Children's Surveillance in Foster Care

Our dataset was on the Adoption and Foster Care Reporting System’s most recent data from 2023 available on the Children’s Bureau website. AFCARS reports things such as types of trauma the children have experienced, their living situation before being in the care of the state, race, gender, and a myriad of other identifying factors. Our main question that led our study asked if children’s identifying information in foster care can be justified by the AFCARS data collection system. This is an ethical concern about the privacy and surveillance of children within the AFCARS system.

We went about our research by investigating how other reliable organizations such as the Adoption Council and Children’s Rights have analyzed the data. First, we compared the 2023 AFCARS data to past years which allowed us to better understand the effectiveness of the data collection as it pertains to supporting children in the system. Next, we searched for any gaps in the data. We used Poirier’s three-part method to navigate and efficiently conduct our study. To expand on our research question, we examined the effectiveness of the AFCARS’ data through exploring how often children in the foster care system actually have the appropriate resources available to them.

From our research and analysis, we found that the data on children in foster care is required to meet children’s needs and to emphasize the issues within the system. The curation of the AFCARS data allows for the government to better determine the types of resources and aid that they need to have available for children in the foster care system. The numbers revealed that 15,590 youth aged-out of foster care in 2023. This data exposes how states are not following federally mandated timeframes to move children into permanent families. Another prominent issue exposed from our analysis is that many children in foster care are not given adequate resources and support. According to “Children’s Rights”, an estimated 80% of children in foster care are considered to have severe mental health challenges, however less than 25% of those children are given access to mental health services within their first year of being under the care of the state. Overall, we found that our government should be using this close surveillance of children in foster care to address and resolve issues within the system.