Inside Philly’s hidden foster care system, where parents ‘voluntarily’ give up their children

In fall 2021, Tytianna Hawthorne received a phone message from an investigator with the Philadelphia Department of Human Services: Someone may have abused her 1-year-old daughter.

The investigator was acting on a confidential tip to ChildLine from a caller who said a photo of Su’Layah on a social media account showed “hookah charcoal burn marks” on Su’Layah’s inner thighs.

Hawthorne, a first-time mother at 20, had spent time in foster care herself and had no love for the system. She also knew DHS had the power to take away her child. She hoped that the evident good health of her daughter, Su’Layah Williams, would speak for itself, and she called the investigator back.

She told the investigator she first discovered the marks when her daughter returned after a weekend visit with her father. She treated them with Neosporin. Hawthorne said that money was tight, and that she and her daughter had been living with family members and friends.

The marks were barely visible, a DHS record noted, and the mother and daughter were “clearly bonded.” Still, the investigator wanted a medical examination.

Su’Layah had not been burned, a doctor reported, according to records reviewed for this article. She had impetigo, a common childhood skin infection that can flare up and look like a burn.

On his next visit to Hawthorne’s home in Strawberry Mansion, the investigator said he was concerned that although Su’Layah’s impetigo had subsided, Hawthorne had not yet purchased the antibiotic cream prescribed at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Then to Hawthorne’s surprise, a woman named Danaejah Harper joined the meeting.

Hawthorne and Harper had met years earlier, during a stay at a group home.

“You’re my sister,” Harper told her at the time. “We have the same father.”

Hawthorne had not believed her because they didn’t look alike. In the years since, they occasionally ran into each other, including at LOVE Park after Su’Layah was born. Harper insisted on calling Su’Layah “my niece.”

“I didn’t think she was my sister and didn’t want anything to do with her,” Hawthorne said in an interview last spring.

Then the DHS investigator said something that chilled her.

“I have enough evidence now that I could take your daughter into the foster care system,” she recalled him saying. “But if you can place the child elsewhere, with someone I can trust, we don’t need to get the courts involved.”

The offer the DHS investigator made falls in the category of “voluntary arrangements.”

Some parent advocates report that such voluntary placements can allow kids to return home far more quickly than formal foster care. But parents report feeling coerced into accepting the agreements: Place the child here, they are told, or we’ll take them into foster care.

When the DHS investigator made this offer, Harper said she would care for Su’Layah.

Hawthorne had little time to weigh her options and lacked an understanding of what each choice entailed: Technically, voluntary arrangements allow parents to retain all legal rights to their children and keep them out of foster care. That is a powerful lure. But in practical terms, accepting a voluntary agreement cedes power to the child welfare agency to dictate every aspect of a child’s life without court supervision or the mandated provision of needed services.

Child welfare researchers call this “hidden foster care” because agencies gain the same level of control over children and families without ever taking legal custody.

In the crush of the moment, like many parents, Hawthorne felt overwhelmed. Legal custody, however, struck her as the primary goal. So she consented.

The case was then passed to the city’s community umbrella agency (CUA) system, a network of privately contracted agencies that have responsibility for overseeing children and families after a DHS investigation.

About 14 months later, Su’Layah was dead, allegedly kicked to death after Harper left her home for work. Her roommate and partner, Diamond Joyner, was charged with first-degree murder. Her trial is set for June.

Hawthorne arrived at the hospital only in time to cry her goodbyes.

Earlier this year, a lawyer representing Su’Layah Williams’ estate filed a wrongful-death suit naming both Harper and Joyner as defendants.

Accusing them of “an almost-two-year effort … to steal Su’Layah Williams, as they stated they wanted to start a family of their own and could not,” the attorney, A.J. Thomson, wrote that “no evidence … supports the contention by Danaejah Harper that she is related in any way to Tytianna Hawthorne.”

In an interview last year, Thomson also blasted DHS for taking Su’Layah from her mother over the failure to buy antibiotic skin cream only to place her in the home where she would be killed.

“I really just couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Thomson said, “and I kept thinking, ‘Imagine if some white family on the Main Line was treated this way.’ It would never happen.”

Kara Finck, a University of Pennsylvania professor of family law, suggests that Hawthorne and her daughter were separated due to poverty.

“In a case like this,” said Finck, who directs Penn’s Interdisciplinary Child Advocacy Clinic, “the child and her mother could have better been treated as a case in need of support services.”

Case managers developed significant evidence that Hawthorne had the capacity to parent her daughter, according to a review of more than 1,000 pages of DHS documents in her case file. Su’Layah received regular doctor’s visits and vaccinations, achieved typical child development milestones, and was in good health. One woman Hawthorne and Su’Layah lived with said the young mother sought her help applying for benefits for her daughter.

Child welfare agencies are supposed to identify these strengths and build on them, said Toshira Maldonado, a former CUA case manager. “But you know that kind of service takes time, and too often the system doesn’t want to invest that kind of time.”

What Hawthorne most needed from DHS was help with housing and employment services.

The voluntary arrangement DHS imposed on Hawthorne allowed DHS — and the CUA — to invest minimal time and resources in the case while maintaining control over Su’Layah Williams’ life.

By law, Su’Layah and her mother appear to have been owed services. As DHS case files note, Hawthorne had an IQ of 70, qualifying her for a cognitive disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“This should have entitled them to more services,” Finck said, “not less.”

Her cognitive ability also suggests the agency’s use of a voluntary safety plan was particularly inappropriate, confronting her with an immediate choice she might have needed time to process.

Su’Layah’s case was overseen for the longest period of time by Northeast Treatment Centers, defendant in a separate lawsuit filed by Thomson that was settled last summer. (Under the terms of the settlement, Hawthorne and Thomson are not permitted to speak about the case. Interviews with them for this article took place before then.)

The files in the case reveal a series of failures to serve Hawthorne and ensure her daughter’s safety. Designating the case “voluntary” likely did the most damage.

From an agency perspective, the math is simple: If her daughter had been officially entered into court-approved foster care, DHS would have owed Hawthorne an array of services to reunite her with her daughter.

Under the terms of a voluntary arrangement, Hawthorne was owed nothing.

Numerous documents indicate Hawthorne should have engaged mental health services but without information about a contracted agency that was to provide them.

Hawthorne said in interviews last spring that she was never offered anything at all. Family advocates said the lack of named providers in the files suggests Hawthorne was merely told she should seek services.

Attorney Marcia Lowry, who led a successful lawsuit against New Jersey that triggered reforms there 20 years ago, said that voluntary agreements present problems. “They hide the number of families the agency is dealing with and reduce the amount of services they’re obligated to provide.”

DHS also appears to be operating in a legal gray area.

State law describes “voluntary placement agreements” as taking place for no more than 30 days before DHS must either reunite the family or take the case into dependency court.

Under any such arrangement, DHS must create a “safety plan” to govern the child’s living arrangement.

However, according to local dependency attorneys, DHS no longer engages in voluntary placement agreements, instead categorizing all such arrangements as “voluntary safety plans” — which sounds like a mere semantic difference but carries massive legal ramifications.

“Legally, these voluntary safety plans are a much greater concern,” said Temple family law professor Sarah Katz, “because they can go on indefinitely, the parents are often not made aware of their rights, and the government takes as much control of the child as they would if they had them in their custody. It’s essentially a total denial of parental rights.”

Hawthorne and her daughter Su’Layah faced this exact predicament — life in “hidden foster care,” under government control but outside of court oversight.

Though Su’Layah was never officially in DHS custody, her life was under its control. Parents can choose to terminate the agreement at any point, but sometimes do not understand this or fear that DHS will then take the child into government custody. And in Hawthorne’s case, her rights were routinely ignored.

In May 2022, according to court documents, Hawthorne texted her case manager that she did not want her daughter placed with Harper any longer. “I don’t want her with her. … I don’t want her around my child.”

No change was made.

Then in June 2022, Hawthorne texted Su’Layah’s case manager to ask if she could visit her daughter for her birthday.

According to Katz and Finck, both DHS and the CUA had no legal authority over Hawthorne and her daughter. However, the case manager texted her back: “No.”

Legally, Hawthorne could have gone to see Su’Layah at any time. But because she did not want to risk seeing her daughter swept into foster care, she complied.

“We’re seeing these cases in the clinic a lot,” Katz said. “When either DHS finally seeks custody of the child, or if a parent just gets tired of waiting to be reunited with their child, takes their child back, and forces DHS’s hand.”

Katz said she is concerned because “the notion that these plans are ‘voluntary’ is laughable. The parents comply the whole time out of fear of DHS.”

Plus, she’s also seeing many “voluntary arrangements persist for months” before coming before a judge.

How many of these cases, Katz wondered, “are never making their way into custody or dependency court?”

DHS won’t say. The agency has denied Right-to-Know requests seeking records about voluntary safety plans, including any document that notes how many it conducts annually.

The Su’Layah Williams case file totaled 1,117 pages’ worth of DHS documents, with the vast majority of those pages covering the period of time when she was in a voluntary arrangement. DHS, however, responded that it does not track the number of such plans as a statistic.

Nationally, researchers estimate that 250,000 kids are in “hidden foster care” each year. DHS Commissioner Kimberly Ali said in an email that the sharp reduction in foster care placements, which are down almost 60% since 2017, has nothing to do with the agency’s use of voluntary safety plans.

Katz said the city’s reported reduction in foster care cases could be driven in part by the use of voluntary plans. “I fear we’re bringing down the number of kids in foster care by denying families their due process rights,” she said.

Thomson, Hawthorne’s attorney, said last spring: “These are poor Black mothers and poor Black kids. The system is just set up so that child welfare workers have too much power.”

After her daughter’s killing, Tytianna Hawthorne did the only things she could still do to care for her.

She sought custody of her remains and held her funeral.

Hawthorne’s experience reflects a tragic twist on the way many families experience the child welfare system. Nationally, only about half of families separated by foster care are allowed to live together again, typically within a year, and achieve what the system calls reunification. In Philadelphia, that number has fallen below 40%.

In the wake of her daughter’s death, Hawthorne tried to remember when they were together and happy: SuSu, as she called her, watching Doc McStuffins on TV, learning to dance, and appearing unnaturally smart for her age.

Some days the sadness ran so deep, Hawthorne could barely function. But she was capable of recognizing her own needs and advocating for her daughter.

The last time she saw Su’Layah, the little girl lay in a hospital bed, dying. But when asked if she would be willing to share anything she said to the little girl, she protected their last memory.

“No,” she stated. “… I’m gonna leave that private.”

Some months after her daughter’s death, she texted a picture.

The image was a headstone she’d secured: “Su’Layah M. Williams. June 27, 2020-Feb. 4, 2023. Forever in Our Hearts.”

The stone includes an image of a large teddy bear, carved into the marble, with a bow tie and its arms spread, as if ready for a hug.

No one can stop her from visiting.