Greg Knotts:
The title “We Don’t Exactly Get the Welcome Wagon” comes from a self-assessment of an out gay teen describing the out-of-home child welfare system. This one sentence vividly and effectively describes his experience and provides a summative framework for Mallon’s in depth look at this challenging system. The out-of-home [group homes as opposed to in-home placements and ‘foster families’] child welfare system in the U.S. has nearly a half million adolescents receiving services (p. 11). These adolescents range in age from 13 to 18 or 19, with follow-up services available until a youth reaches age 21.
Teens find themselves in this system for a variety of reasons: parents asking them to leave their house (for any number of reasons), parents simply unable to care for them, state removal from biological homes (for a variety of abusive reasons) (p. 4). These kids are already saddled with the stigma of foster care. Add to that stigma the challenge of growing up at all, and then attempting to come out during this adolescent development, it is little wonder that the gay and lesbian teens in this study were ready and willing to share a myriad of experiences about the shaping of their identities.
The youth in this study all self-identified as gay or lesbian. Less than one third of the group interviewed were placed into care for reasons relating to their sexual orientation, but almost all were at least out to themselves by the time they were placed in the system (p. 4). The boys knew they were gay from a mean age of 10 and the girls from a mean age of 13 (p. 12). Mallon quotes several studies about children’s early sexuality that help to confirm many of the respondents’ assertions that they knew they were gay, or at least different, from ages as early as four or five. ”’It is easy to lose sight of the fact that sexuality is a component of human personality that is already developing in a child’s earliest years’” (p. 22). As in the child welfare system as a whole, this study has a majority (72%) of minority ethnicities represented (p. 11). These teens are battling attempting to grow up; attempting to grow up in the child welfare system; attempting to grow up in the child welfare system as a sexual minority and as a racial minority. Am I a foster kid? Am I a gay foster kid? Am I a gay black foster kid? “They must…choose to openly address or ignore a supplementary status that is generally regarded as marginal” (p. 21).
As if all of these challenges to identity development were not enough, the child welfare system is historically homophobic, intolerant and basically ignorant of the need to address these issues, as the following statement from a child care worker indicates:
We don’t have any residents who are gay or lesbian. We have over a hundred adolescents in our programs and I know all of them and none of them are gay or lesbian! We have never encountered any gay or lesbian adolescents in our programs….In some cases [my social workers] had a few kids that they suspected night have been, but after they talked to them, they found out that they weren’t (p. 7).
With such attitudes it is easy to see why none of the ‘suspects’ felt comfortable sharing any potential newly forming sexual identities.
Many of the teens interviewed were still in contact with their families — again for a variety of reasons. They not only had to come out to themselves, they needed to come out in the confines of the child welfare system and they needed to come out to their families who had already become estranged and sometimes, indifferent. As these kids searched for a good fit within the system, they also longed to find a fit within their biological families. Mallon offers a five-step process that this acceptance, this fit, often follows. Tacit awareness is when a gay or lesbian identity might be intimated or surmised because of behavioral and communication differences; parents noticing their child is ‘different’ from the other kids (p. 40). Response, the second stage, involves discovery or disclosure of the new identity and the initial reaction of the family, often creating crisis (p. 41). Adaptation often involves a family asking the gay child to “change” or to keep the disclosure private, and settlement is mourning the loss of the presumed heterosexual role the child was to take (p. 41). Amalgamation, the final stage of acceptance, moves the family toward new behaviors and new expectations for living with the gay or lesbian identity of their child (p. 42). Mallon’s family acceptance process is aligned with personal acceptance strategies of Herek, Troiden and others.
But it is the day-to-day living at these group homes that can bring the gay or lesbian youth the most difficulty. Most often it is other teens in the program that offer the most amount of challenge. Derogatory comments, harassment and even abuse plague the gay teen in child welfare (p. 85). The teens interviewed, worldly in their schema and approach to life, offer an interesting look at the homophobia they experience. “The kids that are the most uncomfortable will use the terms that are usually derogatory. I find these kids are most uncomfortable with their own sexuality” (p. 64). “With all of the criticism about faggot this and faggot that, the ones who are saying that are the ones who are usually doing it” (p. 78). “When I first came here, honey, they tried that shit with me, calling me a homo and a faggot and all that, but, those same boys were up knocking on my door late at night” (p. 96). What drives these same kids who knock on doors late at night to be the most vicious in terms of harassment and abuse? Internalized homophobia? Fear? “Of those interviewed, 78% of the adolescents and 88% of the child welfare professionals said that [the system] was not safe” (p. 86).
Mallon finds the gay kids are the ones who fear the most for their safety. 52% of the youth interviewed said they experienced physical abuse and 98% said they experience verbal abuse (p. 98). For example, one teen said:
I had three kids who used to harass me, the worst ones, and I knew they were gay too, they are all in the life, I see them in the Village, they are in the closet and they are so scared to get bashed that they join in the bashing themselves, they make it so much more violent for the out people (p. 101).
So as not to be ‘found out,’ it is easier to join in the harangue of others. Fear of discovery and overt homophobia make the child welfare system simply a reflection of the larger society.
It is in this larger society, ironically, that some teens literally run to. They choose the streets over a group home where the staff, hired to serve and protect them, offers the least amount of comfort or guidance. A teen remembered his experience:
[My social workers] told me that God didn’t intend for people to be gay and that I should be ashamed of myself….That made me feel bad, bad, so I just left there. I couldn’t take it. I would rather be on the streets than in a place where I wasn’t wanted (p. 113).
Some of those interviewed did find a good fit, with staff that supported them and where ‘you could be yourself’ (p. 79). Residents in these more positive settings took their cues from the staff, not surprising in an environment filled with youth looking for role models and an adult world to try and emulate. The previously mentioned overtly homophobic and abusive teens will typically not act that way if the environment does not welcome that behavior. “If staff are okay, then kids are okay…I don’t feel that there is too much prejudice in the kids. It’s more in the way the staff act” (p. 61). But when only 9% of those interviewed said they had a positive experience throughout their time in child welfare and 52% said they ever experienced this positive or ‘good fit’, the child welfare system has great strides to make (p. 79).
Mallon paints a bleak picture. “We Don’t Exactly Get the Welcome Wagon” is not only an appropriate title, it sounds as if it is an appropriate summation of the out-of-home child welfare system at present. Mallon synthesizes an exhaustive amount of interview and statistical material into this discussion. He takes on a challenging system and adds an even more challenging view to the debate. Mallon effectively brings voice to this population not on too many of our front burners. But he does it in a disjointed and haphazard fashion. He weaves individual threads throughout the narrative: homophobia, role modeling, adolescent development, that never become more than threads. The tapestry that is the child welfare system is left to readers to create for themselves. He does, however, conclude with some concrete ideas about the future of out-of-home child welfare.
His conclusion centers on the heterocentrism central to the child welfare system in general. Certainly, he asserts, child welfare suffers from the “twin myths of homosexual molestation and recruitment,” as well as the “mindless dominance of the larger society, heterocentrically oriented and heterosexually controlled” going relatively unchallenged (p. 121). Mallon suggests “there is no single policy or magic program that will erase the abuse and poor fits which most have endured”(p. 144), but rather suggests the need for three types of agencies: Voluntary Agencies and Public Agencies that are sensitive to gay and lesbian needs and the creation of Gay and Lesbian Agencies, run by sexual minorities for sexual minorities. Kids need role models and Mallon uses voices like these: “It helps to have a positive influence, it’s like I’m gay and I can help” and “Gay staff know more, they feel comfortable with you and they are not embarrassed about it or anything like that,” to suggest that even the teens in the system are clamoring for more than a visceral gay presence. “If all a gay kid knows about gay people is what he hears from straight people, then he’s probably never going to figure out what he is. He will probably only know about the myths of homosexuality” (p. 72). Someone has to help these kids who are already burdened with the social stigma of child welfare and “heterosexually oriented professionals, even those who are sensitized, cannot be substituted for gay/lesbian adults who share the actual experiences of growing up on the margins of society with these young people” (p. 127).
Ultimately, Mallon asserts, “discrimination, bias, and the absence of written policies appears to have allowed these environments to go unchecked” (p. 118). Sensitization would be nice, but it is policy and legislation that are needed when it comes to protecting these vulnerable youth on the winding road they traverse to developing their identities.
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