Julian Darwall, Yale College '06

I worked at the National Center for Youth Law (NCYL), in Oakland, California. NCYL uses a variety of approaches to child welfare, mental health, education, and juvenile justice issues. Its advocacy repertoire includes impact litigation, legislative efforts, working with media sources, and publishing materials, and articles in its journal Youth Law News. I worked primarily with a senior attorney, who focuses his efforts on child welfare issues and who has had a great impact on the child welfare systems of Utah, Maryland, and Arkansas.

My major project was preparing an 11,000 word article and presentation on the recruitment of foster parents and foster parent depiction in the media. The article consisted of a literature review of unprecedented depth, a survey of 1,200 (one year) of newspaper articles on foster parents, a 20-year magazine survey, and a survey of Hollywood depictions. The literature review sought to answer a host of questions prompted largely by the 2003 study of the Pew Commission on Foster Care. In a nationwide survey conducted for the Pew Commission on Foster Care in 2003, pollsters asked people what they thought motivated persons to become foster parents. They found public perception of foster parents was mixed. Although 42% of those polled said that most people who become foster parents do so out of concern for children, almost one-third (29%) believed that foster parents are mostly interested in financial gain. Poor public perception of foster parents is often cited as hindering recruitment. In 2002, the federal Department of Health’s Office of the Inspector General found that 90% of foster care program managers surveyed believed that poor public perception and a lack of public understanding of foster care needs were barriers to effective recruitment.

With the results of the Pew Commission survey in mind, we asked why a significant portion of the general public has a negative image of foster parenting, what media sources the public relies on for its image of foster care, and how the media, in fact, portrays foster parents. The literature review was formed with research on what we know about foster parent characteristics, motivations, utilization in the system, etc. It was compiled from data in national databases, a federally mandated study of children in foster care, and the limited social science literature. One of the major findings of the social science literature review was that data are mixed on the levels of abuse and neglect in foster care; it is difficult to know how effective (or abusive) foster parents are. Quality data, even through the government, appears hard to obtain for reasons having to do with reporting procedures.

A particularly interesting result of the media study is that the print sections of the media appear to give relatively benign and even strikingly positive portrayals of foster parents. Moreover, only about 1.5 articles seem to accompany each publicized abuse case. For most cases in the last year, the newspaper media certainly could not be characterized as sensationalizing individual cases of foster parent abuses, except in a small handful of particularly gruesome offense cases. This also held true for magazine articles. However, the Hollywood and fiction depictions of foster parents flew wildly in the opposite direction, with the foster parent often taking the stock role of the particularly evil stepmother. This finding was also born out in newspaper write-ups of fiction, cultural, and artistic events, which were the only segment of newspaper articles that contained more negative than positive representations. The expressions that serve to shape public perception were found to be far the most negative toward foster parents. We hope to present our findings at the Child Welfare League of America convention in Washington, D.C., in addition to presenting them at a national foster parent convention in Hawaii.

I also did quite a bit of research on the child death review process. The Child Abuse and Protection Act (CAPTA) requires that states provide reports on child deaths due to abuse and neglect. In almost all states, “child death reports” are provided as a means of meeting the CAPTA requirement and giving statistical information about all child deaths. These reports are written by interdisciplinary review teams that often have a large scale public health emphasis. However, in almost all cases, these reports only provide statistical data that give little information on how to actually prevent child deaths in the future — certainly, less than CAPTA intends to require. My work on the review process included the researching the amount of money that states had been receiving under CAPTA, confidentiality laws around child death, the structure of child death reporting systems, and the reports, themselves. I looked at over 25 states, social science literature on the reliability of child death reporting, and the National MCH Center for Child Death Review and its new standardized reporting process.

In addition to my research, I had opportunities for a number of trips to neighboring sites that were related to public interest law. These included a large juvenile justice facility, a tour of community development sites (with the National Economic and Development Law Center), and the local courthouse. One particularly compelling experience for me was when we visited a juvenile justice facility and it reminded me quite a bit of the facility at which I worked that got me interested in juvenile justice. Speaking with the kids, who reminded me of my guys from my old job, reaffirmed my belief in the type of work done by organizations like National Center for Youth Law. At one point, a number of the inmates were asked to speak about their experiences and their self accountability. Candor let them represent their humanity quite clearly and in a positive way; it was beneficial to both sides and allowed us to share with one another.

I also liked being in charge of drafting our letter to a representative to persuade him to hold a House Human Resources Committee hearing on the issue of child death information disclosure and CAPTA. Being a part of the earliest process of idea development and recognizing the importance of a certain issue (which is now being actively discussed and litigated) made it very clear the type of impact that NCYL (and I) could have in a relatively short period of time. Another interesting experience was when I alerted our media person to the fact that a certain foster parent agency was advertising for foster parents with posters saying “Need a job? Be a foster parent.” We contacted the San Francisco paper, who ran an op-ed that received a lot of reader response a couple days later. Within two days, every sign on benches and in the Bay Area Rapid Transit system from the agency had been changed. Basically, there were all sorts of moments were I felt what a big impact I could have.

I am still very interested in youth law and am currently enrolled in a law school class, “Representing Children,” for which I am researching child representation practices in Alaska, Estonia, Nigeria, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Spain, and Puerto Rico. I plan on taking a year or two off, likely to participate in the Teach for America program, while deciding on whether I would like to apply to law school or graduate school in philosophy. I am also currently a fellow at the Zigler Center for Child Development and Social Policy at Yale, and will be conducting research on children institutions this semester.