Kinship foster care: protection or risk?
Adoption & Fostering › Vol. 33 Nbr. 3, September 2009
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Kinship foster care: protection or risk?
Introduction
In 2007, we carried out a study of foster care in Andalusia, in southern Spain. With its eight million inhabitants it is the most populated region in the country. Our research was commissioned by the Andalusian authority on child protection, which is interested in promoting family fostering in order to increase not only its numbers, but also its quality. This article presents some of our research findings, highlighting certain distinctive features of kinship foster care compared to what happens when the caregivers are unrelated to the child or young person. It reflects on the urgent need to improve the current state of the most common type of fostering in Spain, in order to ensure that it is truly a protection alternative rather than a way of perpetuating the children's previous risk-bearing situation. Background: child protection in Spain Compared to other countries child protection in Spain has three distinctive features. First, residential care is used extensively for children who have to be separated from their birth families. Second, intercountry adoptions greatly outnumber domestic adoptions. Lastly, kinship foster care predominates over non-relative foster care. Although this article focuses on this third feature, we believe that it is necessary to present figures to illustrate the other two in order to provide a better picture of the current trends in child protection in Spain. Official figures show that in 2005, 9,285 minors entered residential care (a rate of 121.8 per 100,000 children). In that same year, 4,383 children were placed in family foster care (30 per 100,000 children) and there were 691 national adoptions (11.7 per 100,000) and 5,423 international adoptions (70.9 per 100,000) (Ministry of Work and Social Affairs, 2007). As Browne and colleagues have pointed out (2006), the irony is that Spain is receiving a large number of children through international adoption while, at the same time, more children are kept within residential care and there are relatively few domestic adoptions. Changing this st...See the full content of this document
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