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Essay on The Legal and Ethical Issues Related to Foster Children Aging Out of Foster Care
Young people who are on the streets are often there because of a long series of failures by those whose job it is to intervene and protect them. To make matters worse, the foster care system was set up to take infants and young children from neglectful and abusive homes and is not equipped to deal with the complex demands of adolescence. Although the child welfare and education systems are the greatest source of those failures, the legal system too is implicated in its failure to effectively advocate for the needs of adolescents and teenagers.
A disproportionate number of homeless youth have been through the foster care and criminal and juvenile justice system at some point. Many of the crimes youth become involved in are directly related to their survival, such as turnstile jumping, begging, theft, sleeping in abandoned buildings, and prostitution. Once released from foster care and detention facilities, young persons are not provided a continuum of services and often return to the streets with a criminal record that now may be a barrier to certain public benefits.
Most of the legal service agencies working with homeless and runaway youth direct a great bulk of their services to entitlement work. Most homeless youth at different points in their lives will rely on public benefits in order to survive, and most of these young people will be denied or temporarily cut off from the benefits to which they are entitled, including cash benefits, Medicaid, food stamps, social security and emergency housing. They invariably face difficulty applying for and establishing eligibility for benefits. Because of lack of stable housing these youth often fail to respond to required documentation requests or appear at appointments and benefits are often revoked even after painstaking efforts to establish eligibility. Depending on the age of the young person, they may also need assistance in establishing emancipated....
