| Summary: | Upwards of three million children are subject to severe forms of abuse or neglect annually in their homes, and more than half a million live in foster or institutional care, with the numbers growing exponentially. Substance abuse is wreaking havoc in home s and in the child-welfare system-80 to 90 percent of the children victimized by abuse and neglect are being raised by parents who use and abuse alcohol, cocaine, and other drugs during pregnancy. Children removed from their homes be cause of maltre atment languish in institutional care, often bouncing back and forth between foster families and their original families, with state agencies reluctant to terminate parental rights and move them on to adoption, however dim the prospects for nurturing at h ome. Nobody's Children is an intense look at child welfare policies on abuse and neglect, foster care, and adoption. Elizabeth Bartholet, one of the nation's leading experts on family law, challenges the accepted orthodoxy that treats children as belonging to their kinship and their racial groups and that locks them into inadequate biological and foster homes. She asks us to apply the lessons learned from the battered women's movement as we look at battered children, and to question why family preservation ideology still reigns supreme when children rather than adult women are involved. Bartholet asks us to take seriously the adoption option. She calls on the entire community to take responsibility for its children, to think of the children at risk of abuse and neglect as belonging to all of us, and to ensure that "Nobody's Children" become treasured members of somebody's family.
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