Session: Examining the Role of Surveillance and Discrimination within Child Welfare Contexts (Society for Social Work and Research 28th Annual Conference - Recentering & Democratizing Knowledge: The Next 30 Years of Social Work Science)

In light of conversations around abolishing or reforming child protective services, it is important to understand the different contexts in which these discussions take place at the policy, practice, and community levels. Oftentimes these conversations focus on a main effects approach to racial disproportionality and overrepresentation focusing either on racism and discrimination or poverty and socioeconomic disadvantage. This symposium seeks to examine the different contexts in which these discussions take place and use an intersectional approach when applicable in understanding the potentially detrimental aspects that surveillance, discrimination, and racism may play in the lives of marginalized families, youth, and children in contact with the child welfare system and other allied systems.

Historically, those in the helping professions and social workers in particular, resisted playing a role in the State surveillance of clients facilitated by mandated reporting. A series of policies were passed in the 1960s and 1970s that compelled helping professionals to engage in mandated reporting against their will. After these policies were passed, evidence suggests that surveillance often took place along racialized, gendered, and class-based lines often disproportionately impacting Black women, children, and families. In the present day, having contact with the child welfare system often increases the likelihood of contact with the juvenile justice system and also creates contexts where youth with marginalized identities feel disconnected within their communities. This symposium examines the historical context of surveillance and discrimination as well as perceptions of child welfare and juvenile justice professionals and youth related to the negative developmental outcomes that families and children within the system may experience related to the oppressive nature of the child welfare system.

The first paper examines the role that the first federal child welfare policy, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) of 1974 played in expanding the role of social control among helping professionals, ultimately turning them into agents of the State with the implementation of mandated reporting policies. The second study also examines CAPTA and examines how the coded language within historical policy documents ultimately aided in the criminalization of parents using racialized, gendered, and class-based dimensions of criminality, ultimately precipitating the later overrepresentation of Black women, children and families within the child welfare system. The third paper examines the perceptions and beliefs of child welfare and juvenile justice professionals on the systemic factors and racial bias impacting Black crossover youth within congregate care settings. The fourth paper examines how after contact with the system, adolescents in foster care with marginalized identities often struggle and experience a lack of community within perceived oppressive contexts. Together these papers explore the potential detrimental aspects that surveillance, discrimination, and racism may play in the lives of marginalized families, youth, and children in contact with the child welfare system and other allied systems.