Racism and racial disparities in Child Protective Services involvement: How can government respond?

Frank Edwards has written an exceptional essay focused on reconciling critical and quantitative approaches to understanding the role of historic and contemporary racism as drivers of racial disparities in Child Protective Services (CPS) involvement in the United States. Moreover, he proposes an innovative theoretical framework with explicit empirical applications for estimating the magnitude of the effects of racism in producing these disparities. This approach, which we look forward to seeing implemented in future empirical work, holds considerable promise for increasing our understanding of the extent to which racist processes have resulted in and continue to result in Black and Native American/American Indian populations being disproportionately represented in CPS systems.

We commend Edwards on this endeavor and, on the whole, see no major areas of disagreement between his perspective and ours. We fully agree that historical and contemporary racist processes—that is, the pervasive influence of structural racism in U.S. society, including in its social and governmental institutions and their policies and practices—have ultimately resulted in racial disparities in CPS involvement in the United States, that the magnitude of the effect of racism on these disparities has not been estimated, and that estimating its magnitude will contribute to fully contextualizing the etiology, evolution, and persistence of racial disparities in CPS involvement and informing research, policies, and programs to address them. We also concur with Edwards's assessment that two particularly rigorous quantitative studies (Baron et al., 2024a, 2024b) have found convincing evidence of caseworker bias within CPS, specifically with respect to foster care placement. We underscore, however, that these findings indicate that caseworkers are more likely to leave White children than Black children in homes in which they are at especially high risk of being abused or neglected. This evidence suggests that, to the extent that foster care placement of children who are at greatest risk of maltreatment in their home serves to protect those children from abuse and neglect—to promote their safety—CPS may be better serving (protecting) Black children than White children.

Like that of Edwards, our thinking is “informed by critical race and feminist theories of the welfare state, [which] argue that racial inequalities in CPS exposure are caused by deep structural and institutional processes.” In our view, by limiting the opportunities and resources available to Black and Native American/American Indian populations both throughout our nation's history and in the present, these processes have directly resulted in the social and economic marginalization of these populations. They have also shaped the economic and social contexts in which these populations live, leaving them disproportionately at risk of a wide range of environmental- and individual-level factors, including ongoing exposure to racism, discrimination, and associated “toxic stress,” which have been strongly linked to both child maltreatment and CPS involvement.

Rather than diverging in our assessments of the root causes of racial disparities in CPS involvement, the primary divergence between Edwards's essay and ours lies in our respective core foci. Edwards's essay focuses specifically on how to better understand and estimate the role of historical and contemporary racism in driving contemporary racial disparities in CPS involvement. Our essay focuses on leveraging the best existing evidence to understand the extent to which racial disparities in CPS involvement may be driven by racial disparities in real-time decision-making on the part of both potential reporters to CPS and CPS agencies and caseworkers, within the context of historical and contemporary racism, with the aim of drawing implications from this evidence to inform government actions to reduce child maltreatment, CPS involvement, and racial disparities therein. As such, we view Edwards's essay as particularly useful for guiding future policy-relevant research, but less so for informing current real-world government actions. In contrast, our view may be less useful for guiding research and more so for informing pragmatic government responses to racial disparities in CPS involvement in today's context, taking into account the relevant legal, regulatory, policy, and system constraints that guide CPS's mandate and activities. That is, we predominantly focus on the contemporary role of CPS itself and of individuals making CPS reports. Edwards does not directly address how these individuals and agencies should take historical and contemporary racism into account when making decisions in the context of a specific child's and family's presenting situation, nor how doing so may interface with CPS's primary mandate to respond to current allegations of child abuse and neglect and to act accordingly to protect and promote child safety, regardless of the underlying societal causes thereof.

Our review of the existing evidence indicates that the structure of U.S. society, including persistent racism, has resulted in both greater risk of maltreatment itself and of CPS involvement among Black populations than White populations (our essay does not directly consider Native American/American Indian populations). We further conclude that this difference in risk is a larger determinant of racial disparities in CPS involvement than are differential actions toward families of different races by potential reporters, CPS caseworkers, and CPS agencies. That is, in our assessment, the influence of societal racism on the contexts and behaviors that disproportionately result in CPS involvement among marginalized populations is a much larger driver of racial disparities in CPS involvement than are differences by race in agency and individual processes at the time at which reporting and case decisions are made. As such, these decisions largely reflect the proximate information pertaining to imminent risk to child safety that is available at the point in time at which such decisions are made. In short, whereas explicitly racially biased decision-making may not be absent from reporting and case decisions, the best available evidence suggests that greater risk of maltreatment (resulting from historic and contemporary racism) among Black families at the point at which reporting and case decisions are made—rather than explicitly racialized reporting and case decision-making at that time—constitutes the primary proximal mechanism linking racism to contemporary disparities in CPS involvement.

It is crucial to recognize that CPS systems operate in an untenable context: They are heavily criticized for failing to protect children who are subsequently abused, neglected, or killed at the same time that they are heavily criticized for being too willing to intervene with families—particularly Black and Native American/American Indian families—and to remove children—particularly Black and Native American/American Indian children—from their homes. Moreover, while CPS is frequently condemned for causing racial disparities among the families that are brought to its attention, CPS is not mandated to address the societal factors that lead to child abuse and neglect, but rather to respond to allegations thereof. What, then, can government do to reduce child maltreatment, CPS involvement, and racial disparities therein?

One potential solution is to abolish CPS (see, e.g., Dettlaff et al., 2020). Doing so would certainly eliminate racial disparities in CPS involvement. However, on its own it would do nothing to eliminate likely racial disparities in child safety and children's exposure to structural disparities that create unsafe conditions. Furthermore, even if other systems were put in place or bolstered to better support families and promote child safety (see, e.g., Feely et al., 2020; Waldfogel, 1998), some nontrivial portion of children would undoubtedly experience abuse and neglect, and existing evidence suggests that children from marginalized racial groups would be overrepresented in this portion. As such, we argue that society has a vested interest in retaining a system, though it need not necessarily take the current CPS form, that is charged with responding to allegations of abuse and neglect and intervening with the goal of ensuring child safety.

Alternatively, both CPS's mandate and mandated reporting criteria could be substantially narrowed to target only particularly severe instances of abuse and neglect. Whereas this would certainly lead to lesser overall system involvement, it is unclear whether or how it might affect racial disparities therein. Moreover, it may serve to delay identification of and potential service provision for families in the early stages of challenges or crises until their circumstances have exacerbated to the point that severe maltreatment has occurred, thereby leaving a greater proportion of children—and, potentially, disproportionately children from marginalized racial groups—in circumstances that jeopardize their safety.

A third potential reform is for CPS to adopt race-specific decision-making processes that explicitly entail a higher threshold for intervention with racially marginalized families than with White families. This approach may be effective at reducing racial disparities in system involvement but, again, is unlikely to reduce likely racial disparities in child safety. Moreover, where racial bias in CPS decision making has been found (Baron et al., 2024a, 2024b), the evidence indicates that it reflects under-removal of White children rather than over-removal of Black children at high risk of maltreatment (there is no available evidence that indicates that such patterns also occur at the investigation and substantiation stages of CPS involvement). This suggests that CPS agencies should review and revise their processes and procedures with a focus on ensuring that White children at high risk of abuse and neglect are not overlooked. Yet, whereas better promoting the safety of White children vis-à-vis foster care placement may reduce racial disparities in foster care placement, though not necessarily reduce disparities in reports, investigations, or substantiations, it will not result in lower placement rates for Black children.

We find none of these options particularly compelling with respect to both promoting child safety and reducing racial bias in CPS involvement. Rather, we argue that CPS's overarching mandate remain in place and that, as argued in our initial essay, reforms focus on service reorientation in the ways CPS approaches, engages, and serves children and families such that it functions to promote child safety while simultaneously partnering with families to address—and delivering services that aim to compensate for—the range of economic, social, and individual circumstances (i.e., the effects of racism) that resulted in their becoming system involved. To do so, CPS must be able to provide families high-quality economic, parenting, mental health, substance abuse, domestic violence, and other supports and services that are well-aligned with their needs, appealing (or at least palatable) to them, and that both give them a sense of hope and have a reasonable likelihood of substantially benefitting them.

As we also argue in our initial essay, the larger burden of addressing effects of racism on the current circumstances and structural barriers that lead families to become at risk of child maltreatment and/or to come to the attention of CPS must fall primarily to the larger social welfare policy arena. Here, we encourage a wide range of government agencies, including CPS, in partnership with nongovernmental health and social service providers, to engage in a society-wide social determinants of health–focused, public health approach to preventing and combatting child maltreatment and the conditions and circumstances that determine it. We find the systems synergy approach advocated by Feely and colleagues (2020) to present a compelling schema for moving in this direction. We also encourage the federal government, states, and the philanthropic sector to support the implementation and evaluation of innovative holistic child maltreatment prevention initiatives via large-scale pilot programs that are specifically geared to address factors associated with maltreatment, and targeted at geographic areas, communities, and populations with particularly high rates of CPS involvement.1