Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost Its Way

Studies in Social Medicine

by Mical Raz

In the early 1970s, a new wave of public service announcements urged parents to "help end an American tradition" of child abuse. The message, relayed repeatedly over television and radio, urged abusive parents to seek help. Support groups for parents, including Parents Anonymous, proliferated across the country to deal with the seemingly burgeoning crisis. At the same time, an ever-increasing number of abused children were reported to child welfare agencies, due in part to an expansion of mandatory reporting laws and the creation of reporting hotlines across the nation. Here, Mical Raz examines this history of child abuse policy and charts how it changed since the late 1960s, specifically taking into account the frequency with which agencies removed African American children from their homes and placed them in foster care. Highlighting the rise of Parents Anonymous and connecting their activism to the sexual abuse moral panic that swept the country in the 1980s, Raz argues that these panics and policies—as well as biased viewpoints regarding race, class, and gender—played a powerful role shaping perceptions of child abuse. These perceptions were often directly at odds with the available data and disproportionately targeted poor African American families above others.

Genres: History

180 pages, Hardcover

Published December 18, 2020

Reviews

[Janis Yue · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tremendously well-researched historical account of the development of child abuse policy in America written with a critical analytic approach. I learned a lot about how various historic events and actors have shaped the “child welfare”/family regulation system into the harmful entity it is today and will use Raz’s analysis to situate my work as a child mental health provider. My only critique is that I felt that Raz’s proposed solutions in the conclusion could have incorporated more of an explicitly abolitionist lens, instead of advocating for continued engagement with law enforcement to investigate what she deems legitimate cases of child abuse.

[Carrie]

Related to my job as an attorney that represents children and parents in Child Welfare cases.

[Christopher Greeley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fabulous short book on the recent history and failings of the current child welfare system in the US