Reform, not abolish, child welfare: A science-informed path

By Antonio R. Garcia, Jill Duerr Berrick, Melissa Jonson-Reid, Richard P. Barth, John R. Gyourko, Patricia Kohl, Johanna K.P. Greeson, Brett Drake, and Victoria Cook

A note from Child Welfare Monitor (CWM): CWM welcomes submissions from authors who represent points of view that are more evidence-based and child-centered than what is typically presented by leading media outlets and other child welfare publications. We are privileged to share this commentary from an illustrious group of child welfare scholars from schools of social work and social policy around the country. While this essay does not mirror the views of CWM in every detail, we share the authors’ basic premise regarding the need to reform, rather than abolish, the child welfare system.

Over the past couple of years, while teaching classes, presenting lectures, or offering invited talks and workshops, students and participants have inquired about the need to abolish the child welfare system. Some have questioned whether they should continue their pursuit of a career in this field. They are aware of the growing calls by abolition advocates, particularly UpEND and JMac for Families, to completely eradicate child welfare services, despite offering no evidence as to its likely impact on child safety or permanency.

Abolition advocates have successfully convinced a few scholars, an unknown number of students, and a surprising number of community members and decision-makers that child protective services must be eliminated. Acting on briefs supplied only by activist groups, the United Nations has even called for all major child welfare laws in the United States to be repealed or replaced. 

Why?  The narrative built by the abolitionists includes two major parts: First, classist and racist bias largely determines who has contact with the child welfare system, with poor children as well as Black and Native American children being routinely and unnecessarily harassed.  The resounding narrative–largely offered by lawyers, not child welfare scientists–is that the interventions and intentions of child welfare services and its staff are inherently racist (e.g., Roberts, 2022).  Some child maltreatment scholars (e.g., Briggs et al., 2023) have even gone so far as to reiterate Roberts’ claim that the modern child welfare system (CWS) was intentionally designed as a mechanism of racial oppression. This conclusion flies in the face of history as documented child welfare historians (e.g., Myers, 2004). Purveyors of this narrative ignore efforts like those of pioneering African American women pursuing the development of child welfare facilities for African American children who were routinely insufficiently served by family and community (Peebles-Wilkins, 1996); they fail to mention the work of the Children’s Defense Fund, and a diverse coalition of policymakers, who helped to shape the modern CWS through their work to expand family preservation and support services. Nor do they acknowledge that the Title IVE program was, in part, explicitly developed to extend equal protections to Black children (Hutchinson & Sudia, 2002).

Second, those who denigrate child welfare services argue that CWS interventions do more net harm than good, and for that reason should be abolished.  Child welfare services are said to sever familial connections (Roberts, 2022), and unjustifiably surveil children and families (Gruber, 2023). To that end, they argue that the best way to protect children and families is to abolish the current system and replace it with family and community-based responses (Kelly, 2021). This proposed alternative to CPS is remarkable for the degree to which it is vague and undefined.  Nothing approaching a concrete plan for such a system has ever been suggested to our knowledge.  Given the historical lessons of relegating unwanted or abused children to orphanages, orphan trains, indenture, or detention centers, it is difficult to point to an example of American communities fully embracing the care of children whose parents are unable to care for them.

The abolition movement sidelines any past record of successful reforms of child welfare or hope for future evidence-based or incremental change. Anxious, perhaps, that reforms have been uneven or too slow, the proponents of abolition do not suggest improving the complex and intricate web of local, state, and national child welfare policies that have been developed over the last 40 years.  Critically, their proposals have no evidence base. Instead, they rely on ideology that disregards the best available evidence (Barth et al., 2020).

The degree to which the abolition narrative is taken seriously is troubling.  Child safety is contingent upon training qualified professionals to respond to signs of abuse and neglect – and ensuring institutions have the resources to recruit and support them. Tuition is covered for many social work students if they agree to “repay” their time by working for the state’s child welfare system after graduation. The premise is to promote and retain a highly educated, culturally responsive child welfare workforce and prepare them to rely upon critical thinking skills and the best available evidence to promote child safety and permanency. With many states facing unheard-of staff shortages following the pandemic, the additional decrease in interest in the field is distressing. 

In our paper, The Stark Implications of Abolishing Child Welfare: An Alternative Path Toward Support and Safety, we offer an alternative path – a reformist position that focuses on four key elements of child welfare that must be maintained and improved to keep children safe:

1) receiving and responding to community signals about risk or harm to children;

(2) assessment of need coupled with a proportionate response;

(3) rights protections to ensure fairness and equity when placement outside the family is required; and

(4) procedures for accountability and quality improvement.

Without these key elements, we contend that children will be left in peril.  Many community members will not know how to respond to signs of risk and harm to children.  The progress we have made in the last few decades toward developing, implementing, and evaluating prevention and early intervention services to address trauma and promote healing will be disrupted. Supports for foster parents, kin, and child welfare staff will be disbanded. The elimination of court oversight will eliminate rights protections for parents, children, and extended family.  Racial inequities in economic hardship will make it more challenging for communities of colorto develop responses, which will likely yield an even larger gap in unmet needs for children of color.

Still, many in our field are challenged by having to choose between abolition and reform. At the core of this debate, we are contending with the interplay of science, practice, ideological beliefs, and conflicting values. What types of evidence are or should be used to guide our decision-making? How do we best balance the support of families with a child’s need for safety without defending the status quo? Said another way, we see no reasonable likelihood that abolishing child welfare services would result in a world where families are better supported to provide care that is not injurious to their children and children are better protected from the harsh realities of child abuse, including fatalities.

The debate offers an opportunity to examine current practice and whether it advances the needs of vulnerable children and families. We underscore in our paper that current services and funding are inadequate. To that end, we delineate alternative pathways to abolition providing some practical, evidence-informed recommendations, including but not limited to the following:

• Create a robust family support and prevention infrastructure outside of Child Protective Services (CPS);
• Reduce poverty and financial hardships through universal basic income supports and targeted economic supports for families in great need;
• Resume the child welfare waivers program to expand and test innovations in case finding and response to family needs; and
• Continue to improve alternative systems for reporting less serious concerns and connecting families to existing resources to reduce the number of families who are subject to unwarranted CPS investigations.

As discussed in our paper, we believe implementing these recommendations offers a holistic roadmap for (1) improving outcomes for all children and families and (2) mitigating racial inequities in exposure to economic hardship and access to services and programs.

Although many jurisdictions have a long way to go in fully aligning practices with our valued principles, the child welfare system, on the whole, has made much headway. We have made progress toward reducing foster care entries, enhancing permanency, supporting youth who must emancipate from care, and developing alternative response paths for less severe cases.  The number of children in foster care is now lower by more than 175,000 children than it was in 1991, despite population growth (US DHHS, 2022; US DHHS, 2000).

We have made advances in the development and implementation of evidence-based, and culturally appropriate parenting programs, and there are innovative approaches to screening and collaboration with other systems such as family drug courts and other models that are  being adopted around the country. Research indicates that families are better served by caring and competent child welfare staff. At a minimum, this means we need trained child welfare professionals to determine if abuse or neglect are occurring and how best to provide services to mitigate risk factors. If removal to foster care is required, trained social work and legal professionals need to be engaged in reunification services and the determination if it’s safe for children to go home.

Finally, it is critical that these efforts are continuously evaluated. Abolition would end the now-routine national reporting of the number of victims of child maltreatment, and their characteristics (i.e., NCANDS; Children’s Bureau, 2023). We would not know if new family- and community-based approaches were helpful or harmful, particularly for the families of color for whom both reformists and abolitionists are concerned. State-level systems that track the provision of services and outcomes would also end, meaning that trends in family needs and gaps in response systems would likely go undetected. We would also lack data to influence policy to end harmful practices and expand funding for effective prevention and intervention services.

As we note, “it is difficult to imagine how eradicating the only structures that exist to address this issue [child maltreatment] would result in any outcome other than jeopardizing the safety and well-being of children as well as reducing accountability to the families that CWS [the child welfare system] serves.”

This is a contentious moment in the journey to create opportunities and healing for all children and families. We hope our message conveys a sense of urgency to engage in critical, evidence-informed practice and policy – and to reflect upon how values, biases, and morals can impact decision-making.  The famous words of Nelson Mandela may be instructive: “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” In efforts to enhance practice and policy, we need child welfare professionals to gain the skills, cultural humility, self-efficacy, and motivation to ensure children live lives free of violence and abuse. Policymakers need to stay grounded in the pathway that has led to significant improvements in child welfare services and rely on research-based reforms. Our children deserve nothing less.

References

Barth, R. P., Jonson-Reid, M., Greeson, J. K. P., Drake, B., Berrick, J. D., Garcia, A. R., Shaw, T., & Gyourko, J. R. (2020). Outcomes following child welfare services: What are they and do they differ for Black children?. Journal of Public Child Welfare, 14(5), 477-499. https://doi.org/10.1080/15548732.2020.1814541

Briggs, E., Hanson, R., Klika, J. B., LeBlanc, S., Maddux, J., Merritt, D., … & Barboza, G. (2023). Addressing systemic racism in the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children publications. Child maltreatment, 28(4), 550-555.

Children’s Bureau. (2023). National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Administration on Children, Youth and Families. https://www.acf.hhs.gov/cb/data-research/ncands

Gruber, T. (2023). Beyond mandated reporting: Debunking assumptions to support children and families. Abolitionist Perspectives in Social Work, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.52713/apsw.v1i1.12

Hutchinson, J.R. (2002).  Failed child welfare policy: Family preservation and the orphaning of child welfare. Washington DC: Child Welfare League of America.

Kelly, L. (2021). Abolition or reform: Confronting the symbiotic relationship between ‘child welfare’ and the carceral state. Stanford Journal of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties, 17(2), 255–320. https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/stjcrcl17&i=271

Myers, J. E. B. (2008). A short history of child protection in America. Family Law Quarterly, 42(3), 449–463. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25740668

Peebles-Wilkins, W. (1996). Janie Porter Barrett and the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls: Community response to the needs of African American children. In E Smith and L Merkel-Holguin (Eds.), A history of child welfare. Washington, DC: Child Welfare League of America.

Roberts, D. (2022). Torn apart: How the child welfare system destroys Black families, and how abolition can build a safer world. Basic Books.

U.S. DHHS. (2022). The AFCARS Report. Washington, D.C.: Administration for Children and Families.

U.S. DHHS. (2000). The AFCARS Report. Washington D.C.: Administration for Children and Families.