TW: mentions of suicide, childhood neglect and abuse.
If I told you I tried to kill myself multiple times during my youth, would you be surprised? Then again, you don’t actually know me. It’s not that surprising; the statistics say I am highly likely to attempt and even more likely to consider suicide.
I was in foster care for a portion of my childhood. Where I lived, I wasn’t able to flourish. At 11-years-old, I had been forced to believe and do horrible things. Even though I aged out and have since grown from that experience, I am still affected by my foster parent’s effects on my brain. I live with PTSD and nearly every day am reminded of the things that were done to me by my foster mother.
According to a 2007 study, adolescents involved with foster care were about four times more likely to have attempted suicide in the preceding 12 months. As someone who has experienced the neglect within the system, I can attest that this is a systemic issue.
As of 2020, the government of Canada’s Child Protective Services requires that potential foster parents take a 35-hour course conducted over a 12-week period, have a medical assessment, and a criminal record check. There is no required mental health assessment or frequent home visits. Unfortunately, this causes many unfit parents to slip through the cracks. Often children get placed in homes and are abused, including, physically, mentally, emotionally, and sexually. These acts are being committed by not only the parent, but in some cases by other youth living in the house.
Victoria (Tori) Lazeo is a friend of mine who lived in foster care until she was nine years old. She returned home to her father until she was fifteen at which point, she decided to move out due to his drug use. This left Tori homeless until she moved in with some friends at the start of May 2020. When Tori was eight years old, she was living in a home with another foster kid and one that was their biological child. In this home they beat her, to the point she needed surgery, she was also sexually assaulted by the 15-year-old foster kid who was living there at the time. Tori was pulled from her home by CPS when a church found out that her parents were severe drug addicts and that they were homeless. She says, “CPS was only called once my school noticed how malnourished I was.”
Social workers are supposed to be responsible for home visits, meetings with the kids and parents, and try their best to find a permanent placement for them — but there is no set standard on any website. As Alberta’s The Foster Care Handboook says, Foster care is a temporary placement for a child who is at risk of endangerment. Unfortunately, a lot of children and youth age out of care at the age of nineteen and end up struggling with the lack of knowledge, guidance, and experience that they need to be a functional member of society. Due to this a large percentage of youth who have either been in care or still are, attempt suicide, the ones who do succeed seemingly escape the endangerment that they were initially placed there to avoid.
When Tori and I were in homes, we often had “grab-and-go” bags in case we had to move houses with short notice, or had to flee due to lack of safety. PTSD really pushed that feeling of comfort and security. Honestly, all children and all people deserve to have a home where they feel safe, respected, trusted and can be vulnerable without judgment, to just have that stability.
We discussed what should be changed about the system as well, and I don’t think that Tori could have said it any better: “These kids need to be taken seriously and be listened to… The whole [foster care] system needs to be re-done, the criteria to pull children from their homes, the people who can be social workers, all of it. They need more mental health checks over education. That should take top priority… The workers need to reassess their values.”
We agreed upon the fact that children and youth who go through this system need to be heard and not dismissed. They need to be spoken to one on one with the social workers so they can be heard and not be scared about the vulnerability. They need that safe person and right now, they do not have one. Tori says, “It shouldn’t take a bunch of kids killing themselves for the government to fix [the system].”
