Legislative efforts to protect LGBTQ youth in foster care: Are they working?

In the interest of protecting the health and wellbeing of youth in foster care, California has enacted or proposed various bills to create legislation protecting them from sexual orientation and gender identity-based discrimination and requiring child welfare staff to become “LGBTQ culturally competent”.  Yet, current research still suggests that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth are experiencing disproportionality and disparities.   The current study describes the findings of the Los Angeles Foster Youth Survey (LAFYS), a randomly sampled telephone interview study (n=786) of youth ages 12-21 years living in foster care in Los Angeles County.  LAFYS was aimed at: a) accurately and confidentially assessing the proportion of foster youth who identify as LGBTQ, b) assessing whether LGBTQ youth are overrepresented in foster care; c) and understanding experiences related to emotional and physical health, as well as factors affecting health and achieving permanency. Key findings were that LGBTQ youth comprise approximately 19% of the city’s foster care population and several disparities were reported.  The current paper presents the findings of this study, focusing on evidence of disproportional representation of sexual and gender minority youth in foster care and the types of discrimination youth reported experiencing (in relation to race, sexual orientation, gender, etc) and in which settings (attorneys, courts, social worker, etc).  Then, the paper will discuss the implications of the findings for using legislative intervention as a means of addressing forms of oppression and discrimination as key social determinants of health and wellbeing within the child welfare context.