When Darcy Olsen, the high-powered head of a nonprofit, felt called to provide foster care for a child, she imagined a teenager. But the social worker begged her to consider an infant. “We have newborns sleeping in social service offices. If you could open a crib, we’d appreciate it,” Olsen was informed.
As a result, Olsen went home with a tiny baby, who had been born severely drug-exposed, snuggling in her arms. She was delighted, if somewhat scared. “Literally from the day I was inspired to open my home, I was ready to start,” Olsen tells IWF. “I’m Type A, and I moved through the licensing as fast as I could because I knew children were waiting. On the very first day my license went through, I got a call to go down to the hospital and pick up a newborn, and the only thing that I knew about her was that she had spent the first couple weeks of her life on a morphine drip.”
That is how Olsen’s family started, and it is also how the Center for the Rights of Abused Children, of which Olsen is founder and CEO, began. Olsen has since adopted four children and fostered six more. In the course of court appointments, Olsen realized that everybody in the courtroom, except the most vulnerable person there, the child, whose fate usually was being decided, was represented by legal counsel.
“There would be attorneys for the biological parents there, attorneys for the government agency, and even the judge had a guardian ad litem, whose job was to give him recommendations on what to do, but the baby had no one. No voice. No attorney. I was stunned.
“I couldn’t believe that children who had been through the worst were the ones without legal representation,” Olsen continues. “I could not imagine how that child could go into a courtroom in a case where their lives were on the line, where their lives hung in the balance of these decisions, and they did not have an attorney to represent or put their rights before the judge.”
“At her final hearing, Baylee chose a new name for herself. It was telling that she chose to take the name of the Center’s litigator who had fought for her. Baylee thanked our attorney for giving her a voice and protecting her life when no one else would,” Olsen tells IWF.
In 2014, Olsen won the Bradley Prize for her work strengthening constitutional rights as then-head of the Goldwater Institute. The first profile of Darcy was published around that time. “I thought, hmm, God doesn’t give you this kind of cash prize for nothing,” Olsen recalls. “And sure enough, I ended up using that money to hire a team of attorneys to protect one of the foster babies that I had in my care from going into a very, very dark situation. And we did win for her. And I made a promise to myself that I would work to help other children like her receive legal representation. A child’s life should not depend on the luck of the draw. That is criminal. Every single child victim needs to have this basic due process protection.”
Legal representation, Olsen explains, is a fundamental right of American citizens. “The criminally accused have the constitutional right to counsel because their lives and liberty interests are on the line, and for the same reasons, this protection should extend to these children. The Center launched a pro bono Children’s Law Clinic to represent children and subsequently fought for and got a law in place in Arizona, where they are headquartered, that guarantees children attorneys in their cases. We have cases in New York, Florida, Texas, and more. This year, we are launching a helpline and expanding our pro bono work so that we can guide children in any state to the local legal counsel and support they need.”
The Center for the Rights of Abused Children’s pro bono clinic recently represented a little girl in a terrible situation.
“One of our pro bono cases involved an 8-year-old girl. Adopted by relatives due to severe physical abuse, Baylee thought she’d found safety. Sadly, her nightmare had just begun. Doctors discovered grim physical evidence of sexual abuse on her tiny body.
“Baylee bravely told workers about the repeated acts of sexual abuse she’d suffered, but the child welfare agency didn’t seek her protection. Instead, the agency sought reunification and forced Baylee to visit her abusers. The child was so frightened that she couldn’t get through the front door of their home without wetting herself.
“We took Baylee’s case and won. Without an attorney in her corner, Baylee likely would have been returned to her rapists,” says Olsen.
“At her final hearing, Baylee chose a new name for herself. It was telling that she chose to take the name of the Center’s litigator who had fought for her. Baylee thanked our attorney for giving her a voice and protecting her life when no one else would,” Olsen tells IWF.
Among the laws sponsored by the Center are mandatory searches for relatives and kin, immediate reporting of children missing from foster care, strengthening penalties for child predators, and of course the right of children to be represented by legal counsel. People who have never dealt with the foster system are likely to respond, “What? These aren’t already laws on the books?” But they aren’t.
Many foster kids fall through the cracks because rules for reporting missing children are sketchy. “Foster parents will report that the child is missing,” says Darcy, “but then the agency can decide what they want to do with that report, and often what they’ll do is they’ll just mark a kid as having run away. That’s one of the most awful aspects of the system. The big picture is that if we could protect the children in foster care from being taken, or running, we could almost eliminate the sex trafficking trade in our country for kids. If we protected children in foster care on the front end, trafficking would be nearly eliminated.”
“The majority of kids who are trafficked in our country are kids from the foster care system,” she continues. “When the FBI does a sting, 90% or so percent will be kids who have been in foster care. This is a billion-dollar industry, and predators know that when kids go missing from foster care, very few are reported as missing and there are almost no searches. Searches generally are not mandatory, and it was only about eight or nine years ago that the feds even required the most basic, baseline reporting at all, but searches are still not mandatory.”
“The big picture is that if we could protect the children in foster care from being taken or running, we could almost eliminate the sex trafficking trade in our country for kids.”
Olsen adds that there is sometimes an additional impediment to searching for missing foster children. “We talked to the local police and asked, if we can make searches mandatory, what would hold you back? And believe it or not, it was that they didn’t have pictures of a lot of the kids, because they tend to be older and in group homes. We went to government offices where they already create a variety of state IDs, and made it mandatory for the older kids in care who are the most vulnerable to have these IDs. If they go missing, that information can immediately be uploaded into all the police scanners, and they can have a picture and all the details right there at their fingertips.”
The ultimate goal of the Center for the Rights of Abused Children is that, to the maximum extent possible, every child will end up in a safe and loving home. The right to parent and have a family is a fundamental right. “We’ve fought for and passed second-chance laws that let courts restore the parent-child relationship when a child can safely return to live with a biological parent. But there’s an ‘and.’ Children also have the right to safety, life, and family. We have a case right now where the child has been in foster care for five years, and there is still no severance that allows the child to be adopted and loved. This happens all the time. And then what happens is that the child remains in foster care so long that the statistical chances of being adopted become practically zero. Some kids will find that miracle, but people in general are not signing up to take in broken fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen-year-olds.”
When Darcy brought her first child home, she was head of the Goldwater Institute and widely published in prestigious places such as the Wall Street Journal. She was a graduate of the School for Foreign Service at Georgetown University. But, “I was scared, and I was praying that I would be enough for this baby. I hadn’t been a parent before, and she was sick. I wanted her to be safe, and I prayed that the mother, wherever she was, would know that her baby was safe, and that I would honor her and do a good job. I went in, and I picked her up, and they wheeled us out in a wheelchair—for real because that’s a hospital regulation, even though I hadn’t just had a baby … and our wild ride began.
“That is the beginning of her story, and about six months in, I find out that she is going to need to be adopted. I should tell you that I really thought about what to do with her, because I was exhausted. There was a friend from church who would watch her during the day when I went to work. I would come home, and I would do the evening feed, the night feed, the middle-of-the-night changing, and then do it all over again, and there were medical appointments, and there were social workers coming in and out of my house, and I’m going down to the courtroom for reports and reviews. So, I should tell you that I really thought hard about what to do. But she was my calling, and I was the only mom she’d ever known. And so I did what any mother would do … and the adoption went through that year. And then I just kept my heart open for that inspiration, and took in nine more over the years, and ended up adopting four total, who needed forever homes, and then helped the others on their way. And it was during that process, when I went to court, that I started to see the system from the inside, and the first thing I realized was in court there would be a lawyer to represent everybody but the child.”
The ultimate goal of the Center for the Rights of Abused Children is that, to the maximum extent possible, every child will end up in a safe and loving home.
The Center for the Rights of Abused Children has programs to help improve education for foster children and “aging out” of the system, which leaves them penniless and homeless. According to its website, there are 114,000 children waiting for forever homes across the country. The Center suggests that people who perhaps have never considered fostering or adopting children might search their hearts and find out if there is a place for one of these children.
“My big thought on the foster care system is that the foster care system is simply a set of laws,” Olsen says. “The scaffolding is the laws. If those laws are broken, weak, or missing, they will fail to protect children. If we want to improve the system, we must change laws. That is the beginning and the end, and all the solutions can really be found in the laws that we create to safeguard the lives of these kids and to protect them. So, I think that’s where the hope is, that in a nation that’s built on the rule of law, with people who know that when something isn’t right, we can fix it. That’s the beautiful hope. We have the hope that 20 years from now, we’re going to have transformed this system into the safe and temporary safety net that it was meant to be.”
That’s a hope that everyone should have. When we look at the many challenges facing our country, ensuring that as many children as possible grow up in loving, supportive families is surely one of the solutions we can all agree upon. We can all be grateful that this is the cause that Darcy Olsen, this dedicated, passionate children’s advocate, has taken up as her own.