Balancing child welfare system impact on Black families with needs of the kids

The New York child welfare system is at the heart of a heated discussion about the harms of removing children from abusive or neglectful homes and the harms of leaving them there. And race is playing a central role in the debate.

In May, the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report — along with recommendations — on civil rights concerns about Black children and families within the child welfare system. It noted that Black families are “disproportionately represented at every stage of decision-making and intervention” within the system.

Critics of the report — including a member of the committee, Rafael A. Mangual, who stepped down in April over concerns about the “activist” nature of the discussions — say the recommendations have potential to sacrifice the well-being of the very children the system is designed to protect in order to satisfy concerns about proportionality.

“My overall concern is that they’re proposing really radical measures that ultimately are going to put kids at risk,” Mangual, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal , told Deseret News. “That’s going to lead to mistreated kids who are at risk of not being discovered.”

What the civil rights report says

According to the committee report, Black families are reported to a child abuse and neglect hotline at higher rates than white families, “raising concerns about bias” among mandated reporters. More Black parents are also listed on the state’s central child abuse and neglect registry. And families that use social services are also more likely to be reported for abuse and neglect than wealthier families, among other issues.

The report notes that Black and other nonwhite families are more often investigated, that “poverty is conflated with neglect” and the child welfare system has “detrimental impacts on the overall well-being and mental health of Black children and families,” especially given that most allegations of abuse and neglect are not substantiated, “indicating that Black families are being needlessly surveilled, investigated and monitored.”

As for family court, the committee concluded that Black families are often treated worse than white families. The report said the treatment sometimes violates their rights and features long delays, separations that are not needed and both harm and trauma to the families.

It also maintains that Black children are more often removed from their homes and are less often put into kinship care with relatives, which hampers maintaining family bonds. And that children are more likely to be placed in group home settings that “more closely mimic prison conditions than family conditions.” The effect, the group wrote, punishes children, who have not committed crimes, “for being Black.”

Among recommendations, the committee said that federal law should be changed so that mandatory and anonymous reports of suspected abuse or neglect either can’t happen or are restricted and so that felons can more easily become foster parents.

They also propose removing parental drug abuse, including during pregnancy, from what counts as child neglect.

The committee also suggested that New York laws be changed to prohibit routine drug screening of pregnant women and newborns. And they promote the idea of a universal basic income that guarantees families have at least an income floor.

The pushback

Thursday, the Manhattan Institute published an issue brief by Mangual, the former committee member, and Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who is also a Deseret News contributor and author of “ No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives .”

Their report, titled “The Radical Push to Dismantle Child Protective Services,” acknowledges that balancing the rights of families and the well-being of children is tough. But it cites a Harris Poll for the Bipartisan Policy Center from last November that found while nearly 60% of folks support the right of parents to raise their children as they want, a nearly identical number do not believe that the child welfare system overreaches.

The duo see the civil rights report as an example of activists “pushing a radical policy agenda that would all but eliminate the government’s role in child protection.” If the recommendations were adopted, per Riley and Mangual, it would be harder to report or investigate child abuse and neglect.

Particularly troubling, Mangual told Deseret News, is the idea that a parent’s drug use — including during pregnancy — doesn’t impact children negatively. It’s an idea that is gaining some traction, he said, noting that Mass General Hospital recently said it would not report drug screen results of babies born with drugs in their systems.

“The idea that a newborn baby who has fentanyl in her system shouldn’t justify any kind of child welfare intervention is insane to me,” Mangual said. Similarly, he added that making it harder to report or investigate abuse or neglect would make children less safe.

The Manhattan/AEI report notes that substance abuse by parents is especially dangerous for very young children, who need constant attention and supervision. They point to recent spikes in infant deaths because impaired parents have rolled over on infants during sleep, as well as drug overdoses by toddlers who got into their parents’ stash. They also cite a litany of harms a 2020 study published in the journal Development and Psychopathology found, including links between parental substance abuse and reduced supervision, family breakdown and poor relationship development with peers. A study in the journal Addiction said parental substance use was linked to child substance use and behavior problems.

The research, they write, shows parental misuse of drugs “predicts child maltreatment.”

Is the system racist?

Mangual said a racial discrimination claim is the most common justification for federal involvement in civil rights.

Still, there’s not much argument about whether more people of color find themselves embroiled in the child protection system compared to whites. But the institute article said the “figures do not control for relevant race-neutral factors that might explain them or shrink their magnitude.”

There are risk factors, they say, that are higher in the Black community, and others where the risk is not greater. In 2015, the Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community reported that “Black women are three times more likely to die at the hands of a partner or ex-partner than members of other racial groups.” It adds that homicide is the “leading cause of death among young Black women age 15 to 34.”

“That goes a long way toward explaining why we see disparate rates of child welfare involvement for these groups,” Mangual said. The civil rights report “only looks at one side of the ledger ... in that child welfare enforcement measures are the only output of the child welfare system, when in fact when the system does its job and operates well, it actually also produces protective benefits that Black kids disproportionately enjoy,” he added.

When other researchers dived into the numbers, Mangual said they found that the race disparity was driven almost entirely by children who had been removed for substantiated child abuse or neglect, then were reunited with family — most children are — and were mistreated again.

Mangual and Riley conclude that “the overrepresentation of Black children in the child welfare system owes not to bias, but to other problems that are unfortunately more common in the Black community.” One study showed that with race-neutral controls, Black children were actually less likely to be removed from their homes compared to white children, they said.

They wrote that the committee’s “hyperfocus on disparities in investigations and foster care placements fails to consider that Black children might be benefiting from enforcement. Reducing the footprint of child welfare enforcement vis-a-vis Black children will deny them important protections.”

Neither Riley nor Mangual dispute that removing a child from home is traumatic for all involved. “We understand that these are traumatic events, that being the subject of an investigation can be traumatic, that being removed can be traumatic for a child. The question is not whether there’s trauma involved; the question is trauma relative to the alternative. And there’s a lot of trauma in leaving a child in a home in which they are not properly cared for, in which they are being abused, neglected, assaulted and subjected to adversity at significantly higher rates,” Mangual said.

Riley and Mangual conclude that the effort to “reimagine child welfare policy is driven by narratives reflecting an underestimation of the dangers of substance abuse, an overestimation of the potential benefits of additional social spending on child maltreatment and the misinterpretation of top-line racial disparities in child welfare.”

Policymakers should take note, they wrote. “If left unchallenged, shortsighted activists will continue taking a sledgehammer to a system whose improvement requires a scalpel.”

The goal should be to protect children, Mangual adds. And if the needs of the child butt up against parental discomfort, the child should win.

Asked why she and Mangual publicly challenge the committee report, Riley doesn’t mince words. In an email to Deseret News, she wrote, “The danger of these myths being propagated — particularly by bodies that carry the mantle of civil rights — is significant. Our report should serve as a sobering corrective to the popular narrative that kids are not really at risk from abusive and neglectful adults. The (committee’s) willful blindness to the situation of these vulnerable children deserves attention and — more importantly — shame.”