For a Former Foster Kid, “Poverty Porn” Is Personal

Years of public speaking classes in high school couldn’t prepare me for my first interview with a reporter at age 18. Through lopsided bangs I had cut myself and with sweating palms, I stared down at the microphone and detailed my dreams of the future. I spoke about the other students and the mentors that helped me along the way, and the fears I had about leaving home and becoming independent. Transitioning out of the foster system after 14 years in and out of it felt a little like rock climbing without a rope: If I looked straight up, I knew I could make it, but one false move and I’d fall, with no one around to help me until I hit the bottom.

The article came out a few days later, but that awkward teenager filled with both hope and fear was nowhere to be found. Instead, my name appeared on a short list of foster children who had miraculously achieved excellence, despite trauma and abuse. I was one of the ones who’d made it out.

I’m not, nor was I ever, an entirely helpless victim. But, I’m also not a bootstrap-wearing superhuman who escaped poverty all on my own—and I was far from being free of poverty when that article came out. I was a teenager, navigating a broken system and hoping like hell I could hang on. I couldn’t wrap my head around who this poverty porn was for. Funders? Policymakers? Kleenex’s bottomline?

Foster youth aging out of the system experience very real negative outcomes, and many leave poverty just to experience it immediately in a different form. After turning 18, 1 in 5 former foster youth experience homelessness, one-quarter experience PTSD, and only half will obtain employment by 24. At the age of 26, the average income of a former foster youth is $13,989, less than half of what the general population makes at that age. These statistics only do so much to explain what it really looks like to turn 18 while you’re still in high school and couch-surf until college to avoid homelessness. They don’t show the abusive relationships these young adults stay in to cling on to some form of stability. And, they definitely don’t bore you with the mountains of paperwork youth transitioning out of the system must navigate and collect to prove they are who they are and that they deserve food, housing, and human kindness.

On my desk I have collected piles of reports and articles with strife-textured stock photos and strings of sentences describing children who are either suffering through circumstance or masterfully overcoming any obstacle in a show of heroic strength. While these narratives help the issue gain attention, the haphazard pursuit of empathy pushes readers toward believing foster children are all the same and have the same needs, and this is a broader problem with how we talk about poverty and all the people vulnerable to it.

In a new paper from the U.S. Partnership on Mobility From Poverty, Ai-Jen Poo and Eldar Shafir enumerate three common problematic narratives about poverty. In short, they are:

1. The poor have no one to blame but themselves and their luck.

2. They have no agency and are helpless victims of flawed systems and must be saved.

Or 3. They are magical unicorns that figured out how to achieve the American dream.

These narratives affect the everyday lives of former foster youth through policies designed by people who never really bothered to ask them what they needed, instead relying on grapevine messaging through these readily available poverty narratives.

The first and third narratives lead to policy inaction: If poor people are the ones to blame for their own poverty, then with enough hard work or mental shifts, they should pull themselves out. Compassionate conservatives tout these stories in books and periodicals, claiming that assistance programs disincentivize hard work, and that the main thing poor people need isn’t policy, but to stop being victims. This is basically the motivating logic behind Kanye West’s rightward shift (he recently tweeted that “self-victimization is a disease.”)

In the article written about me, I was used as an example of individual grit and achievement despite the odds. When stories like this become the norm, like the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson stating poverty is a “state of mind,” governments back out of or roll back assistance programs.

The policies that follow the second narrative, which emphasizes helplessness, rather than power, erase the decision-making ability and agency of low-income youth. The policies that result overpolice the people they seek to help, because they treat the victims of hardship as perpetually in need of protection, from others but also from themselves. These lead to programs meant to help but that come with endless conditions and evaluation requirements.

Another troubling consequence of this narrative is that it makes any help youth receive seem better than nothing, opening the doors for white saviors whose volunteer work has more to do with themselves than the population they are helping. Worse, this opens the door to potential abuse, especially within foster, adoption, and child welfare management, like in the case of Devonte Hart whose complaints of abuse and hunger, along with his siblings’, at the hands of their white adoptive parents, were not enough to get them the help and protection they needed. Race and class-related stigma severely limits trust of those in need and creates a barrier to developing protections for them from their perceived saviors, until a tragedy occurs.

While we can probably thank the helpless-victims narrative for some of the improvements that have been made to expand services for former foster youth, legislators who listen to this narrative often create too many disparate programs, qualifications, and reporting requirements for the average former foster youth. Without guidance accessing the programs, collecting the paperwork, and understanding the hopelessly convoluted bureaucracy, many foster youth decide to take their chances not accessing the services they desperately need.

In my case, I only had four months between high school and college where I needed basic support: food, housing, and internet. To access food, I had to fill out confusing paperwork and gather personal documents from calling and visiting multiple agencies, wait a month for an appointment, and figure out transportation without a car in Los Angeles. To get housing support, I would have had to take a three-month-long independent living skills class, sign up for a work program, and live with a stranger in an entirely different city away from home where they had more affordable housing options. And for the other smaller but necessary things that make life fulfilling, like counseling, dental and eye checkups, internet, cellular, and senior year expenses like robes, photos, and dances, each required their own waivers, essay requests, and financial reporting requirements. It became easier to tell myself I didn’t need or deserve those things than to fight a system that didn’t trust me with my own life.

Here’s the truth. When that reporter interviewed me six years ago, I was experiencing the most success and accomplishment I had ever felt. And, until I read the story, I felt my accomplishments were noteworthy regardless of my status as a former foster youth.

If connecting my achievement to my experience in foster care inspired another kid in foster care to feel powerful and hopeful, I might feel better about it today. But that’s not who my story was written up for—and the people who read it probably didn’t need another poverty piece to make them feel good about their lives. We don’t need more stories. We need a balanced understanding of poverty and human-centered, evidence-based policy. But, that’s a narrative that doesn’t make headlines.