Some of the most destructive ideas of the past half-century, from critical race theory to the notion of gender as a social construct, have been hatched at elite universities. So, it’s not surprising that the new movement to abolish the child welfare system was the subject of a recent multiday conference at Columbia University Law School. The conference, along with the publication of a manifesto by so-called “abolitionists” titled “How We endUP: A Future Without Family Policing,” reflect the dangerous direction of the movement, its lack of grounding in evidence, and its growing influence in the world of child welfare.
It was held on the 20th anniversary of the publication of “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,” a screed by the University of Pennsylvania’s Dorothy Roberts about how our country’s racist policies have forcibly separated children from their parents for no other reason than their low income or the color of their skin. The conference was not a discussion of how to reform a system that people on all sides agree is broken. Rather, the materials described it as “an opportunity to critique [a] limited reform approach and consider radical change to reimagine how society cares for and protects children.”
As the authors of “How We endUp,” including Alan Dettlaff, dean of social work at the University of Houston, and various staff at the Center for the Study of Social Policy explain, “The child welfare system is predicated on the subjugation, surveillance, control, and punishment of mostly Black and Native communities experiencing significant poverty.” They note that “the biggest threats to child safety and well-being are anti-Blackness, economic exploitation produced by racial capitalism, the continuing cultural genocide produced by colonialism, gender oppression sustained through the patriarchy, the ableism entrenched by the current system, and White supremacist norms of good parenting, family and safety.”
The conference organizers point out parallels with recent moves to abolish the police and end mass incarceration. “Both trace their practices to colonization and slavery, mass immigration and displacement of native populations, and the resulting and lasting inequities that have ensued and continue to disproportionately target poor people of color and especially Black and Native American communities.”
Of course, the first thing to note is that societies all over the world, regardless of whether they had slavery and for how long, have police forces, prisons, and child welfare systems. A society of laws must have some way of enforcing them. And if a society is judged (as is frequently suggested) by how it treats its most vulnerable, then it must have a way to care for children who are not safe in the hands of their parents. The second thing to note is that disparate outcomes are not necessarily a sign of racism. It is true that black children are removed from their parents at a disproportionate rate. But they are also about twice as likely to be victims of maltreatment, and they are twice as likely to die from maltreatment as other children.
The child welfare system is supposed to serve a need. If black children are in greater danger of being abused or neglected than white children — child maltreatment is highly correlated with family structure, and two-parent, married couples are not evenly distributed across race in this country — then it is the job of the child welfare system to protect them regardless of the color of their skin. To the extent that these intellectuals and activists acknowledge that there are disparities in the way black children are treated, they attribute such differences to a higher level of “surveillance,” that is, that social workers or police officers are more likely to see families in high-density, low-income neighborhoods. But that would hardly explain a higher fatality rate — to be blunt, it is difficult to claim we are just finding the bodies of dead black children at a higher rate than we find white ones.
But the intellectuals who are leading this movement seem to believe that the only harms that befall a child are the ones the child welfare system perpetrates. So, the first item on their agenda is to reduce “family policing” by changing the front end of the child welfare system. The “upEND” authors propose to do this by ending mandated reporting of child abuse by doctors, teachers, police officers, etc. They note: “Reporting families to family policing systems … begins the process through which families experience harm, trauma, and punishment.” This, of course, ignores that what actually began the trauma was probably the abuse or neglect that was necessary to report in the first place. Second, they want to end the drug testing of newborns and new mothers. They argue that the practice is racist and “does not keep children safe.” In point of fact, impairment due to substance abuse is one of the largest drivers of neglect, and neglect of infants in particular, as anyone who has ever cared for one knows, comes with very high risks. Finally, because families are often investigated for child abuse or neglect in the wake of an incident of domestic violence, the authors want police to stop responding to such reports. “Police do not keep children safe, but rather create more harm, trauma, and violence.”
Just as reducing police presence does not mean crime won’t happen — in fact, there is good evidence that the opposite is true — eliminating the reporting of child abuse and neglect does not make it go away. Pretending a child is safe in a home where his mother is being beaten or ignoring the presence of cocaine in the system of a newborn, or telling teachers they needn’t speak up when they see a lot of suspicious bruises on a third grader, will not make those things go away. They will likely increase the risk to children who, even if they do not need to be removed from their homes, probably need some kind of services to keep them healthy and safe.
Nevertheless, the Columbia panels seemed stacked in favor of such radical change. A panel on “family surveillance” included the director of the We Be Imagining center at Columbia, who authored a piece called “Calculating the Souls of Black Folks,” which opposed the use of predictive analytics in understanding which children are at risk. Another from the Center for Family Representation authored a piece called “The Surveillance Tentacles of the Child Welfare System.”
Panelists at the conference not only advocated for the repeal of the Adoption and Safe Families Act, a law passed in the ’90s to reduce the amount of time children could spend in foster care, but also the Family First Prevention Services Act, a 2018 bipartisan bill that expanded funding of programs to help families at risk. One participant wrote a piece called “The White Supremacy Hydra: How FFPSA Reifies Surveillance, Control, and Punishment in the Family Regulation System.”
Once they are through dismantling the “surveillance system,” then these activists demand that under no circumstances are children to be removed from their homes. And they want those 440,000 children who are currently in foster care to be reunited with their families, ASAP. Of those tiny numbers for whom there are “immediate and severe safety concerns,” they should be sent to live with other family members. Of course, the system already sends foster children to live with a relative if there is one available. Even when the suitability and safety of such placements are dubious, children are still sent to live with kin first.
And speaking of limiting options for children in care, the “upEND” manifesto also demands the elimination of all congregate care, the use of group homes or mental hospitals for children in foster care. Never mind the severe mental health challenges and behavioral problems of the children who are in these institutions: Just send them home, and they can live in “noncoercive settings.” Whatever those are.
At least some of the advocates of these changes are honest about what their goals are. Bianca Shaw and her colleagues from a group called RISE authored a paper for the Columbia conference called “Centering Parents in Child Welfare Abolition.” And that is exactly the point of so many of these reforms: to ensure that our decisions about child welfare are made based on what is best for the adults. Take the absurd idea that families that have been involved with the child welfare system should receive reparations. Apparently, we should pay parents who have neglected or abused their children because, well, the adults are the real victims here.
Giving families more money seems to be at the heart of the recommendations for these activists. If children are being mistreated — and these activists are not conceding they are — it is because they are living in poverty. And if we gave such families more services, better housing, more food stamps, etc., then those children would be properly cared for. While poverty is certainly correlated with involvement in the child welfare system, there is no evidence that one causes the other. Parents with mental health problems, substance abuse issues, violent tendencies, and multiple partners may be more likely to be poor and more likely to have child welfare involvement. But it may not be the lack of money that is the cause. Nevertheless, the authors offer recommendations such as “guarantee housing as a human right” and “eliminate poverty” among their solutions.
The fact that the conference panels are populated with folks from NYU, Columbia, Penn, UC Davis, Emory, and other top universities around the country should be worrisome enough. Because child welfare agencies and family courts are often understaffed and undertrained, they will be more likely to be influenced by all of this nonsense than other state agencies. Representatives of Casey Family Programs, one of the most generous funders of research and training in the world of child welfare, were also among the conference participants. And Casey’s resources have a long history of influencing child welfare policy at the state and national levels.
The final panel of the day included Judge Ernestine Gray, a former juvenile court judge in New Orleans, who was single-handedly able to reduce the number of children in foster care in Orleans Parish to almost nothing. Her paper, ominously titled “The Beginning of the End,” is a chronicle of that process. By refusing to approve the removal of children (particularly black ones) from settings that child welfare investigators found to be dangerous, Gray managed to put the theories of “abolition” into practice. When I reported on Judge Gray’s actions a couple of years ago, I spoke to a local pediatrician specializing in abuse, as well as family court lawyers and social workers, all of whom feared for the safety of these children. Leave it to our academic elite to celebrate a woman who is willing to throw children under the bus to make sure that the latest radical theories are put into practice.
