About the Broken Hearts Gallery

In juxtaposition to Connecticut's widely paraded Heart Gallery, which features the beautiful faces of children in wait for capable parents, the Broken Hearts Gallery features the stories of families that the Department of Children and Families would rather not tell.

The Broken Hearts Gallery is a grass roots initiative established to raise awareness for the experiences of foster and adoptive families who have been harmed or recklessly treated by the Connecticut Department of Children and Families. By assembling a collection of stories with this common theme, we will give voice to our respective encounters. Our goal is to be heard by legislators, law-makers and the media, such that processes may be initiated to require that DCF stand meaningfully accountable to all of its constituents.

Regarded as agents of DCF, foster and adoptive parents are not recognized as individual entities under the law. In the event of maltreatment we do not have the power of legal recourse. There is not a single state statute which holds DCF even minimally accountable to the individuals and families who give their homes and hearts to allow the agency’s mission to be realized. Perhaps most tragically, neither do the statutes address the interests of the system’s most vulnerable victims – the children who are committed to its “care”.

Without an explicit obligation to serve all of its constituents, DCF has the unspoken right to overstep the most basic tenets of human decency with regard to foster and adoptive families. The agency’s power to deceive, manipulate, retaliate, malign and mismanage is unchecked; in the wake of this absolute authority lays devastation. The broken hearts and shattered households of countless individuals and families are not included in any report or statistical tally; they simply disappear, as one by one, good families exit the system to repair their wounds.

While invisible under the law, the unfortunate experiences of foster and adoptive parents are widely recognized and acknowledged by persons working within and around the DCF web. Because there is no legal remedy, it is simply taken as a given that these untenable practices will continue, unabated. This cannot be acceptable! The Broken Hearts Gallery is intended as a collective voice for those “agents” of DCF whose lives have been bent or broken by the misuse of institutional power.