Arizona’s Double Standards: Requirements Higher for Biological Parents to Keep Their Children at Home than for Foster Parents to Take Other People’s Children into Their Home

Arizona and other states have much stricter policies in place for children to stay with their families in their own homes, than standards placed on foster parents to receive children that are not their own into their homes. It would seem logical that the stricter standard would be placed upon those that taxpayers pay to care for children taken from their families, while some grace would be extended to biological families. After all, simply being removed from their homes, no matter the family condition, is in itself traumatic to children. Children have the innate biological, psychological, emotional, social, and spiritual need for their own families that doesn't go away when they are placed with other people. Even the kindness of a stranger is not as welcome to a child as the love of their own mother, father, and grandparents. Yet the opposite is true. The looser standard lies with those homes the children are placed into. Perhaps no story we have covered in the last 4 years illustrates this more clearly than the case of Devani in Arizona, a child taken from her family at the age of 2. Her mother was never charged with abuse, but the state put her into a foster home where she was raped as part of a pedophile pornographic ring. After her foster parent was arrested, she still did not go home, but was placed into a home where she was scalded so badly by hot water that all of her toes were amputated.