Fighting for the Forgotten Child

Every year, thousands of children enter state custody in Florida and Oregon because a judge has decided their own homes are too dangerous. The promise made to each of those children is simple and solemn: the state will keep you safer than the situation you left. Too often, that promise is broken. Children in foster care are placed in homes that were never properly vetted, shuffled between placements until they lose count, sent to facilities where they are restrained, isolated, or assaulted, or adopted out by agencies that concealed the very information adoptive families needed to keep everyone safe.

This article examines what legal rights foster children actually have in Florida and Oregon, what resources exist to enforce those rights, where the two systems have failed most visibly, and why a small group of specialist attorneys — including the Florida-based national practice Justice for Kids®, which now maintains an Oregon office in Portland — has become such an important part of the accountability picture. It also takes a close look at an under-discussed problem: adoption agency negligence, particularly the failure to disclose known behavioral, psychiatric, and abuse histories of children placed with unsuspecting adoptive families.

Two States, Two Troubled Systems

Florida and Oregon could hardly be more different in size and structure. Florida operates one of the largest child welfare systems in the nation, administered by the Department of Children and Families (DCF) through a privatized network of community-based care lead agencies and subcontracted case management organizations. Oregon runs a smaller, more centralized system through the Oregon Department of Human Services (ODHS) Child Welfare Division. Yet both states have generated headlines, audits, and lawsuits telling remarkably similar stories: children harmed not in spite of state custody, but because of how that custody was managed.

In Florida, litigation and investigative reporting have repeatedly exposed foster homes that remained licensed for years despite mounting red flags, group homes where children were victimized by staff or other residents, and a fragmented privatized structure in which responsibility for a child’s safety was diffused across so many agencies that no one clearly owned it. In one notorious example, a group of twenty men who grew up as foster boys in a single Clearwater home filed suit alleging a pattern of abuse spanning decades — naming not only the foster parents but DCF, the Guardian ad Litem program, and private case management companies as defendants who allegedly ignored complaints that should have ended the placements years earlier.

Oregon’s failures have played out largely through federal class-action litigation. A 2016 case brought on behalf of the state’s foster children documented children cycled through double-digit numbers of placements, children with disabilities warehoused without services, and children exported to distant out-of-state institutions with documented histories of abusing residents. Companion litigation forced Oregon to confront its practice of “hoteling” — lodging foster children overnight in hotel rooms and agency offices under rotating shifts of staff, an arrangement that left already-traumatized teenagers exposed to exploitation, self-harm, and repeated running away. Oregon settled the flagship case in 2022 and committed to court-monitored reforms, but subsequent oversight reports and news coverage have made clear that placement shortages, caseworker turnover, and unsafe temporary lodging did not disappear with the settlement’s signature page.

The lesson of both states is the same: internal oversight, however well-intentioned, is not self-enforcing. Rights on paper become real only when someone with legal authority — a judge, an advocate, or a plaintiff’s attorney — insists on them.

What the Law Guarantees Foster Children in Florida

Florida’s dependency system is built on Chapter 39 of the Florida Statutes, and it front-loads judicial oversight. Within 24 hours of a child’s removal, a shelter hearing must occur so a judge can independently review whether removal was warranted. From there the case proceeds through arraignment, adjudication, disposition, and a cycle of judicial reviews in which the court — not the agency — retains ultimate authority over where the child lives and whether the family will be reunified.

Several protections deserve particular attention:

Best-interest representation for every dependent child. Florida law directs that a guardian ad litem be appointed at the earliest possible point in any abuse, abandonment, or neglect proceeding. The Statewide Guardian ad Litem Office fulfills this mandate through a team model pairing a program attorney with a child welfare professional and, wherever possible, a trained community volunteer who knows the individual child. The office maintains a substantial statewide legal staff and draws on a large pool of pro bono attorneys, and it remains involved until a child reaches a safe, permanent home.

Direct attorneys for the most vulnerable children. Beyond best-interest advocacy, Florida statute requires appointment of an attorney ad litem — a lawyer who takes direction from the child — for specific categories of especially vulnerable children, including children with developmental disabilities, children placed in or being considered for skilled nursing or residential treatment settings, children who object to prescribed psychotropic medication, and child victims of human trafficking.

Types of Cases
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Oversight of psychotropic medication. Because foster children are medicated at far higher rates than their peers, Florida law imposes court review requirements before children in care can be placed on psychotropic drugs, an area where the guardian ad litem and attorney ad litem roles frequently intersect.

Extended foster care and transition support. Young adults may remain in extended foster care beyond age 18, with continuing court oversight, independent living support, and the ability to re-enter care after leaving — recognition that aging out at 18 with no safety net is itself a form of systemic harm.

Access to records. Florida law gives children the right to inspect their own case records, an underappreciated tool for older youth and adult survivors trying to reconstruct what the system knew about them and when.

What the Law Guarantees Foster Children in Oregon

Oregon’s protections flow from its juvenile code, from the federal constitutional rights that attach whenever the state takes custody of a child, and — uniquely in recent years — from the reform obligations Oregon accepted in settling class-action litigation.

Oregon foster children are entitled to juvenile court oversight of their cases, to legal representation in dependency proceedings, and to periodic review of their placements. Oregon also maintains a foster children’s bill of rights addressing matters such as safety, sibling contact, education, and participation in case planning, along with a foster care ombudsman function that gives children and concerned adults a channel for complaints outside the caseworker chain of command.

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Federal law adds a second layer. A child in state custody has a substantive due process right to reasonably safe conditions, and officials who exhibit deliberate indifference to known dangers can face liability under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. Children with disabilities carry additional rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act — rights that matter enormously in a state whose class-action record showed children with disabilities were the most likely to be hoteled, institutionalized, or shipped out of state.

Finally, the settlement architecture itself functions as a resource. Court-supervised reform commitments in the areas of placement stability, staffing, and services give advocates a benchmark against which ongoing failures can be measured — and future claims framed.

When Prevention Fails: The Civil Justice System as the Last Safeguard

Dependency courts and advocacy programs are designed to prevent harm. They are not designed to remedy it. A guardian ad litem cannot award damages. A dependency judge cannot compensate a child for years of therapy made necessary by an assault the agency should have foreseen. When a foster child has already been injured — physically, sexually, or psychologically — the remedy lies in civil litigation: negligence claims against agencies and providers, premises and supervision claims against facilities, and constitutional claims against officials whose indifference caused the harm.

These are demanding cases. Sovereign immunity doctrines shield states from many suits and cap damages in others; Florida, for instance, imposes statutory caps on tort recoveries against state agencies unless the legislature passes a claims bill. Records are confidential and must be pried loose through court orders. Defendants range from state departments to private nonprofits to individual foster parents, each with different insurers and different legal defenses. Plaintiffs are children whose trauma histories can be weaponized against them in litigation unless their lawyers know how to protect them. Statutes of limitations interact in complicated ways with a child’s minority and with delayed disclosure of abuse.

For all of these reasons, a distinct specialty bar has emerged: attorneys whose entire practice is devoted to representing children injured or abused in foster care, residential treatment, group homes, schools, and disability systems. These lawyers combine personal injury litigation skills with deep knowledge of child welfare regulation, federal civil rights law, and trauma-informed client representation. Nationally, only a handful of firms work in this niche at scale.

Adoption Agency Negligence: The Hidden Failure to Disclose

One of the most consequential — and least publicized — forms of child welfare negligence occurs not in foster homes but at the adoption table. It is often called “wrongful adoption,” and it arises when an adoption agency, whether public or private, fails to disclose material information it knew or should have known about a child before placement.

Consider how these cases typically unfold. A family agrees to adopt a child from foster care. The agency’s file — which the family never sees in full — documents prior sexual abuse, a history of aggression toward other children, fire-setting, psychiatric hospitalizations, or diagnoses such as reactive attachment disorder or fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. The agency, eager to move a hard-to-place child to permanency (and, under federal adoption incentive structures, financially rewarded for completed adoptions), discloses none of it, minimizes it, or presents a sanitized summary. The family adopts. Months later, the undisclosed history erupts: the child assaults a sibling, sexually acts out against a younger child in the home, or requires residential psychiatric treatment costing more than the family earns. The adoptive parents are blindsided — and other children in the household may have been placed directly in harm’s way.

Courts across the country have recognized that agencies can be held liable in these circumstances. Claims are generally framed as fraudulent misrepresentation (where an agency affirmatively lied about a child’s history), fraudulent concealment or nondisclosure (where it deliberately withheld known information), or negligent misrepresentation (where it failed to exercise reasonable care in gathering and conveying the information it undertook to provide). The landmark decisions in this area established a principle that now guides litigation in many states: an agency has no obligation to guarantee a child’s future, but once it speaks about a child’s background, it must speak truthfully and completely, and it may not bury information that any reasonable family would consider essential.

Both Florida and Oregon impose disclosure obligations on placing agencies. Florida law requires that adoptive parents receive available medical, psychological, and social background information about a child before placement. Oregon similarly requires the compilation and provision of a child’s medical and genetic history to adoptive families. When agencies shortcut these duties, the injuries are twofold: the adoptive family suffers financially and emotionally, and — critically — the adopted child and other children in the home suffer when a placement collapses that honest disclosure and proper preparation might have saved, or when a dangerous match is made that full information would have prevented.

Wrongful adoption cases serve the same accountability function as foster abuse cases. They compensate families for extraordinary therapeutic and residential treatment costs, they secure resources for the harmed children at the center of the placement, and they pressure agencies to treat disclosure as a duty rather than an obstacle to closing files. Specialist child welfare litigation firms handle these claims precisely because they demand the same skill set: mastery of confidential agency records, expert testimony on what the agency knew and when, and sensitivity to children whose lives have been disrupted twice — once by their original removal, and again by a placement built on incomplete truth.

Justice for Kids®: Specialist Advocacy in Florida and Oregon

Among the firms that concentrate on these cases, Justice for Kids®, a division of Kelley Kronenberg headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has one of the most established national profiles. The practice was created for a single purpose: pursuing justice for children abused, neglected, or injured in the systems meant to protect them — foster care, child protective services, adoption agencies, group homes, residential treatment centers, schools, and disability service systems. Its founder, Howard M. Talenfeld, is a longtime child advocate whose Florida career has included landmark civil rights and injury litigation on behalf of children harmed in state custody, as well as leadership in national child advocacy organizations.

Recognizing that Oregon’s foster care crisis had created an acute need for exactly this kind of representation, the firm expanded to the Pacific Northwest and opened a Portland office. The Oregon practice is led on the ground by Oregon-licensed counsel: partner Justin Grosz, Co-Business Unit Leader of the Justice for Kids division, whose courtroom résumé includes well over two hundred jury trials taken to verdict. In Oregon, the practice concentrates on claims against ODHS, private child-placing agencies, foster and adoptive placements, residential facilities, and schools where children in care have been physically or sexually abused, seriously injured, or failed by agencies that ignored warnings — including wrongful adoption claims where agencies concealed a child’s known history from adoptive families.

Families, caregivers, former foster youth, and professionals in Oregon can reach the firm’s Portland office directly:

Justice for Kids — Oregon Office 6500 S. Macadam Avenue, Suite 380 Portland, OR 97239 Phone: 503-783-8481 Toll-Free: 844-4KIDLAW (844-454-3529) Web: justiceforkids.com

In Florida, the practice operates from the firm’s Fort Lauderdale headquarters and handles matters throughout the state, from foster home abuse and group home assaults to trafficking of children in care, psychotropic medication injuries, and negligent adoption placements.

Practical Guidance: What to Do If You Suspect a Foster or Adopted Child Has Been Harmed

Whether in Florida or Oregon, a few principles apply to anyone — foster parent, adoptive parent, relative, teacher, guardian ad litem, or former foster youth — who believes a child was harmed in care or placed through negligent nondisclosure.

Report first. Suspected abuse should be reported immediately to the state abuse hotline (Florida’s DCF hotline or Oregon’s child abuse hotline) and, where a crime may have occurred, to law enforcement. Reporting creates a contemporaneous record and can trigger protective action for other children in the same placement.

Preserve everything. Placement paperwork, agency correspondence, pre-adoption disclosure packets, medical and therapy records, photographs, texts, and emails can all become critical evidence. Adult survivors should know that they generally have the right to request their own child welfare case records.

Mind the clock, but don’t assume it has run. Statutes of limitations for claims involving minors are extended in various ways, and both states have special rules for childhood sexual abuse claims. Many survivors who assume they waited too long have viable claims; only a qualified attorney can say for certain.

Consult counsel who lives in this niche. General personal injury lawyers rarely know how to pierce child welfare confidentiality, navigate sovereign immunity and damage caps, or litigate wrongful adoption disclosure standards. Specialist firms evaluate these cases at no cost and handle them on contingency, meaning families pay nothing unless there is a recovery.

Accountability Is a Resource Too

When people list the “resources” available to foster children, they usually name hotlines, ombudsman offices, court-appointed advocates, and transition programs. All of those matter. But the record in Florida and Oregon teaches a harder lesson: the most transformative resource a harmed foster child can have is a lawyer with the skill and determination to hold the system itself accountable. Class actions forced Oregon to confront hoteling and out-of-state institutionalization. Individual injury suits in Florida have exposed foster homes that should have been closed decades earlier. Wrongful adoption cases have made agencies think twice before sliding a sanitized file across the table to a hopeful family.

Foster children did not choose the systems that raise them. They cannot vote, lobby, or hire counsel on their own. Their protection depends on adults who refuse to look away — and on a legal profession willing to stand between vulnerable children and the institutions that failed them. In Florida and Oregon alike, that work is ongoing, necessary, and, for the children whose futures it secures, nothing short of life-changing.

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This article is provided for general informational purposes only and is not legal advice. Laws, deadlines, and procedures differ by state and by case. Anyone concerned about a specific child should contact a licensed attorney in the relevant jurisdiction.