The Incarnation Children’s Center out of Harlem, NY, also known as the ICC, had raised many eyebrows in the 1990s for the experimental testing that they permitted many of their foster kids to be involved in under their care.

The Incarnation Children’s Center of Harlem had allowed 465 of their foster kids with HIV to participate in a HIV study that had many people questioning the nature of this experiment these foster kids had undergone. It has been claimed by many that racism had a large part to do with why these foster kids, in particular, were placed in this HIV study. The ICC foster care, along with the NYC Administration for Children Services, is said to be responsible for this level of misconduct.

The fact that 98 percent of the foster kids that were provided foster care by the ICC were minority led many to believe that the experiment’s use of these particular foster kids could have been committed with ill intent. Many believe that the foster kids that participated in the study were not valued in the way that a participant in a clinical study should be. The foster care system was criticized by many for enabling this type of activity to be conducted.

The HIV experimental study of the foster kids under the foster care of the ICC caused many to compare the experiment to that of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of Tuskegee, Alabama that lasted from 1932 to 1972. That study involved 399 underprivileged African American sharecroppers that had contracted syphilis and was carried out by the United States Public Health Service.

The focus of the experiment was said to be to be able to form programs that would help African Americans suffering from the illness. Due to a leak to the press, investigators discovered that the men, women, and children in the experiment were not offered the proper care that they could and should have been. Many felt that the foster kids in the foster care of the ICC were exploited in the same way.

Many believed that the ICC foster care subjected these foster kids to violations of the standards of the 1979 Belmont Report for clinical studies. It was the belief that the foster care system failed to allow the kids to be studied with the standard of giving them proper informed consent, minimizing the risks while making sure that the benefits of the treatment options were carried out, and administering a procedure that would not exploit them, and making sure that they were properly compensated for the experimental study.

Unfortunately in some prospects, American society is highly driven by money. People are willing to go to any extent in order to obtain it. Nothing is off limits when it comes to finding a way to access it. Many individuals want a lot of money, but do not truly know the value required to earn it. There are also those that assign a high value to the lives of children.

The intent for granting financial compensation for offering foster placement is to reimburse a person for taking the responsibility for meeting the obligations of that child. There is also an additional element as to why individuals are awarded for foster placement: to encourage others to offer foster placement because there are many foster children that need to be cared for, but there are simply not enough qualified people out there that are willing to provide a home for these children.

There are some that are aware of the financial incentive that comes with offering a home to a foster child, and although that may have some influence over the decision-making process, they will always do their very best to care for that foster child, no matter what.

When children are placed in foster homes, one of the major indications for why some of these children inherit psychological problems is because of the identity problems that they face. Once a child is placed in a foster home, they often feel that he or she no longer has a family with whom to identify.

Many children that are placed in foster homes are not aware of the cause of this void in their lives; they just know that they are unhappy living in these foster homes. Many of these children feel that no matter how hard their foster parents try, they are always going to feel the void of not being able to be with their birth family. 

Even in those circumstances where abuse was prevalent, many of those children had at least moments when they were able to think of their biological family as home. That is not to say that the child should not have been removed from that environment and placed into foster homes by the State. However, many children that are in a foster home will always have a longing to be with their biological families. This is why recent legislation has encouraged placing children in the foster homes of close relatives.

If a child has to be separated from a parent and placed in a foster home, the child sometimes feels as though they are an illegitimate member of their new foster home. When children are placed in foster homes, they sometimes believe that they do not belong to the family.

Once they enter these foster homes, they feel like outsiders in the place that they are supposed to call home. This causes many children placed in a foster home to develop psychological issues. It is difficult for them to live in a foster home because they do not feel like they belong there.

Then there are some children that are placed in foster homes that grow up without their biological family and they go on to live their lives despising the fact that they were not granted the opportunity. Those children that are in these foster homes reach a point in time when they want to learn more about their birth family.

For those that are placed in foster homes and have come to grow a close bond with their foster family while they are in a foster home, they do not know how to handle the fact that they want to learn more about their family. This, too, can cause children to develop psychological problems while they are in a foster home.

While they are in a foster home, they feel a conflict within themselves because they do not know how to deal with the fact that they would like to learn more about their birth families. Some of them feel that this inquisition will hurt their foster family, so they may choose to hold this longing inside, which can lead to psychological problems.