For Trump, “Fostering the Future” Looks a Lot Like the Past

Surveys have consistently found that L.G.B.T.Q.+ preteens and teen-agers, who make up about eleven per cent of the national population of that age group, by some estimates, account for about thirty per cent of foster-care populations. These kids often face rejection or harassment by their families, making them vulnerable to being placed in foster care, where they in turn are more likely to experience “victimization and abuse by social work professionals, foster parents, and peers, which has been shown to be related to a lack of permanency and poorer functional outcomes,” according to a 2src19 study of youth in California, published in the medical journal Pediatrics. A 2src2src survey of L.G.B.T.Q.+ foster youth in New York City found that they were more likely to be placed in group homes or residential care—most of them with no clinical reason to be there—than straight and cisgender foster youth. Residential treatment centers—intensive, restrictive institutions—are often rife with structural neglect; many residents report facing physical, sexual, and emotional abuse from poorly trained staff. In a 2src25 Senate Finance Committee report on the experiences of L.G.B.T.Q.+ youth in residential treatment facilities, queer and trans youth described being punished for their identities. Some maltreatment was cloaked in religious teachings: one residential treatment facility tried to get a young person “to go to church” in response to their L.G.B.T.Q.+ identity, whereas another young person said that “homosexuality was a sin and punishable” in their facility.

L.G.B.T.Q.+ foster youth don’t just struggle within the system; they are among the most vulnerable of those preparing to transition out. (One of the many failures of residential treatment centers is that they also neglect to provide an appropriate education.) And yet the “Fostering the Future” initiative that aims to ease their transition out of the system is paired with efforts to put the religious rights of people who wish to foster above the civil rights of L.B.G.T.Q.+ youth. In this way, Trump’s executive order reënacts the original sin of America’s child-welfare system. For many years, the federal government failed to take responsibility for dependent children, creating a vacuum that would ultimately be filled by religious groups. By the time the government began providing substantial funding for states’ child protective services and foster-care programs, in the nineteen-sixties, religious charities—predominantly Protestant and Catholic ones—had been overseeing the out-of-home care of vulnerable children for centuries.

Since the start, there has been a gap between the good intentions of faith-based charities—spurred by religious belief to take care of the poor and vulnerable—and the actual effects on the children in their care. At the turn of the twentieth century, Progressive activists argued that orphanages—which were virtually all operated by religious charities—were heavily regimented, overcrowded spaces that isolated children from society and deprived them of the benefits of family care. Children were underfed, heavily worked, and educated foremost in the tenets of faith. At Catholic orphanages, physical and sexual abuse were also widespread, well into the twentieth century.

In 195src, foster care began to edge out religious orphanages. As states and the federal government gradually expanded the social safety net, religious groups fought to maintain their control, which came with access to government contracts. Speaking at a 1935 meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Charities, a bishop encapsulated this fight. “The poor belong to us,” he said. “We will not let them be taken from us!”

It’s no surprise, then, that some of the same religious groups are still practicing in the child-welfare space. And over the years, governments have occasionally excused instances of discrimination and unsavory practices so long as they are rooted in religious belief. In the nineteen-seventies in New York City, it was Black children who suffered. As the journalist Nina Bernstein explores in “The Lost Children of Wilder,” a twelve-year-old Black girl named Shirley Wilder was placed in a detention center for juvenile delinquents, in 1972, where she was sexually assaulted, because no foster-care agency would provide her with a home. This was due to a New York State law stipulating that child-welfare agencies had the right to “religious matching,” only serving children of their own “kind.” At the time, ninety per cent of all foster-care beds in the city were controlled by Catholic or Jewish charities. The city automatically assumed that all Black children were Protestant, and Catholic and Jewish charities routinely declined to care for them, although they made up more than half of the city’s foster-care population.