Featured Discussion 38

Why Are There So Many African-American Youth in the Child Welfare System?

Children of color are disproportionately represented in the child welfare system. Although more than half of the 500,000 children in foster care come from ethnic minority families, children from minority communities represent only two-fifths of all American children. Because African-American children under state-mandated care experience poorer treatment and have poorer mental health and educational outcomes than their Caucasian counterparts, placing these children unnecessarily in state custody puts their mental health and educational success at risk.

African-American children specifically are represented in foster care at twice their proportion in the general population. Yet research has shown that African-American families do not neglect or abuse their children more often than white families, even though they are almost twice as likely to be reported to Child Protective Services (19.9 per 1,000 vs. 10.7 per 1,000). In fact, according to the National Incidence Studies of Child Abuse and Neglect, after controlling for income and family structure, African-American families were less likely to mistreat their children than white families.

A report entitled Synthesis of Research on Disproportionality in Child Welfare: An Update, released by Casey-Center for the Study of Social Policy Alliance for Racial Equity, examined why there are so many children of color—especially African-American children—in the child welfare system. The report focused on several steps in the child welfare system—initial reporting, investigation, substantiation of the report, investigation of the allegation, placement in foster care, exit from care, and return to care—as occasions where differential treatment may have played a role in the final outcome of the placement of these children. Through a review of the literature, the report concluded that race was one of the factors that influenced decisions at the stages of reporting, investigation, substantiation, placement, and exit from care. The only stage where no racial differences were identified concerned rates of reentry into the child welfare system. In addition, the review found that minority children have more negative experiences in the child welfare system than white children; this alone can have an impact on their mental health.

This report brings up sensitive issues regarding the differential treatment African-American children and their families receive when interacting with the child welfare system.

Your thoughts…

Comments:

I just want to ask this, why are mixed children considered as special needs children in adoption situations even before they are born? I don't know do you? I think it is wrong to give these kinds of labels out to everyone. And what this grandma said I believe about this girl saying this it is out of anger and hurt, but all it is really hurting is these kids when grandparents don't get these babies in very many cases. I have spent 8 years helping raise grandbabies and this could be me and that would be wrong. Posted Friday, March 2, 2007 at 05:35 PM

This is a timely article and overdue. I have worked in the Social Service area and I agree that the black children are left behind.

Thanks for this well-served article and their should be a outcry. Posted Wednesday, December 13, 2006 at 10:43 AM

I know there is discrimination in the child welfare syatem. I am a student of Social Work. I know the working of child protection services and actually worked with mothers to help get their children back after losing them to child protection services.

My sons daughter was taken from her mother because the mother was presenting some risky behaviors. The case worker involved lied to my son and has lied to the judge about my son and myself. Because grandparents don't have many rights, I wasn't even considered important by the case worker. her reccomendations is always adoption, although I have a suitable home for her and she would have her own bed room and my mother want her same applies to her as well. The case worker has been to my home and my mothe's home and said the following, "You have a loving and nuturing family. Your home is perfect for the child to be placed. You have a wonderful support system". But her reccomendations is adoption.

I believe that when a complaint of this type is reported, the state should be mandated to go through the records of other cases the case worker has worked on to see if there is a pattern.

Yearly culture awareness trainings should be mandatory and systems set in place for those case workers who target minories or any other group of people (single parents, teen mothers, what ever the case). Posted Tuesday, December 12, 2006 at 11:36 AM

This is indeed an important topic, that we should all be constantly considering. One interesting note is that it is African American and Native American children who are over-represented in the child welfare system. Hispanic and Asian children tend to be under-represented. This may mean that there is a protective structure in these cultures. Or it may mean that these families are under-served--in other words, that protective services are not reaching into these communities. We need to watch the statistics as they become more complete. Posted Monday, December 4, 2006 by Joan Shireman at 02:31 PM

One article that I know about that summarizes the information about different parent styles is by Kotchick and Forehand in the Journal of Child and Family Studies (3-4 years ago).
Posted Thursday, November 30, 2006 at 08:52 PM

Re the comment at the bottom... I remember
several studies as of a couple years ago that looked
at parenting practices. Prior studies--done on
mostly white families--provided the basis for a
typology of discipline styles. The bad ones were
"authoritarian" (harsh, punitive discipline) and
"permissive" (inconsistent discipline and lack of
consequences/follow through when children broke
rules). The good kind was authoritative, which
placed a lot of emphasis on consistency and
explaining rationale for rules. Studies supported
the hypothesis that authoratitative parenting led to
better outcomes. Then a critique emerged with its
own set of studies-- basically supporting the idea
that authoritative parenting was not superior to
authoritarian discipline for African American
parents. The authors argued that authoritarian
parenting was a culturally accepted style, and
possibly even necessary for raising children in an
essentially hostile cultural milieu. I am not sure
where this line of research has gone since then, but
assuming there is some merit to the line of
reasoning, one can see how that might contribute
to disproportionality. As noted by a previous post,
however, this is not exactly a non-racial reason.
Personally, I am hard put to imagine reasons for
disproportionality that don't connect somehow to
"bias, prejudice, or racism." Posted Saturday, November 25, 2006 at 10:45 AM

It is possible to do very useful and powerful action
research on this in your own area (county, state,
city). Select a few points along the child welfare
pathway, and assess the percentage of children of
each racial group in the population at that point.
Then compare with the percentage in your
jurisdiction's child population. You will find an
interesting and galvanizing pattern emerges.

For example, in King County Washington
researchers for a community coalition selected the
following points: the decision to investigate a
complaint, the decision to place in foster care vs.
provide in-home services, children remaining in
care 2 years or more, chidren in care 4 years or
more, whether a child exited the system by
adoption, guardianship, reunification, or other ways
and if by adoption how long it took for each group
for an adoption to be finalized. At each point we
used administrative data (yes, there are problems
with this as far as coding race) to describe the
percent of children of each racial group. The
resulting picture (displayed simply by bar graphs)
showed that even though Native American and
African American children made up only 7% of the
county's child population, they made up 50% of the
children in care over 4 years.

This and other findings proved a catalyst for
community dialogue, focus groups to explore what
lay behind the decisions, and action planning for
change in King County. The first action the
coalition took was to raise awareness by sharing
the findings widely and by providing undoing
racism training (from the People's Institute) to the
entire coalition and to local administrators from
courts, child welfare, CASA, and other participating
agencies.

This work was funded by two foundations -- Casey
Family Programs and the Stuart Foundation -- and
the contributed time of over 60 child welfare and
community activists, including youth and family
voices.

I believe that the child welfare system has a
responsibility to provide checks and balances for
the racism that (intentionally and unintentionally) is
present in our structures, our policies and in day to
day subjective decision making. Raising the issue is
the first step. Posted Friday, November 17, 2006 by K. Cahn, Portland State Univer at 10:10 AM

Re: Non-racial reasons for disproportionate placement of African American children in the foster care - I wish you had given us a hint. If the reasons include poverty, it seems to me that these are not "non-racial" reasons, since poverty is linked to discrimination, lack of opportunity, and other "racially-linked" phenomena. To say that discrimination may be unintentional does not excuse it. I hope that many others, including those who work in the child welfare system, and those who study it, will chime in here.

There was a very interesting study some years ago in New Jersey (?) about some of the differences between child rearing attitudes and practices of African American parents and the expectations of people who worked in the child welfare system (some of the differences were directly related to legal issues such as the definition of abuse, but others were a matter of interpretation of workers and others in the system). This is a very important issue, and one that has not had sufficient study and action.

Thanks for addressing this! Posted Thursday, November 16, 2006 at 07:31 AM

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