I was in foster care. Now I fight for kids like me.

On a frigid Chicago winter night over 10 years ago, a young man approached me outside a bar. He had already asked a few other folks for money to help him pay for a warm bed or meal. While he came closer, I mentally prepared to explain that I didn’t have any cash. As he began to speak, he looked at me closely, then asked, “Were you my foster sister?”

That simple question changed my life.

I had spent years carefully crafting a so-called normal existence, with a family, college degree, friends, and a job. But in that moment, he saw me for the identity I had spent my life trying to outrun: a former foster kid.

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I was placed in foster care when I was 5 years old. Over nine years, I lived with at least 15 different families and attended as many different schools. Above all, I just wanted to be normal, to belong, which to me meant escaping the foster kid label, with its preconceived judgments and systemic limitations. At some point, I decided that my first step to “normal” was college. But when I dared to share my dream of going to college with the adults around me, I was written off by judges, social workers, and foster parents alike.

My biological sister first taught me about having rights — that even though we were kids at the mercy of the system, we could demand safety and other rights under the law. My sister and I were separated when I was 10, and she, age 13, was placed in a series of institutional placements, each one more restrictive than the one before. After she and I were separated, knowing my rights helped me to ask my lawyer to enforce my right to a weekly $3 allowance, then a monthly clothing stipend. Knowing my rights and having them recognized gave me the sense that what I did and said made a difference. This created a foundation for resilience and provided the validation necessary to imagine more.

My sister’s experience was different. As strong as her voice was for me, once behind institutional walls, it failed to protect her from abuse and education deprivation. After she was discharged at age 18, she became homeless. Today, she awaits prosecution on several federal drug charges and faces at least 20 years in prison.

Adopted by the Sorenson family at 15, in Hanlontown, Iowa, I hoped for the bare minimum but received a foundation of love, support, opportunity, and safety beyond my wildest imagining. In an effort to shed my past, with its trauma and limitations, I aimed to become the poster child of normal by embracing my privileges and donning a myriad of masks. In high school, I was a cheerleader and a band majorette. In college, I joined a sorority and earned my liberal arts degree before moving to Chicago to work as an accountant.

The “normal” I had created was enough for me — until that winter night on the street corner, when my divergent identities collided, brought together by that simple question: “Were you my foster sister?” The young man and I began listing the placements we could remember without finding one in common. Neither of us could remember all of our foster siblings’ names. He walked away. He never asked me for money.

Even though we couldn’t pin down our specific connection, every person who has moved through foster care becomes family through our shared trauma.

This young man, my sister, and every single child are as worthy of opportunity, support, safety, and love as I was. But for the vast majority of foster youth, that reality never materializes.

In Pennsylvania, approximately 15,000 kids are living in foster care. Being separated from parents is significantly harmful to children, and kids in foster care have rates of PTSD that are almost double that among U.S. veterans. A child who has spent time in foster care is more likely to experience a range of problems later in life, including depression and anxiety, addiction, homelessness, and involvement with the criminal justice system.

This injustice moved me to action. I could no longer live out my “normal,” knowing that so many others never have that chance. When I was in foster care, my words only held power if my lawyer said them. So I decided I needed to be a lawyer.

In 2012, I enrolled in law school. Three years later, I graduated with honors.

In 2019, I was awarded a fellowship to study the rights of youth living in institutional placements, both for kids in foster care and the juvenile justice system. My sister’s experiences in institutional placements inspired my desire to start there.

My research has found that we are failing to protect youth from abuses when they are placed in state facilities, both here in Pennsylvania and nationally.

We are failing to protect youth from abuses.

Pennsylvania aside, it matters how other states care for their youth, since many kids are placed in institutions out of state. Abuse in these facilities is endemic. Between 2017 and 2020, there were news reports of abuses in at least 55 U.S. facilities, both private and state-run, across 44 different states. And the reports keep coming.

Today, Pennsylvania faces an overcrowding crisis, but rather than imagining a different solution, or investing in legislation to ensure the safety of our youth currently placed, there are calls to build new facilities.

One way to empower kids in institutions — for both foster care and juvenile detention — is via effective grievance protection, through which they have the opportunity to speak about abuses and try for justice.

I researched and analyzed grievance protections for youth in institutional placements in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. Only Nevada provides an affirmative right to grievance protection for kids in both types of institutions: foster care and juvenile justice. Although Pennsylvania (along with 35 other states) provides some ability for kids in institutions to disclose abuse, mistreatment, and rights violations, the facility often receives and evaluates grievances against itself. This is not effective oversight, and as a result, maltreatment often persists, sometimes for decades. For example, in Pennsylvania’s Glen Mills Schools (a facility not unlike the one in which my sister was placed), violence was an open secret for decades until the school was closed in 2019 following an Inquirer report.

Before youth can begin to imagine creating their “normal,” they need the power to say no to the abuses and rights violations they experience daily. That starts with listening to the young people who are most affected.

Between 2020 and 2021, in testimony to City Council and the Philadelphia Department of Human Services, youth advocates in Philadelphia bravely shared the abuses they endured at institutions, with the hopes that others would not experience the same harm. Listening to these brave advocates led to the creation of the city’s first Office of the Youth Ombudsperson in 2022, designed to hear and protect Philadelphia children in institutions.

Still, reports of harm and rights violations persist, and one city youth ombudsperson’s office cannot begin to offer protection to all of our children.

Every person reading this must join me in holding our child systems accountable. A part of that accountability is to create space for child and family voices and experiences. This includes listening to the young folks in Pittsburgh and Delaware County decrying building new incarceration facilities; demanding our legislators pass House Bill 1381, which includes many of the bipartisan agreements supported by the Pennsylvania Juvenile Justice Task Force; and supporting our representatives in Washington who reintroduced the Juveniles for Justice Act, which will allow our children to seek help from federal courts to enforce their rights.

We have to listen to young people when they tell us what they need. And then we have to act.

Christina Sorenson is a lawyer specializing in child welfare and the author of “Screaming Into the Void: Youth Voice In Institutional Placements.”