Hope and Resiliency: Interrupting the Child Welfare System to Prison Pipeline

A growing body of literature shows that most children and youth who enter the child welfare system (CWS) have experienced multiple traumas and losing the home they are familiar with creates additional trauma. The same body of research explains that symptoms of multiple traumas manifest as maladaptive behaviors and often go untreated. These untreated symptoms manifest as problem behaviors and can carry over into adult years, leading to criminal justice system involvement. Research on hope as a mitigating factor to the disruptive process of entering the CWS is limited; instead, existing peer-reviewed literature points to factors that could diminish hope. Foster care was positively correlated with juvenile justice system (JJS) involvement and later jail placement. These findings are especially common among Black youth owing to discrimination by law enforcement. Another study found that while foster youth who were aging out of care had hopes for their future, they were overshadowed by the fears of turning into parents who could not care for them. Rather than helping vulnerable children and youth, the foster care system is tasked with navigating personal biases among service providers and structural barriers to ensuring the successful delivery of much-needed mental health care and social support to foster care youth, as this is critical to future success among at-risk youth. Without these basic requirements being met, barriers to instilling hope are likely to continue. As such, we want to determine the potential impacts hope and hopelessness may have on those who have been impacted by the CWS.

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Hi everyone,

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Thanks for taking a few minutes to watch

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our video on hope and resiliency interrupting the child

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welfare to prison pipeline.

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This is a pretty long presentation. So for the sake of time,

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I’m gonna skip around and get to the main points.

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So that’s me in the picture. I’m Jackie Custer and I’m a senior in the B. S. W.

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Program at George Mason University.

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I’m also an undergrad research assistant

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at the social work Integrative research lab

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and one of the professors I work for is also my mentor.

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Dr Michelle hand of the social work department.

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The plan is to get my Masters in the accelerated

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program and then probably on to get my PhD,

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as you can see from the blurb about me,

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I have a particular interest in this study,

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given my background history with the criminal justice system,

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luckily I had a lot of social support and healthy

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people in my life to help me through that dark time

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and I want to be able to give that to Children within the foster care system who

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might have a little hope,

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but could probably used to stand a little more and definitely so we

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can find a way to interrupt the child welfare system to prison pipeline.

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So I’m not going to go through all of these, but

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because they’re the basics about the child welfare system,

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just know that there are about

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440,000 Children in the welfare system in the United States and

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the majority of them have encountered at least one trauma,

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if not multiple traumas throughout their lives and then

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entering into the welfare system adds another trauma.

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And the issue with this is that a lot of

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these traumas are going undiagnosed or misdiagnosed and symptoms of trauma

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manifest in

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unhealthy maladaptive behaviors. And when these go untreated,

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these can carry over into

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older,

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you know, teens and

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and early adulthood, leading to

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behaviors that can lead to juvenile justice system

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or criminal or criminal justice system interventions.

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So,

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something I forgot to mention briefly in the basics of

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the child welfare system are the benefits of hope.

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Hope can provide us with a direction to take in life and when we have hope

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were more likely to achieve those goals.

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Hope has also been um proven to lower stress and anxiety levels.

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So we’ll go here to the current study, um what’s been done so far?

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We’ve used a three database search

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um,

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and asked a what is known about the foster care to prison

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pipeline b what is the role of hope and alleviating maladaptive behaviors

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from the effects of multiple traumas and see what are some ways

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to bring hope to the lives of current foster care youth.

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So the results

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That we got total in total from three databases are 88 articles and 27

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of which have been put into the review and more than half have been

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looked over so far. Um results show a gap in the literature on parts B and C from above.

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Um, and numerous studies cite

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reasons why

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Children and youth in the foster care and child welfare systems would be

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hope less instead of hopeful.

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So the preliminary results here are some qualitative themes we found resilience,

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fear, uncertainty, hopelessness, hope and trauma.

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So while these Children can be resilient and can have hope,

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they can certainly use a little bit more on suggestions for

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future research um and child welfare service to prison pipeline solutions.

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Um the one of the most um

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uh importance here is that more research policy

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and practice that include the perspectives and voices

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of the youth who live or lived in foster care are of utmost importance to us.

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Okay, so moving forward,

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um we’re going to continue adding results to the rapid review spreadsheet

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and with what we’ve uncovered so far,

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we’ve identified a target demographic with whom we will conduct interviews.

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These are people who are formally incarcerated,

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who have come from the child welfare system,

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those who have Children in the child welfare system

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and the professionals who have worked for them.

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So the interviews are going to be guided.

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Um we’ll have some more details as soon as we finish

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with entering the data from the peer reviewed scholarly articles.

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Um but something that came up that was interesting is an adult hope scale.

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It will be invaluable to us in determining

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current levels of hope amongst this population.

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I predict that the simple act of talking about hope

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will bring hope to the individual who’s being interviewed.

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Alright, so, spreading the word, join us on instagram at talk.

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Hope give hope and help us build

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and find solutions and giving hope to those impacted by the child welfare system.

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How you can help

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um you can volunteer to be a big brother or sister,

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and there’s the website to go to for that.

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Um

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and lastly, I know this has been pretty quick.

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Lastly,

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I’d like to acknowledge that this work would not be

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possible without the guidance and support of Dr Michelle Hand.

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Thank you so much Dr hand.

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And a special thanks to my colleagues, Elle and Brandon,

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whose patience and continuous support,

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mean the world to me and congrats to all of us for making it this far with our research.

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They