In more than 700 cases over five years, Georgia reported inadequate housing as the sole reason for taking a child into foster care, a WABE and ProPublica analysis found. Advocates say it would be cheaper to help families get housing.

In recent years, child welfare advocates and policymakers across the country have been working to prevent situations like this, arguing that no parent should ever lose their children just because they can’t afford housing. A handful of states now have laws and policies prohibiting government agencies from taking children into foster care because of homelessness. Georgia has not adopted such a rule, but the state Court of Appeals has ruled a number of times that unstable housing and employment “in no way constitutes intentional or unintentional misconduct resulting in abuse or neglect” that would justify child removals.

But Wise’s experience illustrates how an inability to afford housing still stands between parents and their children in many child welfare cases in Georgia.

Between fiscal years 2018 and 2022, DFCS reported “inadequate housing” as the sole reason for removing a child in more than 700 cases, according to an analysis by WABE and ProPublica.

The analysis, using data from the federal Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, which tracks child removal cases in each state, also shows that in thousands of additional cases — about 20% of Georgia’s nearly 31,000 child removals during the five-year period — DFCS reported housing as one of multiple reasons. Housing was the third most reported reason after substance use and neglect.

  • ivanafterall@kbin.social
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    10 months ago

    Why do Republicans hate children so much? Is it because they’re attracted to them, but can’t have them or…?

    • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I don’t think they hate children per se, I think they just hate poor people. Gotta punish the poors for having the audacity to have children they can’t afford despite their criminalizing abortion!

      • WaxiestSteam69@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        It’s using the kids to punish the parents. Members of my wife’s family claim to be Christians but support these types of policies and don’t see the problem. I’ve had to check out when yhose discussions come up.

        • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Who can forget that famous gospel where Jesus says “fuck them kids!”

          I swear, supply side Jesus ruins everything.

      • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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        10 months ago

        And they don’t think of children as people at all, just pawns they can use to hurt poor adults.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    In the 1920s, my grandmother’s parents abandoned her with not especially close relatives who didn’t care much for her in Schenectady, NY so they could go back to New York City. In the 1950s, my mother, my uncle and my grandparents were essentially homeless for a while. They lived on the enclosed porch of a friend who had a house in Queens. If they had lived in Georgia, and it had been today, I couldn’t even imagine how my grandmother, abandoned by her own parents, would have reacted if my mother had been taken away from her.

    They got their own home after a year and a half or so and my mother was in no way scarred by the experience. In fact, she liked it because the family inside the house had a television and she could watch it.