Invisible Kids: America's Journey from Orphanages to Foster Care

Lost Debate

The Branch

News, Politics, Society & Culture

4.6 • 607 Ratings

🗓️ 27 April 2023

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ravi and Rikki dive into the deep end of the programs that are meant to care for the country’s most vulnerable children: the child-welfare system. First, Ravi interviews journalist and author Dr. Christine Kenneally. Her new book "Ghosts of the Orphanage: A Story of Mysterious Deaths, a Conspiracy of Silence, and a Search for Justice” tells survivors’ traumatic stories of abuse from inside a Catholic orphanage in Vermont. Then, Rikki interviews Dr. Sarah Font, an Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Penn State who specializes her research on child abuse and neglect, foster care, and state intervention. Rikki and Sarah get to the bottom of the good, bad, and ugly of our current foster care system and what we can do to care for children who have nowhere else to go. [03:15] - Dr. Christine Kenneally [47:56] - Dr. Sarah Font Leave us a voicemail with your thoughts on the show! 321-200-0570 Show notes: https://thebranchmedia.org/show/lost-debate/ Subscribe to our feed on Spotify: http://bitly.ws/zC9K Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/3Gs5YTF Subscribe to our Substack: https://thelostdebate.substack.com/ Follow The Branch on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thebranch.media/ Follow The Branch on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thebranchmedia Follow The Branch on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thebranchmedia The Branch website: http://thebranchmedia.org/ The Lost Debate is also available on the following platforms: Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-lost-debate/id1591300785 Google: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vTERJNTc1ODE3Mzk3Nw Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-lost-debate iHeart: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-the-lost-debate-88330217/ Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.co.uk/podcasts/752ca262-2801-466d-9654-2024de72bd1f/the-lost-debate

Transcript

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0:00.0	How is the U.S. supported its most vulnerable children from the early days of orphanages to the current foster care system?
0:07.5	We speak with an author and a researcher to find out if our child welfare system is doing everything it can to prepare our kids and teens to become responsible citizens.
0:16.1	All of this on today's special episode of The Lost Debate, a show for political eclectics.
0:28.5	Hello, everyone. I'm Ravi Gupta. And I'm Ricky Schlaught. Well, Ricky, you know, we were
0:33.8	researching for what we thought was going to be a segment on child welfare. And what we
0:37.7	realized is that there's just so much going on here and that this is such a long saga of
0:42.7	mistreatment of children in this country. So we wanted to devote at least one episode to this.
0:47.7	And so I started off with this interview of this woman named Dr. Christine Caneli. She's an award-winning
0:53.2	journalist and author of several books.
0:55.0	And the book that we focused on is called Ghosts of the Orphanage, a story of mysterious deaths,
0:59.5	a conspiracy of silence, and a search for justice. And she outlines a parade of horrors that
1:06.1	happen in orphanages in this country for over 100 years, you know, up until basically the 70s.
1:12.2	And she did some just old school reporting to unearth, just a repeated pattern of practices
1:18.5	where the Catholic Church and the system of orphanages basically swept under a rug,
1:23.4	a cycle of abuse and mistreatment of kids.
1:26.2	And so we start with that just to talk about like,
1:28.5	what was the first system or the last system of taking care of our most vulnerable kids and
1:34.8	who even were the kids that, you know, attended orphanages? And basically she pierces through
1:39.7	the pop culture kind of myths around orphanages and paints a wholly different picture of what
1:45.2	these places are like. And then you did a different interview to talk about what's going on with
1:49.3	today. Yes, I spoke to Dr. Sarah Font. She's an associate professor of sociology and public
1:54.5	policy at Penn State, and she researches foster care and child abuse and the modern system that we have in place today. And she's doing
	...

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