As women go to jail at staggering rates, Dallas Morning News reporter Cary Aspinwall tapped into her outrage to tell the story of how their children get overlooked.
Through a fellowship with the USC Annenberg-Center for Health Journalism, we travel to LA and look at a program, which is helping ensure babies and parents are safe, healthy, and at the same time connecting them to other Native Americans in the big city.
“When you’re a foster girl, you feel unwanted,” a 21-year-old survivor said. “You’ve been through so much neglect and abuse. And then when you have a man tell you, ‘I love you, I’’ll take care of you, I’ll protect you,’ you want to believe him.”
At each turn, the people responsible for her safety failed her — her birth parents, relatives, foster parents, the Indiana Department of Child Services, school officials, therapists and others.
In Oklahoma, ranked No. 1 for per capita female incarceration, kids were going missing from school because their mothers were locked up in county jail. "This was the most complicated story I’ve ever done," writes 2016 National Fellow Cary Aspinwall.
A new analysis of national data reveals for the first time just a slew of disparities between the mental and physical health of children placed in foster care and otherwise similar kids.
Resilience is a popular buzzword in health circles these days. But as two speakers with extensive experience on the issue told journalists this week, it's a far more complex issue than media accounts commonly suggest.
Can parenting classes help end America’s disgraceful child-abuse epidemic?
Studies show that children who live with grandparents or other relatives typically fare better than children in foster care, but at what cost? Many say they are ill equipped and burnt out trying to be social workers, nurses and therapists for their vulnerable charges.
In California's Sacramento County, black children die at twice the rate of white children. The Sacramento City Council recently approved $750,000 for a county-led effort to lower the high death rate by connecting families with gang violence prevention, foster care assistance, health care and more.
