Under-Examined Histories of U. S. Child Welfare: How Institutions and Policies Perpetuate Harm and Reinforce Social Inequality

Social work scholars are increasingly drawing attention to the racist and settler-colonial history of child welfare systems in the U.S. (Dettlaff, 2023). These historical accounts are critical to understanding issues that have perpetually plagued child welfare systems, such as racial/ethnic disproportionality. When social work scholars fail to accurately account for this history, we obscure the profession's complicity with oppressive systems (Harrell, 2022). These incomplete histories work to justify specific narratives, portraying child welfare systems as benevolent, rather than systems of regulation and control. Complete historical accounts are critical to framing current child welfare issues and how they might be addressed by social workers and policy makers today. In this roundtable discussion, presenters will examine four different aspects of child welfare history that have been under-examined by social work scholars. Each presenter has both lived experience working with(in) child welfare as well as experience conducting historical child welfare research. Drawing on secondary historical sources, the first presenter will discuss how U.S. land-acquisition policies are sustained through the child welfare system, contributing to the overrepresentation of Indigenous Children and reflected in the assimilating effects of foster care and adoption. The analysis emphasizes the need for anti-colonial policies and explores the implications of child welfare abolition for Indigenous Communities.Then, the second presenter will explore the history of mother blame in the U.S. child welfare system, with a specific focus on welfare reform in the 1990s and contemporary child welfare policies. Mother blame is especially pervasive in cases involving intimate partner violence, where mothers are considered the principal protector of their children, often despite their own victimization, and are labeled a "bad mother" due to being uncooperative and hostile. The third presenter will discuss the nexus between Colored Orphan Asylums and Orphans Courts as intersecting oppressive systems on Black children and families descended from US chattel slavery. Utilizing archival research, the presenter will demonstrate how these historic institutions perpetuated generational subjugation of Black families that persists in the current child welfare system through family separation, overrepresentation, and cultural erasure. The final presenter will discuss historical intersections between child-saving movements and Christianity in the U.S. They will present an overview of the limited historical social work scholarship discussing Christianity and child-saving, and demonstrate that the existing literature highlights the benevolence of early Christian social workers while obscuring their complicity in social structures of brutality (Tinker, 1993). To conclude, each presenter will speak to how a more complete understanding of child welfare history is critical to making informed policy recommendations and decisions today. Each presenter will discuss implications for policy and practice related to their historical focus area.