Poverty, Child Protection, and Social Harms: A Critical Interpretive Synthesis of Qualitative Literature

Background and Purpose: A social harm framework aspires to conceptualize how harms experienced by individuals are not typically a direct result of their behaviours or choices, but rather a consequence of how societies are organised. The use of a social harm lens to examine and analyse the unintended but preventable consequences of state intervention to protect children has become prevalent in child protection studies. This study aims to add to the evolving body of knowledge in this area by exploring the distinct harms inflicted on children and families living in poverty who become involved with the child protection system. While recent reviews on the relationship between poverty and child abuse and neglect provide overviews of the available qualitative literature, they do not focus on unpacking the intersection of poverty and involvement with children’s services through a specific theorical framework. Hence, the following question was used to interrogate the literature:

How, if at all, does the qualitative literature on the intersection of poverty and child maltreatment portray the social harms of involvement with child protection systems (CPS) for families and children living in poverty?

Methods: To address our research question, we conducted a critical interpretive synthesis of qualitative literature. The review focused on literature published in English from 2015 to 2022. A systematic search across a range of electronic databases, grey literature websites, and peer-reviewed journals identified 8,418 unduplicated citations. Eligible studies employed qualitative methodology and explored adverse outcomes experienced by parents and children under the age of 18 living in poverty and involved with child protection systems. In total, 23 studies were found relevant for the synthesis.

Results: The literature reviewed in this study indicates that the outcomes of the interaction between the experience of poverty and involvement with child protection systems do not merely reflect the sum of the harms inflicted by each of these. Rather, the evidence suggests that the intersection of poverty and child protection systems, policies, and practices exacerbates social harms, making recovery more difficult and creating distinct injustices.

A synthesis of these articles revealed three kinds of adverse effects of the intersection of poverty and child protection interventions: making things worse by reinforcing social exclusion and isolation, deepening poverty and its harms, and increasing the risk of coercive interventions. A fourth effect, mixing help with harm, pointed to a blend of harms and benefits when services were aimed at expanding financial resources.

Conclusions and Implications: By describing the mechanisms through which the interaction of poverty with state responses amplifies disadvantage and harm, the study contributes to the theoretical understanding of the relationship between poverty and child protection interventions. We explore how the social harms revealed in the synthesis are linked to current neoliberal ideologies and policies and discuss the possibility of developing policies and practices that aim to counter these harms.