This Child Welfare Monitor article summarizes a paper by Richard Barth et. al. analyzing “10 commonly held misconceptions” about child protection and foster care.
The authors are concerned that current efforts to reform these programs are often based on theories that are politically popular but aren’t supported by research.
To take one of their examples, poverty increases maltreatment rates across all demographics, but one product of systemic racism is that concentrated poverty is three to five times higher in Black and Indigenous communities. This turns out to have a significantly greater impact on disproportionality in child protection than caseworker bias, which is a frequent target of disparity efforts. This suggests that a larger proportion of our political capital should be devoted to increasing incomes – for example by promoting access to good jobs, boosting pay equity, and making Biden’s child allowance permanent.
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