Marks “Consistent With Compression”: Washington Documented a Foster Child’s Abuse for Years — and Left Her There

The cruelty of the case against the Washington State Department of Children, Youth and Families is not only in what allegedly happened to the girl. It is in the paper trail. According to a lawsuit filed in January 2026 in Spokane, state workers repeatedly documented signs that a foster child was being harmed — marks on her neck, a stripped-bare bedroom, a bed taken away as punishment — and left her in the home anyway, for years. She entered foster care at four. She is sixteen now, described in the filing as a deeply damaged child seeking justice for preventable harms.

These are allegations in a civil suit, not yet proven, and the state says it cannot comment on active litigation. But the documents the suit describes are the state’s own records, and the pattern they trace is the one that recurs in Washington foster-care cases: the warning signs were seen, written down, and ignored.

A timeline of warnings, in the state’s own files

The girl was placed in foster care at age four after the department learned of abuse in her biological family — the removal itself is not the failure here. Soon she was moved to what was meant to be a permanent foster family. Within about a month, during an unrelated licensing check, a social worker noted marks on her neck that the lawsuit describes as consistent with compression. A month after that, as the family prepared to adopt her, a school nurse called the department about scratches on the child’s neck. When a caseworker made an unannounced visit in February 2019, the suit says, the girl’s bedroom was nearly empty — she had a yoga mat and nothing else to sleep on, her bed reportedly taken away as punishment for wetting and soiling it. Those symptoms, the filing notes, are themselves common signs of abuse.

Each of these was a moment the file could have been reopened and the child pulled out. Instead, the observations became entries in a record no one acted on.

The disclosure, and who finally listened

It was not the department that ultimately intervened. The state placed the girl in the custody of Dianna Gulick — who later filed this suit on her behalf — in 2020. Later that year, according to the lawsuit, the girl disclosed to Lutheran Community Services that an older adopted brother from the former foster family had repeatedly raped and assaulted her. The abuse she had signaled through marks, through a bare room, through the language of a traumatized child’s body had been real all along. The people paid to read those signs had, the suit alleges, read them and moved on.

Not one case — a pattern Washington keeps paying for

This lawsuit lands amid a wave of them. In a separate case, Washington agreed to pay $9 million to a woman who said social workers went as long as 500 days without visiting her while her foster mother kept her out of school for weeks at a time — and then endorsed that foster mother’s adoption petition anyway, with one worker allegedly writing of a desire to “finally get this case out of our system.” Another settlement paid $15 million to three sisters abused in a foster home after social workers failed to make required monthly safety visits for years. In April 2026, the Washington Supreme Court ruled unanimously that DCYF must hand over its internal records to former foster children suing over abuse, rejecting the state’s attempt to keep them sealed. Over three recent fiscal years, Washington paid more than $1 billion in legal judgments and settlements.

What real accountability would look like

A documented warning that produces no action is worse than no warning at all, because it proves the system saw and chose not to move. Real accountability in Washington would mean that a physical sign of abuse in a foster home — a compression mark, an injury a school reports, a child stripped of her bed — automatically triggers an independent review with the authority to remove the child, not just another line in a file. It would mean the required safety visits actually happening and being audited, so a child cannot go 500 days unseen. And it would mean the transparency the state Supreme Court just had to compel: if a department’s records show it watched a child be harmed, the public and the survivor have a right to see them. The girl in Spokane did not need the state to notice something new. She needed it to act on what it had already written down.