Patty Chin believes her life would have been very different if Hawaiʻi’s child welfare system worked the way it should.
She landed in foster care at age 10, she said, because the state mistook the poverty in her mother’s chaotic home in Waiʻanae as a threat to the safety of Chin and her siblings. All six children were removed from the home, and Chin spent more than six years in Hawaiʻi’s foster care system.
She was shuffled among half-a-dozen foster homes and a shelter, lost contact with her siblings for extended periods, and was sexually abused in one of the foster homes. Chin kept much of her ordeal a secret because she worried no one would believe her, and feared what might happen if she told…