Film: Foster Boy UPDATED
See here:
““Too many foster children have been unheard, unrepresented, uncared for. It’s time to make our nation’s foster kids a priority … Speak up. Foster. he film, based on true events, is about a foster boy who seeks justice after he is horrifically abused by an older boy with a history as a sexual predator. When placed in the foster home, that history was not disclosed by the for-profit foster care agency managing the case.
The abused boy is represented by an attorney based on Deratany in the film that turns a spotlight on tragic statistics for the nation’s 430,000 youths in foster care: only half graduate high school; 24 percent are homeless a year after aging out of the system; 60 percent are unemployed five years out; and only 3 percent graduate college.
It was in 2000 that Deratany, a personal injury lawyer, was introduced to the crisis of children removed from biological parents for abuse or neglect — only to be abused or killed in foster home placements by Department of Children & Family Services contractors, or after returned to parents without proper case management. Such cases were particularly rampant with for-profit contractors.Adopt. Their lives hang in the balance,” the familiar voice says in the animated short promoting the new movie, “Foster Boy.”
It’s the voice of retired NBA Hall of Famer Shaquille O’Neal, speaking about a new film for which he is both executive and presenting producer.
“Foster Boy” is based on the work of Chicago attorney Jay Paul Deratany, who for 20 years has been fighting on behalf of children abused or killed while under the care of private foster care firms contracted by state child welfare agencies, beginning with Illinois.
Starring Matthew Modine, Louis Gossett Jr. and Amy Brenneman, “Foster Boy” has been racking up awards at film festivals nationwide — 10 to date, including Best of the Fest and Best Narrative Feature at the International Black Film Festival; Best Feature Film at both the Durham Region International Film Festival and West Texas Film Festival; and Best Full-Length Narrative Feature as well as the Human Rights and Dignity Award at the Tryon Film Festival.
And the buzz is growing over the film O’Neal said he hopes to sell as a series to a streaming service like Netflix or Showtime.
“It’s a powerful film,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times on Thursday afternoon before he would fly here for NBA All-Star Weekend — headlining a fundraiser Thursday night for the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s civil rights organization, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition.
“I was mostly doing medical malpractice, when one day, a client came in, referred by another lawyer who didn’t know what to do with the case. It was a woman whose son had been raped and abused by a foster child she brought into the home,” said Deratany.
“After some investigating, I learned this young man had a history of severe mental illness. He was a predator and had a record of being a predator in other homes,” he said. “Afterward, I was so moved by how poorly children were being treated in foster care that I wrote a few articles. I started getting more of these cases and have devoted my work since then to children’s rights cases.”
In 2018, Deratany, according to his law firm, won Illinois’ largest jury award ever for social service agency negligence — $45 million — in Lavandis Hudson vs. Lutheran Social Services. The 2-year-old Hudson was killed by his mentally ill mother in 2011 after the nonprofit DCFS contractor returned the child.
So why did the four-time NBA champion O’Neal — who since retiring in 2011 has been alternately a music producer, DJ and currently a sports analyst on TNT’s acclaimed “Inside the NBA” show — decide to back this film?
“Watching it was an emotional and eye-opening experience for me. I wanted to know more at the end of the film,” said the 47-year-old, who played for six teams over a 19-year NBA career. O’Neal won three championships with the late Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers, one with Miami Heat.
“I was shocked to learn about this cycle of abuse, neglect and poverty for these voiceless kids. I’ve known foster families whose experiences were positive, and the outcomes for the kids were good — many have gone on to find success and happiness. I had no idea these horrors existed,” O’Neal said.
O’Neal next will present the film at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles on Monday. He said he hopes that putting his support behind a national issue he cares about will spark conversation about much-needed reform in state foster care.
“Foster kids don’t vote, have no money, no lobbyists. They’ll never march, and you’ve never read an op-ed from a current foster kid. They need a voice,” O’Neal said. “When we show the film to foster kids, they stand up and cheer. They say the film has finally given them a voice. That’s why I’m part of it. I love these kids. We all should.””
NBA’s Shaquille O’Neal takes on plight of foster children with new film, ‘Foster Boy’
[Chicago Sun-Times 02/13/2020 by Maudlyne Ihejirika ]
REFORM Puzzle Piece
Update: “If you had told me years ago that I would write and produce a film that highlights the dark underbelly of the legal system and the fight that our nation’s most at-risk kids have to endure to get justice, I’m not sure what I would’ve thought. I’m a personal injury attorney in downtown Chicago and I have seen many eventful, impactful legal battles play out. But when I started working on foster youth cases, I began a journey that would culminate in me getting my MFA to write and produce a feature film about the epidemic of abuse in the foster care system.
It’s not a typical path for a lawyer to take, and it certainly came with challenges – my program was a hybrid of in-person residency events and online classes, so there were many times I would come home after a day of trial work to do homework, and even an instance where I finished a trial in New York and flew straight to Palm Springs to attend an in-person seminar. But the work I was doing in the courtroom often inspired me even more for my MFA work, and it paid off when I obtained my MFA as the class valedictorian – and now the project I’ve worked so hard on is ready to be shared with the world. Now Foster Boy is out in theaters and on demand, and I’ve been reflecting on the process that led to its creation – and my hopes that this film will turn its audiences into champions and activists for these kids.
When I began working on foster-care legal issues, I was disturbed to my core to see how widespread horrifying abuse in the system is. The cases that I took on shattered my assumptions and profoundly moved me. Abused youth who come forward do so out of courage, not because of any fleeting desire for self-gain. No abused kid would sign themselves up to have the most painful moments of their lives publicly dissected just for a quick cash grab, and I wanted to empathetically demonstrate that point to get people to set aside their own assumptions why kids come forward. That’s why in the film, the hardened lawyer Michael Trainer (played by Matthew Modine) begins to believe that a pro-bono client he begrudgingly is forced to represent – a young former foster kid named Jamal (potently brought to life by Shane Paul McGhie) – may really be telling the truth about the extent of his abuse after refusing an initial settlement offer. If he’s not in it for the payday, then is it possible that he is being honest about the intentional negligence that led to his trauma? And what does it say about the power of the system when we’re prone to questioning children’s truthfulness in the first place? These thoughts haunt Michael Trainer in Foster Boy, and it’s a parallel of my own growth into a foster-care reform advocate.
Lawyers are used to stress, frustration, and even outrage about the cases that they work on – but taking on foster-care cases took all that to an entirely different level. By the time many of these cases landed on my desk, I was fighting for justice for a child who had already been irreparably traumatized or, in some cases, even killed. I felt helpless and horrified, like I was always one step behind preventing the system from causing more harm. These cases kept me awake at night. And they would probably keep other people awake at night, too, if they just knew about them.
The kind of sweeping misconduct and mismanagement in the foster care system – a broken system being actively reaped for monetary gain by for profit companies with little regard for safety – seems so outrageous that it seems better suited for fiction. The more involved I got, the more monumental pain and systemic corruption I saw up close, ranging from widespread negligence, denial of treatment, and the outright active enabling of violence and misconduct against kids. It deeply troubled me to know that so many children were being subjected to abhorrent physical, emotional and sexual abuse; nearly one in four foster children suffers from post-traumatic stress-disorder – a rate higher than some groups of veterans returning from Iraq.
From social workers questioning an abused child in the presence of her abusers and catalyzing a punishment from them that led to the child’s death, to foster agencies knowingly endangering families by hiding abuse histories, I’ve seen it all. One of the plot points in Foster Boy is inspired by a case I worked on where a child with a documented history of perpetrating sexual abuse was placed, without warning, into a home with other children. After seeing the agony and bravery of foster kids and activists fighting for justice, I felt that it was my duty to share these stories which had grown to haunt me outside of the courtroom. People need to understand that while Foster Boy dramatized events, the script is based on the very real terror that many foster youth confront and grapple with.
Screenwriter Jay Paul Deratny (left) talking with director Youssef Delara on the set of Foster Boy.
Children who do come forward may feel pressured to settle for less than the damages they truly deserve, because of fear of shaming, character assassination, and retraumatization. Opposing counsel lawyers often said things like, “Your client doesn’t want to relive the trauma and face the embarrassment of being sexually or physically abused,” in front of a jury, an allusion to the harshness of the system. When creating Foster Boy, I thought it was important to convey just how difficult it is to stand up against the foster-care system in legal cases logistically, but also the raw, emotional and potentially volatile way that abuse survivors can react while getting triggered on the witness stand or during other proceedings. Coming forward about abuse and trying to get justice in a world that is not trauma-informed or at all sympathetic is not a simple task, particularly for youth of color. This is especially true for Black children, who are disproportionately represented in the system and subject to a myriad of stereotypes, stigmas and racist microaggressions that make justice even harder to attain.
The lack of oversight and direct negligence of the foster care industry creates a maddening cycle of abuse. Studies show us that 28 percent of foster youth are abused while in the system, but that number is undoubtedly miscounted on the low end. Foster children are often gaslit and conditioned to not report their abuse. That isn’t even considering how many foster youth enter the system directly because of an explicit incident of abuse at home.
Children cycle through the system – in as many as 60 percent of states, foster youth go through more than two placements – while frequently being unable to speak up or get crucial access to psychological treatment. Traumatized children who are exposed to constant instability and not given any assistance can fall into a devastating traumatic phenomenon of re-enacting their abuse onto other kids – something I saw happen in the real-life case that inspired a plot point in Foster Boy. It’s a resounding moral and legal failure that the foster-care system isn’t preventing adults from abusing these vulnerable children in the first place, but it’s outright mind-boggling that youth who have a documented history of abusing other kids are still getting placed in other homes and around other children. It really is that shamefully bad. It really is that egregious. And it really is happening to the 440,000 children in foster care in the United States right at this instant.
The system is so broken that cases like the one in the film are not outliers. The character of Jamal may be fictional, but the pain that he endures is real for far too many foster youth. Telling this story has been a personal mission for me. And I hope that after watching Foster Boy, it’ll be a personal mission for many of the people who see the film, as well. There are so many things that need to be fixed about the foster-care system. But we must start by reckoning with its failures – and believing, supporting and advocating for both the kids who come forward and the ones that are forced to suffer in silence. For now, I myself continue to work on foster-care cases and have been in courtrooms around the country. I will keep fighting for justice for these kids and sharing their stories so others do too.”
[Talk House 9/28/2020 by Jay Paul Deratany]
Recent Comments