*NEW* Ideas for child welfare workers *NEW*

As a child welfare worker, you have a critical role in ensuring the safety of the queer and trans tweens and teens in your care.

If you haven’t met any queer and trans young people in your caseload, chances are they just haven’t come out to you. Queer and trans tweens and teens make up a stunning 30% of young people in foster care. Among homeless teens, 5%-40% are queer or trans (estimates vary depending on the study type and location). And as anyone in the child welfare system likely knows, young people who are homeless or unstably housed are more likely to end up in the foster care system.

For almost all queer and trans young people who end up on the streets or in foster care, their precipitating event (or, really, events) is abuse. In fact, queer and trans young people are disproportionately likely to be abused by their parents. Sometimes, that abuse is “general,” being targeted at all siblings equally or where a parent doesn’t know or isn’t concerned about their child being queer or trans.

Other times, however, a young person is specifically targeted. Sometimes, a parent selects a child to abuse due to that child’d identity or because gender non-conforming tweens and teens can seem “weaker” and, therefore, easier targets than cis siblings. Young people assigned male at birth can be specifically at risk here because “feminine boys” are so widely seen as easy victims. This can be especially true if the abuser is a father.

Once in the child welfare system, one of the challenges queer and trans young people face is a difficulty finding foster parents. Some foster parents are just not willing to have a queer or trans young person placed in their home: actual or potential foster parents are not any less likely to be queer- or trans-antagonistic than the general population. These prejudices could lead to adults who are concerned about or unwilling to have a queer or trans foster child. Adults with these biases may also end up being foster parents who are abusive. (Queer and trans young people can also be abused by their caseworkers, further exacerbating their trauma.)

Depending on your local context, you may need to do direct outreach to find foster parents who are open to having a queer or trans young person placed in their care. Among your actions should be ones direct and sustained outreach to LGBTQA+/SGL adults in your community to recruit and train them to serve as foster parents.

1. Is all of your staff trained on queer and trans young people in general and, more specifically, those in the child welfare system?
2. Is your foster parent training fully inclusive and celebratory of queer and trans young people?
3. Do you require all of your foster parents to be supportive of queer and trans tweens and teens, regardless of who is placed in their home?
   • If yes, how do you verify that the adults are telling the truth?
   • If not, what mechanism do you have to screen out unsupportive adults so a queer or trans young person is not placed in their home?
   • What mechanisms do you have for your young people in care to report abuse by foster parents?
4. What can foster parents do and not do regarding gender-affirming health care?
5. Can foster parents openly use a different name or set of pronouns for their foster youth?
6. What about other gender- or sexuality-affirming actions, like hair cuts and dying, ear or nose piercing, and the like?
7. What information about sexuality and safer sex can foster parents share with the young people in their care?
8. What support groups/forums/meetings do you have for foster or adoptive parents  with queer & trans young people in their care?
9. What support groups/forums/meetings do you have for foster or adoptive parents who are LGBTQA+/SGL?