factors at the community and systems level of the social environment that contribute to foster care entry and to identify prevention strategies that can be empirically tested.

Methods: This study was conducted during the planning phase of a multiyear project evaluating primary prevention strategies for child maltreatment funded by the U.S. Children’s Bureau in the Administration for Children and Families between 2020 and 2021. Data for the current study were obtained through semi-structured interviews and open- ended survey questions collected from 21 participants, including judges, magistrates, probation officers, court-appointed special advocates (CASA), court program directors, a prosecutor, and child welfare attorneys and legal team. Experience working with the child welfare system ranged from 7 years to 37 years. Text data from interview and focus group transcripts were assessed using constructivist thematic analysis.

Findings: The identified risk factors were categorized into community and systems levels. At the community level, poverty was a major contributing factor due to environmental access barriers and insufficient resources and support. Social isolation, community apathy toward prevention, parental incarceration, and a high prevalence of substance misuse, mental illness, and domestic violence were also identified as contributing factors. At the systems level, limited cross-system collaboration and overwhelming workloads among child welfare caseworkers and court staff were noted as main determinants. High turnover, unqualified and inexperienced caseworkers, and inadequate parent support within the child welfare system were also named as contributing factors. Dimensions of the legal system itself were also identified as increasing risk for foster care entry. These included limited court advocates and guardians ad litem, punitive systems in some communities with frequent termination of parental rights, and inadequate reintegration services after incarceration. Other factors that affect foster care entry included stigma related to service receipt and mistrust of the child welfare system.

Conclusions and implications: Our findings highlight the urgent need to improve collaboration and coordination across systems to develop a comprehensive service continuum that is tailored to meet the needs of families. In addition, promoting family-strengthening policies and family-supportive attitudes in communities and legal systems is necessary for a paradigm shift in child and family services that will enable reduce the risk for entry currently being generated at the community and systems levels. These reforms must place families at the center of their efforts to ensure that parents and children receive the support and resources they need to thrive.