Torn to pieces

Brothers and sisters in foster care, rarely adopted together, are routinely split and scattered, never to see each other again.

By Nell Bernstein

Feb 16, 2000 | Christine (not her real name) remembers the day she lost her little brother.

She was 7 and he was 4. They had grown up close. Their mother was an alcoholic and a drug user, their father bedridden with emphysema, so they spent most of their time together, running around the apartment complex where they lived, Christine taking care, leading the way.

"My mom didn't know how to take care of us," Christine, now 22, recalls. "He attached himself to me because I showed him that I cared about him.

"He looked up to me and we always used to do things together. He would follow me around and go places with me, and I'd be watching him. I would always buy him toys and candy and tell him that I loved him. I remember playing with him all the time."

That day Christine was at a neighbor's apartment. She saw a police car drive by, and the next thing she knew, her mother was being arrested and Christine was being driven away in a separate car.

"I was so small," says Christine. "I just thought, OK, my mother's getting arrested. She's gonna come back and I'll probably live with my aunt and uncle until my mother gets well.

"But I never did come back."

Christine saw her brother a few times during the first confusing months in foster care. But then the visits stopped abruptly. At the time, Christine did not understand why. Later she learned from social workers that her brother had been adopted by a family that did not want him to have contact with "outside family members."

When her brother was 10 years old, Christine was allowed a single visit. "I always worried about him, I always thought about him all the time," Christine says. "I still do. But he hardly remembered me at all. He acted like he was [his adoptive parents'] child from birth and didn't know who I was."

Christine -- who went on to grow up in a series of foster homes, group homes and juvenile halls -- wound up feeling as if she were being punished for her mother's mistakes. "I was not part of what my mother did -- neglecting both of us," she says. "I understand that the mother gets singled out because she was neglecting, but to not let brothers and sisters be in contact doesn't make sense to me.

"We were innocent, we didn't do anything, and I don't think it's right for us not to see each other."

In the legal labyrinth set up to deal with disintegrating families, it is common to hear talk of a child's "best interests." They -- the best interests of a child, that is -- are considered when a court decides whether to permanently separate a parent and child. The judge has a legal obligation to question whether the risk of further abuse or neglect outweighs the benefits of the familial bond. In fact, parents have a constitutional right to be with their children unless proved unfit to care for them.

To divide siblings -- to send brothers and sisters in different directions without any explanation or a means to meet again -- doesn't require the same "clear and convincing evidence" that a bond must be severed. An abusive or neglectful parent actually has greater rights before the court to hold on to his or her children than those children have to remain with each other. Those who decide where children will go and with whom they remain are guided, for the most part, by necessity. They must focus on a child's prospects for adoption at a time when the demand, such as it is, is for lone children -- the younger, the better.

It's not that social workers don't try to keep sibings together, says Lillian Johnson, who was director of San Francisco's child welfare department for 10 years. They do. "But it's very quick and dirty, because the likelihood of finding a family that will take more than two children is so limited that pretty soon they start looking at, 'Which two kids should we keep together -- the oldest, the youngest, the middle ones? Should the oldest stay with youngest?'

"It ends up being rather arbitrary. Sometimes all they have are families that only want one child."

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