Ethno-Racial Identity and Child Welfare Decisions: Using Data from the Ontario Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect

Background and Purpose: Ethno-racial minorities, such as Black and Latin American families, experience disproportionate and disparate representation in the child welfare systems of countries such as the United States, Canada, and Britain. There have been suggestions that diversifying the child welfare workforce to reflect the community it services could help address the overrepresentation ethno-racial minorities experience in the child welfare system. While the sparse child welfare literature has discussed the pros and cons of ethno-racial matching and some of the outcomes of such matching, there is the need for more studies to assess ethno-racial identity in child welfare and the extent to which it may help determine child welfare outcomes. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no Canadian study that has used quantitative data to examine the relationship between caregiver and child welfare worker ethno-racial identity. This study therefore seeks to fill this knowledge gap by using the Ontario Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect to identify whether the workforce has become more diversified and whether worker ethnicity is significantly associated with child welfare decisions.

Methods: Descriptive statistics were used to provide a profile of worker ethno-racial identity over the past two decades. Chi-square tests of independence were used to test whether investigation decisions were associated with worker ethno-racial identity.

Results: The study showed that worker ethno-racial identity changed over time in Ontario. The proportion of White workers has decreased gradually from 90% in 1998 to 76% in 2018, whereas the proportion of workers from Indigenous/FNMI, Black and South Asian backgrounds has increased. In 2018, while across all ethno-racial groups most caregivers had been assigned a White worker, 38% of Indigenous/FNMI caregivers were matched to an Indigenous/FNMI worker, and 21% of Black caregivers were assigned to a Black worker. The study also found that there was not a statistically significant relationship between worker ethno-racial identity and investigation approach or investigation outcome.

Conclusions and Implications: The findings of this study suggest that simply increasing the number of child welfare workers to match families’ ethno-racial background may not be enough to reverse rates of overrepresentation. These families also need more support services designed to meet their needs, changes in investigation procedures, and structural changes that address income, housing and educational discrimination. More research is also needed to explore the extent to which matching child welfare workers with clients from their ethno-racial background helps reduce overrepresentation.