Child welfare systems in the United States too often treat poverty as the basis for charges of neglect and decisions to remove children from their parents, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in a report released today. The system’s disproportionate impact on Black and Indigenous families and people living in poverty, and the sheer number of children removed unjustly, make this a national crisis warranting immediate attention and action.
The 146-page report, “If I Wasn’t Poor, I Would’nt Be Unfit: The Family Seperation Crisis in the US Child Welfare System” documents how conditions of poverty, such as a family’s struggle to pay rent or maintain housing, are misconstrued as neglect, and interpreted as evidence of an inability and lack of fitness to parent.
HRW and the ACLU found significant racial and socioeconomic disparities in child welfare involvement. Black children are almost twice as likely to experience investigations as white children and more likely to be separated from their families.
“The child welfare system punishes parents for poverty by taking their children away,” said Hina Naveed,, Aryeh Neier fellow at HRW and the ACLU and the author of the report. “Parents need resources to help provide for their families, but what they are getting is surveillance, regulation, and punishment.”
HRW and the ACLU analyzed national and state data on income and poverty levels, child maltreatment, and the foster system, and interviewed 138 people, including affected parents and caregivers, attorneys, government workers, local, state, and national advocates, and others.
One in three children in the US will be part of a child welfare investigation by age 18. Nearly eight million children were referred to a child maltreatment hotline in 2019, with investigations resulting for three million of them. More than 80 percent were found not to have faced abuse or neglect.
They found that nearly 75 percent of child maltreatment cases nationwide in 2019 involved “neglect” as defined by the system. Counties with higher poverty rates have higher rates of maltreatment investigations. But investigation rates are high for Black families even in counties with low rates of poverty.
Black and Indigenous families are disproportionately affected. Black children make up just 13 percent of the US child population but 24 percent of child abuse or neglect reports and 21 percent of children entering the foster system.
White children make up 50 percent of the US child population, and 46 percent of the children in abuse or neglect reports and entering the foster system. Indigenous children enter the foster system at nearly double the nationwide rate. Indigenous parents are up to four times more likely to have their children taken than their non-Indigenous counterparts.
Removing a child from their parents, even for a short time, can be highly traumatizing, with long-term consequences, the report said. In some cases, children in out-of-home placements experience maltreatment, including sexual or physical abuse, causing further trauma.
More than 250,000 children entered the foster system in 2019. The parents of nearly 61,000 children had their parental rights terminated that year. Parents said their families were “torn apart” or “destroyed” when parental rights were terminated.
