Many households but never a home: stories of resistance from Black youth navigating placement instability in Ontario’s child welfare system
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The child welfare system has a responsibility for maintaining young people’s safety and permanency when they are taken from their guardians. Many young people living in out-of-home care (OOHC) experience placement instability, which can negatively impact their development. The overrepresentation of Black families in the child welfare system has also been a longstanding issue across North America, where Black families are more likely to be involved with the child welfare system, receive poorer quality of placements, remain in care longer, and are less likely to reunify with their families. Given the known negative impacts of placement instability and the disparities experienced by Black families, these concerns may be more urgent for Black youth in care. This article shares the findings from a qualitative narrative analysis conducted on 27 interviews with Black Caribbean youth who have lived experiences navigating OOHC in Ontario’s child welfare system. Utilizing Critical Race Theory and Anti-Black Racism Theory as theoretical frameworks, three main narratives were identified: (1) difficult behaviors during placement transitions; (2) disposability; and (3) a pursuit of safety and belonging. These narratives capture the phenomenon of Black youth navigating placement instability in OOHC. Implications for policy, practice, and research are discussed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it