The Legacy of Harm of Mandated Reporting
The child welfare system purports to protect children but it inflicts physical, emotional, and mental pain on families caught in its web. In 2020, 215,000 children were removed from their homes and placed in foster care. Twenty-five percent of those children were Black, yet Black children only account for approximately 14% of the youth population in the United States. This disparity is a continuation of a long history of controlling and separating Black families in the United States.
In fact, approximately 63% of the removals of Black children in 2020 were based on findings of “neglect,” a standard rooted in white supremacy. This is a troublesome pattern where the vast majority of families that come into the child welfare system, do so through mandated reporting. In 2019, 75% of families referred to child welfare agencies became system involved because of a finding of “neglect”– not abuse. This ground for removal was first established by the 1974 Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), which provided financial support to states for the prevention, assessment, and prosecution of child abuse and introduced “neglect” as a basis for maltreatment reporting. “Neglect” is a nebulous term, which is often a euphemism for “poor”. With this addition, reported cases of maltreatment skyrocketed from 60,000 in 1974 to one million in 1980 and two million in 1990.
CAPTA also expanded the network of professionals mandated to report maltreatment to include teachers, social service providers, police officers, lawyers, and other professionals. CAPTA, as a practical matter, is a mechanism to punish parents experiencing poverty by taking their children and unnecessarily placing them in foster care. This is confirmed as the majority of “neglect” reports cite “inadequate housing” or failure to provide “adequate nutrition” as the basis. This bred mistrust with the very people and systems families – especially those experiencing poverty – should rely on for support.
Once agencies make a determination of neglect families are either required to adhere to a “safety plan” or children might be removed from their homes, ultimately leading to the termination of parental rights. Safety plans, as a practical matter, are designed to change behavior, but in effect, they require parents to comply with mostly arbitrary parenting standards. Throughout the implementation of the “safety plan”, families are closely monitored by child welfare workers and subject to routine check-ins, surprise home visits, strict rules regarding who is allowed access to the children, and a requirement to provide proof of compliance at any time. Due to the pervasive monitoring and the embedded policy to control families instead of support, Juvenile Law Center, and other leaders use the more apt moniker “family policing system” instead of “child welfare”.
Historically, Juvenile Law Center’s work in the child welfare space centered on children’s experiences after they’d already been ensnared in the system. We advocated in the courtroom filing influential litigation and amicus briefs in state and federal courts around child welfare issues such as reducing delays in dependency court proceedings, challenging reasonable efforts provisions, and protecting the right to counsel for children in dependency and termination proceedings. Our work on behalf of children and their families also extended to legislative advocacy and public education to ensure children in foster care could receive the accompanying benefits as they aged into adulthood.
For decades Juvenile Law Center also worked to educate child-serving professionals about keeping children in state care safe from harm. In 1977, Juvenile Law Center published the first edition of Child Abuse and the Law, which provided an overview of federal and Pennsylvania requirements under the Child Protective Services Law (Pennsylvania’s mandatory reporting law). In subsequent years, we published seven editions of Child Abuse and the Law to educate and train physicians, teachers, social workers and professionals on their duty to report child abuse under the mandated reporting laws, which were rooted in federal requirements dating back to 1963.
Our almost 50 years working in the child welfare space confirm that this system is racist, harmful, and irredeemable. Children and families suffer when they become entangled with the child welfare system. Although we shifted away from providing mandated reporting trainings to child-serving professionals more than 15 years ago, we again have pivoted. In 2021, we adopted a strategic plan where we no longer concentrate our efforts on minimizing the harm children and families experience once they are involved in the child welfare system. Instead, we use an abolitionist approach in our child welfare work – with the goal of limiting the power and reach of this system and, ultimately, abolishing the current iteration of the child welfare system.
We draw from the expertise of grassroot organizations that have successfully proven that providing families with resources, instead of surveillance, keeps children safe and allows families to thrive. We plan to amplify and expand those programs through innovative litigation at the state and federal level. Our legal arguments unequivocally call out the racist roots of the child welfare system and the disproportionate impact the system has on Black children and families because we cannot address a problem if we are not honest about its existence.
