Book Review
"Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System" by Alan Dettlaff.
Across the country, child protective services (CPS) and foster care agencies are having a tough time recruiting and retaining social workers and other staff. Working with abused children and families in crisis can be meaningful and rewarding, but it’s extremely hard. In New York City, up to 40% of child welfare caseworkers quit every year. There’s also a desperate need for foster homes to care for children who can’t be safe in their own homes and especially for teens and children with medical or behavioral health struggles. If CPS agencies and foster providers can’t convince dedicated, caring individuals to do the work, children and families will pay the price.
You’d expect that social work professors and child welfare professionals would be encouraging students to enter the field, extolling the rewards of the profession and the joys of helping struggling families and protecting abused children. Increasingly, you’d be wrong. Instead, a growing number of leading voices in the field – academics, attorneys, and advocates – have in recent years taken up the cause of abolishing the child welfare system.
Joining these voices, courtesy of Oxford University Press, is self-styled abolitionist Alan Dettlaff, a tenured professor at and the former Dean of the University of Houston’s School of Social Work. His new book is Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System: The Case for Abolition.
Among the various “abolish” and “defund” movements that arose amid the pandemic is the “abolish child welfare” movement. Detlaff, like many of his fellow “abolitionists,” sees police, prisons, and child protection as vestiges of colonialism and slavery, institutions designed and sustained to further white supremacy. The “family policing system,” as he calls efforts to prevent child abuse and protect its victims,” is intended to destroy black families, to “weaken Black communities and weaken their collective political power.”
In 178 pages, Detlaff makes a valiant effort to cast current child welfare practice as continuing the horrors of slavery. “The forcible separation of Black children from their parents was first used as a means of controlling Black families in the United States over four hundred years ago as a practice of human chattel slavery,” he writes. Since slavery’s abolition, “White Americans have sought mechanisms to recreate systems of forced labor and the perpetuation of an exploitable labor class.” In Detlaff’s retelling of history, the work of progressive 19th century reformers (such as Charles Dickens!) and the pioneering 1960s research on child abuse of Dr. Henry Kempe become a conspiracy to entrap black families in a web of “racialized capitalism.”
What Dettlaff delivers is nothing new. Dorothy Roberts and others have long criticized the disproportionate share of minority children and families caught up in the child protection system. The UpEnd Movement to “abolish child welfare,” based at Dettlaff’s university, has renewed and expanded Roberts’ ideas. Roberts’ criticisms have some merit, and they have over the past 20 years driven policy and legislative reforms designed to reduce unnecessary removals of children to foster care and ensure that agencies don’t mistake poverty for maltreatment. What is more troubling is the conclusion of Dettlaff and his colleagues that reforms will never work, and the only way out is to “abolish” child welfare.
“The work of abolition will only be complete when we abolish the society that supports the existence of a family policing system and all other systems of punishment and oppression,” he says. That means getting rid of capitalism and the “creation of a new society where the concept of welfare does not exist because families have what they need to thrive.” Dettlaff’s vision is a world of free housing, free health care, free childcare, universal basic income, and guaranteed child allowances.
Admitting that his quest is more “spiritual journey” than a prescription for change, Dettlaff makes few concrete recommendations. His book is more a radical manifesto than a policy proposal and could be dismissed as such but for its potential to further damage the ability of real-world professionals to protect children and serve families.
Dettlaff’s home institution, the University of Houston, has master’s-level programs that prepare social work students “for the challenging and rewarding work ound in children's protective services.” But what student at the U of H would want to work in a child protection system that the school’s former Dean of the school has declared corrupt to its core, irreformable, inherently destructive of families, and incorrigibly racist?
I don’t mind Dettlaff’s criticism of the system, even if it is overblown and under-supported by the evidence. Every system needs critics. Jesus Himself might agree with Detlaff’s complaint that this nation was founded on “violence and oppression.” But by discouraging students and young professionals from going into child protection work, Dettlaff does a serious disservice to the very families and children for whom he purports to speak.
I’ve spent over two decades working in the child protection system and understand just how hard the work is and how difficult the job can be. I also understand that the professionals who go into the child protection and foster care field do so because they believe in a purpose: they believe they can make a positive difference in society. Watching those within the profession tear it down from the inside is, frankly, sad.
In other news:
My original inclination this week was to do a longer piece reflecting on this article in the Washington Post that a friend sent me. In short, it’s a deep dive into struggles of a mother and daughter from Guatemala who tried to enter the US without documentation and were separated at the border. The feds deported the mother, and the daughter ended up in foster care. I’ve got a lot of unanswered questions. First, how did the child end up in California’s foster care system? Second, why didn’t they quickly reunite the daughter with her mother in Guatemala? Third, why did the judge think mother was unfit just because she was deported? More on this next week, I hope.
Tennessee advocates are taking up the cause of undocumented children in foster care who have been denied assistance by the foster care agency in obtaining special immigrant juvenile status (SIJS). It’s a problem across the country. These are children whom the courts have determined cannot be returned to their countries of origin, and something needs to be done at the federal level to fix it.
Speaking of child welfare reform, The Imprint has an article on a bill in Congress that would force agencies to distinguish between poverty and neglect.
Kentucky lawmakers convened a hearing to figure out why foster children are sleeping in hotels and offices.
Of 97 children under the age of three who died of non-natural causes in Connecticut between 2019 and 2022, 8.2% died after ingesting fentanyl.
Yet another example of problems with child abuse registries. After a legal battle, an Arizona mother who let her seven-year old play at a park while she shopped was finally removed from the state CAR.