Confessions in Cases of Child Physical Abuse-A CAPNET Study.

Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Depression Treatment for Caregivers Investigated by the US Child Welfare System.

Anti‐poverty policies and income maintenance programmes aim to reduce poverty and income inequality, yet rates of poverty and income inequality have remained stable or increased in 20 of 29 developed nations. Although poverty and income inequality have increased in the USA, the depth and reach of income maintenance programmes have eroded, placing undue strain on other societal systems like education and child welfare. The burden of poverty on child welfare is troubling given the strong association between poverty and child welfare involvement. We conducted a literature review to examine the extent to which the US child welfare system acts as an informal income maintenance programme. Three interrelated research questions were explored: (a) How and when, and under what circumstances, does the US child welfare system provide families with cash and in‐kind transfers, that is, income, food, shelter and durable goods? (b) Which cash and in‐kind transfers are most common in the US child welfare system? (c) How do cash and in‐kind transfers impact families in the child welfare system? Our review yielded eight articles. These articles indicated that cash and in‐kind transfers improve programme retention and reduce child welfare involvement. Implications for research, policy and practice are discussed.‘We conducted a literature review to examine the extent to which the US child welfare system acts as an informal income maintenance programme’Key Practitioner Messages US child welfare programmes offer cash and in‐kind transfers similar to those provided in centralised income maintenance programmes. Cash and in‐kind transfers like food, housing and strollers reduce child welfare involvement and increase programme retention. Conditional cash transfers are cash incentives that boost recruitment and retention in parenting programmes. Even inexpensive material support like donated clothing improve family and programme outcomes in the child welfare system.

Some reflections on strengthening epistemic justice and psychosocial well-being in the US child welfare system describes implications of our comparative ethnographic research beginning with the experiences of parents, professionals, and young people within child welfare systems using a comparative, ethnographic approach embedded within time and place. This approach revealed the cultural embeddedness of child welfare systems, as well as the psychosocial-spiritual harm, specifically moral injury, that can occur as a result of epistemic injustice within the US child welfare system. We argue that barriers to creating a more compassionate, epistemically just and effective child welfare system include a misalignment of cultural notions of child maltreatment—why it occurs, who is worthy of help, and who is responsible for helping—with those notions underlying many progressive policies and programs implemented in the United States over the decades. When progressive laws, policies, and programs that support families conflict with widespread cultural notions that criminalize struggling parents and devalue those who are impoverished and from historically oppressed groups, then implementing them and sustaining support from the general public and those in positions of power will falter.

Chapter 1, Addressing psychological safety within the US child welfare system, provides an overview of Moral Injury in Child Welfare: A call for epistemic justice. It identifies and defines moral injury as a psychological harm caused by epistemic injustice to those involved in the US child welfare system. It outlines the basic argument for how to achieve a balance between enforcing laws for crimes against children and social welfare interventions to assist families and communities struggling under generations of poverty, racism, and genocide. Creating a more epistemically just, effective US public child welfare system begins with an examination of various cultural ways of understanding child maltreatment and “doing” child welfare within informal and formal child welfare systems from around the world that prioritize psychosocial and community well-being alongside physical safety.

Around the world, child welfare systems provide essential services to protect the lives of children who are abused and neglected. Yet these systems can also do great harm. Moral Injury within the US Child Welfare System is based on over 30 years of in-depth, ethnographic research examining the experiences of parents, children, and frontline professionals involved in child welfare systems over time in the United States and across cultures in informal African American and Indigenous systems and formal Japanese and Scottish systems. It argues that US child welfare policies and procedures are overdetermined by adversarial justice system values and practices and underdetermined by social work values and practices. This imbalance leads to the relative silencing of children’s, parents’, and frontline professionals’ voices, that is, to epistemic injustice. When the voices of those within the system are silenced, then systemic racism and other biases remain unchecked; and interventions offered may be irrelevant or ineffective, introduce additional obstacles to already stressed families, and miss incidents of ongoing maltreatment. A system characterized by epistemic injustice also creates vulnerabilities for psychological harm to those within it, that is, to moral injury. Such psychological harm can, in turn, weaken the system itself by undermining parents’ and children’s abilities to engage in services, retention of experienced professionals, and communities’ abilities to thrive. We consider the implications of various ways of “doing” child welfare that prioritize psychosocial and community well-being alongside physical safety for creating a more epistemically just, effective US public child welfare system.

Family Policing as Counterinsurgency and the Gathering Abolitionist Force Dorothy Roberts (bio) I spent the first year of the pandemic writing a book about abolishing the so-called child welfare system—what I call the family policing system. When I heard Dylan Rodríguez’s remarkable presidential address, I was already proofing the galleys of Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.1 Every word Rodríguez spoke resonated with my thinking and activism around the need to dismantle the child welfare system and replace it with a radically reimagined way of caring for families and keeping children safe. The invitation to write a response to his address gave me the opportunity to frame my arguments in terms of his valuable conceptualization of counterinsurgency and the gathering abolitionist force. Conceptualizing family policing—US government surveillance and destruction of politically marginalized families—as state counterinsurgency usefully illustrates and illuminates his key points. A central theme of Rodríguez’s address is that “counterinsurgency not only is directed by the state’s repressive military, policing, and political might but—especially in moments like this—is commonly performed through narratives, aesthetics, rhetorics, and institutional solicitations of a scrambling reformism.” This seemingly contradictory stance of simultaneous repression and reform is essential to US family policing, characterized by inflicting violence on politically marginalized families under the pretense of protecting children from parental maltreatment. The US child welfare system has historically terrorized Black and Indigenous people in the United States by forcibly removing large numbers of children from their homes and placing them in state custody. It regulates even greater numbers of families by subjecting them to intense supervision under the threat of child removal. The legitimacy of family policing depends on maintaining the mirage that its brutal intrusion in families is a benevolent service for needy children. The origins of the US child welfare system lie in the oppression of Black, Indigenous, and impoverished white families by powerful white elites.2 The ideology of violent supervision of Black families by white people can be traced [End Page 221] back to the separation of enslaved family members at the whim of slaveholders, who had absolute legal authority over them. The mass removal of Native children from their tribes and their consignment to boarding schools was literally a weapon of war developed by the US military in the nineteenth century to overpower tribal resistance to its settler colonial project. The establishment and expansion of the formal foster care system were counterinsurgency initiatives against Black liberation struggles. After the Civil War ended, white judges ordered thousands of Black children to be apprenticed to their former enslavers in conjunction with other white supremacist mechanisms, such as convict leasing, designed to return newly emancipated Black people to a subservient status. In the 1950s and 1960s, southern states began dropping Black families from the welfare rolls and placing their children in foster care as part of a white supremacist backlash against gains won by civil rights activists and Black freedom fighters. The terror of family policing continues today. According to a 2014 study, 15.44 percent of Native children and 11.53 percent of Black children were placed in foster care before their eighteenth birthday.3 The rate for white children (4.86 percent) was much lower, reflecting America’s racial hierarchy, but still remarkably high. Almost all the children the state takes by force come from impoverished or working-class families. State child welfare systems engage in tactics akin to what Rodríguez refers to as “the military protocols for neutralizing resistance to US occupation,” which include “‘integrating civilian and military activities.’” Family policing operations—warrantless home investigations, intensive monitoring of families by state agents and civilians deputized to report on parents (“mandatory reporters”), forcible seizure of children followed by placing them in foster care, and permanent severing of family ties for failing to comply with agency dictates—reflect a carceral logic with parallels in the criminal punishment system. State child protection authorities increasingly use modern surveillance technologies and coordinate with law enforcement agencies to manage regulated populations more efficiently. Family policing is part of the prison industrial complex...

Economic evaluation research in the context of Child Welfare policy: A structured literature review and recommendations

This cross-sectional study evaluates rates of psychotropic medication and polypharmacy use among youths in the US child welfare system compared with other youths with Medicaid coverage in 2019.

Creating a more compassionate, just and effective child welfare system: Conceptual frameworks and methods presents our comparative, social work ethnographic methods. It describes the concepts, methodology, and methods used to interpret the experiences of child welfare-involved young people, parents, and professionals involved in the US public child welfare system as well as informal African American and Indigenous systems and formal Japanese and Scottish systems. It describes how we attempt to see the child welfare system through the eyes of those living within it and child welfare systems within the cultures in which they are embedded. Our premise is that understanding the experiences of those within child welfare systems in cultural context is foundational to creating a more just, compassionate, and effective US child welfare system. We are particularly interested in how cultural understandings of the origins of child maltreatment, who is responsible for children, and what constitutes effective intervention influence the psychosocial experiences of individuals within child welfare systems.

The Family First Prevention and Services Act (FFPSA) has created a major policy shift in how services are delivered in the US child welfare system. There is now an increased emphasis and incentive for states to focus on preventing children from entering the foster care system and the juvenile justice system. In addition, the FFPSA has created rigorous standards for evidence around these prevention services. We analyzed juvenile justice outcome data for the Family First parenting program for youth who started Families First between 2007 and2012. Youth in the program were matched to a comparison sample of court-supervised youth in the same time period using a propensity score-matched pair design. We found that youth enrolled in Families First had significantly fewer misdemeanor and felony charges than youth in the comparison group 12 months after the start (54% less) and end of the program (55% less). There were mixed findings for reductions in status and technical offenses. Our results suggest that the Families First model can be an effective intervention strategy for reducing recidivism in youth that are involved in both the child welfare and juvenile justice systems.

This article explores how child welfare policy and contemporary US immigration enforcement come together to transform the immigrant parent into an absence that operates as a legal presence. International legal standards and US child welfare policy protect the right of a parent, regardless of citizenship status or country of residence, to participate fully in child welfare case proceedings and to maintain, or regain, custody of their children. However, restrictive immigration policy, intensified border enforcement, and a contemporary deportation regime have made the separation of immigrant parents and their children a prevalent problem within the US child welfare system, separating children from parents who would otherwise be considered fit. The production of legally absent parents is central to this process. Detention and deportation practices can make immigrant parents difficult to locate. This makes it more likely that an immigrant parent will be deemed absent, and thus declared to have legally abandoned their child, a determination that is necessary for child welfare officials to terminate parental rights. Drawing on ethnographic research in the San Diego–Tijuana region, this article examines the force of legal absence in these cases and the profound consequences this has for families.

The transition from adolescence to adulthood is a significant developmental stage. When foster youth age out of the child welfare system, they are at risk of having to transition without family support. This chapter applies the life course perspective to describe the theoretical and contextual foundation that explains the hardships foster youth experience when emancipated from the US child welfare system. Next, the theoretical basis for natural mentoring among foster youth is explored using the resiliency perspective to frame the discussion. Then, current research on natural mentoring among foster youth is reviewed. Implications are drawn for US child welfare practice, policy, and research with respect to how to improve outcomes for youth who age out of foster care through the cultivation of natural mentoring relationships. The chapter concludes with an examination of systems in place to support transitioning foster youth from England, Israel, and Australia.

Every day in the United States, 130 people die of an opioid overdose,1 and nearly 90 infants are admitted to hospitals with opioid withdrawal, also known as neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS).2 The health care system has been largely unprepared for the magnitude of this crisis. As the numbers of opioid-exposed infants grew, pediatricians focused primarily on improving clinical care. The breadth of the crisis requires alignments of the public health system, hospitals, and our nation’s child welfare system. Recent improvements in the child welfare system through federal legislative action have enabled the system to be more responsive to the unique needs of families affected by the opioid crisis; however, more progress and funding are needed. The US child welfare system evolved over the last 200 years, beginning with reliance on small nonprofit organizations in the 19th and early-20th centuries. The publication of Kempe et al.’s “The Battered-Child Syndrome” in the 1960s3 and the passage of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974 (CAPTA)4 coincided with the emergence of a more organized system of care, one designed primarily to protect children from neglect and physical and sexual abuse. It was not set up to be responsive to the complex needs of families affected by substance use disorder.5 The already overburdened child welfare system is facing new demands made on it by the opioid crisis.6–8 Our analysis of data from the nation’s foster care system reveals that from 2011 to 2017, the number of infants entering that system each year …

The aim of this study was to assess the role of disability and victimization in young people's participation in developmentally salient activities by analyzing a nationally representative group of young people from the child welfare system (CWS). Data were obtained from interviews with young people and their parents, recorded by the second National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW II). The sample group consisted of 405 females and 270 males, ranging in age from 11 to 17years (mean age 13y 6mo), and residing with families throughout the USA. The relationships among disability status, victimization, and participation were explored using weighted logistic regression analysis. Controlling for demographical and family-related factors, the probability of young people with disabilities (YWD), involved with the CWS, reporting two or more victimizations was 120% higher (p<0.01) than that of young people without disabilities. YWD in the CWS were almost twice as likely as young people without disabilities to report participation in only one or no developmentally salient activities. Controlling for all other variables, the odds of restricted participation were 6.8-fold higher (p<0.05) for victimized YWD in the CWS. Young people with disabilities who report victimization are significantly less likely than their typically developing peers to participate in developmentally salient activities. Without coordinated efforts to prevent victimization of YWD in the CWS, there will be significant barriers to their participation, well-being, and independent living outcomes.

Prospective associations between trauma, placement disruption, and ethnic-racial identity among newly emancipated foster youth