“It Was Not Ice to Break, It Was Icebergs to Break:" Fear Management in Child Protection Work with Immigrant Families

Background and Purpose: Child protection work involves a caseworker-led process of 'engagement' with families - and the inherent management of fear related to the potential for removal of children. When this work involves immigrant families, the engagement process has the potential to exponentiate and impact case outcomes. Fear may be an especially potent element due to current immigration policy in the United States regarding the deportation of undocumented or documented non-citizen immigrants. This qualitative study sought to explore child protection caseworkers views on the nature of practice with immigrant families.

Methods: Lipsky's (1980) work on street-level bureaucracy framed our research as it theorizes the functions and nature of the interactions between street-level bureaucrats (e.g. child protection caseworkers) and clients (e.g. immigrant children and families). Lipsky contends that these bureaucrats “construct clients” in the course of their work-related tasks. Informed by Lipsky's framework, this study builds on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 20 child protection workers in the northeastern United States in 2009-2010, we engaged in a three-step data analysis process involving post-interview debriefings, theme identification, and member-checking processes.

Results: Our data suggest that caseworkers spend a considerable energy managing the combination of immigration and child protection-related fear in work with immigrant families. Caseworkers engage in different strategies to minimize these fears, termed here as fear management. First, caseworkers provide knowledge about CPS and the expected role of clients. This strategy included the tasks of providing system and role orientation, engaging in de-stigmatizing work, positive modeling of CPS and boundary drawing. Second, caseworkers engaged in strategies aimed at learning culture, a process which manifests in the actions of caseworkers formally and informally educating themselves about families' cultures of origin and/or histories - and communicating with families about what they have learned via a feedback loop. Third, caseworkers engaged in brokering concrete services in order to facilitate engagement by acting as agents for their immigrant clients in fulfilling very concrete needs, such as providing a winter coat or liaising with legal services. Fourth, caseworkers engaged in dignity and status work accomplished through communication, where caseworkers recognize parents' strengths and acknowledge their positive role in parenting, often against the odds.

Conclusion and implications: This study contributes to existing scholarship on child protection practice with immigrant families at both theoretical and practical levels. At the theoretical level, this study extends Lipsky's work by revealing processes of client socialization that converge and differ from the processes discussed by Lipsky. At the policy level, findings suggest that one branch of the state—immigration regulation—can adversely affect or even cancel out another part of the state—child protection. At the practice level, the notion of ‘fear management' can be a guiding framework for practice with immigrant families. Although further examination of the ways in which fear management strategies identified herein is needed in order to determine whether they may constitute best practices, considered use of these strategies are recommended to help caseworkers to develop an immigration-sensitive ‘lens' while engaging in culturally responsive practice.