Local Child Welfare Research Articles

COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT IN THE ESTABLISHMENT OF CHILD DECENT QANUN IN EAST ACEH DISTRICT

This research focuses on community involvement in the formation of Qanun Anak in East Aceh District, Indonesia. East Aceh has strong religious and cultural values, which require the implementation of Qanun Anak to protect children's rights. Community involvement is considered essential to reflect local values and ensure the protection of children's rights. Community participation is not only limited to the establishment of the Child Qanun, but also includes implementation and supervision. The ongoing education program aims to increase public understanding of children's rights and open dialogue between the community and the government. Regular consultation forums serve as a forum for evaluating the impact of Qanun Anak, sharing success stories, identifying challenges, and finding solutions together. The local child welfare center becomes a dynamic hub that connects the community with resources to support children. The involvement of village governments, the private sector, and NGOs has had a positive impact with financial support and knowledge to overcome challenges. The mass media is a strategic partner in voicing children's rights and raising public awareness. The campaign through the media helped maintain the momentum of awareness of children's rights and the importance of implementing Qanun Anak. This study used qualitative methods with primary data from direct interviews and secondary data from local governments, children's forums, youth institutions, and the people of East Aceh. Community participation in the formation of Qanun Anak reflects the spirit of democracy, involving religious leaders, traditional leaders, child activists, parents, teachers, and children. The public consultation mechanism involves multiple voices in the harmony of discussion, ensuring the Child Qanun reflects the values and needs of the community. Children's participation is recognized and encouraged, creating regulations that strengthen their rights. This process involves technology with online surveys and virtual discussion forums. Education increases public understanding of children's rights and the urgency of Qanun Anak. The Qanun of a child-worthy city is not just a legal text, but rather a moral manifesto and a shared commitment to protecting children's rights. The people of East Aceh play an active role in making unique contributions, overcoming conflicts through collaboration, and creating an environment of support for children. The urgency of Qanun Anak includes the protection of children's rights, child development support, child empowerment in decisions, empowerment of parents and communities, as well as relevance to contemporary challenges. It is hoped that with the sustainability of community commitment and the real implementation of Qanun Anak, every child can grow up in an environment full of support and equal opportunities.

Partnering with a child welfare agency to design and deliver a BSW child welfare course: mixed results and lessons learned

ABSTRACT This paper describes a collaboration between a university and a local child welfare agency in the development and delivery of a Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) child welfare course featuring lived experience knowledge and learning situated in community-based child welfare sites. We present results of an exploratory mixed methods pre-post survey and focus group evaluation which examined changes in student general knowledge, perceptions of skills for decision- making and orienting beliefs about child welfare families. The results did not yield uniform significant results. The discussion delves into lessons learned about the importance of supporting students to develop skills for respectfully gathering and critically analyzing information and how to break through what we observed as student reluctance to learn about child welfare wrongdoings. We reflect on why, despite centering curriculum on lived experience knowledge, we were not successful in overturning students’ negative orienting beliefs about families and children receiving child welfare services. We conclude with considerations for new directions in BSW child welfare curriculum.

낮엔 경로당, 저녁엔 아이들 사랑방 ‘꿈미소’: 서울특별시 강동구 사례연구

The Gangdong-gu Dream Smile project is an innovative initiative that was developed based on the input of residents in the community. The goal of the project is to support the healthy growth of children and address any gaps in care by providing a dedicated space for children and youth activities at senior centres after hours. This project is an excellent example of how private resources can be leveraged to create a child-friendly and healthy city.
 The project was developed with the active participation of local residents and the community. However, there were some challenges in securing facilities due to objections from the senior centres. Nevertheless, through extensive engagement and consultation, such as providing briefings to residents, improving the internal environment, and collecting feedback, the project was able to garner support from seniors, children’s Guild Movement Group, local child welfare experts and activists, and local residents. Additionally, the project established a user-led space for children and youth, which sets it apart from other facilities.
 Overall, the Gangdong-gu Dream Smile project is an excellent example of community-driven innovation that promotes healthy growth and wellbeing of children.
 The project’s success was made possible through collaboration and engagement with the local community, and it serves as a model for other communities looking to create child-friendly and healthy spaces.

Negotiating collaborative agreements: Interprofessional collaboration in a Norwegian welfare context

ABSTRACT Interprofessional collaboration among welfare services is a policy objective promoted to ensure successful service provision to people with complex needs. In the Nordic region, people who are not in education, employment, or training often have challenging life situations requiring help from a multitude of services. In Norway, significant political and institutional efforts focus on implementing policies that support collaboration. However, we know little about how service workers formalize joint efforts. In this study, I used institutional ethnography to explore how interprofessional collaboration was constructed through negotiations of collaborative agreements among leaders of welfare services and how such negotiations are consequential for collaborative practices. I explored two cases of negotiations initiated by the leader of the Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration. The negotiations were with the local child welfare and protection services and Refugee services, focusing on the transition of care regarding youth and refugees. The data includes two collaborative agreements between the services, an observation of the negotiation of one agreement, and 10 interviews with leaders and staff. Results show that collaboration is constructed based on holistic service provision. The negotiations, however, do not result in such collaborative practices, but are characterized by the demarcation of responsibilities and work.

Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust by Joanna Sliwa

Reviewed by: Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust by Joanna Sliwa Sean Martin Joanna Sliwa. Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2021. 218 pp. Joanna Sliwa has written a comprehensive and detailed account of the experiences of Jewish children in Kraków during the Holocaust. This meticulously researched yet brief study delivers on the promise of its title. Focusing tightly on sources from the children themselves, Sliwa outlines what happened to them from the occupation in 1939 to the immediate postwar years. The great contribution of her work is her excavation of the voices of these children. In addition to published testimonies and memoirs, Sliwa makes extensive use of the oral histories of the Visual History Archive of the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. In Sliwa’s work, the children speak of their daily lives under the most tragic of circumstances, teaching us both more about what happened and about how they survived. Sliwa’s presentation of children’s lives and memories can sometimes make for challenging and compelling reading; the author does not shrink from sharing the disturbing details of the children’s worst experiences. But the author’s sensitive tone combines with her mastery of the sources to yield a volume that is at once respectful of its subjects and informative for its readers. Sliwa’s approach is chronological and loosely thematic. In six brief chapters, she addresses shifts in the city immediately following occupation, adaptation to life in the ghetto, the clandestine activities children participated in, the work of the local child welfare associations, followed by the experiences of children hiding in the Płaszów concentration camp, and those who survived by hiding and fleeing. An even briefer epilogue addresses the immediate postwar circumstances the children faced and the fate of child survivors living in Kraków today. The story Sliwa tells concerns just under 19,000 children, according to a census conducted by the Jewish Council in November 1939. Her story narrows tragically in its final chapters on the comparatively small number of children concealed in Płaszów and those who hid on the “Aryan” side or fled to other towns after the destruction of the ghetto. It also opens up, though, as the accounts of these children involve places and people beyond the ghetto and Płaszów. The strength of Sliwa’s narration is the details from the testimonies she has mined to learn more about her topic. Of note are interactions between parents and children. For example, she describes how, upon the impending dissolution of the ghetto in March 1943, Renate Leinkram’s mother cut her thirteen-year-old daughter’s hair and dressed her in adult clothes, hoping she would pass as an adult worker in Płaszów. Sliwa also notes often how children could help adults, for example, through smuggling, such as in the testimony of Janka Warszawska. The final chapters on hiding are also of great interest. Sliwa’s summary of the testimonies of street children who survived outside of Płaszów illuminates their relationships with other children and the dangers of public environments such as the train station. Sliwa’s structure resembles the many memoirs written by child survivors that, regardless of the child’s age, begin in 1939. While this lends focus, it also obscures the history of Jewish childhood before the war. Additional background on the history of the topic, both generally and in Kraków, would have given the [End Page 226] reader an even greater sense of both the continuity and rupture of the wartime period. For example, greater attention to questions of the languages used by children and adults could illuminate further the specific characteristics of daily life. In addition, the question of class could have been addressed more forthrightly. Sliwa does well to point out often that those whose parents worked in advantageous positions were more likely to be protected in a given situation. But is there anything else one might conclude about class from the qualitative and quantitative data Sliwa...

The Racial Origins of Foster Home Care

AbstractBlack family values and behavior have long been at the center of policy solutions to intergenerational poverty. But in the early twentieth century, the Black family took on paradoxical significance as a solution to child poverty and neglect through the foster family. This was part of a broad realignment in child protection that upheld the “Home” as the best place for children—yet the concept came to mean something different for White and Black youth. Using New York City as a case by which to study broad transformations in child protection ideology and local child welfare response, I find that in the 1930s substitute care underwent a dramatic transformation with many White children cared for in their own homes or in therapeutic institutions, while previously excluded Black youth gained disproportionate access through race-matched foster families. Though a seemingly progressive approach, I argue that the prioritization of the foster home over the biological home illuminates how the family was envisioned as a solution to poverty in the context of racial inequality. Child welfare workers imagined that patterns of placement in race-matched foster families could be manipulated to overcome segregation and exclusion from the emerging welfare state. But as more non-White children entered substitute care, the conditions of poverty and distress in segregated communities necessitated a return to congregate care for “hard-to-place” minority youth as Black families seemingly failed to take care of their own. This case is important because it highlights the way in which official foster care systems emerged not as an extension of Black kinship care strategies, but as an experimental solution to dependency and neglect that mobilized the Black family to resolve the many consequences of state abandonment.

Child maltreatment investigations: Comparing children, families, and reasons for referral in three European countries

BackgroundAlmost all countries have developed measures to ensure that children do not suffer from violence in their families. However, the legal framework, definitions of maltreatment, and institutional structures differ. Whereas in other areas of social policy comparative research is very common, child protection research falls behind. Research questionsThe article examines the differences between cases referred to local child and youth welfare authorities due to concerns about abuse or neglect in Germany, England and the Netherlands, comparing the characteristics of the child, the family, the person reporting the suspected maltreatment, and the type of maltreatment. Method1207 case files on children investigated due to suspected child maltreatment from the Netherlands, England, and Germany were analyzed using a standardized coding scheme. ResultsThe family backgrounds of the children reported differed substantially, with more lone parents in England and more children living in two households in the Netherlands. The persons and institutions reporting their concerns to the local child and youth welfare authorities also differed, with more reports from children and family members in Germany and more from health services in England. In England, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and sexual exploitation were more frequently the reason for referral than in the Netherlands and Germany. DiscussionDifferences between countries can partially be explained based on differences in policies and relations of other systems to the child protection system.

Different Year, Different Jurisdiction, but the Same Findings

For the last fifteen years, the Center for the Study of Social Policy (“CSSP”) partnered with local agencies to use an Institutional Analysis (“IA”), a method that identifies how local child welfare institutions are not working for families. We have particularly focused on the experiences of Black families.
 Through a comprehensive and varied qualitative data analyses, each IA strives to make the invisible and detrimental workings of systems more visible, that is, each IA reveals specific institutional features that contribute to poor outcomes for Black families. Findings from IAs have identified problematic policies, practices, protocols, resource distribution, and other features at the local, regional, state, and federal levels. From the twenty IAs conducted to date, we have substantial evidence of the insidious, pervasive, and mutating structural and institutional racism ingrained in child welfare systems. While the IAs have unique findings in each jurisdiction, there are also common findings, including: lack of meaningful and reasonable efforts to keep families together; policies that undermine existing networks of Black families; lack of due process and poor advocacy for Black families; inaccessible, inappropriate, and ineffective resources offered to families; coercive and punitive interventions; hyper surveillance of Black families; workforce fear of Black families, particularly Black fathers; and ineffective mechanisms of accountability that result in blaming families for the failures of workers, providers, and larger societal ills (lack of housing, lack of livable wages, etc.).
 This Piece presents evidence compiled over the years which leads us to conclude that reforms within the current system will only go so far and that radical investment in community supports and anti-poverty efforts are necessary.

Providers Assessing Child Abuse and Neglect

Providers Assessing Child Abuse and Neglect

The evaluation of a Nurturing parenting program implemented by child welfare workers

This study assessed Nurturing Parenting Program (NPP) for parents at-risk or currently involved with child welfare services. NPP was implemented with 74 caregivers by trained local child welfare workers with support from community providers. Changes in parenting attitudes and knowledge were assessed pre-post. Child welfare administrative data measured the outcome of NPP on maltreatment investigations and out-of-home placements post NPP. Findings from this study showed improved parenting knowledge and attitudes as well as low rates of subsequent investigations. Findings suggest the feasibility and utility of NPP implementation by the child welfare workforce.

The Push for Racial Equity in Child Welfare: Can Blind Removals Reduce Disproportionality?

There have long been concerns regarding racial disproportionality in the U.S. child welfare system: Black children are represented in foster care systems at levels much higher than their numbers in the overall population. Calls for reform have grown louder in recent months, as the nationwide push to re-examine structural racism in institutions has reached the child welfare system. An increasingly popular reform seeks to reduce disproportionality by eliminating perceived implicit biases in the decisions of child welfare workers. This program, known as removals, works off of the following premise: if demographic information is unknown to professionals deciding whether or not to remove a child, then implicit biases will not impact foster care placement decisions. We conduct the first quantitative analysis of blind removals and derive two main findings. First, we show that the over-representation of Black children in most foster care systems is almost entirely driven by the fact that Black children are roughly two times more likely than White children to be investigated for child maltreatment to begin with. Conditional on initial rates of investigation, investigators remove White and Black children at similar rates. Specifically, we calculate that equalizing the removal probabilities of White and Black children would only reduce overall disproportionality by 4.5 percent. Thus, policies that target racial disparities in the removal decision have limited scope for impacting racial disproportionality in most foster care systems. Second, we find no evidence that blind removals had any effect on the already small racial disparities in the removal decision but they substantially increased time to removal. These findings yield an important insight for the multiple states and local child welfare agencies currently considering implementation of blind removals: the policy is not well-suited to reduce racial disproportionality in most foster care systems.

Don't Call it a Comeback: The Promotion of Rehabilitation and Reunification of Families Affected by Poverty‐Related Neglect

While Child Protective Services may provide some services to remedy the underlying issues of child neglect allegations, these efforts are often bare minimum and inadequately implemented in order to effectuate the goals of family reunification. This Note proposes an amendment to the Family Court Act in order to promote compliance of local child welfare agencies' obligation to reunify the family unit. The amendment will mandate that agencies show, by clear and convincing evidence, that the child protective services agency has made active efforts to reunify the family.

‘Mutatio Sub Pressura’: An Exploration of the Youth Policy Response to the Syrian Refugee Crisis in Germany

AbstractThis article explores the response of the child welfare system in Germany to the recent refugee crisis. Drawing on administrative data and qualitative interviews with administrators, front-line workers and refugee youth in Nuremberg, the article provides a contextualized account of how the crisis led to the collapse of established bureaucratic procedures, new forms of interagency collaboration and a flexible distribution of responsibilities and tasks. Combining a street-level bureaucracy (SLB) perspective with insights from the literature on crisis and policy change, the analysis shows how the responses of front-line workers effectively altered the content of services, introduced new actors and expanded the professional capacity of the local child welfare system. On a broader level, the findings indicate that front-line practice is not merely guided by policy mandates, but also responds to situational and institutional circumstances. For the child welfare system in Nuremberg, the findings raise important questions about the extent to which aspects of the crisis response will remain a part of the service delivery process moving forward, and whether the recent experience will better prepare them for future crises.

Supportive housing for precariously housed families in the child welfare system: Who benefits most?

BackgroundSupportive housing is a promising intervention for insecurely housed families in the child welfare system. ObjectivesWe examined factors associated with housing and child welfare outcomes to understand whom supportive housing benefits the most. Participants and settingAnalyses included 500 insecurely housed families involved in child protective services across five U.S. sites. Researchers randomized families to receive supportive housing or the usual services offered to families in local child welfare systems. MethodsWe examined predictors of homelessness and child welfare outcomes with logistic regression, survival analysis, and receiver operating characteristic curves. We also examined supportive housing’s effect across risk levels for each outcome and tested theoretical moderators of intervention effects. ResultsConsistent with findings from the larger project of which this was a part, supportive housing improved housing outcomes for families, especially those most at risk form homelessness. Its effects on child welfare outcomes varied by study site more than by risk level. Family characteristics and experiences that predicted housing and child welfare outcomes also varied by site and added limited accuracy to predictive models. Theoretical moderators did not influence supportive housing’s effects. ConclusionsSupportive housing increases housing security and may influence child welfare outcomes in some contexts. Family characteristics and experiences marginally improve targeting of supportive housing to insecurely housed families involved with CPS.

Returning to foster care: Age and other risk factors

This study uses longitudinal administrative data from twenty U.S. states to examine the risk of returning to foster care after children are either reunified with their parents or placed with guardians outside the foster care system. Our sample for this analysis includes all children who, before age 18, exited their first spell to either reunification or placement with guardians between 2003 and 2010 with follow-up through December 31, 2017 (N = 607,289). Focusing on demographics of the children, placement history and elapsed time since their exit from care as risk factors, a discrete time hazard model was specified to integrate children’s development as a factor predictive of reentry. Subgroup analyses identified which children are most at risk of returning to care. Of all children who exited their first spell to reunification, 27% reentered care by 2018 and of all children who exited their first spell of foster care to live with a guardian, 17% reentered care by 2018.The study found older teens, children who experienced changes in care type before reunification, children who were discharged to reunification within six months of entering care, and children whose last placement was congregate care all show significant risks of reentry into care. Additionally, while the number of infants who enter, leave and return to care before their first birthday is relatively small, the children in this group have a substantial risk of re-entering care. State and local child welfare agencies can use the results of this study to target their service investments such as those they might support with federal Family First Prevention funds.

Professional Values Challenged by Case Management—Theorizing Practice in Child Protection with Reflexive Practitioners

In this article, we theorize and reflect based on former research into professional practice and discretion as well as use some results from working together with practitioners in child protection services to explore the phenomenon of non-performing. Regulation lies at the heart of the contemporary child protection discourse. On the one hand we have seen a trend towards systematization of assessment content and procedures, on the other hand it is assumed that rational management approaches can secure consistency of performance. Social workers may be weary of the constraints all this imposes, but seem generally content to comply. Our reasoning was that social workers in child protection should be helped to get to grips with modifications to practice so that multi-challenged families could be accorded priority. These changes would include a reframing of assessment to take account of family needs as well as the needs of children. Follow-up would also require much more attention. Additionally, the choice of help provided for children and families would have to come into better focus, despite the limitations often experienced in practice. The question we asked was whether these types of reframing could be fostered within local child welfare units. We conducted a field trial in which child protection units were encouraged to reframe their practices, with the support of an expert group. The idea was to enhance and enable innovation through the combination of a more thorough dialogue with the families involved, as well as critical reflection based on available knowledge related to the identified challenges. We do a critical discussion of the work and the results from this in order to enhance knowledge on innovation in child protection.

Outsourced Children: Orphanage Care and Adoption in Globalizing China by Leslie K. Wang

Reviewed by: Outsourced Children: Orphanage Care and Adoption in Globalizing China by Leslie K. Wang Michelle Samura (bio), Cala Gin (bio), Dorcas Hoi (bio), and Florencia Park (bio) Outsourced Children: Orphanage Care and Adoption in Globalizing China, by Leslie K. Wang. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2016. 208 pp. From $24.95. Cloth ISBN: 9780804799010. Paper ISBN: 9781503600119. Digital ISBN: 9781503600126. As a leading source of international adoptees, China has drastically shaped the social, political, and cultural landscape of many countries for more than two decades. According to the U.S. Department of State, since 1999, families in the United States alone have adopted over eighty thousand children from China. In Outsourced Children: Orphanage Care and Adoption in Globalizing China, sociologist Leslie K. Wang unpacks the complex sociopolitical and economic dynamics at play in the seemingly simple process of adopting a child. Through in-depth ethnographic observations coupled with historical and policy analysis, Wang deftly analyzes a myriad of issues underlying fluctuations in Chinese adoption and examines China’s international adoption system as a means of globalization through “outsourced intimacy.” Coined by Wang, “outsourced intimacy” refers to “the process by which the Chinese state has outsourced the care of locally devalued children to Westerners who, using their own resources, remake them into global citizens” (4). Wang illustrates how this global exchange involves complicated power dynamics between the United States and China, within China itself, and among Chinese state-run orphanages and Western non-governmental organizations (NGOs). In the first three chapters, Wang discusses how the outsourced intimacy of abandoned children came to be an incremental part of China’s globalization efforts and an exercise of soft power. Wang applies a social Darwinist ideology to describe the desire for “high quality,” or suzhi gao, citizens to represent the country’s global image. Limited resources are invested in those who are the “fittest” in body, mind, and skills to carry the economic and political ambitions of the country, as evidenced by the one-child policy. Driven by desire for labor power, strength, and prestige, China’s goals of modernization and economic prosperity have resulted in the discrimination of females and youth with special needs due to socially constructed norms of worthiness and utility. By outsourcing the care of these vulnerable populations, China’s adoption policies have ensured that orphans are adopted into select families who will rear “high quality” citizens. Through this transnational exchange, China uses adoptees as a means to secure the country’s future, enhance China’s image abroad, and fund the local child welfare system. In chapter 4, Wang recounts her experiences with Tomorrow’s Children, an evangelical Christian organization located in the Haifeng Children’s Welfare Institute (CWI). In this facility, infants are transformed into desirable adoptees through Western care practices of personalized quality care. Wang focuses on the conflicts that emerged between low-paid Chinese caretakers, or ayis, and [End Page 270] Western volunteers due to their differences in childcare practices. Despite the well-meaning intentions of Western NGOs, their approaches have, at times, resulted in the inadvertent neglect of youth with special needs. In chapter 5, Wang details her experience at Helping Hands, a local grassroots organization composed of expatriate wives located in Yongping Social Welfare Institute. Wang discusses the shared intentions of short-term volunteer tourists and expatriate wives who seek to fulfill their own lives through “temporary, sometimes self-indulgent” work (116). Both organizations highlight struggles with cultural misunderstandings between the ayis and Western volunteers. Chapter 6 centers on the political, social, and economic factors contributing to the increased adoption of youth with special needs in China through the Waiting Child Program. China’s changing supply of available female adoptees and America’s evangelical church-based adoption movement indicate the expansion and overlap of each country’s transnational influence. At the same time, Wang suggests that the privatization of childcare by Chinese state authorities and the religious and moral motivations of American evangelicals “ignore pervasive economic disparities and cultural stigmas against disability in China” (135). While China’s overall economic conditions have improved, the percentage of special needs youth put up for adoption has increased as Chinese families still find caring for children with...

Family Surveillance: Police and the Reporting of Child Abuse and Neglect

Police are responsible for producing about one-fifth of all reports of child abuse and neglect investigated by local child welfare agencies, and low-level interactions with police often result in the initiation of a child welfare investigation. Because police contact is not randomly or equitably distributed across populations, policing has likely spillover consequences on racial inequities in child welfare outcomes. This study shows that police file more reports of child abuse and neglect in counties with high arrest rates, and that policing helps explain high rates of maltreatment investigations of American Indian–Alaska Native children and families. The spatial and social distribution of policing affects which children and families experience unnecessary child protection interventions and which children who are victims of maltreatment go unnoticed.

Foster care outcomes and experiences of infants removed due to substance abuse

ABSTRACTThis exploratory study used administrative data from the 2015 foster care file of the Adoption and Foster Care Reporting System to examine the experiences and outcomes of infants who had substance abuse indicated as their reason for removal. Logistic regression was used to explore the relationship between removal for substance abuse and race/ethnicity, placement setting, case plan goal, and discharge manner. T-tests were used to compare infants groups with respect to average placement duration. Separate analyses were conducted to compare outcomes for infants with substance abuse as their sole removal reason and for infants with substance abuse included as at least one removal reason amongst others. Nearly 17% of infants had substance abuse indicated as their sole removal reason and over 50% of infants had substance abuse included among multiple removal reasons. Infants removed due to substance abuse differed on a number of key outcomes compared to infants whose cases did not include substance abuse as a removal reason. Findings suggest that local child welfare systems would benefit from ongoing assessment of trends in substance abuse removals and that more attention to the long-term child welfare outcomes of children who were removed due to substance abuse as infants is warranted.

The relationship between child welfare financing, screening, and substantiation

This study examines the relationship between state-level child welfare spending and two important decision points in the child welfare system: the decision to screen out a referral and the decision to substantiate. The model is estimated using a pooled fractional probit estimator that controls for year effects and state-level clustering. The findings suggest that decreases in state-level child welfare expenditures predict increases in the proportion of referrals that are screened out and decreases in the proportion of maltreatment claims that are substantiated. The results are robust to the inclusion of caseload and federal spending as control variables, to the exclusion of states known to have changed their screening or funding practices during the sample period, and to the use of combined state and local child welfare expenditures as an explanatory variable in lieu of state-level child welfare expenditures. The findings imply that the amount of money a state spends on child welfare may influence important decisions in the child welfare process.