Saturday, 15 January 2005 - 8:00 AM

This presentation is part of: Foster Care and Adoption

Race and Child Protective Services: Are African American Children More Likely to be Placed in Out of Home Care?

Purpose: This study examined the effect of race on the decision to remove children from their caregivers and to place them into out of home care following a substantiated allegation of child maltreatment.

Methods: A secondary analysis was conducted using data from the National Study of Protective, Preventive, and Reunification Services Delivered to Children and their Families, 1994 (1997). The final sample consisted of 1387 cases that were selected utilizing a two-stage stratified random sample design covering all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The selected child maltreatment cases came from within public child welfare agencies providing protective, preventive and reunification services to children and their families. The cases represented families who had an open case on March 1, 1993 and all cases that had been opened during the intervening 12 month period ending on March 1, 1994. Logistic regression analyses were employed to determine the effect of the race of a child with a substantiated child maltreatment allegation on placement into out of home care.

Results: African American children more likely to be removed from their caregivers and to be placed in out of home care than were White children even when other factors (e.g. poverty, gender, age, type of child maltreatment) were taken into account. The odds ratios revealed that African American children were 1.4 times more likely than White children to be placed in out of home care. The variable for race was found to be statistically significant at the .05 level when African American children were compared to White children. In addition, the variable for poverty was analyzed and not found to be statistically significant at the .05 level when African American children were compared to White children. The odds ratios of 0.84 revealed that African American children who were placed in out of home care were less likely than were White children to be in poverty.

Implications: This study confirmed race was a predictor for children being placed into out of home care. Furthermore, the variable of race was not confounded by the variable of poverty which was not found to be a predictor of placement into out of home care. In addition, this study highlights once again the overrepresentation of African American children in out of home care. The difference in this study was race was found to be statistically significant at the .05 level when determining who would be placed in out of home care.

Finally, if racism is about outcomes and not intent (Horace Seldon, personal communication, May 3, 2003), then child protective services (CPS) needs to examine closely policies and practices that continue to place a disproportionate number of African American children into out of home care. It is no longer sufficient to blame the ills of society for racism, when it is the CPS worker who removes African American children from their homes. Until child protective services acknowledges the bias that exists within the system, it will not be able to address the underlying causes of those biases.

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