Fighting for Justice, Inside and Out

Camille D. learned to pack a trash bag with everything she owned in under ten minutes. It's a skill nobody should have to develop before age ten, but foster care taught it to her out of necessity, six placements in six years, each move arriving with almost no warning.

"I stopped unpacking my bags for a while," she says. "Why would I? Nothing stayed long enough to matter."

A System, Not a Single Villain

None of Camille's individual foster placements were cruel in any dramatic way. The harder truth, she says, is that the system itself was the obstacle, caseworkers rotating too fast to build real continuity, placements decided by bed availability instead of fit, a court calendar that moved at its own pace regardless of what a six-year-old actually needed.

I stopped unpacking my bags for a while. Now I help kids trust that the next room might actually be permanent.

At twelve, she was placed with a foster family who told her explicitly, on the first day, that this placement was meant to be permanent. "I didn't believe them for almost a year," she says. "I kept the trash bag under my bed, just in case."

Learning the System to Beat It

That family stayed. Camille stayed in one school district long enough to build real relationships with teachers who watched her navigate an entirely different kind of instability than most of her classmates. One of them, a debate coach, saw something in her ability to argue a case and encouraged her to try mock trial. She was good at it, unusually good, at building an argument out of chaos.

She went on to study political science and then law, drawn specifically to family and juvenile law. "I wanted to understand the system from the inside," she says, "because I'd already learned it from the outside, the hard way."

Standing in the Courtroom Now

Camille now represents children in the foster care system, showing up to the exact kind of hearings that once decided her own life without much input from her. "I can't fix the whole system," she says. "But I can make sure the kid in that hearing has one adult in the room who actually knows what it feels like to have a trash bag packed under the bed."