Problem
The Smith family has just adopted Aisha, a ten-year-old African-American girl who has been in the foster care system for three years. Aisha and her siblings were placed in foster care after her mother was convicted of theft. Aisha's father died when she was two years old, and her other family members were unable to care for her. Before Aisha was placed in foster care, she lived in poverty with her mother and two siblings, and Child Protective Services had been called on the family a few times because the children occasionally were seen unsupervised. However, despite the difficulties her family faced, she seemed to be mostly thriving in her environment. While Aisha's mother often struggled to provide the necessities for her family, she and Aisha were close, and Aisha spent a lot of time with her brother and sister. She was happy to attend the same elementary school as her siblings. After her mother's arrest, Aisha was placed briefly with an African-American family and had been adjusting well to school, peers, and her new family there.
Aisha's new adoptive family are devout Roman Catholic, upper-class Caucasians with three other children who are all older than Aisha. For the past several weeks, Aisha has experienced trouble adjusting to her new family. She will not talk or eat, and she has encountered problems in school. Aisha told the social worker at the foster care agency that she misses her parents, biological siblings, foster family, church (her family of origin is Baptist), friends, and neighborhood. She feels out of place with her new family and school, and she is not sure how she will fit into her new environment.
Aisha's vignette mentions how other institutions affecting her life-education, foster care, and criminal justice, in particular-could be assessed through a lens of conflict theory. Using Aisha's case vignette as a guide, consider how a social worker approaching work with Aisha from a conflict theory perspective would view these systems' influences on her situation. What insights might such an analysis reveal? Although conflict theory does not inform interventions directly, what might be some approaches that you would consider, perhaps in the macro domain, to address these systems' effects on Aisha?