Introduction
Child welfare researchers have begun to examine the need to transform the system from an entity that routinely results in stress and adversity in the lives of those who interact with the investigative and service components, to one that successfully prevents child injuries and enhances the lives of families that come to into contact with it. Academia is currently examining the transformation topic but seems stuck in a debate as to the extent of culpability the institutions of the child welfare system have in the continuing failure to prevent harm in general and disproportionate harm specifically. We are focused specifically on the interruption of the current trajectory of child welfare in United States, given its roots in racially unequal systems of government, though scholars have found similar concerns in other high-income, Western countries, with systemic discrimination putting some populations at more risk of child welfare contact .
In this essay, we examine the intersection of academia and practice, and the language commonly used to scrutinize and explain social injustice, both internal and external to child welfare. We maintain that in search of professionalism, social work necessarily needs “clients” and so we reduce the complex occurrences of child maltreatment to an individual parent deficit model. We argue that to truly improve or replace the system, research agendas should be focused on the routine ways the system fails to function in a protective way, and we must necessarily research the resource deprivation that leaves certain parents unable to access adequate supervision and care for their children, leaving them prone to situations that may be considered “neglect” should something go awry. We argue that the current debate surrounding whether aspects of the child welfare system are racist is moot, as the system is embedded in laws and institutions born of and perpetuating inequalities based on race. We conclude by calling for a public health centered research agenda, focused on the social and environmental factors that create the conditions for neglect and abuse as well as policy interventions that eliminate resource deserts for disadvantaged families.
The Relationship of Academics to Practice/Policy
Academic schools of social work have long partnered with federal and state child welfare agencies to train a “professional” workforce as well as to provide evaluation of outcome performance (Scannapieco et al., 2012). The Children’s Bureau has (and continues to) spent millions of Title IV-E dollars on partnerships with Social Work schools to educate Bachelor and Master level social workers (Cheung et al., 2005), preparing these students for work in child welfare. Schools of social work also partner with state and federal agencies to provide data analysis of these jurisdiction specific performance, for example, the California Child Welfare Indicators Project at Berkeley’s School of Social Work produces publicly available state and county level child welfare performance measures (https://ccwip.berkeley.edu) for the State of California, and Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago is funded by both private and public partners to produce multistate outcome indicators (https://fcda.chapinhall.org/). While these relationships allow data-sharing across entities and sophisticated analyses of the effectiveness of child welfare agency efforts, these close partnerships can also stymie the urgency and efforts of academic institutions to radically change child welfare systems; they are now embedded into the mechanics of the child welfare system as a whole.