You Can’t Fight the System: Strategies of Family Justice in Foster Care Reintegration

Abstract

On first blush the very notion of justice seems an unlikely subject for family therapy intervention, a topic more in the domain of lawyers, judges, and philosophers, than psychologists, social workers, and family therapists. However, as Madanes (2000) has noted, issues of betrayal, mistreatment, disconnection, broken promises and divided loyalties both covert and overt, are core issues in most family conflicts. The outplacement of children from their biological families represents the worst-case scenarios of family injustice. In such cases, ways of working with either the biological or foster family are virtually incomparable to the therapy of an intact family, or even post-divorce blended family. Instead, the therapist is confronted with myriad problems that do not neatly fit within the confines of traditional family psychology. While extreme by definition, these cases offer unparalleled teaching about issues of justice, and their importance goes well beyond their specialized nature. This article illustrates one such case and the interventions we used to restore justice to a family caught up in “the system.”