Consent vs. Coercion with Foster Families Posted on March 1, 2006 Cassandra Simmel (bio) explains how difficult it can be to make sure that children and parents in the foster care system fully understand consent issues.

With this population it's important to remember that children by definition are in foster care because they've experienced some kind of abuse or neglect. These kinds of circumstances might lead foster children to really want to please authority figures. By having the assent process you need to be very careful that it does not come across at all as coercive, that they do have a choice in the matter.

It's also important to remember that there might be some cognitive delays in this population; they may not understand a lot of the language involved in the assent process and what this whole process is. They could be in this brand new environment of foster care, and they're so used to dealing with a whole host of authority figures. To them it's just, 'Here is someone else telling me I've got to take part in this. People are going to ask me questions, and do things. Alright. Whatever you want.'
You need to be very cognizant of their own cognitive limitations and really try and assess that. I

t's also important as far as the consent process, if the biological parents are involved. If it's a situation where they've just come back from foster care, they might be now living with their biological parents again. They might be at risk for being removed, might be a vulnerable population in that sense. I think that often times parents when they're consenting to these kinds of projects, they may think their children will never disclose anything about abuse. They don't understand the risk that they might be putting themselves into in these situations, or it's also likely that we need to think very broadly about discipline practices and other kinds of parenting practices which could be considered abuse in certain situations, but the parents may not construe them as abuse at all. So, they may very willingly agree to be part of this project not knowing that they're putting themselves at risk for some type of abuse disclosure, that could be interpreted as abuse.

« Back to Article