By disclosing even the most harmless information, foster
care kids often accidentally share too much on social media, putting them at
risk. But banning social media altogether can be isolating
Being a typical teenager on Facebook is hard, but the
repercussions of a beer-soaked photo or an overshare-y status update seem
trivial compared to the things kids in the foster care system have to worry
about. Using their real name, posting pictures at distinct locations or even
just listing where they go to school — harmless information, for most of us —
can make them traceable by estranged family members. Since staying away from
social media entirely isn't a realistic (or healthy) solution for an already
isolated community of kids, some researchers are looking for a compromise.
“Their life isn’t like everybody else. They have many
more considerations and personal threats they need to consider that most teens
don’t have to worry about,” Dale Fitch, an assistant professor in the School of
Social Work at the University of Missouri, told me. Fitch's latest research,
published in the Journal of Technology in Human Services, looks to develop
situation-specific policies about privacy and disclosure with foster care
youths.
Facebook's inadvertent undermining of the foster care
system was always something on the horizon, says Fitch, but it wasn't until
recently that researchers started thinking about this issue seriously. At a
child welfare and technology conference last year, a panel of teenagers in the
foster care system talked about how the tendency was for agencies to restrict
their social media use completely, which was pretty much ineffective as they
found a way to get online anyway.
"The notion that you can control and that you
should control these children differently seems to me kind of getting away from
what we’re trying to achieve with foster care kids — which is normalcy,"
Dan Heimpel, a journalist and founder of Fostering Media Connections told
me."Creating barriers to what other kids have complete access to is not a
good thing."
Kids in foster care typically don’t have much control
over their lives, so Facebook is often the one thing they do get to control.
For many teenagers, internet life is real life, so you could see how isolating
it'd be to restrict these kids from something as vital to their normalcy as
Facebook. In addition, it has a particular attraction for kids that are moving
constantly, offering a way to instantly find new friends and keep in touch with
old ones. Instead of cutting them off completely, Fitch suggests using
pseudonyms, avoiding geographic identifiers or creating two profiles — one
public and one private (despite Facebook policy against this) — depending on
each kids' situation.
But for those that work directly with the foster teens,
the problem is as much about the foster care system's inability to integrate
social media and technology into a longstanding (and possibly outdated) system.
"In general, when you’re dealing with organizations that work with foster
care youths, most are behind in terms of their use of new mediums," Theo
Fowles, the social media coordinator of the California Youth Connection, told
me. “They’re behind because there’s not a clear way to implement the social
media within the systems in place."
For instance, youths that have to check in with a social
worker at a certain time could do this through video chats or real-time,
private location apps — imagine a privacy-centric FourSquare — but Fowles says
these things haven’t been implemented in a way that is effective. Probably
because weeding through a zillion new ways to use social media is low on the
list of priorities for social workers, especially when compared to finding
these kids a family. But establishing guidelines for the foster youths wouldn't
necessarily be a complicated ordeal. Both Heimpel and Fowles agree that a set
of recommendations about how to talk to children about the information they're
sharing and with whom is probably enough.
"Foster youth should be trained to create profiles
that not only protect them but allow them to express themselves," he told
me. "Maybe they’re not on Facebook but they're on Tumblr. Maybe they're
not posting locations on Foursquare but they're tweeting what they think on
Twitter."
Embracing some kind of social media could be beneficial
for both the youth in foster care and the system as a whole; in doing so we'll
learn a lot more about the life of these youths, says Fitch. "Are they
really connected with other people? What type of connections are they trying to
make?” he told me. “Youth in foster care like other youth, they just want to be
connected and supported socially — it's just a little more complicated for
them."