ABSTRACT
During the past decade, child and adolescent forensic psychiatry has emerged as a sub-specialized area of increased activity, complexity, and utilization. This chapter examines the role of the child psychiatrist in foster-care placement in the advent of new legislation supporting more permanent placement for children. Child permanency planning arose through recognition that psychological harm is done to children who drift in and out of care, moving perhaps from their original family to foster parents or to children’s homes (Black and Wolkind 1991). A number of studies conducted during the 1970s, which collectively came to be known as ‘permanency-planning projects,’ showed that goal-oriented case plans and assertive case work, combined with intensive services to a child’s birth parents, could facilitate family reunification and permanent planning for children (Rosenfeld et al. 1997). In 1980, the Federal government passed Public Law 96-272, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act, which was designed to: end the drift of children in foster care; encourage planning for permanency for each child within a hierarchy of desirable options rather than long-term foster care; provide for oversight to move cases through the child welfare system; and develop preventative services to avoid family breakdown when children are temporarily removed from the home (Fein 1991).
