Race, Poverty and Child Protection Decision Making

Abstract

Some ethnic and racial minority groups, as well as families living in poverty, are overrepresented in the child welfare system. It is important to understand how issues of socio-economic status and race enter into child protection decisions. This research used a factorial survey method to look at the influence of race and poverty on child protection decision making. Participants were asked to make decisions about the severity of risk, service provision and the importance of a home visit on fictitious, but unique, vignettes in which the independent variables were randomly assigned. The finding was that race and poverty were not statistically significant in any of the decisions made. Rather, it was other factors of disadvantage, such as substandard housing, spousal violence and substance use, that impact decision making. A possible explanation for this finding is that child protection work with its reductionist and individualistic perspective obscures the context of people's lives. The increasingly technocratic discourse in child protection blames individual parents and holds them responsible for not protecting their child from vulnerability, regardless of any historical and structural impediments they may face in attaining adequate resources.