Children in the foster care system and orphanages have often been overlooked and cast away to the shadows. Who is keeping their adolescence safe and a priority from the horrors of being institutionalized? Children within the system are more susceptible to a life of emotional, physical, and mental abuse. Society tends to forget about them when they are calling out for the world to help them the most. Researchers have conducted studies and experiments on institutionalized children, but have the ethics of these experiments been truly evaluated? To some that is a question of objectivity. Yes, these children are not being put in harms way and rather helping push the boundaries of scientific research on the effects of children within the system. Though to others, this debate has been deemed to terms of subjectivity in regard to the moral conflict of exploiting these children’s trauma for educational gain in the name of science.
In the article, “Ethical Considerations in International Research Collaboration: The Bucharest Early Intervention Project”, Zeanah et al. weighed the ethical costs of conducting experiments on institutionalized children. The researchers highlighted the multiple ethical controversies that arose from such a study. The Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP) was a study that evaluated the ethics of experiments noting the physical and psychological effects on children living in orphanages or the foster care system. The researchers conducted this study so that they could bring the government data proving whether foster care or institutional care to be more beneficial for citizens. In their conclusions, the researchers state that foster care was better for child development and had less of a negative impact on the child’s well-being over being institutionalized. Due to these findings, the debate of removing children from these institutions and placing them into the foster care system has become a question of ethical responsibility for the researchers and a moral obligation. If the researchers do not act in the best interest of the children, the research does not prove to have the benefits it claims to be providing.
In the article, “Who Speaks for Me?: Addressing Variability in Informed Consent Practices for Minimal Risk Research Involving Foster Youth” Greiner et al. discussed the importance of informed consent from foster youth when conducting empirical studies. The researchers reviewed many pieces of literature on conducted experiments in retrieval of informed consent. The researchers concluded by stating that there is no concrete way to obtain informed consent from foster children to participant in scientific research. Though, they emphasize in high regard that consent should be adequate of the child’s interests and be accompanied by an individual of legal authority when seeking out research involving youth in the foster care system.
Overall, both articles proved to be very informative when discussing the problems arising from the ethical standpoint of conducting experiments on institutionalized children. The ethical questions that have been raised are very complex and hard to deliver a clear cut answer. To some it maybe easier to quickly condemn the study, but then how would the children’s best interest be kept a top priority? Would they simply be forgotten once again? Any negative environment involving children is not ideal, yet how does one turn the bad into good? Some people might find the data retrieved to be very important for the progression of enhancement of child development in the foster care system and can be deemed beneficial on the long term.
References:
Greiner, M. V., Beal, S. J., Allen, A., Patel, V., Meinzen-Derr, J., & Matheny Antommaria, A. H. ( 2018). Who Speaks for Me? Addressing Variability in Informed Consent Practices for Minimal Risk Research Involving Foster Youth. Journal of Health Disparities Research and Practice, 11, 111-131. doi:https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1797&context=jhdrp
Zeanah, Charles H., et al. “Ethical Considerations in International Research Collaboration: The Bucharest Early Intervention Project.” Infant Mental Health Journal, vol. 27, no. 6, 2006, pp. 559–576., doi:10.1002/imhj.20107.
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