The Racist Underside of Child Welfare
By Samantha O’Brien (Summer 2017 Intern)
“Obvious malnourishment, listlessness or fatigue. Stealing or begging for food. Lack of personal care — poor personal hygiene, torn and/or dirty clothes. Untreated need for glasses, dental care or other medical attention. Frequent absence from or tardiness to school. Child inappropriately left unattended or without supervision.”
These are the standards for “maltreatment,” as stipulated by the New York State Office of Child and Family Services. Their website claims that this list is not exhaustive, and if you observe one or more of these signs, you are encouraged to report your suspicions to the Statewide Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment.
You are encouraged to report these suspicions, regardless of whether or not there are also signs of physical abuse. You are encouraged to report without considering the gravity of this act, without considering the irreversible damage that removing one’s child could inflict upon the parents and child alike.
You are not encouraged to consider the sympathetic alternative, which is that “malnourishment,” poor hygiene, and lack of appropriate health care are, rather than a neglect borne in indifference, most direct correlates of poverty. And you are certainly not encouraged to examine the systemic racism and injustice underpinning this poverty, as well as the decision to criminalize this poverty. Quite the contrary, you are asked to callously assume that if a child is deprived of these human needs, it is the result of “bad” parenting, a willful — if not malicious — decision to simply neglect. Thus, a child is removed from their home and separated from their loved ones, suffering the incalculable damage that familial separation can incur. Meanwhile, the state continues to abandon the parent(s), providing them with the façade of an opportunity to “better” themselves without doing anything to alleviate the cycle of poverty in which they are trapped.
Thus in practice, child protective services, not just in the state of New York but around the country, has conflated “neglect” with “poverty” and opts to punish low-income parents for their conditions, subjecting them to what is often described as the civil equivalent of the death penalty — the removal of a child from their parents. Once a report is made to Child Protective Services, the stipulations for how to proceed are incredibly vague. Bureaucrats are left to their own devices, sent to homes to hunt around for “something” that will either confirm or deny the suspicion of abuse or neglect. The part where it gets thorny, however, is that there is virtually nothing concrete that can truly “dismiss” suspicion of abuse and neglect — only confirm. It is indeed a losing battle, a reversal of the justice implicit in “innocent until proven guilty.” A parent is guilty until proven innocent, yet there remains to be seen a clear consensus on what “innocent” parenting would look like.
An immaculately furnished house, cupboards stocked with pricey Trader Joes snacks, a Honda Odyssey packed with a bunch of white children in soccer jerseys, the smell of a home-cooked dinner wafting from the kitchen, tabletops littered with math problem sets and permission slips. A light-skinned mother decked in Lululemon activewear, flitting about from yoga to a PTA meeting, there to answer the doorbell on its first ring.
These are the images of white American parenting that child protective services, subconsciously or not, looks for when it attempts to dismiss charges of abuse and neglect. CPS sees that which has been decreed “normal” parenting and finds it much easier to forgive the minor details — the scraped knees, muddy cleats, whining children. Even the cabinet filled with bottles of expensive red wine is not construed as potential alcoholism, but simply the way that parents are expected to blow off steam at the end of an arduous week. These things are all easily — and perhaps reasonably — dismissed as falling within the drudgery of “normal” family life.
The concepts of “family” and, more precisely, “motherhood,” are fraught with racist and classist expectations. Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body, convincingly articulates how the stereotype of the “bad black mother” has a long, insidious history. It is rooted, in part, in the pervasive and damaging jezebel and welfare queen myths, narratives that injuriously suggest that black women are particularly sexually promiscuous and apt to squander government money. These myths underlie the prevailing belief that white women can parent black children better than black mothers can. It asks us to scrutinize the black mother that “isn’t around” to drive the kids to soccer practice or to help them with math homework, that as a matter of sheer frugality, feeds her children the more highly processed food options, that struggles to maintain a stable form of employment or afford regular pediatric care. It asks us to scrutinize, report our suspicions, take our misplaced sense of justice into our own hands. Heaven forbid that she be grappling with untreated, non-violent forms of substance addiction or mental health crises. Heaven forbid it, because if it is suspected that this is also the case, her parental rights are as good as gone.
Thus, the child welfare system targets the intersection of blackness and poverty, focuses its efforts on child removals rather than social services that might help alleviate the impacts of poverty, uproots black children from their homes on the basis of little to no evidence of abuse, and summarily displaces them into middle to upper class and, more often than not, white homes.
During my summer interning at National Advocates for Pregnant Women, based in Manhattan, I was tasked with creating an educational presentation on the pervasive racism endemic to the child welfare system, as well as to create a database of resources for parents confronted with this system. What I learned was indeed appalling, but nothing had quite prepared me for the culmination of my summer — a day trip to family court, supervised by Lisa, one of NAPW’s staff attorneys, as well as one of my mentors over the summer. At family court, Lisa introduced me to Joyce MacMillan, the founder of the Child Welfare Organizing Project, a New York based organization dedicating to supporting and advocating on behalf of families affected by the child welfare system. CWOP is among the small handful of organizations committed to this work in the country and is one of the most effective. Although they almost never win cases, they are one of the most effective in that they take on many clients and that their clients love and trust and almost depend upon them.
The first thing Joyce did upon meeting us was hug us, thank us, and beg us to get the word out. “People really think children are being saved here when really, their lives are being ruined.”
She introduced us to Ben, father of Matilda.¹ Matilda was curled up on the chair next to her father, giggling and singing along to a handheld Nintendo game. Ben stood up immediately to greet and hug Joyce the moment we walked through the doors of family court. They held each other for quite a while. And then he turned to us and, essentially, began to beg. Begged us to see his side of the story, to see him as a kindhearted father that loves his daughter very much. Begged us to look around at all the black and brown faces and recognize that this could not be a coincidence. He called it a mass injustice. A nightmare. Hell. Madness. And at last, he begged us to get the word out, to get people to see what really happens in here.
To this day I can still hear his litany of grievances replaying in my mind. He told us that he was worried, gesturing to his daughter, because of her scraped knees. He explained to us that it happened at soccer practice that week but that he just knew they’d find a way to get him on it. Everything has to be perfect if you want any chance of winning one of these cases, he was convinced. I glanced over at Matilda, who was still giddily immersed in her game, kicking her legs back and forth gleefully, and indeed, on each knee, I spotted two Dora the Explorer Band-Aids in an x-mark.
Daddy! Matilda shrieked. Come look! Ben chuckled wearily and sat down next to his daughter, engaged but enervated, visibly carrying the weight of the world while his daughter remained blissfully unaware of the injustice unfolding around her. Ben and Matilda were two of dozens and dozens of black and brown faces filling up the waiting room. Candidly, the only white people to be seen were lawyers.
No amount of research, no academic lens, no extent of jurisprudential knowledge could accurately convey the blatantly callous denial of humanity that occurred in that courtroom. Ben’s instincts were proven correct — the case became almost entirely about the Band-Aids plastered across his daughter’s knees, became about the vague tangentials: Ben’s lack of a stable job, his rocky relationship with his ex-wife, his flaky teenaged babysitter, his daughter’s innocuous scrapes–but, beneath it all, the case became about his race.
Seeing this horror show unfold before my eyes was the culmination of the process of my summer of what the folks at NAPW call “unlearning.” Unlearning often applies to the implicit biases against race, class, gender, and other forms of perceived “difference” that we internalize over the course of our lives, but it can also apply to certain skewed perceptions of societal phenomena, primarily caused by the distortion of the media. Without recognizing the disproportionate impact that race has on how one is treated within the child welfare system, I had previously accepted the seemingly progressive, race-neutral goal of promoting children’s welfare. Certainly, the threat of child abuse seemed like an abstract horror to me. A couple of high-profile cases of “terrible” parents doing unspeakable things to their children had caught my attention over the years, and of course, I supported any initiative to get these children “out.” Child protective services saved children, I believed, from these situations, from these bad parents that were so unimaginably different from my own. I implicitly trusted child protective services simply because I believed that every child deserved the same love, guidance, and nurturance that I had been so lucky to have been raised with, the nurturance necessary to allow them to fully flourish.
However, as it turned out, these beliefs that I had sustained for the better part of my life flew in the face of nearly every statistic I came across in my research. In 60 percent of child welfare cases, parental substance abuse, regardless of whether or not it was tied to child abuse, was not only a factor in, but was indeed central to, the investigations. In 2012, 9.96 percent of black or African American children, 12.95 percent of Native American children, 8.03 percent of multiracial children, 4.79 percent of Latinx children and 4.24 percent of white children were in the child welfare system.² Moreover, regardless of how unlivable you might believe the children’s original circumstances to have been, the welfare system has not proven itself to be a viable alternative. Children cycled through the system end up in the juvenile justice system at higher rates, are at greater risk for unintended, childhood pregnancy, and will go on to have a harder time holding a job.³ To quote directly from the National Coalition for Child Welfare Reform’s Overview of Child Welfare in America, “most parents who lose their children to foster care are neither brutally abusive or hopelessly addictive. Far more common are cases in which a family’s poverty has been confused with child neglect.”⁴ In effect, rather than getting to the root of poverty and social inequities, the greatest common denominator of children removals, the child welfare system perpetuates this cycle of poverty. Rather than conceiving of drug abuse as a treatable form of mental illness and providing the necessary services to rehabilitate these parents, the system conflates drug abuse with child abuse, rather than focusing primarily on the latter, and effectively punishes parents for their mental health crises.
Knowing this, carrying the weight of the statistics, was not enough for me to help Ben as the folks from Child Protective Services removed his daughter from his very arms. It was not enough for me to provide any semblance of comfort as Ben wept for Matilda, wept for the most treasured person in his life. As Matilda cried out for her father, I mourned for this family that the state had summarily given up on. I mourned for Matilda’s lost opportunities and the fragmented relationship with her blood relatives that lay ahead. I recognized that the epistemological shift that had occurred over the course of a summer was fruitless, self-indulgent even, if I could do nothing to translate this new consciousness onto the whole of society.
My intention in writing this is not to undermine the “real” experiences of traumatic parental abuse that some children are unfortunate enough to face. However, much like the war on crime or the war on terror, these high-profile cases are merely the tip of an iceberg and represent a small slice of the cases that the child welfare system actually covers. Media sensationalism blows the actual prevalence of these cases well out of proportion. In the wars on crime, terror and, as Richard Wexler terms it, the child welfare industrial complex,⁵ the public reaction of horror and fear lands disproportionately on non-white Americans. Moreover, the powers that be and the institutions at large recognize and possess the recourse to “deal” with child abuse. What remains unrecognized and unrepresented are the effects that cycles of poverty and racism have on the outcomes of children and families. What is lacking is some form of cohesive government program to help parents and families overcome these cycles.
[1] Ben and Matilda’s names have been changed for privacy reasons.
[2] “United States Foster Care Placement by Race.” Kids Count Data Center.
[3] Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development. “Impact of Foster Care and Juvenile Justice on Future Youth Outcomes | Mandel School.” Mandel School RSS, 6 Nov. 2015, msass.case.edu/impact-of-foster-care-and-juvenile-justice-on-future-youth-outcomes/.
[4] National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. “Child Abuse and Poverty.” National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, 7 Sept. 2015, nccpr.org.
[5] Wexler, Richard. “Richard Wexler: Family First Act Institutionalizes Institutions, Sets Up Prevention to Fail.” The Chronicle of Social Change, 1 July 2016, chronicleofsocialchange.org/opinion/family-first-institutionalizes-institutions-sets-prevention-fail.
