Tag: upend

GUEST POST: Torn Apart: How the Abolition Movement Destroys Foster Youth – And How Listening To Us Can Build A Safer World

by Patty Flores

I am grateful to be publishing this essay by a gifted and needed young voice in the child welfare space. Liliana “Patty” Flores, MSW is a clinician, researcher, advocate, educator, and motivational speaker. Her intersectionality and affiliation with marginalized identities such as being an undocumented Salvadoran female, LGBTQ+, foster youth, homeless, and cycling in and out of juvenile jails, have shaped the way she sees social issues. Patty was born in El Salvador and migrated to the U.S. at age 10. She spent half of her life in foster care, struggling with substance abuse. Patty turned 18 years old in jail. She eventually graduated high school and enrolled in college while still incarcerated. She now has an A.A. in Social and Behavioral Sciences, an A.S. in Administration of Justice from Pierce College, a B.A. in Sociology from UC Riverside, and a Master’s in Social Work from Smith College. Her goal is to empower those of similar backgrounds like herself. Read more about Patty and her work at www.defyinglabels.com. –Marie Cohen

Imagine going to school with bumps on your head and bruises on your back and legs from being repeatedly punched and kicked; this was my reality as a kid. Youth with lived experiences in foster care face countless challenges, even when the abuse finally stops – one way or another. For me, it stopped because at age 12 I reported it. I then found myself in foster care and having to navigate the complicated child welfare system, speaking little English and knowing nothing about how the child protection system (CPS) works in this country. Although my experience in care was hard for numerous reasons, including substance use, incarceration, homelessness, and being undocumented, I am alive only because this country has a system of protection in place for children and youth like me who have been victimized by their parents.

The movement to abolish the current child welfare system –spearheaded by the organization upEND and its co-founder, Alan Detlaff–has sparked useless controversy and divided the community of people who are concerned with child safety, permanency, and wellbeing. Former foster youth like me, who are pursuing college and graduate education,  are silenced in our classrooms. Also silenced are our allies, who are shamed for wanting to pursue a career in child welfare. The child welfare abolition movement originated from academics like Detlaff who have  no lived experience of foster care. Who are these ivory tower elites to tell anyone that foster care is unnecessary and should be eliminated when they’ve not lived through it themselves?

The child welfare abolitionists have chosen to ignore those of us with lived experience of child abuse and neglect who refuse to endorse their program of eliminating the child protection system. Are they too uncomfortable to talk about the cruel truth of being an abused or neglected child? Do they fear this conversation will thwart their efforts to abolish the system? It’s much easier to ignore the issues of child abuse and child deaths, to avoid engagement with survivors, and to see only the adult perpetrators as victims, than to recognize the reality of child abuse and neglect. It is also much easier to talk about tearing a system down than to grapple with the question of how to build one up that truly promotes child safety, permanency, and well-being. It is  harder to acknowledge the harms of child maltreatment and work together with us to find solutions that ensure our safety, stability, and well-being. Abolitionists are choosing the easy, less messy way out. They argue that foster care is not the answer. But for some of us, it is the only answer after experiencing abuse and neglect without extended family support.

I was born in El Salvador and am a descendant of the Pueblo Pipil, an indigenous group of people in El Salvador. I migrated to the United States as an unaccompanied minor at the age of ten. My background is rooted in a history of civil war and the struggle of oppressed indigenous people to overthrow those in power. In the United States, child welfare abolitionists often label themselves as “revolutionary” or claim to be engaging in “revolutionary” social work, but they are mistaken. True revolution occurs when the community rises up against oppression from those in power, not the other way around. These are the lessons I have learned from my revolutionary ancestors.

Child welfare abolitionists use the term to brand themselves as social justice warriors and  silence those with lived foster care experiences. They discuss child protection and  foster care among themselves, excluding the very people most affected.  It is  an abuse of power for the “abolitionists” to neglect the voices of those with lived experiences in foster care, while enhancing their own prestige within the elite ivory tower. 

Advocates for abolishing the child welfare system (or as they call it, the “family policing system”) argue that collective efforts and community involvement are the solution in cases of child abuse and neglect. Yet nearly five years have passed since the inauguration of upEND, and the child welfare abolition movement has not provided specifics about how this would look in practice. Nor have I heard Dettlaff or other child welfare abolitionists discuss the experiences of young people like me who endured abuse and neglect. Are they afraid of the harsh realities we’ve experienced? How can they even talk about the child welfare system when they refuse to acknowledge our existence?

I keep asking myself these questions: where was the community when I witnessed my mother being violently attacked, with a gun held to her head by my father? Where was the community when Gabriel Fernandez lost his life? Where was the community when Danieal Kelly was starved to death by her mother? Or much more recently, as four-year-old Jahmeik Modlin, slowly starved to death in an apartment stocked with food? Where is the community when children continue to lose their lives at the hands of their caregivers daily? When I’ve spoken to community members about their role in intervening when child maltreatment or violence on the streets occurs (a “solution” prescribed by the “abolitionists”), they’ve expressed fears of retaliation or concerns about getting themselves into dangerous situations where they could be attacked by the perpetrators.

The child welfare abolitionists have manipulated many young people, students, and activists into adopting oversimplified, Black and White narratives that erase other ethnic groups and the intersectionality children like me experience. To support their argument, they assert that the media is responsible for over-emphasizing cases of abuse and deaths, which they contend are infrequent. But when you grow up witnessing so much violence, abuse, and neglect firsthand, you don’t have to watch the stories on the news. In fact, I did not grow up watching any TV. I learned about all this violence because I lived it.

College and university professors who support abolition (and who have never worked in the system) consistently push the narrative that CPS serves only to break Black and Brown families apart. They rarely if ever acknowledge the suffering endured by the over half a million children and youth who are abused and neglected annually and the need for a system of child protection in this country. As a young person with lived experience in an abusive family, I felt compelled to speak up in the classroom. And I did, immediately standing out with my thick accent and visible head tattoos. Fortunately, many of my classmates, including peers with experience in foster care, supported me and together we pushed back against professors’ biases and prejudice. I felt powerless growing up, and I still feel powerless as I navigate the racist, sexist, and classist world of academia.

In Defying Labels: From Negative Credentials to Positive Credentials?, an article I wrote for a newsletter at UC Riverside, I explained that society often shifts blame to the child for revealing family secrets in cases of abuse and neglect. The last thing I want as an adult is to keep being torn down and silenced by those in positions of power – professors, researchers, policy analysts, lawyers, and others. The abolition movement is tearing foster youth apart. Why not actually listen to what we have to say? This is the only way toward a safer world for all.








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.