Foster care, stigma, and the sturdy, unkillable children of the very poor

Abstract

Foster care has been provided for thousands of vulnerable Australian children from the early nineteenth century. Despite the prevalence of this system of care as the preferred means of providing out-of-home care across the country from the late nineteenth century, very few people who lived in foster care as children have written about their experiences, a total of 23 in all. Although a small sample, these few stories tell a larger one of the complexities of lived experience of foster care: for some it was entirely positive, for others it was wholly negative and for most it was somewhere between those two extremes. What I show in this paper is that what many of the stories have in common, no matter where they sit on that continuum, is the painful acquaintance with social stigma at an early age.