Child welfare systems in the United States are too often taking children away from their parents simply because they are poor.
A new report and video from Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) document the problem: the authorities are treating poverty as the basis for charges of neglect.
To start with, let’s understand the scale of the system. 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.
Of those that were deemed child maltreatment cases nationwide in 2019, about three quarters involved “neglect” as defined by the system – and that’s where the problem can emerge.
For the authorities, even a family simply struggling to pay the rent can be treated as “neglect” of a child.
But quite clearly, being poor doesn’t make you unfit to be a parent. The labelling is simply wrong.
And, of course, as with so much else in the US, the broken system disproportionately affects Black and Indigenous people.
Black children make up just 13 percent of the US child population but 21 percent of children entering the foster care system. Indigenous parents are up to four times more likely to have their children taken away than their non-Indigenous counterparts.
In sum, the government has created a massive system of surveillance, regulation, and punishment – a scheme that impacts a third of US kids and is highly discriminatory – when what they should be doing is actually helping families.
Rather than spending money on a system that takes children away from poor parents, why not use that money to help those poor parents create better homes for their kids instead?
That would be better for the kids, better for parents, and better for society.