Understanding Systems, Understanding Families: Child Welfare Caseworkers' Perceptions of Structural Inequality and Attribution to Families

Background: Child Maltreatment has long been linked to experiences of economic hardship and poverty (Berger, 2004). A growing number of jurisdictions have sought to disrupt the relationship between poverty and neglect by providing more concrete economic supports to system-involved families, or changing legislation to exclude poverty from definitions of neglect. Importantly, child welfare caseworkers are predominantly trained in traditional psychosocial and behavior treatment and assessment approaches focused on substance use, mental health, and individual behavior. This is striking because these trainings and tools generally do not focus on the role of poverty or economic risk in child maltreatment, despite the extensive research on their connections. To our knowledge, no research has sought to understand how child welfare caseworkers perceive the role of structural poverty and inequality and how they do or do not apply these frameworks to the families they serve. We investigate how caseworkers understand the role of structural poverty in child welfare and the extent to which they apply this perspective to the families they serve.

Methods: We conduct general thematic analysis with a flexible coding process using data from 9 structured focus group interviews with a total of 64 child welfare caseworkers and supervisors employed by a large child welfare service agency in Illinois. We used inductive analyses to explore worker interpretations of material needs in child welfare.

Results: Results demonstrate three predominant themes. First, caseworkers understand and acknowledge that structural forces influence poverty and the ability to move out of poverty. However, although they identify these forces as significant, there is a disconnect between their acknowledgement of structural forces and their treatment of clients; workers still ascribed individual blame to their clients for their poverty and their child welfare system involvement, citing a range of individual behaviors as the drivers of these experiences. Second, caseworkers routinely applied middle-class norms about saving and spending to their clients and faulted them for spending money on what would otherwise be considered unobjectionable spending. For example, caseworkers repeatedly described mothers getting their nails done as profligate spending. Third, we find durable perceptions of class and individual effort among the caseworkers. Caseworkers generally had lower levels of education, received low pay, and often had their own personal experiences with the child welfare or criminal justice systems. Trained exclusively in social-behavioral models, the caseworkers often explicitly distinguished themselves from their clients; although they had similar backgrounds and experiences, they were “different” and had made the individual effort to overcome structural barriers in their communities.

Discussion: Although economic supports are a promising avenue for child maltreatment prevention and intervention, considerable barriers to implementation exist in the form of caseworker training, assessment tools, and bias. This study highlights that, while caseworkers acknowledge the importance of structural poverty, they are resistant to applying these structures to the lives of their clients. Addressing this disconnect in structural realities and individual attribution of blame in child welfare practice through training could be a key pathway to providing more equitable services to child welfare-impacted families in the future.