Product Description

IIn 1973, a young ACLU attorney filed a controversial class-action lawsuit that challenged New York City’s operation of its foster-care system. The plaintiff was an abused runaway named Shirley Wilder who had suffered from the system’s inequities. Wilder, as the case came to be known, was waged for two and a half decades, becoming a battleground for the conflicts of race, religion, and politics that shape America’s child-welfare system.

The Lost Children of Wilder gives us the galvanizing history of this landmark case and the personal story at its core. Nina Bernstein takes us behind the scenes of far-reaching legal and legislative battles, but she also traces the life of Shirley Wilder and her son, Lamont, born when Shirley was only fourteen and relinquished to the very system being challenged in her name. Bernstein’s account of Shirley and Lamont’s struggles captures the heartbreaking consequences of the child welfare system’s best intentions and deepest flaws. In the tradition of There Are No Children Here, this is a major achievement of investigative journalism and a tour de force of social observation, a gripping book that will haunt every reader who cares about the needs of children.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #194757 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-05
• Released on: 2002-02-05
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Amazon.com
At age 12, Shirley Wilder ran away from an abusive home and landed in New York City's foster-care system. By age 13, she was named the plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit that challenged the city's 150-year-old system as unconstitutional. At 14, Shirley gave birth to a son, Lamont, who was soon swept up in the same system. This absorbing account by New York Times reporter Nina Bernstein follows the threads of the tragic lives of Shirley and Lamont Wilder and the lawsuit that bears their name. In the process it illuminates the city's--and the nation's--dysfunctional social welfare system and its impact on the children it purportedly helps.

The Wilder lawsuit was filed in 1973 by a passionate young lawyer who stuck by it through 26 years of litigation, without the case ever being fully resolved. The accusation: that New York City's system violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments for giving private religious agencies control of publicly financed foster-care beds. These mostly Catholic and Jewish agencies gave preference to white Catholic and Jewish children, while the growing numbers of black and Protestant children were sent to inappropriate institutions that left them with more problems than they had when they came. Such was the fate of Shirley, who, for lack of anywhere else to go, was placed in Hudson, a state reformatory for delinquents with no treatment services for abandoned or abused children. Hudson "looked like a camp from the outside and was unmistakably a prison within." There was rampant violence and sexual abuse, and girls were regularly punished by being put in "the hole," a 5-by-8-foot cell with no windows, furniture, or heat, which Shirley would later testify was like "Winter. Winter--all year round." But a case that named state and city officials, 77 voluntary agencies and their directors, and 84 individual defendants including nuns, rabbis, and clergymen, and that threatened to pit blacks and Jews against each other, was a case destined to enter a legal wilderness of avoidance and delay.

Shirley and Lamont's unforgettable stories reveal the deep fault lines in a system that often does more harm than good. While reforms come and go with little success, Bernstein makes clear that the child welfare system will never really change until there is a coming to terms with the system's place as "a political battleground for abiding national conflicts over race, religion, gender and inequality" and the "unacknowledged contradictions between policies that punish the 'undeserving poor' and pledge to help all needy children." --Lesley Reed

From Publishers Weekly
In this first-rate investigation, New York Times reporter Bernstein explores the genesis and aftermath of the landmark 1973 legal case filed by young ACLU attorney Marcia Lowry against the New York State foster-care system. Known as Wilder for its 14-year-old African-American plaintiff, Shirley "Pinky" Wilder, the suit claimed Jewish and Catholic child welfare services had a lock on foster care funding and placements. Like Susan Sheehan in Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair, Bernstein illuminates broader social issues through the story of Shirley; Lamont, the son she bore at 14; and Lamont's young sonDall graduates of New York's hellish child welfare system. The tale is gut-wrenchingly DickensianDall the more so because, as Bernstein shows, the well-meaning 19th-century Jewish and Catholic philanthropists, clerics and parents who founded and expanded the child welfare system in New York ultimately deprived huge numbers of children of their legal and human rights as the demographics of New York changed. It took 25 years and many more lawsuits before the reforms mandated by Wilder began to be realized. In the interim, Lamont endured the same excruciating experiences his mother had suffered, including physical and sexual abuse, homelessness, witnessing the deaths of other children in foster care and losing his own child to the foster care system. A crack addict, Shirley died of AIDS at 40. Despite these horrors, the book ends with the hopeful postscript that Lamont's son currently lives with his mother, Kisha, and visits his now self-supporting father on weekends. Ten years in the making, this viscerally powerful history of institutionalized child abuse and the criminalization of poverty, of civil rights and social change, is compelling and essential reading. Agent, Gloria Loomis. (Feb. 28) Forecast: Like Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities, this book has the potential to jumpstart a national conversation about the failings of our social safety net for impoverished children. If it garners the review attention it deserves, it will find a solid audience among readers of Kozol's and Sheehan's books.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This book is a fascinating history of 28 years of change in the child foster care system in New York City, where sectarian interests controlled the placement of homeless, neglected, abused, and emotionally disturbed children and adolescents. The book follows the lives of lead plaintiff Shirley Wilder and her son as Shirley goes from homeless preteen to teenage mother at 14 and is shifted from home to foster home to group home to institution. Her son grows up in foster care and institutions. The book simultaneously follows a 1986 federal lawsuit, which became known as Wilder, brought on behalf of foster care children in New York City by the ACLU Children's Rights Project. New York Times reporter Bernstein conducted extensive interviews of many of the participants for this book, which is compelling both for its elucidation of child welfare practices and for its demonstration of how litigation can affect social policy. A necessary purchase for New York State academic and larger public libraries and a very useful one for social welfare and policy collections nationwide.DMary Jane Brustman, Univ. at Albany Libs., NY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Sometimes There Is No Light At The End of the Tunnel
There's one word to describe this book: depressing. That doesn't mean you shouldn't read The Lost Children of Wilder, but it's so upsetting that the story will stay with you long after you've finished reading the book. In some true stories, you have the expectation of hope, even a small sliver, that things will get better. Without giving away the very moving details of the rest of Shirley Wilder's story, let me say that the story on page one is nothing compared to how sad her life becomes later on in the book, and the outrage you'll feel reading the first few chapters will not prepare you for how sad and angry the rest of her story will make you feel.

The anger isn't at Shirley Wilder or her child. The anger is for a child welfare and foster care system that was hopelessly broken then and is a thousand times worse today.

Ultimately, despite the groundbreaking class-action lawsuit, nothing changed, not for the tragic life of Shirley Wilder and her son. The system is just as broken today as it was thirty years ago.

Required Reading for All who work with homeless & homeless youth.
This book gives you the nuts and bolts of the Wilder case. It also gives marevelous insight into the lives of youth in Foster Care. If you think you know how it all "goes down" for youth in these circumstances- read this book. This is a complex social issue that requires understanding at the individual level.

This is also great book to read for those "thinking" about a career in social work, etc.

The Wisdom to End Foster Care and Orphanages
Once read, it might behoove caring persons to consider whether foster care and orphanages are proper environments for children whose parents are living, and whether even extended relatives are preferable to "kennel care" offered to humans, must less "sentenced" to them. In a modern age, if society cannot cope with the problems and the harms that occur with unwanted children, it's possible that we have been traveling down the wrong social path for some time. Examining the extent to which these environments are necessary, and damaging to children, it might be possible that alternative perspectives might provide solutions that are more family friendly, and salvage responsible, rather than to subject children to these emotionally detached and wrenching environments. It's possible we have been delusional for far too long in recognition of the fact that children are not as resilient as we tend to think they are, and that they were provided with two parents for that reason, because they need the protection, love and nurturing of parents, not just adult strangers. If we consider that it is unhealthy for mental health patients to be warehoused (if we can avoid it), why do we do it with children?