While the country was busy ideologically debating the issues of the “Forest Family”, in the silence of any parliamentary day On March 11th, the Senate approved the bill no. 1694 on the “Protection of minors in foster care”.
For the Italian foster care system, this is no small matter, so it is important to fully understand the content of this text and the effects it will generate on an institution that currently allows approximately 30 thousand children and adolescents (data from the Guarantor Authority for Children and Adolescents) with temporarily unfit parents (0.2% out of 9 million minors in Italy) to still live with families or family communities.
Well, the new Bill – strongly supported by the Minister for the Family Eugenia Roccella and the Minister of Justice Carlo Nordio – establishes two new Registers: the National Register of foster families and family-type communities and a Register of public and private care institutions. These will collect on a provincial basis all the information regarding the number of minors placed outside their families of origin, the reasons that led to the protection measures, the duration of the recovery “projects”, and the type of situations that welcome the children, be they foster families, family communities or care institutions.
Not only that. Legislative Decree 1694/26 also establishes a national observatory on public and private care institutions and on family-type communities and foster families, a supervisory body which will have the aim of analyzing all the information received in the Registries and reporting any “improper placements” to the competent authorities, also arranging inspections and checks, as well as an annual report to the Chambers.
In reality, monitoring of foster care has been necessary (and desired) for some time. The institution of family foster care, in fact, was created more than 40 years ago (with Law 184/1983 and subsequent Law 149/2001) to “place the minor temporarily without a suitable family environment” with a family or family community while waiting for the conditions for reunification with the parents to be re-established. The maximum duration of these placement projects is indicated by law as 2 years, renewable for another 2.
Over time, however, an ever-increasing number of “projects” were not rigorously verified by social services and the Courts and, in the absence of an adequate recovery of behavior on the part of the parents, many children remained with foster families or in family communities “sine die”, without ever starting an adoption process (ex art. 44 L. 184/83). A very negative practice for all the protagonists involved: first of all for minors, who grew up to 18 years of age and older without ever being legitimately “children” within foster families (with impactful consequences on documents, health decisions and the possibility of traveling abroad), and then also for parents – foster and original – incapable of supporting hybrid situations for such a long time. Giving order to these drifts with constant monitoring, restoring to children in foster care the right to a legitimate and adequate family (hopefully the one of origin, or if necessary the foster one transformed into an adoptive one) can only be positive.
The fear, however, is that the aim of Ministers Roccella and Nordio (and with them the entire majority, the only one in favor of this bill) is different from this. During her report in the Chamber, Senator Erika Stefani (Lega) declared that “it is a provision that pursues the principle of the superior interest of the minor, to guarantee the right of minors to live and grow within their families of origin”. The purpose of the Register is therefore “to monitor that the conditions exist for the use of foster care to avoid the creation of situations of improper placement”. There is therefore no talk of “correction” of some practices that distort temporary foster care, but the establishment of a supervisory body for a system that “improperly” places children outside of families and then does not let them back. A statement that disavows the protection work done by the Juvenile Courts on children subjected to mistreatment, neglect and abuse in the family. And which, rather than aiming for an improvement in family custody, would seem to imply a desire to abolish it, certainly not in the best interest of the minors in our country.
