Article

Getting Eyes in the Home: Child Protective Services Investigations and State Surveillance of Family Life

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Abstract

Each year, U.S. child protection authorities investigate millions of families, disproportionately poor families and families of color. These investigations involve multiple home visits to collect information across numerous personal domains. How does the state gain such widespread entrée into the intimate, domestic lives of marginalized families? Predominant theories of surveillance offer little insight into this process and its implications. Analyzing observations of child maltreatment investigations in Connecticut and interviews with professionals reporting maltreatment, state investigators, and investigated mothers, this article argues that coupling assistance with coercive authority—a hallmark of contemporary poverty governance—generates an expansive surveillance of U.S. families by attracting referrals from adjacent systems. Educational, medical, and other professionals invite investigations of families far beyond those ultimately deemed maltreating, with the hope that child protection authorities’ dual therapeutic and coercive capacities can rehabilitate families, especially marginalized families. Yet even when investigations close, this arrangement, in which service systems channel families to an entity with coercive power, fosters apprehension among families and thwarts their institutional engagement. These findings demonstrate how, in an era of welfare retrenchment, rehabilitative poverty governance renders marginalized populations hyper-visible to the state in ways that may reinforce inequality and marginality.

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... Less than two percent of all children in Hawaii were reported to CPS in 2019, compared to almost 17 percent in Vermont. The number of investigations into these reports is often used as a proxy for the scope of child maltreatment in the child welfare literature (Fong, 2020) which is misleading given that being reported and investigated does not inherently mean that child abuse occurred. In fact, CPS screened out over two million reports in 2019, 21.7% increase from 2015 (USDHHS, 2021). ...
... Others may report hoping to get families access to services they believe they need, with the added benefit of state enforcement and surveillance. Fong (2020) argues that CPS investigations are not a result of "professionals sounding the alarm about children in imminent danger, but from constrained street-level bureaucrats hoping to rehabilitate families in need by shuttling them to a multifaceted surveilling agency" (p. 622). ...
... 622). When focused on the moral and obligatory duty to report, mandatory reporters too often miss or ignore the potential consequences of mandatory reporting, including deportation (Bergen & Abji, 2019), parental incarceration (Jensen et al., 2005;Matthew et al., 2019), trauma, and an increased likelihood of future investigations (Fong, 2020). ...
... Further, in our experiences in teaching a doctoral-level ethics course, we have found that trainees frequently report being advised against verifying their own suspicions, letting Child Protective Services (CPS) handle investigations. This general guidance to refrain from investigating neglects to consider that systemic racism and biases can have grave consequences for marginalized families (Beniwal, 2017;Cénat et al., 2021;Child Welfare Information Gateway [CWIG], 2021;Dettlaff et al., 2020;Fong, 2020;Legha & Gordon-Achebe, 2022). We acknowledge that investigating has legal implications, as it could compromise the integrity of the investigation and lead to conflicts of interest. ...
... The original purpose of the welfare system, designed to support White families, has shifted over time to punitive investigations that criminalize parents, limiting opportunities for alternative approaches to child abuse prevention and intervention (Fong, 2020;Legha & Gordon-Achebe, 2022). Making unnecessary, ill-informed reports creates backlogs in the system, impeding its efficiency in serving families who need intervention and often devastating those families who do not. ...
... In addition to cultural considerations, the client's identities must be considered to determine how likely they are to receive just and fair treatment by CPS and the judicial system. Families living below the poverty line and families of color are more likely to receive unequal treatment and are more likely to remain under continued scrutiny once in the system (Dettlaff et al., 2020;Fong, 2020;Legha & Gordon-Achebe, 2022), so careful attention to these factors is important. ...
Article
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Mandatory reporting, a cornerstone of child protection, is intended to safeguard the welfare of children; however, the existing framework often fails to adequately consider the diverse needs and circumstances of marginalized families. This article highlights the need for greater attention related to reporting cases of suspected child maltreatment and advocates for a paradigm shift in training psychologists, highlighting diversity and multicultural competence as integral components. Drawing on a comprehensive review of literature, we shine a critical light on systemic failures of the child welfare system for marginalized families, including families of color and those living in poverty. When contemplating reporting, we urge trainees to consider how reporting bias might influence accurate reporting and highlight the importance of distinguishing between poverty and neglect. Through the application of a case example, we provide a nuanced discussion of an ethical decision-making process grounded in research that considers psychologists’ legal and ethical responsibilities with particular attention to diversity variables. We conclude the article by providing teaching and training recommendations pursuant to the ethical and legal ramifications of mandatory reporting. The recommendations embrace ethical principles and prioritize diversity in mandatory reporting practices for a more just and equitable approach to child protection.
... Kinship foster caregiving for youth can also improve well-being and behavioral and mental health outcomes and increase the likelihood of permanency and/or reunification (Kelly et al., 2021;Rubin et al., 2008;Sakai et al., 2011;Testa, 2001;Winokur et al., 2018;Xu & Bright, 2018). It can reduce kinship foster caregiver and youth stress; facilitate frequent, quality parent-child interaction and contact; ease the transition from the parental household to a different yet familial context and culture (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2012;Austin, 2020;Charest-Belzile et al., 2020;Epstein, 2017;Fong, 2020;Grogan-Kaylor, 2000;Horwitz & Marshall, 2015;O'Brien, 2012); and increase children's feelings of connection (Hassall et al., 2021). Given that researchers have also linked kinship foster caregiving's positive outcomes to the functioning of healthy families, it is important to focus on caregiver and positive youth development rather than only related deficits for youth and caregivers (Blair et al., 2009;Kelly et al., 2021;Richardson & Gleeson, 2012;Testa, 2001). ...
... This lack of support can unintentionally increase the risks to the children involved; for instance, caregivers may permit children to have unsupervised visits with their biological parents who are coping with domestic violence, substance abuse, or mental health concerns (Geen, 2004;Rubin et al., 2008). Kinship foster caregivers are less apt to qualify for the resources and support that foster parents receive (Callahan et al., 2004;Fong, 2020;Rubin et al., 2008;Sakai et al., 2011;Sands et al., 2009;Scannapieco & Hegar, 2002) or use available services (Coleman & Wu, 2016). All of these factors can put children at risk. ...
... Kinship foster caregiving arrangements provide youth with nurturance and connection to a broader network of extended family support (Testa & Kelly, 2020). Though kinship foster caregivers often observed gains in their family member's development and happiness, well-documented caregiving demands were palpable (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2012; Austin, 2020;Epstein, 2017;Fong, 2020;Grogan-Kaylor, 2000;Kelly et al., 2021;O'Brien, 2012;Rubin et al., 2008;Sakai et al., 2011;Testa, 2001;Winokur et al., 2018;Xu & Bright, 2018). Kinship foster caregivers often coped with physical and emotional demands, difficulties securing additional resources, and the challenges of balancing competing demands at home and work. ...
Article
Kinship foster care has increasingly become the first line of support in child removal cases. Case managers, kinship foster caregivers, and foster parents have perspectives that can inform and enhance services for families and children. The authors investigated the lived experiences of 18 families by conducting 38 qualitative interviews with 20 case managers, 10 kinship foster caregivers, and 8 foster parents. These participants reflected on five themes: starting points for placement, perceptions of and motivations for kinship foster caregiving (e.g., placement considerations, risks in kinship foster caregiving arrangements), informational support (e.g., opportunities, hurdles), barriers and challenges related to support (e.g., financial and instrumental support, child care, respite care), and access to improved social and professional support. The authors describe study limitations, implications for practice, and conclusions.
... Some argue that reports to child protective services and subsequent investigations often are unwarranted intrusions on family life (Hutchinson, 1993) that place parental rights at risk (Cecka, 2014). As a result, caregivers may experience anxiety and fear of having their child(ren) removed (Schreiber et al., 2013), which can impact whether and how they seek help (Fong, 2020;Melton, 2005;Rise PAR Team, 2021). ...
... However, these consequences have led to several problematic issues in implementation. While mandated reporting policies can be an important strategy to identify abuse that occurs in private and would not be identified otherwise, these policies have also normalised the surveillance of families and have created a pathway for the unwarranted intrusion into family privacy (Fong, 2019(Fong, , 2020). Reporting families for child abuse and neglect concerns that do not exist due to helping professionals' fear of liability is a prime example of such an unwarranted intrusion. ...
... Reporting families for child abuse and neglect concerns that do not exist due to helping professionals' fear of liability is a prime example of such an unwarranted intrusion. Further, mandated reporting is also at times weaponised by mandated reporters to coerce families into reporting events that may later be used against them (Fong, 2020). This demonstrates that the impact of mandated reporting extends beyond its initial intended purpose of detecting child abuse cases. ...
Article
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It is widely known that those in the helping professions are mandated to report suspected incidences of child maltreatment. However, few are aware of the historical resistance to mandated reporting that helping professionals demonstrated before the passing of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) of 1974 and the associated federal mandates that compelled helping professionals to engage in mandated reporting, oftentimes against their will. By analysing historical policy documents through a grounded theory approach, the authors identified three themes that describe the rationale for the passage of CAPTA: (1) identifying national evidence of child abuse; (2) resistance to intrusion of the helping professional-client relationship; and (3) the necessity of immunity waivers for those who reported instances of child abuse and misdemeanor punishment for those who failed to report such instances. In light of conversations around abolishing or reforming child protective services, it is important to understand how the first federal child protective services policy in the United States originated and how these regulations embedded social control into the foundation of the helping professional-client relationship, thus turning helping professionals into unwilling agents of the state. Implications of mandated reporting, including introducing a penal aspect to the helping professional-client relationship, are also explored.
... Intervention with Oranga Tamariki-involved parents occurs in a unique context, in which others have identified parents' need for help rather than them requesting this support themselves. Although services may not be mandated, parents can feel obligated to appear to engage with services they may not really want, to avoid the risk of losing custody of their children (Fong 2020;. ...
... But I guess there is that question around how much is something consensual when this information is going to be used in a family group conference to shape decisions on your care of your children -Angie Despite all the stated honesty and collaboration, practitioners were well aware of being perceived by parents as having a monitoring role for Oranga Tamariki -inadvertently becoming part of the government's surveillance (Fong 2020). For those working with Māori families, this discomfort in complicity is deepened by the history of colonisation and inequity (Gerlach et al. 2017). ...
Article
There is an urgent need to locate effective interventions for parents involved with child protection services (CPS), Oranga Tamariki in Aotearoa New Zealand. This article describes a qualitative research study that sought to understand: (1) the nature of service provision to families; (2) workers’ perceptions of challenges and effective treatment components in delivering intervention; and (3) effective practices for working with Māori. Participants were staff members working within NGOs, providing interventions to families with ongoing Oranga Tamariki involvement. Data comprised responses to semi-structured interviews (n = 9), interpreted using thematic analysis. Findings highlighted that all participants worked within family homes to deliver intervention, and drew on Te Whare Tapa Whā. Challenges included ongoing child maltreatment concerns and participants’ sense of responsibility for keeping children safe whilst being unable to do so adequately within their non-mandated roles. Perceived effective elements were: strong relationships, transparency, and having courageous conversations when needed. For indigenous clients, self-determination and the effects of colonisation were of prime importance. Themes highlighted responsive practice, with a pragmatic understanding that family priorities may not always align with professional views. This is consistent with international findings regarding challenges in delivering parenting interventions and identifies potential essential components for effective practice.
... A growing body of sociological literature has examined various aspects of the child protection system in several states of the USA (e.g. Edwards, 2016;Fong, 2020;Lee, 2016;Reich, 2005). These studies have highlighted how the state seeks to protect children by monitoring parental behaviour and, in the worst cases, taking children away from parents -what some see as 'coercive welfare intervention' (Edwards, 2016, p. 575). ...
... Sociological studies on child protection systems have alerted to the coercive character of the system that results in children being unfairly taken away from their families due to structural factors (housing, unemployment, lack of basic services, etc.) (Edwards, 2016;Fong, 2020). Various studies have shown that child welfare policies target racially disadvantaged and impoverished families, making them more likely to lose their children to institutional care and/or be deprived of their parental rights (Briggs, 2021;Mack, 2021;Polikoff & Spinak, 2021;Roberts, 2002Roberts, , 2022. ...
Thesis
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Research on transnational adoption has paid insufficient attention to the perspectives of actors in countries of origin. This dissertation aims to examine transnational adoption from Bolivia by centralising the perspectives of families of origin, local child welfare and adoption professionals, and Bolivian adoptees. By focusing on their accounts, we gain insight into the prevailing ideologies and social mechanisms that structure the Bolivian child protection and adoption system. Particular attention is paid to the conditions and contexts in which child relinquishment, child removal and searches for relatives take place. This ethnographic study, based on an activist anthropological approach, was conducted mainly in Bolivia and draws on participant observation and in-depth interviews with more than 70 participants. The empirical findings suggest that impoverished and marginalised families who deviate from parenting ideals are more likely to become entangled in the net of the child protection system. In such cases, social investigations may be conducted on these families, which may result in their children being taken away if they do not meet the conditions set by child welfare professionals. However, these professionals are often hampered in their work by a lack of financial and material resources, which limits the conduct of research on family reunification and leads to more child removals. The study also questions the closed nature of the adoption system, which allows loopholes for irregular practices in the system despite the various safeguards and protocols put in place. In addition, the findings also point to the resistance expressed by families of origin and Bolivian adoptees in their search for restoration. The families of origin often long for information about their children, which may lead them to try to obtain information about their children or look for them themselves. In turn, Bolivian adoptees develop their own strategies to connect to their origins by seeking belonging and community. Finally, the dissertation proposes dismantling the oppressive logics and mechanisms of transnational adoption and calls for radically re-imagine new ways of caring for children and their families.
... However, with the growing recognition of the racial inequity within the child welfare system and its adverse effects on communities of color, emergency physicians now must reconsider their approach. [6][7][8] As frontline care clinicians for injured children, emergency physicians should seek to strike a balance between safeguarding children from abuse and shielding families from unnecessary exposure to the child welfare system. ...
... Through a robust body of qualitative and narrative research they highlight how the system disrupts parental authority, hinders children's relationship development, fosters distrust among neighbors, and harms maternal mental health. 7,[20][21] There is little evidence that contact with the child welfare system can improve outcomes for children or families. 22 The role of emergency physicians as mandated reporters and providers of frontline care to injured children makes them de facto gatekeepers to this unequal system. ...
Article
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Child maltreatment remains a concerning source of morbidity and mortality in the United States, where more than 600,000 children are victims of abuse each year, with well-described, long-term consequences for physical and mental health. However, the US child welfare system is characterized by systemic racism and inequity. Black and Native American children are more likely to be evaluated and reported for suspected abuse despite evidence that race does not independently change their risk of being abused. Once reported to child protective services (CPS), these children are more likely to be removed from their homes and less likely to be reunited with their families than White children. Much of the inequity in this system starts at the front door, where a growing body of research demonstrates that bias regularly infiltrates decision-making in the initial clinical evaluation and management of suspected abuse. Minority children presenting to emergency departments (ED) are more likely to receive diagnostic testing and are more likely to be referred to CPS. In this editorial, we argue for the application of an equity lens to child protection in the ED. We discuss how emergency physicians can balance efforts to protect children from abuse with the imperative to protect children and families from the harms of an inequitable child welfare system. Our discussion concludes with concrete recommendations for emergency clinicians to participate in active bias mitigation and thoughtfully navigate their responsibilities as mandated reporters.
... For decades, studies have shown the prevalence of racism and surveillance within the family policing system (Fong 2020;Merritt 2020Merritt , 2021Palusci and Botash 2021;Roberts 2008). Children in Black and Indigenous families are significantly more likely than children of other races to be investigated by the family police (Putnam-Hornstein et al. 2021;Yi et al. 2023). ...
... In the same way, people who experience family policing suffer. Families who experience a family policing investigation, whether substantiated or not, report feelings of fear, stress, and powerlessness (Fong 2020;Merritt 2020). Families who report experiences of racism in their interactions with the family police report feelings of shame, judgment, and disrespect (Merritt 2021). ...
Article
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Since the era of chattel slavery, the state has used institutionalized abuse and violence as a tool for reproductive control. Today, public institutions and social services have been established by the state to police and surveil the behavior of poor communities and parents to maintain the reproductive violence and oppression that began centuries ago. This paper uses a reproductive justice framework to explore how the history of criminalizing pregnancy, surveilling Black and Indigenous communities, and denying reproductive autonomy are connected to and maintained by the present-day family policing system. In doing so, this paper expands on existing literature to create a stronger link and build solidarity between the movements against family policing and reproductive oppression.
... The high frequency of repeated CPS reports raises important questions about the effectiveness of current intervention strategies in addressing the complex underlying needs of families experiencing chronic system involvement. Prior research has identified that some CPS reports are made because families are deemed to need services (Fong, 2020). Multiple reports may suggest that some families require more intensive, sustained, and tailored support to prevent recurrent system involvement (Jonson-Reid et al., 2010;Palmer et al., 2024;White et al., 2015). ...
... Additionally, it is also crucial to recognize the role of racial bias in CPS reporting that can contribute to the higher frequency of reports involving Black mothers compared to their White and Hispanic or Latina counterparts (Roberts, 2014). While acknowledging potential bias, attributing these differences solely to bias may lead to missed opportunities for timely support to families in need Fong, 2020). The higher percentage of CPS reporting among Black mothers likely reflects a complex interplay of factors imperfectly measured in our data, including socioeconomic disadvantages such as higher rates of poverty, unemployment, and inadequate housing, which disproportionately affect Black families and can exacerbate the risk of CPS reporting (Maguire-Jack et al., 2015;Pager & Shepherd, 2008). ...
Article
Child maltreatment can affect multiple children in a family, yet its occurrence and chronicity has been often assessed by focusing on a single child. Although this approach provides valuable insights, considering the experiences of all children in a family may provide a more complete understanding of maltreatment dynamics. Using linked birth and child protection system (CPS) records from California, we analyzed 20 years of data on 194,514 first-time mothers to document the prevalence, timing, and chronicity of maternal CPS reporting across multiple children. Mothers were categorized by the number of live childbirths: one (25.7%), two (36.2%), three (20.9%), and four or more (17.2%). Overall, 33.0% of mothers were reported to CPS, increasing from 18.5% for mothers with one child to 63.1% for those with four or more children. For mothers with two or more children, more than 70% experienced an initial CPS report only after the second child’s birth. Our findings have implications for understanding the dynamics of maternal reports to CPS, emphasizing the need for lasting and family-focused interventions.
... These partnerships bring additional expertise and practical insights that enrich the training programs, providing trainees with a broader understanding of child protection issues and practical strategies to address them. This Vnding aligns with the literature, which empha-sizes the importance of community and professional partnerships in child protection education (Bryan et al., 2020;Fong, 2020;Wilson et al., 2020). ...
... This suggests that partnerships with NGOs and other experts can signiVcantly enhance the effectiveness of child protection education. This Vnding aligns with Wilson et al. (2020), Bryan et al. (2020), andFong (2020), who stress the importance of community and professional partnerships in child protection education. ...
Article
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This study investigates the learning experiences of tutors and trainees regarding child protection education in Uganda’s Early Childhood Development (ECD) teacher training institutions. Using a descriptive cross-sectional survey design, the research involved 125 participants, including 15 tutors and 110 trainees, who were selected through purposive sampling. Data collection methods comprised structured questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and focus group discussions, with analysis employing both thematic and statistical techniques. Key findings reveal significant curriculum content and delivery variations, with practical training components like role-plays and case studies less frequently incorporated than theoretical lectures. Trainees highly valued interactive methods for their practical relevance. Challenges identified include insufficient resources, limited professional development opportunities for tutors, and cultural and societal barriers to effective child protection education. The study underscores the need for a balanced approach integrating theoretical knowledge and practical skills, continuous professional development, and more robust institutional support. Recommendations for future research include expanding the scope and representativeness of samples, employing longitudinal designs to assess long-term impacts, and exploring the integration of practical pedagogical methods. Addressing these gaps is crucial for enhancing the effectiveness of child protection education and ensuring the safety and well-being of children in ECD settings in Uganda.
... Second, segregated, disadvantaged neighborhoods in which Black families are concentrated may receive more surveillance than other neighborhoods due to increased contact between residents and mandatory reporters (Fong, 2020), especially law enforcement (Ousey & Lee, 2008) which accounts for approximately 19% of CPS reports (Kelly et al., 2019). A previous study found that higher arrest rates within counties were associated with a greater number of CPS reports from police (Edwards, 2019). ...
... Although community members highlight unequal surveillance by public institutions and service systems as a concern in disadvantaged neighborhoods (Fong, 2020), we find that Black-White report disparities for voluntary reporters (e.g., reports from relatives, friends, and neighbors) are larger than Black-White report disparities for mandatory reporters (law enforcement and education personnel) in the most segregated counties. These patterns provide some support for the hypothesis that segregation contributes to racial disparities in CPS contact primarily through marginalized and stressful social environments that impact family functioning. ...
Article
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In the U.S., Black children are overrepresented in Child Protective Services (CPS) reports relative to their share of the population. Although a large body of research has described and delineated possible causes of this disparity, the potential role of racial residential segregation is understudied. Racial residential segregation imposes vastly unequal built and social environments on Black children, including higher rates of poverty and crime and fewer amenities. These under-resourced environments may contribute to disproportionate exposure to maltreatment and related social adversity, to differences in CPS reporting decisions by professionals and community members, and to differences in CPS screening and decision-making. Using data on 584 large counties from the 2019 National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS), this exploratory study examines how county-level racial residential segregation is associated with CPS report and substantiation rates for Black and White children and with the Black-White disparity in CPS report and substantiation rates. Measures of county segregation — dissimilarity and isolation indices — were calculated from the American Community Survey and U.S. Census data. We found that the Black-White CPS report disparity ratio was largest in the most segregated counties. Yet, both Black and White CPS report rates were lower in the most segregated counties compared to counties with low to moderate segregation. The law enforcement–initiated CPS report rate for Black children was especially high in moderately segregated counties compared with both high- and low-segregation counties. Segregation was not associated with CPS substantiation disparities. The highest-disparity counties did not have above-average reporting rates for Black children. Together, these findings suggest that community characteristics may contribute differently to the absolute rates of CPS reports for Black children and the extent of the Black-White disparity within these rates. Racial residential segregation is an important consideration for future research, policy, and program development focused on reducing racial disparities in, and levels of, CPS contact.
... We highly recommend taking into account culturally-and gender-specific considerations as they relate to Black youth and their families. Furthermore, while we support increasing economic funding toward preventive services, we argue that it is important that these services focus on family support, rather than the punitive approaches currently found within childprotective services (Fong, 2019(Fong, , 2020. ...
Article
This theoretical reflections paper emphasizes the importance of strengths-based approaches, intersectionality, and culturally responsive trauma-informed care to promote positive developmental outcomes for Black youth and their families in child-protective services and the juvenile justice system. We emphasize the importance of promoting psychological well-being, facilitated by prosocial relationships, to mitigate the impact of trauma and adverse childhood experiences. We highlight the need to apply the framework of intersectionality in practice and policy reform to improve outcomes using culturally and gender-responsive approaches. This study sheds light on the disparities, challenges, and opportunities for intervention among Black youth and their families at-risk of, and currently involved with, child-serving systems. Special consideration is given to the structural issues that uniquely impact the lives of Black youth and their families to transform current practices and policies within child-serving systems.
... In Norway, child welfare workers aim to guide parents in becoming responsible and culturally acceptable, while in the UK, professionals prioritize helping minority families address social challenges. Previous research indicates that both Norway and the United States adopt a coercive approach to parenting, resulting in extensive family surveillance and fear among parents, particularly those from immigrant backgrounds or with low socioeconomic status (Fong, 2020;Vassenden & Vedøy, 2019). While previous studies emphasize the role of child welfare services (CWS) professionals in protecting children, this study focuses on how refugee parents experience surveillance from ECEC professionals. ...
... 3 These challenging interactions can foster mistrust and decrease families' willingness to engage with social service programs. 10 ...
Article
Noah, an 18-month-old infant with trisomy 21, was brought to the emergency department for adenovirus bronchiolitis. He was found to meet criteria for severe malnutrition, and his medical team called Child Protective Services (CPS) with concern for neglect. He remained hospitalized for 1 month while a safe discharge was coordinated by the medical and CPS teams. Through this case, we explore racism as a root cause of discharge delays among children with special health care needs who interact with the child welfare system. Our discussion delves into the origins and consequences of racial disproportionality within the child welfare system. We describe how Black children, including those with special health care needs, are disproportionately involved with the child welfare system and highlight the potential role of the health care system in these inequities. Ultimately, this racial disproportionality in CPS involvement may contribute to a cycle of oppression for Black families, undermining family and child health, well-being, and trust in the health care system. Understanding the role of racism in both the child welfare and health care systems can empower pediatric providers to be agents of change. Noah’s case underscores the potential for pediatric providers to either perpetuate or mitigate racial disparities. We propose actions at the individual, institutional, and structural levels, emphasizing the importance of equitable family-centered care practices and trauma-informed care, establishing protocols for the management of potential abuse or neglect, and advocating for policies that reduce racial disparities in child welfare referral, support families, and prevent abuse and neglect.
... Much research has documented how institutional rules and norms classify and exclude marginalized groups (Lipsky 1980;Watkins-Hayes 2009;Soss et al. 2011;Headworth 2021). Implementing rules involves the movement, displacement, containment, and surveillance of people-from street corners (Stuart 2016;Herring 2019) and homes (Fong 2020) to medical institutions (Lara-Millán 2021), prisons (Wacquant 2009), and back into their communities (Eife and Kirk 2021). Recent work has theorized these practical and spatial components of poverty governance, with attention to the ways bureaucrats enact rules and use their legitimated discretion within a broader bureaucratic field. ...
Article
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This article theorizes how space shapes access to state institutions, and with what consequences. Drawing on 125 interviews and over 400 hours of ethnographic observations concerning two criminal courthouses within the same county, we identify four spatial features that differentially shape access while working alongside institutional rules and norms: functional distance, neighborhood social life, exterior built forms, and interior built forms. When they constrain access, these features constitute spatial burdens, which contribute to distinct institutional and collateral costs concentrated among marginalized groups. We theorize how these costs likely reproduce systemic patterns of inequality by extending people’s burdensome interactions with the state institution they seek to access and compelling them to interact with other state institutions that further the state’s power over their lives. The theory of spatial burdens has implications for the study of poverty governance and institutional inequality.
... This inherently creates issues that stem from how indicators of concern are defined, particularly when they are built from disciplinary modes of power that fail to recognise non-white, non-Western, lower-class experiences as part of the acceptable norm. What results is a system with features of racial disproportionality and surveillance bias that continue to reinscribe precarity upon those that the system purports to support (Feely and Bosk 2021;Fong 2020;Purtell et al. 2021). When considering how this impacts recordkeeping, Hoyle et al. (2019) raise concerns about the fixity of information that gets recorded by these systems, noting "The 'paper self' created by a file may have serious impact on how people are subsequently treated and understood by others" (p. ...
Article
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Just as archival scholarship has increasingly engaged in conversations around care and holistic considerations of the agency of records subjects, the child welfare systems of the modern Western world have been moving towards conversations that aim to centre and celebrate the voice of the child in new and important ways. However, too often are these conversations held back by the enormity of the issue and the overhaul that would have to take place for philosophy to match with practice. In this paper, I suggest that part of the problem is that we have been trying to make these changes philosophy first, placing a new way of thinking on top of an old way of doing—an approach that will never generate change. Leaning in to using speculation to imagine what the new recordkeeping of a caring system might look like, I propose that the act of recordkeeping is the fulcrum that could make caring child welfare a reality and illustrate some of the avenues through which we might pursue instigating the systemic changes needed if we are to see the agency and perspectives of children prioritised in child welfare and protection practices.
... This contrary finding necessitates caution in the interpretation of the current study's findings related to post-reunification caseworker visits. Continued agency involvement following reunification could lead to oversurveillance of families that may result in children needlessly reentering care, particularly for Black children and families living in poverty (Detlaff et al., 2020;Fong, 2020). The relationship between oversurveillance and unnecessary removals is evident in the findings from a study by Greenfield et al. (2023) who found that systemic factors, including greater surveillance by police and social services, increased the risk for children to experience short stays in foster care. ...
Article
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To prevent children from reentering the welfare system, it is crucial to understand the role of caseworker visits after reunification on reentry and identify the factors related to reentry. Utilizing the administrative data of one Mid-Atlantic state, children who reunified with their families between July 2016 and June 2020 were selected as the study sample ( N = 3,510). Reentry rates were higher for children who did not have caseworker visits after reunification than for those who did. The survival analysis revealed that male children, living in metropolitan areas, having a prior history of removal, having a behavioral issue, and court-ordered return increased the risk of reentry, while Black children, older children, having a last placement as trial home visit, and caseworker visits after reunification decreased the risk of reentry. The study suggests formally outlining policies for post-reunification caseworker visits and increasing collaboration between the child welfare system and court system.
Article
The Behind Closed Doors project is a qualitative research study considering sousveillance in mandated social welfare contexts. Sousveillance (the practice of recording people in authority without their consent) and sousveillance social media advocacy (posting sousveillance recordings publicly without consent) are significant phenomena effecting the delivery of contemporary mandated social services (e.g., child protective services; probation and parole; mandatory mental health intervention). Sousveillance video recordings shared online via social media (e.g., YouTube and TikTok) are analysed using multi‐modal discourse analysis; individual interviews with client content creators, frontline social workers, union representatives and professional regulators supported a deeper understanding of the effect of sousveillance on workers, clients and organisations. The significance of sousveillance as a resource for shifting power relations in practice is also considered.
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Existing research on housing and the carceral state demonstrates a divergence in the carceral state's orientation toward property owners and the unhoused. We focus on the liminal arena of rental housing and draw on three cases—landlords’ use of criminal history to screen rental applicants, citizen participation in policing neighborhoods, and crime initiatives that weaponize building code enforcement—to posit a continuum of housing carcerality. We argue that the carceral regulation of rental housing emerges from sources in civil law and policy, illustrating the enduring relevance of what Beckett and Murakawa call the shadow carceral state. Yet, in the rental context, the carceral state tends to have a more covert, decentralized character which does not consistently align with the economic interests of rental property owners and other housing market elites in comparison to its manifestation at the ends of the continuum.
Article
The US criminal punishment system, undergirded by carceral logics that center retributive punishment for all measure of offenses, has extended far beyond the walls of formal institutions of incarceration as a shadow carceral state, including into the institution of the family. Families, particularly those of color and who are low-income, face these carceral logics in systems expected to provide support and services, but that often reinforce and reproduce the criminal punishment system's structural violence and retributive responses. We contribute to the understanding of the carceral state's impact on families by conceptualizing the family policing industrial complex through a synthesis of the carcerality experienced by families in two sites—the immigration system and the child support enforcement system. We conclude by calling for the abolition of this complex, exploring transformative justice-oriented remediations of its harm found in various alternative responses to policing families.
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Arranging safe and secure child care is necessary for parents of dependent children to maintain their participation in the labor force. This article uncovered the extreme version of work–childcare conflict faced by low‐income mothers. The constant, underlying threat of the loss of income and unsafe conditions for children influences child care and work, hindering their ability to move out of poverty even when employed. This qualitative study uses interview and focus group data collected from low‐income mothers in Colorado, Georgia, and Massachusetts from 2009 to 2020 to explore the obstacles as well as the strategies for finding and keeping child care. The data are the mother's voices as they describe their experiences negotiating care arrangements while working or looking for work. Factors that contributed to this extreme version of work–childcare conflict included: difficult conditions at work and mixed experience relying on care from family and friends. Also uncovered were problems affording paid care and utilizing public vouchers, which may undermine assistance programs. Child care from schools, family, and public programs were greatly diminished during the Covid‐19 pandemic, further exacerbating work–childcare conflict for low‐income mothers. Policy implications and the effects of the pandemic on childcare arrangements were also considered.
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In New York City, public housing residents are subject to constant, concentrated electronic surveillance that is beset by inequalities in application and the potential for adverse outcomes. In the literature, there is little insight into either the process by which such systems function or the impacts of this intensified exposure. This article explores, in particular, the role of inference in determining the effectiveness of surveillance. Through an analysis of qualitative data gathered through interviews with public housing residents, this article argues that surveillance, notwithstanding its actual function, is associated with powerful inferences about its functional possibilities. Findings address a source of endogeneity in existing surveillance-related studies, demonstrating how inferences about electronic surveillance notwithstanding their actual surveillant functionality may be related to the use of avoidance practices.
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Building on scholarship on the politics of listening and the listening subject, this article proposes re‐hearing as a listening practice where empowered actors assert that various qualities of personhood are hearable or perceivable in relation to what marginalized persons say, do, or are otherwise associated with. Although there is an expectation that in US courts lay actors can have a hearing and a voice before the law, I identify how practices of re‐hearing shaped how parents and their narratives were heard (or left unheard) in a California child welfare court. My ethnographic research examined the listening and entextualization practices of judges, attorneys, and social workers involved in child welfare case management in California. I found that re‐hearing practices co‐constructed the continued marginalization of lay actors within contexts of state surveillance by attributing suspicion to parents and their silences in ways that exceeded and constructed evidence collected against them. Ultimately, I argue that child welfare courts and professional actors within them collectively comprise a listening institution that normalizes re‐hearing low‐income and racialized parents through frameworks of deficiency and risk.
Article
Museums can provide valuable benefits for children, but children from low socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds are less likely to have exposure to such institutions. We draw on interviews with 52 low‐SES parents to explore how perceptions of museums influence whether parents would consider bringing their children there. Respondents express a clear preference for enriching activities for their children. However, our findings reveal a tension between this general desire and parents' impressions of what museums are and how their children will experience them. We illustrate how limited familiarity with museums produces a circumscribed view of the range of experiences available at different kinds of museums and influences parents' perceptions of their child‐appropriateness, thus demonstrating the role of class‐based cultural knowledge in shaping the choices parents make about out‐of‐school activities. Our findings complicate the binary narrative that attributes parental investments to either preferences or resources and highlights how cultural knowledge about such activities may contribute to social inequality. The study also offers insights for cultural institutions that wish to attract a more socioeconomically diverse base of visitors.
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In the United States (US), children's ‘best interest’ principles are central to child welfare policy, but their incorporation into immigration laws is less robust. Drawing on data from international and domestic policies, interviews with legal professionals and legal guidelines, we compare how Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS) and asylum – the main forms of immigration relief for undocumented youths in the US – align with children's best interest principles. SIJS, while promising, undermines family integrity by imposing rigid child‐rearing standards that may penalize immigrant families. Asylum upholds family integrity, but the application process involves intense interviews and strict evidentiary standards that harm youths’ well‐being. Given asylum's high denial rates, the process often results in trauma without much promise of the permanency asylum can offer. Consequently, both SIJS and asylum fall short of protecting children's rights and best interests. We argue that how legal systems manage youths significantly affects youths’ well‐being and their access to rights and benefits. The impact of legal processes on youths should be paramount to best interest policies and practices. We conclude with policy recommendations for SIJS and asylum that better promote children's best interests.
Article
The present study is one of the largest quasi-experimental studies to date on the effects of home visiting on documented child maltreatment during a child’s first two years of life. In this matched comparison group study, we compare 8796 families that participated in a home visiting program (HV families) to 8796 similar non-participating families (non-HV families) selected from birth records using Coarsened Exact Matching. Using sequential logistic regression, we identify that HV families have significantly higher odds of experiencing a child maltreatment investigation by their child’s second birthday compared to non-HV families; however, among those that were investigated, HV families have significantly lower odds of having their first investigation substantiated for maltreatment. Overall, HV families do not differ significantly from non-HV families in the odds of experiencing a substantiated investigation over 2 years. We share implications for considering surveillance bias, and we highlight the importance of including both substantiated and unsubstantiated investigations when studying the effects of home visiting on documented child maltreatment.
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The United States Constitution guarantees every citizen access to counsel to fundamentally preserve the right to a fair trial. Over two-thirds of criminal defendants lack the resources to secure an attorney and are thereby deemed indigent by the court. The dearth of generalizable data for indigent defendant outcomes leads legal scholars to cite the pragmatic and theoretical mechanisms for evaluating the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of publicly funded defenders. Empirical evidence is restricted by studies conducted in specific jurisdictions and on particular stages within criminal processing. Consequently, a broad understanding of indigent defendants’ outcomes is limited and often disjointed; thus, underscoring the need for a systemic evaluation of the current empirical literature. The goal of the current study was to conduct a meta-analysis on studies of outcomes for people with public defenders, assigned counsel, and retained attorneys to better understand what (if any) discrepancies exist in criminal legal outcomes as a function of indigent defense status. Specifically, this study examined the current empirical literature on pretrial, case, sentencing, and post-case outcomes for indigent defendants compared to defendants with private/retained attorneys and for those with public defenders compared to assigned counsel. Overall, results showed that indigent defendants experience worse outcomes across court processing stages than defendants with retained counsel. Results showed fewer discrepancies between defendants with public defenders and assigned counsel. Findings suggest that the disadvantages indigent defendants experience in criminal legal outcomes are likely an effect of systemic and individual biases rather than a consequence of ineffective counsel.
Article
Due to forces of retrenchment and fiscal austerity in the contemporary U.S. welfare state, the federal government has increasingly delegated the funding of public programs to private entities. How does privatization influence the way marginalized populations experience the social safety net? To develop insights on delegated poverty governance, this study examines a longstanding public-private program—Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs)—which comprise a nationwide network of clinics serving over thirty million predominantly low-income patients in medically underserved areas. I conducted a case study drawing on in-depth interviews with patients and staff in a small-town FQHC in the Rust Belt. Unlike other social welfare programs, I found a pronounced absence of stigma associated with the FQHC, largely due to features of the delegated policy design, the blended institutional setting, and strategic organizational decisions. However, low-income patients were also unaware of their rights to treatment when encountering paternalistic enforcement of overdue billing rules, which resulted in delayed or foregone health care. Due to underlying tensions surrounding commodification, I argue that privatization of the safety net may quell the stigma of government programs among the poor while simultaneously disentitling individuals from their rights of social citizenship.
Article
Objective This study examined parents' accounts of how their extended kin networks shaped and were shaped by the child protective services (CPS) process. Background Arguably the most important recent shift in child welfare policy has been a move away from non‐relative foster care and toward kin placement. Yet increasing family complexity along with network disadvantage may weaken kin support. Method This study draws on 81 in‐depth interviews with a sample of parents with prior involvement with the CPS system in New Jersey. Our sample includes 54 Black, 19 white, and 8 Hispanic parents. We used inductive analysis and iterative, qualitative coding to interpret participants' accounts and classify their networks. Results Parents often indicated that the quality of kin ties helped to steer case outcomes, benefitting parents with supportive and resourced family connections and impairing those isolated from family or embedded in disadvantaged networks. State intervention in the family also affected kin ties, often compromising parents' relationships with relatives. Conclusion The results of this study reveal that child welfare agencies prioritize kin support as a solution to addressing family needs even though the parents who come under the purview of CPS often lack supportive kin networks. This study has implications for understanding the family safety net and the role of kin networks in government processes.
Article
How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect domestic violence? We might expect that the most marginalized victims experienced the most dramatic upticks in violence during the pandemic. However, through life-story interviews, I found that survivors who were enduring abuse, poverty, housing insecurity, and systems involvement pre-COVID did not suffer worse abuse during the pandemic. For multiply marginalized survivors, COVID did not produce more violence directly, but instead worsened the social contexts in which they already experienced violence and related problems, setting them up for future instability. The small group of survivors in this study who did experience COVID as a novel period of violence were likely to be middle-class and better-resourced. To explain these findings, I suggest moving away from a model of crisis as “external stressor.” I offer the concept “clustered vulnerabilities” to explain how—rather than entering in as “shock”—crisis amplifies existing structural problems: social vulnerabilities pile up, becoming denser and more difficult to manage. “Clustered vulnerabilities” better explains crisis in the lives of marginalized people and is useful for analyzing the relationship between chronic disadvantage and crisis across cases.
Article
Researchers have shown how punitive state contact shapes the lives of poor Black individuals but have paid less attention to the role of punitive state contact in the lives of the Black middle-class. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 29 middle-class Black mothers recently investigated by Child Protective Services (CPS)—a punitive state institution with the ability to remove children from their homes—this article asks how Black mothers who are not poor assess risk of future CPS contact and navigate the threats it poses. Armed with greater resources than poor mothers, middle-class Black mothers work to evade future CPS contact through institutional shuffling—a resource-intensive evasion strategy that involves shuffling children out of certain types of institutions and into others. I find that middle-class Black mothers shuffle their children out of formal institutions and into informal ones, out of predominantly white institutions and into predominantly Black ones, and out of institutions where they have weak ties and into institutions where they have strong ties. While shuffling may shield mothers and children from future CPS contact, it may also shrink mothers’ networks, isolate children from a broad array of institutional resources, and inadvertently expose middle-class Black families to greater surveillance and punishment.
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Research documents the ways that policing, incarceration, and deportation influence the health of racialized, poor families in the U.S. However, we lack empirical analysis of the ways that family policing through the child welfare system affects health. In this paper, I review the literature on intersectional harms in carceral institutions to argue that the child welfare system is a social determinant of health. First, I provide a review of the ways carceral institutions target women of color through settler‐colonial logic and the criminalization of race, poverty, and reproduction. Second, I share what is known about carceral effects on health and the mechanisms by which they function: 1. stigma, 2. maternal stressors, and 3. threat. Third, I delve into how these mechanisms manifest within the child welfare system and underscore the importance of examining their adverse health consequences. I conclude with a discussion where I call for more research on the child welfare system as a social determinant of health to understand abolitionist healthcare practices that contribute to dismantling the expanding carceral state. Collectively, these areas of literature illustrate the U.S. child welfare system's role in a broader criminalization process that detrimentally impacts the health of impoverished mothers of color.
Article
To govern, states collect and evaluate information about citizens. This paper examines a social credit system (SCS) in China, a state initiative aimed at governing trust through the quantification of social behavior. Our analysis opens the ‘black box’ of an SCS metric, investigating how trust is translated into numbers and the implications of this translation. We reveal that the SCS is deeply relational and embedded in specific interests, biases, and logics of governance. The system has the potential to reinforce structural injustices and inequalities as it particularly disadvantages rural residents. Meanwhile, it subjects government employees to stricter surveillance, indicating its multifaceted objectives. Our finding uncovers the nuanced ways the system interacts with social stratification in Chinese society and the administrative structure inside the state. We problematize the individualistic, decontextualized, and behavioral assumptions undergirding the metric, and advocate for a critical reassessment of the sociopolitical dimensions of such quantitative governance infrastructures.
Article
In a recent issue of Child Maltreatment (2023 vol. 28 (4)), an editorial by Palusci et al. and a commentary by Briggs et al. were published. These two publications express the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (APSAC) Board’s and the Child Maltreatment editorial team’s stance relative to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice (DEIJ). The current commentary expresses a range of concerns regarding how APSAC and Child Maltreatment plan to advance DEIJ through their editorial policies.
Article
At a time when educational attainment in young adulthood forecasts long-term trajectories of economic mobility, better health, and stable partnership, there is more pressure on mothers to provide labor and support to advance their children’s interests in the K–12 system. As a result, poor health among mothers when children are growing up may interfere with how far they progress educationally. Applying life course theory to the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health to investigate this possibility, we found that young adults were less likely to graduate from college when raised by mothers in poor health, especially when those mothers had a college degree themselves. Young people’s school-related behaviors mediated this longitudinal association. These findings extend the literature on the connection between education and health into an intergenerational process, speaking to a pressing public health issue—rising morbidity among adults in midlife—and the reproduction of inequality within families.
Article
Ethnic minority parents who are fearful of child welfare services (CWS) is an acknowledged social problem, but the existing academic understanding is limited. Interpretations in previous research have tended to highlight people's ‘dispositions’, typically cultural backgrounds, and lack of knowledge, or ‘structures’ like welfare and penal systems. More neglected is how CWS fears can be generated from interactional processes within groups. Building on extensive ethnography with Norwegian Somalis, a marginalized migrant group, we extend the sociological understanding of ethnic minority parents’ CWS fears. Relying on an interactionist theoretical framework, we centre Erving Goffman's interaction ritual (e.g., facework) and stigma, which we combine with Robert Putnam's bonding social capital. From this vantage point, we construct a ‘bottom-up’ theoretical model highlighting transmission of child removal stories in tight-knit social networks. Among Norwegian Somalis, fears emanate from a social process with four interconnected factors: (A) adversities and ‘tribal stigma’; (B) bonding social capital, for coping and self-respect; (C) children as a ‘lifeline’. Together these generate (D) wide diffusion of child removal stories, which perpetuates pervasive CWS fears. This model should productively inform comparative research.
Article
Public discourse has become more polarized, especially when it comes to moral issues. Moral issues related to gender and sexuality—particularly concerning children—are politically fraught. To assess the extent to which ideologies about gender and parenting are polarized, we interviewed eighty-five gender activists from diverse political orientations. Surprisingly, we found some convergence in how activists on the political left and right discussed gender and parenting. Specifically, those on the right endorsed some traditionally progressive ideas, including that girls should be able to play with “boy toys” and to aspire to traditionally male pursuits. Meanwhile, in affirming children’s right to express their gender identity, those on the left treated gender identity as innate, an idea traditionally associated with conservatives, while saying little about sexism. These similarities, notwithstanding, we also found important differences between how these two groups discussed gender socialization. We discuss the implications of these different approaches and how caregivers and other adults can reconcile a commitment to affirming children’s gender identity while also addressing gender inequalities.
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Drawing on in‐depth interviews with 50 Latin American immigrants in Dallas, Texas, this article uncovers systematic distinctions in how immigrants holding different legal statuses perceive the threat of deportation. Undocumented immigrants recognize the precarity of their legal status, but they sometimes feel that their existence off the radar of the US immigration regime promotes their long‐term presence in the country. Meanwhile, documented immigrants perceive stability in their legal status, but they sometimes view their existence on the radar of the US immigration regime as disadvantageous to their long‐term presence in the country. The article offers the concept of system embeddedness—individuals' perceived legibility to institutions that maintain formal records—as a mechanism through which perceived visibility to the US immigration regime entails feelings of risk, and perceived invisibility feelings of safety. In this way, the punitive character of the US immigration regime can overwhelm its integrative functions, chilling immigrants out of opportunities for material and social well‐being through legalization and legal status. More broadly, system embeddedness illuminates how perceived visibility to a record‐keeping body that combines punitive and integrative goals represents a mechanism of legal stratification for subordinated populations—even absent prior punitive experiences with other social control institutions that might otherwise be thought to trigger their system avoidance.
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En el tercer capítulo de su tercera parte, Orwell escribe en 1984: We control matter because we control mind. Reality is inside the skull (Orwell, 1992: 268). Si el escepticismo es la llave de la sociología, ese desatar los andamiajes de la realidad y dejar al desnudo la construcción deliberada de las estructuras relacionales (Bourdieu, 1991), Gary T. Marx, profesor emérito del MIT, lleva toda una vida dedicada a la sociología con mayúsculas.
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Objective To systematically search for research about the effectiveness of mandatory reporting of child maltreatment and to synthesise qualitative research that explores mandated reporters’ (MRs) experiences with reporting. Design As no studies assessing the effectiveness of mandatory reporting were retrieved from our systematic search, we conducted a meta-synthesis of retrieved qualitative research. Searches in Medline (Ovid), Embase, PsycINFO, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Sociological Abstracts, Education Resources Information Center, Criminal Justice Abstracts and Cochrane Library yielded over 6000 citations, which were deduplicated and then screened by two independent reviewers. English-language, primary qualitative studies that investigated MRs’ experiences with reporting of child maltreatment were included. Critical appraisal involved a modified checklist from the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme and qualitative meta-synthesis was used to combine results from the primary studies. Setting All healthcare and social-service settings implicated by mandatory reporting laws were included. Included studies crossed nine high-income countries (USA, Australia, Sweden, Taiwan, Canada, Norway, Finland, Israel and Cyprus) and three middle-income countries (South Africa, Brazil and El Salvador). Participants: The studies represent the views of 1088 MRs. Outcomes Factors that influence MRs’ decision to report and MRs’ views towards and experiences with mandatory reporting of child maltreatment. Results Forty-four articles reporting 42 studies were included. Findings indicate that MRs struggle to identify and respond to less overt forms of child maltreatment. While some articles (14%) described positive experiences MRs had with the reporting process, negative experiences were reported in 73% of articles and included accounts of harm to therapeutic relationships and child death following removal from their family of origin. Conclusions The findings of this meta-synthesis suggest that there are many potentially harmful experiences associated with mandatory reporting and that research on the effectiveness of this process is urgently needed.
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Urban police officers concentrate much attention on individuals who experience various forms of inequality. Some police tactics that address the socially marginal garner public concern, especially when violence occurs. Solutions to such police-community tensions are elusive, in part because police cannot meaningfully reduce inequality. Yet there are better and worse ways to police the impoverished, and we use this article to contrast three general approaches: aggressive patrol, coercive benevolence, and officer-assisted harm reduction. We contrast their operating logics and their implications for police practice and tactics. We find great merit in officer-assisted harm reduction, which is a nascent effort. Pioneered in Seattle, it helps to reorient police culture and practice and enables efforts to address some of the challenges facing many impoverished individuals. Although its widespread adoption will not eliminate police-community tension in poor communities, it is superior to other alternatives, and thus deserves replication.
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This study estimates the associations of income with both (self-reported) child protective services involvement and parenting behaviors that proxy for child abuse and neglect risk among unmarried families. Our primary strategy follows the instrumental variables approach employed by Dahl and Lochner (2012), which leverages variation between states and over time in the generosity of the total state and federal earned income tax credit for which a family is eligible to identify exogenous variation in family income. As a robustness check, we also estimate standard OLS regressions (linear probability models), reduced form OLS regressions, and OLS regressions with the inclusion of a control function (each with and without family-specific fixed effects). Our micro-level data are drawn from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal birth-cohort of relatively disadvantaged urban children who have been followed from birth to age nine. Results suggest that an exogenous increase in income is associated with reductions in behaviorally approximated child neglect and CPS involvement, particularly among low-income single-mother families.
Article
Although Black mothers are disproportionately represented among formerly incarcerated mothers in the United States, existing research has largely neglected to document the challenges they face in resuming their parenting roles after prison or jail. This study addresses this gap using 18 months of participant observations with formerly incarcerated Black women to examine how state surveillance under post-release supervision and child welfare services shapes and constrains formerly incarcerated Black women’s mothering practices. The study develops a typology of three context-specific strategies these women employ to anticipate, react to, and cope with state interventions that threaten their mothering: collective motherwork, hypervigilant motherwork, and crisis motherwork. These findings suggest that contrary to popular constructions of formerly incarcerated Black women as negligent mothers, they navigate multiple, overlapping sources of violence to protect their children. Yet, the labor of navigating the state structures that put their children at risk often placed these women in conflict with the state. This paradox suggests the state criminalizes the maternal labor of formerly incarcerated Black women and that these state logics are used to justify state intervention in Black women’s post-incarceration parenting.
Article
With the expansion of state surveillance and enforcement efforts in recent decades, a growing literature examines how those vulnerable to punitive state contact strategize to evade it. This article draws on in-depth interviews with eighty-three low-income mothers to consider whether and how concerns about Child Protective Services (CPS), a widespread presence in poor communities with the power to remove children from their parents, inform poor mothers’ institutional engagement. Mothers recognized CPS reports as a risk in interactions with healthcare, educational, and social service systems legally mandated to report suspected child abuse or neglect. Departing from findings on responses to policing and immigration enforcement, I find that CPS concerns rarely prompted mothers to avoid systems wholesale. Within their system participation, however, mothers engaged in a selective or constrained visibility, concealing their hardships, home life, and parenting behavior from potential reporters. As reporting systems serve as vital sources of support for disadvantaged families, mothers’ practices of information management, while perhaps protecting them from CPS reports, may preclude opportunities for assistance and reinforce a sense of constraint in families’ institutional interactions.
Article
This essay proposes to view unnecessary child separation as a form of child abuse in itself. In order to end child abuse, we must end unnecessary coercive intervention into the family lives of poor and cultural minority families. This essay reviews the history of mandatory reporting and the creation of a system which encourages reporting, while offering little material assistance to struggling families. Misuse and misunderstanding of mandatory reporting requirements creates an unnecessary burden on families and the child welfare system, and perpetuates cultural and racial disparities. The essay suggests viewing unnecessary reporting as a form of community policing, and suggests that it is necessary to affirmatively act to reduce unnecessary, low quality reports. This will improve the welfare of American children, both by allowing the child welfare system to focus on children at risk of imminent harm, and by preventing the detrimental effects of unnecessary coercive intervention, including the removal of a child from their home and community.
Article
Over the past 30 years, cities across the United States have adopted quality-of-life ordinances aimed at policing social marginality. Scholars have documented zero-tolerance policing and emerging tactics of therapeutic policing in these efforts, but little attention has been paid to 911 calls and forms of third-party policing in governing public space and the poor. Drawing on an analysis of 3.9 million 911 and 311 call records and participant observation alongside police officers, social workers, and homeless men and women residing on the streets of San Francisco, this article elaborates a model of “complaint-oriented policing” to explain additional causes and consequences of policing visible poverty. Situating the police within a broader bureaucratic field of poverty governance, I demonstrate how policing aimed at the poor can be initiated by callers, organizations, and government agencies, and how police officers manage these complaints in collaboration and conflict with health, welfare, and sanitation agencies. Expanding the conception of the criminalization of poverty, which is often centered on incarceration or arrest, the study reveals previously unforeseen consequences of move-along orders, citations, and threats that dispossess the poor of property, create barriers to services and jobs, and increase vulnerability to violence and crime.
Article
Racial inequality persists despite major advances in formal, legal equality. Scholars and policymakers argue that individual biases (both explicit and implicit) combine with subjective organizational decision-making practices to perpetuate racial inequality. The standardization of decision making offers a potential solution, promising to eliminate the subjectivity that biases consequential decisions. We ask, under what conditions may standardization reduce racial inequality? Drawing on research in science studies and law and society, we argue that standardization must be understood as a heterogeneous practice capable of producing very different outcomes depending on the details of the standard and the organizational infrastructure surrounding its use. We compare selection devices—simple quantified tools for making allocation decisions—in undergraduate admissions and child welfare to highlight the complex relationships between race and standardization. Child welfare agencies adopted a colorblind actuarial device that attempted to predict which children were most at risk and then make decisions based on those predictions. In contrast, the University of Michigan’s points system explicitly considered and valued race, with the goal of increasing minority student enrollments in the context of promoting student body diversity. Comparing these cases demonstrates how actuarial standardization practices, including those adopted with the intention of reducing racial inequality, tend to reinforce an unequal status quo by ideologically reconfiguring mutable social structures into immutable individual risk factors. In contrast, nonactuarial practices that explicitly promote racial equality are vulnerable to political challenges as they violate norms of colorblindness and cannot be defended in terms of their predictive validity.
Article
Background: Prior research documents spatial concentration in the incidence of child maltreatment reported to and confirmed by Child Protective Services (CPS), but without estimates of the prevalence of such reports, the extent of CPS contact in different communities is unknown. Objective: To estimate the prevalence of CPS reports during early childhood and substantiated investigations during childhood for children living in different types of neighborhoods. Participants and setting: Children who experienced CPS reports and substantiated investigations in Connecticut. Methods: This study uses synthetic cohort life tables to estimate the cumulative risk of CPS reports before age five and substantiated CPS investigations before age 18, by neighborhood poverty rate and neighborhood racial composition. Results: The analysis reveals substantial stratification in the prevalence of CPS contact by the demographic characteristics of children's residential neighborhoods. For example, while 7% of children in low-poverty neighborhoods (under 10% poor) experience a substantiated CPS investigation at some point during childhood at 2014 and 2015 rates, this risk more than doubles to 17% for their peers in moderate-poverty neighborhoods (10-20% poor) and more than triples to 26% for their peers in high-poverty neighborhoods (over 20% poor). Similar trends emerge when examining CPS reports in early childhood as well as when comparing neighborhoods with different proportions of White residents. Conclusions: CPS reports and substantiated investigations are a widespread and disproportionately experienced life event for children in poor neighborhoods and children in non-White neighborhoods.
Article
Police are responsible for producing about one-fifth of all reports of child abuse and neglect investigated by local child welfare agencies, and low-level interactions with police often result in the initiation of a child welfare investigation. Because police contact is not randomly or equitably distributed across populations, policing has likely spillover consequences on racial inequities in child welfare outcomes. This study shows that police file more reports of child abuse and neglect in counties with high arrest rates, and that policing helps explain high rates of maltreatment investigations of American Indian–Alaska Native children and families. The spatial and social distribution of policing affects which children and families experience unnecessary child protection interventions and which children who are victims of maltreatment go unnoticed.
Article
Punitive and disciplinary forms of governance disproportionately target low-income Black Americans for surveillance and punishment, and research finds far-reaching consequences of such criminalization. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 46 low-income Black mothers of adolescents in urban neighborhoods, this article advances understanding of the long reach of criminalization by examining the intersection of two related areas of inquiry: the criminalization of Black youth and the institutional scrutiny and punitive treatment of Black mothers. Findings demonstrate that poor Black mothers calibrate their parenting strategies not only to fears that their children will be criminalized by mainstream institutions and the police, but also to concerns that they themselves will be criminalized as bad mothers who could lose their parenting rights. We develop the concept of “family criminalization” to explain the intertwining of Black mothers’ and children’s vulnerability to institutional surveillance and punishment. We argue that to fully grasp the causes and consequences of mass incarceration and its disproportionate impact on Black youth and adults, sociologists must be attuned to family dynamics and linkages as important to how criminalization unfolds in the lives of Black Americans.
Article
This study examined the relationship between receipt of child care subsidies and child maltreatment investigations in a sample of low‐income mothers in Illinois. We expected that receiving child care subsidies would have a protective effect on child maltreatment risk and therefore decrease the likelihood of child protective services investigations. Using structural equation modelling, we tested the direct and indirect paths of the receipt of child care subsidies to physical abuse or neglect. We found only direct effects of receiving child care subsidies on both physical abuse and neglect investigations. The findings suggest an important protective role of child care subsidies in the lives of low‐income families.
Article
State-level public assistance agencies completed nearly a million SNAP fraud investigations in fiscal year 2016. These investigations hinge on compiling incriminating information about clients. Drawing on interviews with welfare fraud workers in five U.S. states, this article shows how fraud investigators creatively exploit clients’ social networks to extract such information, and thus use clients’ social ties against them. Investigators gain some information through elective cooperation, when people voluntarily implicate others. Fraud workers say these denunciations typically arise from negative-valence ties (bad blood). Other times, investigators co-opt neutral or positive-valence ties (good will) for enforcement purposes. This co-optation includes eliciting information from unwitting acquaintances and exploiting clients’ own online social networking activity. These findings demonstrate social ties’ appropriability, through which they serve as resources for relational outsiders’ interests. Repurposing welfare clients’ social ties for fraud enforcement presents a two-fold threat to subsistence and social mobility prospects: it imposes punishments—including program disqualifications—while simultaneously damaging social support networks. These enforcement practices reveal appropriability as an unrecognized property of social ties, particularly for socioeconomically marginalized people, and constitute a noteworthy element of contemporary poverty governance.
Chapter
The state is central to social scientific and historical inquiry today, reflecting its importance in domestic and international affairs. States kill, coerce, fight, torture, and incarcerate, yet they also nurture, protect, educate, redistribute, and invest. It is precisely because of the complexity and wide-ranging impacts of states that research on them has proliferated and diversified. Yet, too many scholars inhabit separate academic silos, and theorizing of states has become dispersed and disjointed. This book aims to bridge some of the many gaps between scholarly endeavors, bringing together scholars from a diverse array of disciplines and perspectives who study states and empires. The book offers not only a sample of cutting-edge research that can serve as models and directions for future work, but an original conceptualization and theorization of states, their origins and evolution, and their effects.
Article
The ideology of intensive mothering sets a high bar and is framed against the specter of the “bad” mother. Poor mothers and mothers of color are especially at risk of being labeled bad mothers. Drawing on 138 in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations, this study analyzes the discursive and interpersonal strategies poor mothers use to make sense of and defend their feeding and children's body sizes. Food beliefs and practices reflect and reinforce social inequalities and thus represent an exemplary case in which to examine intensive mothering, its ties to growing inequality, and how individuals are called to account for it. Findings demonstrate intersecting inequalities, meanings, and contradictions in mothers' accounts of meeting intensive mothering expectations around feeding, health, and weight. In light of moral framings around feeding and weight, mothers' experiences of surveillance, and the double binds they encounter in feeding children, mothers practice what the authors term defensive mothering.
Book
Widely praised as an outstanding contribution to social welfare and feminist scholarship, Regulating the Lives of Women (1988, 1996) was one of the first books to apply a race and gender lens to the U.S. welfare state. The first two editions successfully exposed how myths and stereotypes built into welfare state rules and regulations define women as "deserving" or "undeserving" of aid depending on their race, class, gender, and marital status. Based on considerable new research, the preface to this third edition explains the rise of Neoliberal policies in the mid-1970s, the strategies deployed since then to dismantle the welfare state, and the impact of this sea change on women and the welfare state after 1996. Published upon the twentieth anniversary of "welfare reform," Regulating the Lives of Women offers a timely reminder that public policy continues to punish poor women, especially single mothers-of-color for departing from prescribed wife and mother roles. The book will appeal to undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate students of social work, sociology, history, public policy, political science, and women, gender, and black studies - as well as today's researchers and activists.
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After decades of the American "war on drugs" and relentless prison expansion, political officials are finally challenging mass incarceration. Many point to an apparently promising solution to reduce the prison population: addiction treatment. In Addicted to Rehab, Bard College sociologist Allison McKim gives an in-depth and innovative ethnographic account of two such rehab programs for women, one located in the criminal justice system and one located in the private healthcare system-two very different ways of defining and treating addiction. McKim's book shows how addiction rehab reflects the race, class, and gender politics of the punitive turn. As a result, addiction has become a racialized category that has reorganized the link between punishment and welfare provision. While reformers hope that treatment will offer an alternative to punishment and help women, McKim argues that the framework of addiction further stigmatizes criminalized women and undermines our capacity to challenge gendered subordination. Her study ultimately reveals a two-tiered system, bifurcated by race and class.
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This article examines the intersection of two structural developments: the growth of surveillance and the rise of “big data.” Drawing on observations and interviews conducted within the Los Angeles Police Department, I offer an empirical account of how the adoption of big data analytics does—and does not—transform police surveillance practices. I argue that the adoption of big data analytics facilitates amplifications of prior surveillance practices and fundamental transformations in surveillance activities. First, discretionary assessments of risk are supplemented and quantified using risk scores. Second, data are used for predictive, rather than reactive or explanatory, purposes. Third, the proliferation of automatic alert systems makes it possible to systematically surveil an unprecedentedly large number of people. Fourth, the threshold for inclusion in law enforcement databases is lower, now including individuals who have not had direct police contact. Fifth, previously separate data systems are merged, facilitating the spread of surveillance into a wide range of institutions. Based on these findings, I develop a theoretical model of big data surveillance that can be applied to institutional domains beyond the criminal justice system. Finally, I highlight the social consequences of big data surveillance for law and social inequality.
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Influenced by news reports of young children brutalized by their parents, most of us see the role of child services as the prevention of severe physical abuse. But as Tina Lee shows in Catching a Case, most child welfare cases revolve around often ill-founded charges of neglect, and the parents swept into the system are generally struggling but loving, fighting to raise their children in the face of crushing poverty, violent crime, poor housing, lack of childcare, and failing schools. Lee explored the child welfare system in New York City, observing family courts, interviewing parents and following them through the system, asking caseworkers for descriptions of their work and their decision-making processes, and discussing cases with attorneys on all sides. What she discovered about the system is troubling. Lee reveals that, in the face of draconian budget cuts and a political climate that blames the poor for their own poverty, child welfare practices have become punitive, focused on removing children from their families and on parental compliance with rules. Rather than provide needed help for families, case workers often hold parents to standards almost impossible for working-class and poor parents to meet. For instance, parents can be accused of neglect for providing inadequate childcare or housing even when they cannot afford anything better. In many cases, child welfare exacerbates family problems and sometimes drives parents further into poverty while the family court system does little to protect their rights. Catching a Case is a much-needed wake-up call to improve the child welfare system, and to offer more comprehensive social services that will allow all children to thrive.
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This article reimagines poverty governance as a labor process. Extending theories of bureaucratic fields and street-level bureaucracies, the proposed model suggests that the state manages the poor through fragmented activities embedded in horizontal and vertical relations of production. I use an ethnography of 911 ambulance operations in a single California county to advance this perspective. From plugging gunshot wounds to moving sidewalk slumberers, ambulance crews interact with a mostly impoverished clientele base by transforming spaces in bodies and bodies in spaces. This two-sided governance puts the ambulance in recurrent contact with the hospital emergency department and the police squad car. Across these institutions, ambulance crews struggle with their nurse and police counterparts over the horizontal shuffling of burdensome work, shaping the life chances of their subjects in the process. At the same time, bureaucratic and capitalistic forces from above activate a lean ambulance fleet that is minimally wasteful and highly flexible. This verticality structures clientele processing through the ambulance and fuels tensions across the frontlines of governance. In an effort to advance theory and fill an empirical gap, this article proposes a new model for understanding the management of marginality and highlights an overlooked case of poverty regulation.
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It has long been observed that centralized social control requires some level of cooperation from the populace. Without such assistance, control agents are unable to acquire the local knowledge necessary to locate and prosecute deviants. Yet why citizens cooperate with authorities, especially in the most repressive regimes, remains a puzzle. This article develops two models of such cooperation: in the first, authorities actively use incentives to elicit denunciations from the populace, through either coercion or the promise of rewards. In the second, authorities passively gain access to local negative networks, as individuals denounce to harm others whom they dislike and to gain relative to them. Using internal variation in the early years of the Spanish Inquisition (1486 to 1502) and Romanov Russia (1613 to 1649), I demonstrate the differing effects of each model on patterns of denunciations. Paradoxically, social control is most effective when authorities provide individuals maximum freedom to direct its coercive power.
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Given that childhood maltreatment is a significant international public health problem contributing to all major morbidity and mortality determinants, there is need to explore current practices and readiness of health care professionals (HCPs) to assess maltreatment, identify maltreatment risk factors, and complete mandated reporting. HCPs (N = 114) completed a child maltreatment mandated reporting measure to assess level of comfort with mandated reporting, commitment to the reporting role, and confidence in the child protection system to take action as needed. Additional questions explored comfort discussing maltreatment and risk factors for maltreatment in a medical setting and knowledge of community resources. Results indicated that HCPs were committed to their mandated reporting role and did not perceive substantial potential negative consequences of reporting. However, there were concerns regarding lack of confidence in the system’s ability to respond sufficiently to reports. Despite commitment to the reporting role, results showed that large proportions of HCPs do not routinely screen for maltreatment, feel uncomfortable discussing maltreatment history, and lack knowledge about community resources. Additional training efforts must be prioritized in health care systems to improve short- and long-term health outcomes.
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Objectives: To estimate the lifetime prevalence of official investigations for child maltreatment among children in the United States. Methods: We used the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System Child Files (2003-2014) and Census data to develop synthetic cohort life tables to estimate the cumulative prevalence of reported childhood maltreatment. We extend previous work, which explored only confirmed rates of maltreatment, and we add new estimations of maltreatment by subtype, age, and ethnicity. Results: We estimate that 37.4% of all children experience a child protective services investigation by age 18 years. Consistent with previous literature, we found a higher rate for African American children (53.0%) and the lowest rate for Asians/Pacific Islanders (10.2%). Conclusions: Child maltreatment investigations are more common than is generally recognized when viewed across the lifespan. Building on other recent work, our data suggest a critical need for increased preventative and treatment resources in the area of child maltreatment. (Am J Public Health. Published online ahead of print December 20, 2016: e1-e7. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2016.303545).
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Research has consistently demonstrated that children living in low-income families, particularly those in poverty, are at a greater risk of child maltreatment; however, causal evidence for this relationship is sparse. We use child maltreatment reports from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System: Child File from 2004 to 2013 to investigate the relationship between changes in a state's minimum wage and changes in child maltreatment rates. We find that increases in the minimum wage lead to a decline in overall child maltreatment reports, particularly neglect reports. Specifically, a $1 increase in the minimum wage implies a statistically significant 9.6% decline in neglect reports. This decline is concentrated among young children (ages 0–5) and school-aged children (ages 6–12); the effect diminishes among adolescents and is not significant. We do not find that the effect of increases in the minimum wage varies based on the child's race. These findings are robust to a number of specifications. Our results suggest that policies that increase incomes of the working poor can improve children's welfare, especially younger children, quite substantially.
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Research documents a link between poverty and child welfare involvement, but the nature of this relationship is unclear. By providing in-depth accounts of situations leading to child welfare involvement, parents' perspectives can enrich our understanding of why and how poverty matters for child welfare involvement. Based on in-depth interviews with 40 poor parents previously investigated for child maltreatment, I discuss contexts of poverty that provided pathways to child welfare involvement. Poverty created environments of desperation and disadvantage, combined with reliance on supports that reported parents to child welfare agencies. The vast majority of incidents parents described implicated in their involvement parental adversities related to poverty; embeddedness in disadvantaged networks or volatile personal relationships; and/or involvement in, or need for, social services. These findings suggest a research approach that interrogates this complexity and maltreatment prevention policies that broadly strengthen supports for families and communities.
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Research has shown that legal cynicism is pervasive among residents of poor, black neighborhoods. However, controlling for crime rates, these residents call police at higher rates than whites and residents of middle-class neighborhoods, and ethnographic research suggests that mothers in particular sometimes exact social control over partners and children through police notification. Given these findings, how might researchers better understand how legal cynicism and occasional reliance on police fit together? Drawing on interviews with poor African-American mothers in Washington, DC, this article develops an alternative conception of cultural orientations about law: situational trust. This concept emphasizes micro-level dynamism in cultural conceptions of the police, expanding the literature on police trust by emphasizing situational contingency. Mothers deploy at least four alternative strategies that produce moments of trust: officer exceptionalism, domain specificity, therapeutic consequences, and institutional navigation. These strategies shed light on the contextual meanings of safety and legitimacy.
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This study shows that state efforts at child protection are structured by the policy regimes in which they are enmeshed. Using administrative data on child protection, criminal justice, and social welfare interventions, I show that children are separated from their families and placed into foster care far more frequently in states with extensive and punitive criminal justice systems than in states with broad and generous welfare programs. However, large welfare bureaucracies interact with welfare program enrollment to create opportunities for the surveillance of families, suggesting that extensive and administratively complex welfare states engage in “soft” social control through the surveillance and regulation of family behavior. The article further shows that institutionalization, a particularly restrictive form of foster care placement, is least common in states with broad and generous welfare regimes and generally more common under punitive regimes. Taken together, these findings show that policy regimes influence the interaction between families and the state through their proximate effects on family structure and well-being and through institutional effects that delimit the routines and scripts through which policymakers and street-level bureaucrats intervene to protect children.
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Although sometimes family members engage in monitoring as an extension of governmental surveillance, they also monitor each other, other families, and their own borders to preserve norms about what a family should be and what family members should do. Whether it is the seemingly benign surveillance of using baby monitors, the more obviously intrusive use of home drug tests on teenagers, or the way people in public feel free to judge and comment on the family composition of others, monitoring goes on all the time-and even (or maybe especially) when there seems to be no monitoring going on at all.
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Victor Rios grew up in the ghetto of Oakland, California in the 1980s and 90s. A former gang member and juvenile delinquent, Rios managed to escape the bleak outcome of many of his friends and earned a PhD at Berkeley and returned to his hometown to study how inner city young Latino and African American boys develop their sense of self in the midst of crime and intense policing. Punished examines the difficult lives of these young men, who now face punitive policies in their schools, communities, and a world where they are constantly policed and stigmatized. Rios followed a group of forty delinquent Black and Latino boys for three years. These boys found themselves in a vicious cycle, caught in a spiral of punishment and incarceration as they were harassed, profiled, watched, and disciplined at young ages, even before they had committed any crimes, eventually leading many of them to fulfill the destiny expected of them. But beyond a fatalistic account of these marginalized young men, Rios finds that the very system that criminalizes them and limits their opportunities, sparks resistance and a raised consciousness that motivates some to transform their lives and become productive citizens. Ultimately, he argues that by understanding the lives of the young men who are criminalized and pipelined through the criminal justice system, we can begin to develop empathic solutions which support these young men in their development and to eliminate the culture of punishment that has become an overbearing part of their everyday lives.
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Mention the word welfare in a room full of people in the United States and you can expect to see brows furrow and mouths tighten in disgust. Welfare, the colloquial term for some public benefits in the United States, no longer holds its original meaning: well-being. Instead, it has become a pejorative term used to label "welfare mothers" or "welfare queens." And while welfare use has always carried the stigma of poverty, it now also bears the stigma of criminality.
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First published in 1980, Street-Level Bureaucracy received critical acclaim for its insightful study of how public service workers, in effect, function as policy decision makers, as they wield their considerable discretion in the day-to-day implementation of public programs. Three decades later, the need to bolster the availability and effectiveness of healthcare, social services, education, and law enforcement is as urgent as ever. In this thirtieth anniversary expanded edition, Michael Lipsky revisits the territory he mapped out in the first edition to reflect on significant policy developments over the last several decades. Despite the difficulties of managing these front-line workers, he shows how street-level bureaucracies can be and regularly are brought into line with public purposes. Street-level bureaucrats-from teachers and police officers to social workers and legal-aid lawyers-interact directly with the public and so represent the frontlines of government policy. In Street-Level Bureaucracy, Lipsky argues that these relatively low-level public service employees labor under huge caseloads, ambiguous agency goals, and inadequate resources. When combined with substantial discretionary authority and the requirement to interpret policy on a case-by-case basis, the difference between government policy in theory and policy in practice can be substantial and troubling. The core dilemma of street-level bureaucrats is that they are supposed to help people or make decisions about them on the basis of individual cases, yet the structure of their jobs makes this impossible. Instead, they are forced to adopt practices such as rationing resources, screening applicants for qualities their organizations favor, "rubberstamping" applications, and routinizing client interactions by imposing the uniformities of mass processing on situations requiring human responsiveness. Occasionally, such strategies work out in favor of the client. But the cumulative effect of street-level decisions made on the basis of routines and simplifications about clients can reroute the intended direction of policy, undermining citizens' expectations of evenhanded treatment. This seminal, award-winning study tells a cautionary tale of how decisions made by overburdened workers translate into ad-hoc policy adaptations that impact peoples' lives and life opportunities. Lipsky maintains, however, that these problems are not insurmountable. Over the years, public managers have developed ways to bring street-level performance more in line with agency goals. This expanded edition of Street-Level Bureaucracy underscores that, despite its challenging nature, street-level work can be made to conform to higher expectations of public service.
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Disciplining the Poor explains the transformation of poverty governance over the past forty years—why it happened, how it works today, and how it affects people. In the process, it clarifies the central role of race in this transformation and develops a more precise account of how race shapes poverty governance in the post–civil rights era. Connecting welfare reform to other policy developments, the authors analyze diverse forms of data to explicate the racialized origins, operations, and consequences of a new mode of poverty governance that is simultaneously neoliberal—grounded in market principles—and paternalist—focused on telling the poor what is best for them. The study traces the process of rolling out the new regime from the federal level, to the state and county level, down to the differences in ways frontline case workers take disciplinary actions in individual cases. The result is a compelling account of how a neoliberal paternalist regime of poverty governance is disciplining the poor today.
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Offending Women is an eye-opening journey into the lived reality of prison for women in the United States today. Lynne Haney looks at incarcerated mothers, housed together with their children, who are serving terms in alternative, community-based prisons-a type of facility that is becoming increasingly widespread. Incorporating vivid, sometimes shocking observations of daily life, she probes the dynamics of power over women's minds and bodies that play out in two such institutions in California. She finds that these "alternative" prisons, contrary to their aims, often end up disempowering women, transforming their social vulnerabilities into personal pathologies, and pushing them into a state of disentitlement. Uncovering the complex gendered underpinning of methods of control and intervention used in the criminal justice system today, Offending Women links that system to broader discussions on contemporary government and state power, asks why these strategies have arisen at this particular moment in time, and considers what forms of citizenship they have given rise to.
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In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA and its partners had been engaging in warrantless mass surveillance, using the internet and cellphone data, and driven by fear of terrorism under the sign of ’security’. In this compelling account, surveillance expert David Lyon guides the reader through Snowden’s ongoing disclosures: the technological shifts involved, the steady rise of invisible monitoring of innocent citizens, the collusion of government agencies and for-profit companies and the implications for how we conceive of privacy in a democratic society infused by the lure of big data. Lyon discusses the distinct global reactions to Snowden and shows why some basic issues must be faced: how we frame surveillance, and the place of the human in a digital world.
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Current scholarship has explored how the carceral state governs and regulates populations. This literature has focused on prison and on the wide-reaching collateral consequences of a felony conviction. Despite the obvious importance of these findings, they capture only a portion of the criminal justice system’s operations. In most jurisdictions, misdemeanors, not felonies, constitute the bulk of criminal cases, and the number of such arrests is rising. This article explores a puzzling fact about New York City’s pioneering experiment in mass misdemeanor arrests: the preponderance result in no finding of guilt and no assignment of formal punishment. Drawing on two years of fieldwork, this article explores how the criminal justice system functions to regulate significant populations without conviction or sentencing. The author details the operation of penal power through the techniques of marking through criminal justice record keeping, the procedural hassle of case processing, and mandated performance evaluated by court actors to show the social control capacity of the criminal justice system.
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All matters related to ethnography flow from a decision that originates at the very beginning of the research process-the selection of the basic object of analysis-and yet fieldworkers pay scant attention to this crucial task. As a result, most take as their starting point bounded entities delimited by location or social classification and in so doing restrict the kinds of arguments available to them. This article presents the alternative of relational ethnography. Relational ethnography involves studying fields rather than places, boundaries rather than bounded groups, processes rather than processed people, and cultural conflict rather than group culture. While this approach comes with its own set of challenges, it offers an ethnographic method that works with the relational and processual nature of social reality.
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In street-level work discretion is inevitable. Scholars have articulated a dominant view or narrative that addresses the role of discretion in the administrative state. This state-agent narrative acknowledges inevitability of discretion and emphasizes that self-interest guides street-level choices: street-level workers use their discretion to make their work easier, safer, and more rewarding. In addition the dominant narrative describes street-level workers as policy makers, yet it worries about the threat that street-level discretion poses to democratic governance. Street-level workers, themselves, tell a different story, a counternarrative of the worker acting as a citizen agent. These two narratives are not wholly inconsistent but they differ in emphasis and meaning. The description of the street-level counter-narrative is based on extensive fieldwork in two states and five agencies. Rather than discretionary state agents who act in response to rules, procedures, and law, street-level workers describe themselves as citizen agents who act in response to individuals and circumstances. They do not describe what they do as contributing to policy making or even as implementing policy. Moreover, street-level workers do not describe their decisions and actions as based on their views of the correctness of the rules, wisdom of the policy, or accountability to any hierarchical authority or democratic principle. They base their decisions on their judgment of the worth of the individual citizen client. Street-level workers discount the importance of self-interest and will often make their work harder, more unpleasant, more dangerous, and less officially successful in order to respond to the needs of individuals. They describe themselves as decision makers, but they base their decisions on normative choices, not in response to rules, procedures, or policies. These normative choices are defined in terms of relationships to citizens, clients, coworkers, and the system. By substituting their pragmatic judgments for the unrealistic views of those with formal and legitimate authority, street-level workers are, in their view, acting responsibly.
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The degree and scope of criminal justice surveillance increased dramatically in the United States over the past four decades. Recent qualitative research suggests the rise in surveillance may be met with a concomitant increase in efforts to evade it. To date, however, there has been no quantitative empirical test of this theory. In this article, I introduce the concept of "system avoidance," whereby individuals who have had contact with the criminal justice system avoid surveilling institutions that keep formal records. Using data from Add Health (n = 15,170) and the NLSY97 (n = 8,894), I find that individuals who have been stopped by police, arrested, convicted, or incarcerated are less likely to interact with surveilling institutions, including medical, financial, labor market, and educational institutions, than their counterparts who have not had criminal justice contact. By contrast, individuals with criminal justice contact are no less likely to participate in civic or religious institutions. Because criminal justice contact is disproportionately distributed, this study suggests system avoidance is a potential mechanism through which the criminal justice system contributes to social stratification: it severs an already marginalized subpopulation from institutions that are pivotal to desistance from crime and their own integration into broader society.