Nobody's Children: Abuse and Neglect, Foster Drift, and the Adoption Alternative

by Elizabeth Bartholet

Overview

Nobody's Children is an intense look at child welfare policies on abuse and neglect, foster care, and adoption. Elizabeth Bartholet, one of the nation's leading experts on family law, challenges the accepted orthodoxy that treats children as belonging to their kinship and their racial groups and that locks them into inadequate biological and foster homes. She asks us to apply the lessons learned from the battered women's movement as we look at battered children, and to question why family preservation ideology still reigns supreme when children rather than adult women are involved.

Bartholet asks us to take seriously the adoption option. She calls on the entire community to take responsibility for its children, to think of the children at risk of abuse and neglect as belonging to all of us, and to ensure that "Nobody's Children" become treasured members of somebody's family.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807023198
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	11/17/2000
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Bartholet is a professor at Harvard Law School. Her first book, Family Bonds: Adoption, Infertility, and the New World of Child Reproduction, was called "brilliant . . . an intelligent and passionate exploration of the legal, racial, and psychological issues" by The New York Times Book Review. The mother of three boys, two of them adopted from Peru, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Editorial Reviews

An extraordinary book. Chilling, inspiring, and utterly convincing, it creates an ironclad case for the adoption solution. —Sylvia Ann Hewlett, coauthor of The War Against Parents

"Bartholet sounds the alarm on the savage consequences the child welfare system has on so many children and challenges us to confront the reality that substance abuse . . . is the culprit in most cases of child abuse and neglect. Everyone who cares about our nation's most vulnerable children should read this book." —Joseph A. Califano, Jr., president, The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University

"Blood and race remain the over-riding factors in determining the future of suffering children. This should be required reading for those who look on adoption as the last resort." —Mary McGrory, Washington Post columnist

"Bartholet is a passionate crusader on behalf of children, and brings to her subject vigorous, clear-headed prose and the moral authority of her professional dedication." —Ann-Janine Morey, Chicago Tribune

"Bartholet issues a strong challenge to the child welfare system to facilitate adoption of children who have been abused and neglected…All people concerned about the healthy development of children should read Nobody's Children. I highly recommend it." —Alvin F. Poussaint, M.D., clinical professor of psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

"The way we treat abused and neglected children in this country remains a national scandal. Bartholet challenges the priority placed . . . on keeping battered or neglected children with their families or racial group, and makes a strong case for increased use of adoption." —Senator Howard M. Metzenbaum (ret.), author of the Multiethnic Placement Act

"A disturbing look at how the lives of 'America's modern-day orphans' are sacrificed for the often unrealistic goal of keeping troubled families together. . . . The author makes her case intelligently, fearlessly, and exhaustively." —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

It is inspiring to see an intellectual join passion with knowledge and focus them effectively upon an important social problem. That is precisely what Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor at Harvard law school and an expert in family and civil rights law, has done. For a decade, she has been on a crusade to better the predicament of parentless children. . . . .

Bartholet has now written a book, Nobody's Children, that deepens her critique of the way our society fails orphans and children who are abused or neglected by "parents." I put parents in quotation marks pursuant to one of the main lessons of Nobody's Children-that "true parenting should be defined more by social bonds than by blood." In Bartholet's view, parenting consists of nurturing a child. She resists endowing an individual with the honorific title of parent simply because that person sires a child or gives birth to it. [She argues that] the blood tie alone should be viewed as an insufficient predicate for parenthood, especially when adults seriously neglect or abuse children that are presumptively "theirs." When adults do these things, Bartholet contends, their parental rights should either be terminated or suspended and reinstated only if they show convincingly that they are apt to rehabilitate themselves forthwith. Children, Bartholet convincingly argues, should not be condemned to dangerous, dysfunctional homes once it is clear that putative "parents" cannot, in fact, parent. Rather than waste public resources and precious time on doomed efforts at "family preservation" where there is no realistic family to preserve, she advises administrators and legislators to free neglected and abused children more readily and quickly for adoption. . . . .

One need not agree with all that Bartholet writes . . . to feel admiration and gratitude for her analysis of the dismal situation in which all too many American children-our children-are stuck. She has distinguished herself nobly as a caring, combative and insightful public intellectual.

— Randall Kennedy is a professor at Harvard Law School. He is also a contributing editor of IntellectualCapital.com.

Randall Kennedy

A disturbing look at how the lives of "America's modern-day orphans" are sacrificed for the often unrealistic goal of keeping troubled families together. Bartholet (Family Bonds: Adoption and the Politics of Parenting, 1993), an expert on family law and an adoptive mother herself, traces the historical, political, and cultural reasons why battered and neglected children are far more likely to spend years in "foster limbo," or be sent back to abusive homes, than to be adopted by loving families. The author charges that despite recent legislation that bars race as a factor, everyone from private foundation administrators to judges, lawyers, and bureaucrats continues to be guided by the notion that children should be cared for by relatives, or adopted by families who look like them. Back in 1972, the National Association of Black Social Workers denounced transracial adoption as a form of "racial genocide." Though "race-matching policies have gone underground" since then, Bartholet believes they resurface in criteria like "kinship" and "cultural competence." Because other relatives may not be up to the task of parenting, and because there are not enough minority families to adopt all the children who need them, the author asserts that race-matching essentially condemns many youngsters to lasting physical, cognitive, and emotional damage. Whereas wife beaters are treated like criminals, child abusers, often plagued by poverty and substance abuse, tend to be seen as victims themselves. Bartholet expresses sympathy for their plight but demands that social workers stop using precious child-welfare resources to prop up deeply disturbed families. "What matters," she insists, "is that thechildren get into homes where they can thrive." She also suggests, somewhat unrealistically, that the state could take a proactive role in reducing child abuse by instituting "universal visitation" of all families before and after birth. The author makes her case intelligently, fearlessly, and exhaustively. Curiously, since her subject matter is so wrenching, Bartholet's writing lacks emotional power. Nobody's Children ultimately appeals not to the heart, but to the head.

Kirkus Reviews