Recent revelations of sexual abuse inside the group homes that house 1,500 Massachusetts children and teens were both painful and familiar. One study found that one in four adolescents living in group settings report experiencing sexual abuse.
The risk to Massachusetts youth is particularly acute: Two thirds of teenagers in state care are housed in group homes, one of the highest rates in the nation.
Stories about physical and sexual abuse of vulnerable children and youth in congregate care are far too common. But as each new scandal brings another round of recrimination and promised reform, the underlying question remains: Is it ever appropriate to house youth in congregate institutions such as group homes?
Like early childhood, adolescence is a time of critical developmental growth. More than anything else, healthy development depends on trusting relationships with caring adults. Being supervised by a rotating cast of shift workers makes forging these relationships not merely difficult but impossible.
When children are abused by those charged with protecting them, the damage is both profound and obvious. But even those who escape this worst outcome suffer grievous harm in congregate care. This is as true for a 16-year-old as it is for a 6-month-old. Children simply cannot thrive in institutions — and a group home, despite the name, is a form of institutional care.
In 2024, a group of internationally respected researchers on adolescent development came together at the request of the Youth Law Center to synthesize our knowledge and reflect on its application to teenagers in foster care. Our aim was to bring decades of research on adolescent development to bear on the child welfare system in the hope of improving the lives of those in its care.
Together, we came up with recommendations for improving the foster home experience to better support healthy adolescent development. When it came to group homes, however, we could do no such thing. Group care, as extensive research documents, is antithetical to what teens need to grow. Though there is a role for short-term stays in high-quality facilities that provide actual treatment, too often group care settings serve as warehouses that offer only rigid structure instead of effectively addressing the trauma that most of their residents have experienced.
Like young children, teenagers have the need and the right to grow up in a family with at least one stable, loving adult caregiver. No amount of reform can fix the fundamental mismatch between a group home staffed by shift workers and this central imperative. The structural neglect that is inherent in congregate care interrupts adolescent development across the board.
A meta-analysis of 300 studies covering more than 100,000 children who grew up in institutional settings documented substantial delays in physical and brain growth, health and cognition, and socio-emotional development. That these findings apply to teenagers as well as young children should not be surprising.
A strong relationship with a trusted adult is the secure base that allows the adolescent to take risks, explore the world and begin to navigate the passage toward adulthood. Being cared for by an ever-changing array of workers who come and go in shifts makes sustaining this essential relationship impossible.
This is not breaking news. We have known that group care is damaging for more than a century. When Theodore Roosevelt convened a group of experts on the care of dependent children in 1909, their central conclusion mirrored our own: Whenever children must be removed from their homes, “they should be cared for in families wherever practicable.”
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child reached a similar conclusion: families should be afforded the assistance they need to care for their children. When this is not possible, children should be cared for in family-based settings.
The promises to improve protocols and procedures that follow each new revelation of abuse are not only inadequate, they may be worse than nothing at all. By creating the illusion of progress, these never-ending “reforms” legitimize an intrinsically damaging institution.
That does not mean that nothing can be done. Decades of research offer a clear alternative to institutional care: supporting families so children can remain in their homes, and when that is not possible, placing them with well-trained foster families who can help them develop their full potential.
More than a century has passed since the Roosevelt convening reached this same conclusion. The time has come to shutter the group homes and give all children the families they need and deserve.
