South Carolina: Decades of Reform and an Ongoing Systemic Crisis

South Carolina’s child welfare system has been in and out of crisis for decades, heavily criticized for operating a system that removes children from their homes, ripping family and cultural ties apart. While foster care systems claim to protect children, they instead often re-abuse them, subjecting vulnerable youth to horrifying rates of sexual abuse and physical abuse. South Carolina’s systemic issues that allow foster children to be sexually and physically abused demonstrate a broader national reality: foster care is a failed human experiment on these kids. This habit of removal over reconciliation has led to family separations, placement instability, and intense trauma for children. South Carolina’s active, ongoing Michelle H. v. McMaster class action lawsuit demonstrates these dangers. Children should not be removed from their natural parents who are their main source of safety, stability, and protection without a significant, compelling reason.

As Mary McLeod Bethune stated, “We have a powerful potential in our youth, and we must have the courage to change old ideas and practices so that we may direct their power.”

As sensitive advocates, Justice for Kids® continues to protect foster children by working with licensed, qualified lawyers in South Carolina to file personal injury and damage claims throughout the state. Justice for Kids® refuses to be silent.

Every case below is part of one continuous legal fight: holding  South Dakota’s child welfare system to the constitutional standard it has repeatedly failed to meet.

We connect families with licensed South Carolina attorneys who handle personal injury and damage claims on behalf of children abused in state custody — at no upfront cost to you.

Unjustified, aggressive and lengthy separations deeply traumatize children, cutting their ties to their parents, extended families, and overall cultural heritage. When a system resorts to careless emergency removals without solid evidence, it creates a never-ending cycle of instability and deep emotional harm. As seen in national analyses of child welfare failures, litigation in South Carolina operates a system that is so overburdened and poorly maintained that it frequently fails to secure timely permanency, protect children from abuse, or provide safe placements. This systemic disregard for foster children’s basic rights reflects the country’s national crisis, where foster care placements put our youth in danger rather than safety and security.

These localized failures directly evidence the catastrophic national crisis. Severe placement shortages have caused foster children to sleep on office floors and inside budget motels under the bare minimum supervision of exhausted case workers. Federal data tracks approximately 20,000 youth who age out of the foster care system annually across the country, representing about 10% of the older foster care population. National data from Casey Family Programs shows the many harms the foster care system imposes on children, including educational neglect. Foster children are disproportionately likely to fall behind on education, with only 55%-56% graduating high school compared to over 83% of their statewide peers, and just 3% to 12% ever attaining a four-year college degree. Vulnerable foster youth that are left to grow up alone in institutional isolation face incessant trauma instead of strong family bonds and are thereby led into adulthood entirely unprotected.