Decades of Reform and an Ongoing Systemic Crisis

Louisiana’s child welfare system has been in and out of constant crisis for decades. While foster care systems claim to protect children, they are instead re-abusing them, permanently damaging and subjecting vulnerable youth to horrifying rates of emotional, sexual, and physical abuse. Louisiana’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. As a state entangled in class-action litigations for decades, Louisiana’s history with Del A. v. Edwards and the pending Jacob B. v. DCFS lawsuits shows these ongoing, active dangers. Children should not be removed from their natural parents who are their main source of safety, stability, and protection without a significant reason.

As Fred Rogers once said, “We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say, ‘It’s not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.’ Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.”

As child welfare advocates, Justice for Kids® will protect injured foster children in Louisiana by filing personal injury and damage claims in the state. Justice for Kids® refuses to be silent.

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

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

Even decades after the initial court filings in Del A., the fight for Louisiana’s foster children remains a pressing issue. As shown in national analyses of child welfare failures, litigation in Louisiana reveals 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. According to a 2019 Child Welfare League of America report, only one-third of children available for adoption in Louisiana were actually adopted, and in 2016 alone, 145 children aged out of the system without achieving permanency. A deep-dive review into the state’s operations revealed that between 2020 and 2023, entries into the Louisiana foster care system to skyrocket by more than 50% without reducing child abuse deaths. This systemic disregard for foster children’s basic rights in Louisiana reflects the country’s national crisis, where temporary placements put our youth in danger rather than peace.

Foster care systems are inflict severe physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and catastrophic damage, causing deep personal injury to vulnerable foster youth trapped in state custody. The devastating, multi-generational toll of this institutional betrayal can be seen in the investigation into the New Orleans Archdiocese, which currently faces over 500 child abuse claims.

The complaints allege a horrifying culture of torture. Survivors describe being subjected to daily molestation and groping by authority figures who utilized lockdown units, placed pillows over children’s faces, and wore masks to conceal the identities of rapists during assaults inside the property’s cathedral. Other children describe being tied up by their genitals and subjected to near-suffocation by complicit employees.

Left completely unprotected, the profound trauma suffered by these children shattered their adult lives. Terrified youth who ran away to escape the torture were routinely mislabeled as “violent,” chemically restrained with heavy anti-psychotic medications like Thorazine, and placed in straitjackets inside state mental well-being hospitals. Demonstrating a direct pipeline from institutional child abuse to the criminal justice system, at least 23 survivors from these two orphanages alone later suffered severe legal troubles and became incarcerated as a direct consequence of unaddressed childhood trauma.

The continuous systemic disregard for foster children’s basic rights in Louisiana is only a fraction of our country’s national child welfare crisis, where foster care placements put our youth in danger rather than safety. Youth face extreme instability, cycling through abusive environments and psychiatric institutions due to a severe deficit of certified homes, leaving older teens especially stranded. 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.