Examining Racism in Child Welfare: The Inaugural Elie Hirschfeld Symposium

Two months ago, the first-ever Elie Hirschfeld Symposium on Child Welfare brought together leading experts on family law, public interest, and race. Panelists issued a harsh critique of the current child welfare system, and ultimately called for its abolition. The symposium was named in honor of a recent Elie Hirschfeld donation, which also established a fellowship at the NYU Law Family Defense Clinic.

The current child welfare system is based on a view of poverty as an ethical shortcoming, said Khiara Bridges, associate dean for Equity, Justice, and Engagement at Boston University School of Law and author of Reproducing Race. She asserted that the system fails to acknowledge the systemic structures of poverty that impact black and brown communities. “The moral construction of poverty is the idea that people are poor because something is wrong with them,” said Bridges. This perspective creates a child welfare system focused on addressing what it sees as moral failings through chaotic and emotionally tumultuous family separations, Bridges said. The result can impact entire communities, which are overwhelmingly poor and black.

State welfare agencies and social workers have also begun to use predictive analytics — which are based on large data sets of past offenders — to determine the likelihood that a person will commit certain crimes, including child abuse. The results of these analytics determine which referrals require investigation. But the data sets, Roberts says, are drawn from deeply racist data, and current structural inequality and human biases are built into these predictions.

“You can’t explain mass incarceration, the explosion of foster care, and the abolition of welfare without seeing how racism fueled all of these and how they have led to these disproportionate numbers of black people in the system,” Roberts said.

NYU Law’s Peggy Cooper Davis called for legislation that more definitively protects constitutional human rights. In order to change the way that black and brown children and families are treated in the child welfare system. “There is no explicit [constitutional] right of political representation, or education, or public accommodation, or bodily integrity, or family, or personal integrity,” she noted. “There is no explicit right of equal protection.” The 14th Amendment, which was supposed to ensure equality for minority groups, is too vague and fails to be implemented in state-level institutions such as the child welfare system.

The first step, panelists agreed, was not reform, but abolishing the current system.