Abstract
Young people in the child welfare system are subjected to intensive and wide-ranging observation, surveillance and documentation practices that have been facilitated by the expanding use of digital technologies. Drawing on qualitative research, this article examines the pervasiveness of these governmental practices and their impacts on the psychological wellbeing and long-term trajectory of young people. Leveraging a Foucauldian framework, this article theorizes a form of 21st-century ‘archival surveillance’ and argues that contrary to the intended goal of utilizing documentation to protect children and minimize liability, the child welfare system’s overuse and misuse of digital technologies violate children’s rights and disproportionally criminalize youth of colour. At the same time, youth appropriate digital technologies in ways that help them survive, connect and resist the inhumane impacts of this archival surveillance.
Introduction
I remember because it was my first time [in court]. I was just like, ‘What are those? What are they doing?’ And the [other youth] said, ‘That’s your file’. Your file is literally what defines you … The judges, the attorneys, the staff, all they needed to do was look at your file and be like, ‘I know everything about you. I know what you’ve done’. That’s how people know you, is your file. So the other youth were like, ‘The bigger your file, the more terrible kid you are’. And I was looking at mine and this was my first time, and I was like, ‘What the hell?! Why is mine so big?’ (Alejandra)
At a 2014 stakeholder event, Philip Browning, Director of Los Angeles County’s (LAC) Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), announced that he hoped to roll out a new iPad programme where emergency response social workers could use the devices to distract children with games like Angry Birds while also passively recording conversations between the worker and the family. To the large crowd of senior administrators, policymakers and non-profit 1 leaders present, this use of digital technology did not appear to raise any concerns; contrarily, the programme is a consistent extension of nationwide practices that utilize documentation procedures to protect children’s rights and safeguard against liability. While the programme has yet to be rolled out, it highlights the increasing use of digital technologies by child welfare bureaucracies to achieve their programmatic mission and the troubling issues of consent, privacy and children’s rights that accompany them.
As Alejandra, a 23-year-old Mexican American crossover youth 2 who spent her adolescence rotating between juvenile detention facilities and group homes, reveals in the epigraph, youth in care do not have detailed knowledge of their ‘file’ and are confounded when adults in power use it to make unilateral decisions about their lives. As DCFS collects information, data and evidentiary documentation on young people and families, continuously expanding the digital archive or individual ‘file’ on each foster youth, children’s rights and wellbeing are violently compromised. This article explores the way the overarching emphasis on documentation procedures fails to account for the voices and desires of young people and works to systematically disempower those at the centre of these archives – foster youth themselves.
Young people in the child welfare system are under a particularly persistent microscope: digital cameras photograph their bodies to be added to state databases; recorders document their conversations in court; security cameras track their movements in group homes; and state workers add documents to their file on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. The potential for continuous surveillance is only increasing. New digital technologies have not only expanded the capacity of the child welfare system to record larger quantities of material, growing the archive on each foster youth, but have also expanded the ability to search, leverage and share that material. Social workers and judges can now comb through decades worth of youth case files with a click of button or digitally access inter-agency documents in a matter of minutes.
Child welfare agencies such as DCFS argue these documentation and file-sharing practices are an important way to safeguard children’s rights, enhance service delivery and facilitate continuity of care, an argument backed by various academic, foundation and government reports (Department of Children and Families Services, 2014; Feely, 2012; Johnson et al., 2012; Potter and Brittain, 2009). The assumption that intensive digital documentation and file sharing are in the ‘best interests of the child’ (Blue Ribbon Commission, 2014: v), as the County argues, however, is a paternalistic one that minimizes youth voices (Coady, 1996) and obfuscates the harm and racialized violence of these practices. In particular, narratives about foster youth vulnerability and the need to increase adult protection have disproportionally hurt youth of colour, spawning a series of problematic laws in the 1990s, such as the Adoption and Safe Families Act, that have minimized foster youth’s chances of reunification with their families (Briggs, 2012).
This article argues that contrary to the intended goal of utilizing documentation practices to enhance child protection, DCFS’ invasive overuse and misuse of digital technologies violate children’s rights to privacy, consent and self-determination, and serve to inhumanely police youth of colour, who make up 86% of youth in care (County of Los Angeles DCFS, 2015). Drawing on 2 years of data and deploying a Foucauldian framework, this article theorizes a form of 21st-century ‘archival surveillance’, arguing that the over-reliance on the archive as a site through which a child can be known and protected becomes an instrument that justifies and leads to their disempowerment and criminalization. More specifically, I argue that foster youth’s files create a panoptic web of surveillance that disciplines young people in two key ways. First, through accruing a massive amount of data, foster youth’s files provide an archive of specific materials that is often leveraged as ‘evidence’ to justify their physical restriction, re-placement or incarceration. Digital practices that facilitate the over-documentation of youth bodies allow private behaviours to become potentially deviant ones, therefore expanding the likelihood of being criminalized; furthermore, the longevity and searchability of digital files intensify the inescapability of this process. Second, while archival surveillance ensnares many foster youth in a web of criminalization that severely impacts their life chances, I argue that it succeeds in policing even those it does not formally criminalize through encouraging all foster youth to monitor and surveil themselves; in other words, foster youth become so fearful of their files and the attendant threat of criminalization that they begin to regulate themselves, behaving as if they are always being documented, even when they are not.
While archival surveillance impacts the lives of foster youth in profound and invasive ways, young people in the system find avenues to resist the totalizing narrative and policing function of their file through their own use of digital technologies. Exploring how foster youth create and utilize blogs, websites and mobile apps to tell their stories, document abuses, share resources and counter pathologizing narratives, this article seeks to understand how the very digital technologies that dispossess can also be tools youth deploy to survive, connect and resist.
Method and setting
This article draws on 2 years of ethnographic fieldwork as a practitioner-researcher in Southern California, nearly 40 qualitative interviews, and visual and discursive analysis of DCFS’ online memos, training manuals and newsletters. From August 2013 through October 2015, I served as the founding programme coordinator for a university-based college access programme for current and former foster youth. During this same period, I also attended and took field notes at more than 60 different public meetings, conferences, fundraisers, workshops and fairs related to foster youth services in LAC. Foster youth’s voices were notably absent from most of these events. Building from the belief that foster youth themselves are the experts on foster care, 3 this article draws heavily on qualitative interviews with foster youth and those close to them. Under institutional review board (IRB) approval, I interviewed a total of 38 individuals, 28 former foster youth and 10 practitioners. Prior to the interviews, informed consent was obtained and any questions answered. Interviews were open-ended and ranged from 30 minutes to over 2 hours; follow-up interviews were conducted with four participants. 4 Two interviews were also conducted with focus groups that youth themselves had formed; these interviews highlighted young people as valued experts (Levine and Zimmerman, 1996) and collectively produced insights unlikely to be captured individually (Krueger and Casey, 2009). Interviews were recorded and transcribed; after transcription, a dual process of manual and digital coding was utilized to identify recurring themes. While pseudonyms were assigned, humour, slang and swear words were kept intact in an effort to minimize researcher mediation of youth voices (Sprague, 2005).
When adjusting for age, the youth interviewed were representative of the larger DCFS foster youth population in LAC in terms of geography, ethnicity, gender and sexuality in so much as any group can be ‘representative’ of these markers. The final sample of foster youth included 10 who identified 5 as Black or African American (36%); 9 who identified as Latino, Hispanic, Chicano, Mexican American or Salvadoran (32%); 8 who identified as mixed (28.5%); and 1 who identified as White (3.5%), mirroring the overrepresentation of youth of colour at every juncture of the child welfare system in Los Angeles (County of Los Angeles DCFS, 2015) and nationwide (Roberts, 2003). Roughly half the youth identified as men and half as women. Six (21%) identified as openly lesbian, gay, bisexual or queer. Seven (25%) had children. While all participants were technically ‘former’ foster youth, having aged out at 18 or 21, I deploy the term ‘foster youth’ as a conscious effort to recognize an identity that participants themselves highlighted as paramount. As several youth emphasized, there is ‘no expiration date’ on their foster care experience.
Archival overdrive: The intensification of data collection and sharing
Digital technologies have facilitated the expansion of child welfare documentary practices through enabling rapid communication and file sharing between distinct departments and through expanding the capacity to document, surveil and subsequently search the materials gathered and produced, resulting in an extensive archival panopticon that surveils predominantly young people of colour. The extensive degree of documentation results in a net loss of time invested in young people; social workers in this study report spending two-thirds of their time on paperwork, findings similar to those reported countywide (Blue Ribbon Commission, 2014). As state workers dig deeper into foster youth’s lives and document their observations of them, they draw them into a web of panoptic surveillance. The panopticon, Foucault points out, is a system of constant observation and ‘permanent documentation’ that appears invisible but exercises its disciplinary power through imposing on its subjects a ‘compulsory visibility’ (Foucault and Rabinow, 1984: 218, 199). Child welfare files help produce this visibility through the constant over-documentation of young people’s lives. Each month social workers investigate the status of each child on their caseload and write detailed reports; in addition, social workers must complete and file paperwork with the requisite authorities for particular situations, such as when a young person is to be transported in someone’s vehicle, has a visit with their siblings, needs medical treatment, switches schools, gets into a fight or runs away. In group homes, the level of documentation is even higher; behaviours that in a family-based setting might not be viewed as unusual – such as arguing with a sibling or housemate over the computer, talking back to an adult or not being hungry for breakfast one day – suddenly become worthy of recording. As scholar Mike Featherstone (2006) argues, ‘archive reason with its thirst for detail sees everything as potentially significant and archivable’ (p. 595). Digital video surveillance has only facilitated the proliferation of archives on young people, adding hours and hours of material to files that detail young people’s behaviours and movements. That youth do not consent to being documented, visually or verbally, is irrelevant; foster youth are wards of the state and as such their archives are outside of their own control.
More than three-quarters of the foster youth in this study brought up their ‘file’, although there was no research question specifically aimed at this. Young people emphasized how surveilled they felt by an expansive archive kept about them over which they had no control and traced the ways it impacted their daily life and long-term trajectory. Melanie, for instance, a 23-year-old foster youth who identifies as Hispanic and Salvadoran, details the non-consensual and invasive process of over-documentation:
I don’t have anything nice to say about DCFS … Everything is about paperwork … Every time [my social worker] would come to meet with me, everything I would tell her would be included in the report the following month.
Melanie’s file, like those of all group home residents, included not just reports from her social worker, but from every employee that worked at her group home in Hollywood. It was ‘violating’, she emphasizes, and incredibly disempowering to have no control over what was documented and who had access to it:
All of the staff always have to write in your file at the end of each shift. So the longer you have been living [at the group home] the more files you have. But you were never allowed to look at your file. And when a new staff came in, in order for them to know what happened on the previous shift, the first thing they had to do when they got there was read the file. None of us ever knew what was in the file, but all of these people were policing us and watching us. Some of them would come up to you and say, ‘Oh, I heard about what you did earlier today’. … [It might be] something you didn’t want someone to know. But they know because it was written in your file.
For Melanie, the surveillance that went into producing an official archive on her life made her feel ‘policed’ and dispossessed of the ability to tell her own story; Melanie came to be known not through human-to-human interactions with staff or her own self-presentation, but predominantly through her adult-narrated file.
In all, 15 of the youth in the sample emphasized concerns regarding the validity of the narratives in their files and the ways they were adult-centric. Martin, for instance, a 23-year-old African American foster youth currently living at a transitional housing programme (THP), says that he would ‘read [his] file and it was a whole lot of lies’ and covered only his aunt’s point of view. Diamond, a 24-year-old foster youth who identifies as African American or Black, concurs that her social worker and foster mom had a close relationship and would joke over coffee for an hour as they talked about her. ‘I almost felt absent’, she says, ‘the conversation was about me. I didn’t have a voice’. While the right of children to participate in decisions that impact their lives is enshrined as a right under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, in reality, protection rights often far outweigh participation rights; this is often because adults in power rarely recognize children – particularly low-income children and children of colour – as agents and because the notion of ‘protection’ is constructed from an adult perspective that severely neglects the voices and vantage points of young people. While foster youth files are supposed to capture the narratives of young people, they are often adult-centric, excluding young people’s voices altogether.
The files of young people like Melanie, Martin and Diamond include not only adult-mediated reports from social workers and group home employees but also cross-agency digital files, including school records, photos, medical and mental health records and law enforcement documents. DCFS’ Student Information Tracking System Database, for instance, allows social workers to access foster youth’s attendance records, report cards and disciplinary reports without having to ever go to the school. In some instances, this inter-agency digital collaboration can improve continuity of care for young people with dozens of caregivers in their lives; at the same time, it also extends the tentacles of archival surveillance into more realms of young people’s everyday lives.
Archives as evidence: The role of digital files in pathologizing and criminalizing foster youth
Youth in foster care report that throughout their tenure in the system, their file is a weapon regularly used against them – a tool used to justify internal punishment, transfer from a foster family placement to a group home, transfer from a low-level group home to a lockdown facility or incarceration in a juvenile detention facility. Of the 28 youth interviewed, 57% were forced to move to a higher level residential placement as a result of a behavioural infraction, and 40% were at some point sentenced to a detention facility. While particular behaviours, law enforcement structures and legislative realities shape this process of criminalization, documentation procedures contribute in two key ways. First, through documenting events – including benign and private ones – and cataloguing them in separate youth files, the archive renders these occurrences visible, marking them as significant and individual events. Second, through permanently storing searchable material, the archive facilitates the progressive interpretation of foster youth behaviours as pathological, preventing foster youth from having a ‘clean slate’ and thereby increasing their chance of criminalization. Foucault (1982) argues, ‘the archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events’ (p. 129). In other words, the very act of documenting something helps render it potentially important; this is especially the case with foster youth.
Mirroring the former three-strike policy of the California criminal justice system, many group homes in Los Angeles expel young people from the facility after a certain number of successive infractions, even minor ones, are documented in their file. In one group home, for instance, one young woman in the study was expelled and transferred to a lockdown group home for throwing a pillow, because this behaviour, when read together with other episodes documented in her file, was interpreted by the judge as evidence of her on-going non-compliance, a decision she was unable to appeal. While in criminal courts there is the theoretical right to due process, Gabriel Chin (2002) points out that within administrative law and the bureaucratic ‘fourth branch’ of government, under which the child welfare system falls, there is not a parallel concept.
A detailed examination of Vlad’s case similarly illustrates how the adult-centric reports and cross-agency documents that accrue over many years in a youth’s file can be collectively read in ways that criminalize youth and permanently impact their lives. Vlad, a 22-year-old who identifies as mixed (Mexican, Puerto Rican, Chilean and European heritage) and who spent most of his life in the system, was thriving in a kinship placement at his uncle’s home; he took music lessons, loved his school and was close with his uncle. However, after his uncle’s new girlfriend moved in, things deteriorated; the girlfriend did not like sharing space with Vlad and requested he move. After a Halloween glow lamp caught fire in Vlad’s lofted bed, the girlfriend reported to DCFS that Vlad had intentionally lit the fire, and as a result, he was immediately removed from the home. Vlad insisted that he was not even in the room when the fire started and kept mentioning the glow lamp in his lofted bed, but it was too late; having a fire-setting accusation in one’s file is serious business – he was now in the dreaded ‘red zone’ of infractions and there was no way to turn back.
Jacques Derrida (1998) illustrates how the archive not only stores knowledge but also interprets it through ‘gathering together signs’ (p. 3). In Vlad’s case, for instance, it was not documentation itself that proved problematic for him but the fact that only certain things were documented (the girlfriend’s side of the story) in lieu of others (his side of the story) and that certain items collectively logged within the archive – a missed therapy appointment, a failure to do an assignment at school, a mysterious fire – were collectively interpreted as a sign of deviance and dangerousness meriting removal and re-placement in a higher level lockdown facility.
Vlad’s file impacted his placement in part because details from youth files are shared with prospective families and group homes, and as Alejandra mentioned, if you have a big file or serious ‘red marks’, you are seen as a ‘bad’ kid. Robert, a White social worker who has been with DCFS for 4 years, says that he worked at a mid-level group home that children’s social workers would call ‘really desperate to place kids’. The non-profit administering the group home encouraged staff to ensure the youth was a ‘good fit’ since it was not high security. ‘I hate to say this’, Robert continues,
But it’s like being a used car salesman cause those kids are so hard to place … you have to really sell it up … cause most group homes won’t take fire starters or kids with psych holds on their record.
Using the troubling language of ‘used car salesman’, Robert illustrates how in a semi-privatized system where contracted agencies have the right to turn youth away, young people with thicker files experience more placements and are sent to more punitive facilities. In Vlad’s case, after several lower level neighbourhood-based group homes rejected him because of his alleged fire-setting history, the judge sent him to a large higher level group home, replete with walls, security cameras, on-site school and strict policies regarding leaving campus. It took him months to earn back basic privileges at this facility.
As foster youth like Vlad get moved from place to place, their file both grows and follows them; digitization in particular allows bulky decade-long foster youth files to be quickly accessed and searched. Oscar, a 21-year-old half Black and half Salvadoran foster youth who emancipated early from the system and now lives at a THP, highlights the inescapability of this process with a striking analogy:
Have you ever seen hitchhikers? They got that stink and they got that red bag that they carry wherever they go. When I was in the system that was me. Wherever I went, they for sure made sure every foster home I went to knew about every incident I did from A to B … They put, ‘he had attitude problem, he didn’t want to listen when he had to go to bed at night. He AWOL’d’.
6
It’s like a baggage you carry around everywhere you go. It basically marks you.
For Oscar, these ‘marks’ had significant and irrevocable consequences. Because Oscar had so many ‘red reports’ in his file – most due to being suicidal or running away to visit his siblings placed in other homes – he was shut out of not just foster homes, but eventually even standard group homes until the only option left was a gated lockdown facility with an on-site school. Although he technically had not committed any crimes and was not actually on probation or incarcerated, to Oscar the difference felt negligible: ‘You go to school, you live, you eat, everything in the same place. [There’s] barbed wires. It’s basically jail, outside of jail’.
Through cataloguing so-called transgressions in a singular file, the archive helps to individuate social problems and obfuscate their material and political causes. As Foucault elucidates, the archive becomes a key way to ‘maintain [the subject] in his individual features’ (Foucault and Rabinow, 1984: 202). Files help frame youth as solely responsible for their own behaviours, discounting how events such as running away (or ‘going AWOL’) are structured by the violence of a larger state system that uses child removal as a racialized tool of social control (Briggs, 2012; Roberts, 2003). Instead of framing Oscar’s running away to see his siblings as a natural response to the violent effects of state-imposed child removal, files help decontextualize youth behaviours, framing them as individual transgressions rather than responses conditioned by larger forms of institutional violence.
Furthermore, archives on foster youth prevent young people involved in the child welfare system from ever being given a fresh start. While in home settings behaviours such as eye rolling, sarcasm, fighting or running away might result in a young person being disciplined, they are often viewed as age-appropriate forms of acting out and as such rarely result in forms of punishment that permanently alter the child’s trajectory. In the child welfare system, however, the archival documentation of successive behaviours leaves little room for foster youth to ‘just be kids’ or for them to outgrow pervious developmental stages; a young person who goes AWOL at age 12, for instance, is permanently labelled a ‘runner’ and subsequently barred from certain types of home placements, even 4 or 5 years later. Oscar and Vlad’s experiences illustrate how youth’s files and the deviant labels they assign stay with them throughout every stage of the system. Files become key tools to define and label deviance and to justify punishment and incarceration, a violent process that only begets further surveillance and brutality that young people feel for many years to come. While life chances for young people coming out of foster care in the United States are abysmal – 50% of all youth who have aged out of foster care in California end up homeless or incarcerated (Alliance for Children’s Rights Facts and Stats, 2015) – those for crossover youth with experience in both the foster care and juvenile justice systems are far worse (Abrams et al., 2008; Culhane et al., 2011; Herz et al., 2010). 7 Documentary procedures alone cannot account for these horrifying trends; however, their role in facilitating the progressive expulsion, re-placement and criminalization of foster youth make them an important part of this cycle of dispossession.
Terror, compliance and internalization of the panopticon
While archival surveillance helps create a panoptic web that criminalizes many foster youth, it also helps control those who are not formally criminalized. Social control is more readily achieved when subjects are induced to participate in their own self-regulation. Foucault (1995) argues that, ‘in the perfect camp, all power would be exercised solely through exact observation’ (pp. 187–189); punitive action and the physical exercising of control are not needed if subjects respond to observation through restricting and governing themselves. The minute-by-minute reporting foster youth are subjected to produce such a fear of displacement and incarceration that it succeeds in regulating youth bodies even without actually displacing and incarcerating them; the threat, or ‘constant terror’ as one participant describes it, is sufficient. To survive the system and avoid the possibility of their file criminalizing them, foster youth internalize a variety of ‘self-steering mechanisms’ to control their bodies and minds (Foucault et al., 1997: 225); these include performing over-compliance and utilizing silence, tools that can have long-term psychic and developmental consequences for the young people who practise them.
Half of the foster youth in this study reported resorting to silence, monosyllabism or over-intentionality when speaking in an attempt to regain control of their narrative and limit the punitive possibilities of their file. Hakim, for instance, a 26-year-old Black foster youth who grew up predominantly in group homes, felt constantly scrutinized by those he was supposed to trust. Often he would be midsentence with a staff person at his group home when they would leave the conversation to go document something he had said even if it was seemingly innocuous. ‘You feel like you’re a case study’, he says with disgust: ‘You all say you all care but look I’m seeing you all writing everything down instead of saying “let me go talk to this youth”’. Hakim knew he could not skip therapy or totally avoid speaking with group home staff but that he could be very intentional with what he told them: ‘I went through four years in my group homes and only talked to my therapists about the same shit every time’. By keeping conversations overly upbeat and surface level and by not ‘going any deeper’, Hakim was able to prevent some surveillance of his life and control at least a portion of what was written about him.
Silence and monosyllabism are effective ‘everyday resistance’ (Kelley, 1996; Scott, 1985) strategies that allow young people to reassert their agency and control over their narratives and temporarily disrupt the ability of caseworkers to add documents to their files. Actions such as silence, however, while effective survival techniques, rarely produce structural change and often have serious psychic consequences; Hakim, for instance, was unable to utilize his therapy sessions for therapeutic purposes despite deeply wanting access to mental health services. Because underground resistive practices force actors to wear a ‘mask of grins and lies’, they ultimately reinscribe invisibility (Kelley, 1996: 7, drawing on a Laurence Dunbar poem). This can have a long-term impact on the young people repeatedly using them. Conditioned for so long to withhold information and keep quiet, several in the study reported interpersonal difficulties later in life as a result of the non-communication they had practised for so many years.
While some foster youth respond to archival surveillance through silence and monosyllabism, other young people take the opposite approach, trying to do everything that was expected of them. Melanie details how this was an important survival strategy:
I saw being ‘good’ as a useful way to keep the key people who worked at the home on my side. I felt like I couldn’t afford to not have them on my side because they were the people in charge of your files.
While Melanie decided ‘being good’ all around was the best permanent avenue to survive the system, other youth performed compliance more selectively, behaving in exemplary ways only when they knew it was going to be documented. Oscar, for instance, after years of being followed by his file and its ‘red reports’, says that he finally learned ‘how to play the system’. He shares that
In order for them to stoop down to your level, all you had to do was to be that ‘model citizen’, so I got good grades, I did everything what you do as far as school. So that’s how I got them to not see me to lock down.
For Oscar, knowing which papers the judge needed to see in his file – report cards with good grades and no red reports from social workers – influenced his decision-making and allowed him to move from a higher level facility back to a foster family. Benjamin Gillespie (2015) points out that non-normative bodies are ‘systematically forced to perform virtuosity as a survival tactic’ (p. 38), and indeed for Oscar and others, their decision to perform as ‘model citizens’ eased the violence in their lives.
Like silence, however, performing normative citizenship and complying with rules are not without their costs, and in many ways only helped to reinforce the larger system. So accustomed are some youth to performing as if under perpetual surveillance that many find it hard to ever fully be themselves. Damien, for instance, a 22-year-old foster youth who identifies as African American, found himself using the same strategies he used in his group home even though he had aged out of the system and was now living at a THP. ‘I’m pretty reserved in the big picture’, Damien says, imparting that in addition to limiting what he shares with his THP counsellors, he also tries to minimize what they see of him on their surveillance cameras by limiting his movements and rarely inviting people over, although guests are permitted:
That’s what just makes me be like I’m here but I’m not here. You feel like you can’t really be. You feel like, ‘I’m gonna do this’ and then you be like, ‘Aw, nah’. And you be like ‘Come through’ [to a friend]. And then you be like, ‘Aw no, never mind’.
Damien limits the control his THP has to document his life but in doing so severely restricts his own movements and interactions with friends and family, suffering the physical and psychic consequences of increased isolation. As youth internalize particular behavioural expectations and remain in constant fear of opening up, they report feelings of disembodiment and disconnection from themselves, their families and their communities. Their experiences reveal the power of the panopticon to produce social control and illustrate how the effects of archival surveillance extend long beyond discharge from the system.
As we see with half the young people in this study, compliance is achieved not just through coercion or force but also through self-management and the internalization of the system’s expectations. In this sense, as Foucault theorizes, power is productive – bodies are not just repressed but transformed, learning to act on themselves rather than always being acted upon (Foucault et al., 1988: 18). While acts such as silence, self-censorship or over-compliance can be temporarily empowering and critical for survival within a punitive system, participating in so-called ‘self-defeating’ forms of resistance (Solórzano and Bernal, 2001) that have long-term consequences for the foster youth leveraging them is a subtle way the dominant system achieves hegemony.
Youth resistance: Challenging digital archives, creating new ones
While the archive regulates foster youth’s lives and impacts their life course, young people regularly resist the totalizing narrative and invasive power of their file. Several foster youth in this study were familiar with their right to access their files once they turned 18 or aged out and tried to embark on the process of obtaining a copy as a way to empower themselves – a process that, in theory, should be facilitated by the digitization of child welfare files. Only Melanie, however, was successful in this effort, and while she was angered by the file’s sheer size and gross inaccuracies, she felt empowered having exercised her right to have it after so many years of adult mediation and controlled inaccessibility. No other young person who sought out their file, however, was able to procure it; furthermore, four were told, incorrectly, that they were not allowed to access them, illustrating how archives not only police youth bodies, as discussed, but are themselves also policed (Maynard, 2009).
Many youth found it more empowering to move outside the DCFS bureaucracy, challenging the ‘official’ narrative of their life through the production and distribution of their own narrative. Youth of colour are subjected to widespread narratives of biological and cultural deficit (Solórzano and Yosso, 2002; Valencia, 1997), and those involved with the child welfare system in particular are often subjected to an additional layer of pathologization. Monovocal ‘master narratives’, like those perpetuated by courts and in foster youth files, are essential tools for dominance – they essentialize, stereotype and silence marginalized groups; distort reality; and blame individuals rather than highlighting institutional neglect or systemic violence (Montecinos, 1995). Counter-stories, or narratives that challenge these dominant tropes, can be a powerful form of resistance (Solórzano and Yosso, 2002; Yosso, 2006). Many youth leverage counter-storytelling practices, turning to poetry, spoken word and writing to speak back to the system and to give testimony that stands in stark contrast to the official narrative told about them in the DCFS archive. Youth participants spoke at cultural events, fundraisers and conferences; interviewed with local and national reporters; and appeared on television and the radio. Many youth had taken to the Internet, reversing the disempowering function of the DCFS digital archive through producing an archive of collated narratives created by foster youth, rather than about foster youth. Through blogs, chats websites, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat, these youth sought to create community, counter pathologizing tropes about foster youth and, ultimately, win back the ability to not just tell their story but also, as one participant phrased it, ‘tell it how it is’. Vlad, for instance, who majored in social entrepreneurship, worked hard his senior year to utilize his familiarity with start-up technologies to start the process of launching a website called Foster Nation. Foster Nation will serve as a site where foster youth can look up resources across county and state boundaries, share their stories, highlight injustices, and build alternative community spaces.
Through sharing information across borders and digitally re-narrativizing foster youth’s lives, Foster Nation creates a new archive with different goals and based on different forms of knowledge. These ‘disqualified’ ways of knowing – or what Foucault also terms ‘knowledges from below’ – can be the basis of an insurrection; the archives, in other words, can be leveraged as ‘contemporary tactics’ to promote subjugated knowledges disqualified by the state (Foucault et al., 2003: 7–8). Foster Nation challenges the geographic boundaries delineated by the child welfare system, counters pathologizing tropes that blame foster youth and their families and creates community in the face of violent efforts to individualize and separate foster youth from each other, their families and the world. It creates a digital archive that diverges from the official DCFS one and puts forth a different vision for what the child welfare system could be like, and in these ways is an intensely political challenge to a destructive and divisive system.
In addition to producing counter-stories and counter-communities digitally, many foster youth utilize legal strategies as a way to challenge DCFS documentation and file-sharing practices. Eduardo, Oscar’s 23-year-old brother, for instance, was able to successfully work with a foster youth legal advocacy organization to bring a lawsuit against a group home that had documented a series of false behaviours to justify kicking him out. He supplemented these efforts with mass texts, Facebook posts and emails spreading information about legal protections for foster youth he had learned about through a Foster Youth Bill of Rights poster.
Many youth sought to challenge DCFS’ power to unilaterally surveil their lives and their bodies through their advocacy work with the foster youth–led California Youth Connection (CYC). During my 2 years as a practitioner and researcher, CYC staff and youth from their 20 chapters statewide were working on two priority state legislative bills – AB1416 and AB260 – that they had drafted. AB260 seeks to help break the cycle of foster care by preventing past information from a pregnant foster youth’s file being utilized as the pretext to take away that parenting foster youth’s child. AB1416 gives foster youth the opportunity to regularly evaluate their foster families and caregivers and have this feedback added to the family’s file (California Youth Connection: CYC’s 2015 Legislative Priority, 2015). That the only foster youth–led organization in California has focused their legislative energies on issues related to documentation procedures reveals just how much foster youth see the archival policing process as a primary problem and just how urgently they are fighting to change it. However, it is critical to recognize how in the case of AB1416 surveillance is not being eliminated but inverted – foster youth would be given a regular opportunity to report on caregivers rather than just the other way around. This would add more youth voices to the child welfare system’s archival narrative and might shift the unidirectional nature of archival surveillance, and as such is a powerful intervention that should be implemented; at the same time, it does not contest the problematic existence of archival surveillance and points to how resistance itself can be liberatory at the same time that it supports larger technologies of social control. Ultimately, even as youth seek to resist certain aspects of the state, by making rights-based legal claims and participating in civic activism they can also implicitly participate in a nation-state predicated on settler colonialism and on-going forms of racialized, gendered and classed exclusion (Grande, 2004; Kwon, 2013). I highlight this complexity not as a critique of the organizing efforts herein discussed – efforts that would positively impact youth in care – but to try and understand the elusive ways power operates.
At the same time, foster youth advocacy efforts, while entrenched within wider structures of power, remind us that young people are not future political beings, defined by their youth status and if under 18, their inability to vote, but current political beings with power and agency to contest and change the system that dispossesses them. Their efforts remind us that at times what foster youth need is not more adults in their lives, or additional layers of paternalistic state protection, but improved channels to assert their agency and participate in the decisions impacting their lives. Furthermore, foster youth’s appropriation of digital technologies to create counter-narratives, their efforts to both evade and challenge unidirectional documentation procedures and their efforts to use digital spaces to build alternative communities help shine a light on the ‘cracks in the archival edifice’ (Maynard, 2009: 178), highlighting not only what must urgently change but perhaps most importantly the avenues through which we might begin to do so – the cracks through which, with more force and persistent organizing, a violent and racialized system of youth surveillance might slowly start to crumble. As digital documentation practices radically extend the ability of child welfare systems to record, archive and surveil youth bodies nationwide, it is urgent that we critically interrogate the effects of these practices, challenge their implementation and centre youth voices and experiences as we fight to do so.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.