POLICY and PRACTICE    

How we can better protect children
from abuse and neglect

The fundamental structure of the public child welfare system is that of a coercive apparatus wrapped in a helping orientation. Agencies ostensibly having the mission to help are mandated to ask whether parents can be blamed for their child welfare problems, and these agencies have the power to remove children from their homes. Thus, the public child welfare agency has a dual-role structure: On one hand, the agency attempts to engage in prevention and support, and to promote family preservation; on the other hand, it also has the task of investigating complaints against parents and removing children from them. This fact has had enormous consequences for the fate of child protection.

1. Yet there is reason to believe that the agency continued to remove children from their homes as much as before, and perhaps no less than its more single-minded and enthusiastic child rescue counterparts in New York City and elsewhere.

2. One can imagine that, in finding more and more people in need of help, the Massachusetts SPCC workers also found more and more who seemed in need of judgment. When workers were disposed both to help and to judge, business for both supportive family preservation and coercive child rescue efforts thrived. Unsuccessful attempts to change the parents further justified actions to rescue the children by taking them from the parents.

Parent/Professional Relationships
The current child welfare agency’s structure assumes a position of both helper and judgmental coercive agent, much as it did in earlier days, and it repels parents in need of help from seeking it. Parents fear that the problems they perceive they have will be reinterpreted by the agency as child neglect, with intervention consequences that they neither sought nor desired. The public child welfare agency is regarded by many parents with child-rearing problems more as an enemy than a friend, as something to be feared and avoided, and certainly not as a place to come voluntarily for help. Thus, relationships with child welfare agencies are far more often initiated by complaints filed by others than by self-referrals on the part of parents. These relationships are fundamentally distorted by the agency’s coercive dual-role structure. Since the relationships are authoritarian and coercive, the agency has no incentive to respond to the needs perceived by its clients. Even if the agency’s caseworkers are sympathetic, understanding, and inclined to be responsive to parents’ perceptions of their needs, the agencies themselves are not, in that they do not develop the resources wanted by the parents. Thus, it is quite common that the supports and services parents want are not the ones that are offered by the agency.

However, the parents are not free to vote with their feet, for they will then be judged as uncooperative, often with dire consequences. On the surface, at least, the child welfare agency – client relationship has the appearance of a traditional professional relationship. The professional prescribes the treatment for the client. But the relationship, say, between a physician and a patient is authoritative, not authoritarian. The patient does not anticipate that the physician will judge her or him as a person and take coercive action. Moreover, physicians may be able to prove that their remedies have been successful in the past. They thereby win or earn the trust of their potential patients. Indeed, their past success in general has inspired patients’ confidence in them. This is not the case with protective child welfare.

Instead, the fact of growing foster care placements, together with child welfare professionals’ own assertions of rising tides of child abuse and neglect, attest to their lack of success. In lieu of success, an authoritarian relationship between professional and client is needed to maintain the authority and dominance of professional specialties. In turn, the professionals come to have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and even expanding their industry by broadening their claims. The less success they can show, the more hysterical become their cries of a “growing” problem. Embarrassed by the fact that the vast majority of their coerced clients are poor people, they have always been quick to defensively assert that “not all poor people abuse and neglect their children,” and that “many abusing and neglecting parents are middle class.” Yet the increasing numbers of impoverished children they claim to be abused and neglected implicate a very substantial proportion of all poor families.

The politics of child welfare
Child welfare advocates, including many who consider themselves liberal, have helped to demonize the poor through the great child abuse crusade that began in the 1960s and that continues unrelenting at the present time. Unwittingly or not, child welfare advocates contributed to the negative stereotypes of impoverished parents and the political atmosphere that paved the way for punitive AFDC “reform” to become the law of the land in 1996. Indeed, an alliance between liberals and conservatives maintains and supports the child protection system as currently structured. Our definitions of key child welfare concepts are based upon simplistic assumptions that parents alone are to blame for injuries to their children. The term “child protection,” in current usage, refers to protection from “child abuse and neglect,” which in turn denotes the culpability of parents in harm or danger to their children. These definitions thereby promote the erroneous notion that the most widespread threats to the safety and well-being of children stem from the misbehaviors of their parents. It is almost a given in the field today that, short of removing the children, the only alternative is to change the parents.

In any event, because of its incorporation of a “preventive” orientation, “child protection” gains the support of liberals as well as conservatives. Even if poverty and its consequences wereto be more adequately addressed through other, non-coercive systems, child removal activity would continue at current rates, so long as we allowed the dual-role child protection system to persist. Many Western European countries, which have dual-role child welfare systems like ours, maintain at least as many children in foster care (proportionately) as we do in the United States, even though they have far lower child poverty rates and more progressive and extensive social welfare supports for families and children.

Directions for change
Several years ago I proposed reforms that might address these problems. Greatly narrowing the definitions of child abuse and neglect is a necessary first step. Beyond that, the investigative and foster care functions of the public child welfare agency should be entirely severedfrom it.   The agency could then be devoted to the delivery of preventive supports and services, largely to impoverished families, on a voluntary acceptance basis, without accusation or blame. More importantly, transferring the task of receiving reports and the investigative function to law enforcement agencies, and placing the foster care system under the civil court system, would unmask the coercive part of the total child welfare system. No longer would impoverished families needing assistance be so readily subject to threat and innuendo as they are now. No longer, at least not in the name of prevention and family preservation, would public monies flow into coercion and family separation through foster care placement. No longer would the civil rights of poor people be violated in the name of child protection.

1. Antler, J., and Antler, S. From child rescue to child protection: The evolution of the child protective movement in the United States. Children and Youth Services Review (1979) 1,2:177–204.

2. Gordon, L. Heroes of their own lives: The politics and history of family violence. New York: Viking, 1988, pp. 69–79.

3. Sudia, C.E. What services do abusive and neglecting families need? In The social context of child abuse and neglect. L.H. Pelton, ed. New York: Human Sciences Press, 1981, pp. 268–90.

4. Pelton, L.H. Personalistic attributions and client perspectives in child welfare cases: Implications for service delivery. In Basic processes in helping relationships. T.A. Wills, ed. New York: Academic Press, 1982, pp. 81–101.

5. AFDC refers to Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the government program that provided cash assistance to poor families until August 1996. See the article by Courtney in this journal issue for further discussion of AFDC.

6. Pelton, L.H. Child welfare policy and practice: The myth of family preservation. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry (1997) 67,4:545–53.

7. Pelton, L.H. For reasons of poverty: A critical analysis of the public child welfare system in the United States. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1989.

8. Lindsey, D. The welfare of children. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.