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PROPOSAL FOR
A STUDY OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS ON CHILDREN FROM
BEING TAKEN FROM THEIR PARENTS AND RAISED BY THE STATE
The chief argument made for the current excessive state (CSD - Children’s Services Division) authority to take children from their families has been the claim that doing so, whatever harm it causes to the parents or their rights, helps the children. This argument, which is undoubtedly true in cases of genuine physical, sexual or emotional abuse, weakens when the child has been taken on the basis of minor parental infractions or supposed infractions. There are numerous studies that show how children from abusive homes are likely to become abusers themselves, use drugs and/or otherwise run afoul of the law. By now, with many children taken from their parents for minor reasons, under the existing state statutes, it is time for a study of the psychological effects that the replacement of parental custody with state custody has on the children involved. Good social science should mandate this.
If the number of children taken from their parents were small, and their parents’ violations of the law and the bodies, spirits and dignity of the children consistently severe, such a study might be ill considered. Or it might, in that context, find that the children studied, when compared to control samples of children with genuinely abusive parents, did better than that control sample. But with Oregon one of the leading states in terms of the percentage of its youth being raised by the state, a different set of findings might be likely.
Such a study should compare the following groups in late or post-childhood ages (i.e., 16-18 and/or 18-21 or older if available):
- State-raised children (presumed to come from abusive families, many of which probably are not)
- Not state raised children who also come from abusive families. (This data might come from other states, or from the earlier studies, in Oregon, that laid the basis for the current statutory powers of CSD.)
- Not state raised children who do not come from abusive families (i.e., ordinary children without “risk indicators” in early childhood.) (Or, if the chief risk indicator - poverty - is present, the study would be weighted or subdivided into sub-classes of risk/not risk, to account for it.)
It is very likely such a study would find that the state-raised children have as high a rate of social and emotional problems as do (or did) children from abusive families who were not taken from those families. And the state raised children would, in all likelihood, show some distinguishing social and emotional problems of their own, as a class. These might be similar to those from genuinely abusive families, as the effect of state-sponsored family breakup is likely to cause similar problems - aggression, weak social skills, inability to bond, escape into drugs, insecurity, apathy, etc - as serious parental violence or sexual abuse.
But it is possible that the state-raised youths might show not only those problems, but others as well, perhaps with sufficient clarity and distinctiveness to warrant identification of a State-Raised Syndrome (SRS) among such children. This might include, beside the other, familiar social and emotional ills, severe anti-government feelings, fantasies of aggression at non-parental authority figures, confused (as opposed to aggressive) thinking, a failure to adopt any values (due to conflicting values from different foster parents/state appointed guardians), and a tendency to drift geographically, in imitation of the childhood experience.
Be that as it may, it would be an interesting experiment in social science to structure and fund such a research project. And it might help right the current imbalance in the way Oregon now treats families and children.
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