How do you tell the stories of people deemed ‘statistically insufficient’?

While researching my project on foster care in the spring, I was surprised to find a press release that was sent out last December that I hadn’t noticed before. It was from the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), an organization protecting and promoting the civil rights of Asian Americans. It highlighted an amicus brief the organization had filed to the New York State Court of Appeals to support a Chinese immigrant father’s challenge against the lower court’s decision to terminate his custody of his child. 

AALDEF is an organization well known in the Chinese community, and Chinese language media outlets have been covering almost all the issues the organization takes on. But this press release had not been turned into a story anywhere in the Chinese language media.    

Part of the reason for it being ignored was soon made clear during ensuing interviews. A typical one was with an executive of a foster agency. I asked why the number of Asian American foster parents is so low in New York when Asians make up 18% of the population. The agency serves hundreds of foster children, including only a handful of Asians. The executive told me that when she was preparing for the interview, she searched through the statistics and found that Asians are not even listed in many official child welfare data sets, such as for New York State’s Child Welfare Services Quarterly Reports.

This is not a surprise. Until recently, many political polls or TV viewership ratings did not separate out Asians as a group because they didn’t make up a significant part of the population. In statistics, this is called “statistically insufficient,” meaning that the number is too small to draw any conclusion.  

While the rapid growth of the Asian American population — more than tripled over the past three decades — has prompted some data collectors to include a category for them, the field of child welfare (where Asians are vastly underrepresented) is changing slowly. The near invisibility of Asians in foster care stats, and their low numbers when they are shown, have sent a message to journalists: “Nothing is going on here.” 

Even the Asian media outlets that have been covering the community extensively may have missed important stories because of that. It partly explains why there wasn’t a single story I could find that thoroughly examined the foster care system in the Chinese language media outlets before my project, which looked at how the lack of Asian foster parents can lead to a loss of culture and language. The problem makes it harder to reunite families and can lead to a  host of negative long-term consequences for both kids and their parents. 

There are many challenges and barriers to covering people who are dismissed as “statistically insufficient.” For one, it is very hard to find anecdotes. This is particularly true with the Asian community, where people tend to be tightlipped about domestic conflicts or a humiliating loss of face. And the fact that almost all court documents regarding a child welfare case are sealed is also not helpful either. 

There is no better way to overcome this challenge than old-fashioned shoe leather journalism. You have to ask everyone you think may have access to cases and information, and leave no stone unturned. It is time consuming, but when you eventually find people who would like to share their stories, you feel very satisfied. 

One lesson I learned during the process of doing this project is that “statistically insufficient” people are often likely to be isolated. Due to the lack of media coverage and the “hush hush” tendency of Asian cultures, the birth parents fighting to get their children back that I have interviewed didn’t know who to turn to when they needed an ear. They didn’t even realize they were not the only ones who had been going through the ordeal. 

That is indeed part of the function of my story — to help parents see that they are not the only ones struggling with the child welfare system. Before the story was published, I found it was helpful to share some of my findings with my sources, especially the isolated parents. Without revealing too much detail, I’d tell them I had just interviewed another parent coming from their same home city and having had a similar experience with the system. I found the sources really appreciated that and it also helped to encourage them to share their own stories.     

For someone like me who is not a child welfare reporter, the system could be complicated and overwhelming. It was easy to go from not knowing where to look to feeling like everywhere seemed to be worth looking at. My advice is to try to read as much as you can about the child welfare system to get the bigger picture, but constantly remind yourself about the angle of the story that you are pursuing to avoid getting lost in the woods. 

In September, the New York Court of Appeals will hear the case of the Chinese father featured in that overlooked press release (as well as in my story), and I plan to follow their plight through to the end. The reason is simple: My story has shown that “statistically insufficient” doesn’t mean no one suffers from inadequate services. And the suffering is real. For example, a main character in my story, Mr. N saw his daughter, who lost her ability to communicate in Chinese with him while in the foster system, eventually adopted by her foster parents. The father said he’d have to live in the pain of losing his daughter forever.      

If a family’s reunion is postponed or canceled because of inadequate services in the system, then the hurt is lasting. This largely overlooked suffering, happening to people whose existence is often not counted, is community news really worth pursuing.