Commit to Antiracist Practice
The intersection of racism, domestic violence, and the child welfare system presents a complex web of challenges that disproportionately impact Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) survivors and their children. Although domestic violence is a pervasive issue that knows no boundaries, BIPOC survivors face unique challenges due to historical and structural racism, economic disparities, and overall limited access to culturally appropriate resources that hinder healing. While the child welfare system was designed under the premises of protecting children from harm, it can instead perpetuate it, due to inherent systemic and structural biases that influence decision-making in ways that have profound and long-lasting consequences for domestic violence survivors’ lives. It’s time to reimagine systems rooted in racial inequities that conflate poverty with child neglect, sever cultural ties, and exacerbate trauma and displacement for survivors of domestic violence and their children.
Help Families with Actual Needs
Families navigating domestic violence within the child welfare system require attention to their actual needs. However, interventions often become solely fixated on white centric notions of child safety with case plans that require survivors to jump through hoops to prove their worthiness rather than provide resources that actually address a survivor parent's safety and immediate needs. Survivors face a host of individual, social, and systemic barriers such as fear, shame, distrust of police and courts, and a lack of appropriate, trauma-informed, culturally relevant services. Amplifying these challenges is the notable absence of access to services such as housing, childcare, healthcare and basic food and clothing. Effective interventions would provide resources that meet actual needs rather than inadvertently destabilize families and intensify existing barriers.
Advance Legal/Policy Protections
Lack of legal representation, cultural values codified in discriminatory policies and assessments, undefined methods of recourse, and abstract policies and terms (such as “conservatorship” instead of removal) in systems and across states perpetuate inequity. Survivors need access to legal representation and institutional and public policy advocacy to protect their rights and freedoms. Access to counsel, clear and transparent avenues for grievance and recourse for families, the elimination of the practice of using “safety plans” as signed legal documents to avoid due process, under threat of having children removed, and reevaluation mandatory reporting in ways that account for implicit bias are needed to promote public policy that prevents unnecessary removals and protects survivors.
Nurture Partnerships
Systems should create and engage in authentic partnerships with survivors and communities in investigations, interventions, services, and treatment to children and families who are exposed to or experiencing domestic violence (such as those in the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act Reauthorization Act of 2010 (CAPTA) (42 U.S.C.A. §5106(a). Traditional approaches to “partner” with survivors and culturally specific communities, often amount to little more than a feedback loop or referral network or struggle to foster genuine connections with superficial engagement and unaddressed power imbalances.The path to authentic collaboration requires a radical shift that ultimately paves the way for more equitable and impactful outcomes for all.
Generate Relevant Research
Responses to survivors of domestic violence in the child welfare system should be developed from research that directly pertains to the experiences, strengths, challenges of those most effected. The American Evaluation Association recognizes that evaluations cannot be culture free. Those who engage in evaluation do so from perspectives that reflect their values, their ways of viewing the world, and their culture; it shapes the ways questions are conceptualized and influences what and how data is collected, analyzed, and interpreted. Research has established, for example, that most parenting information is biased and based mostly on studies conducted on children in the U.S. and other western European countries. This bias becomes entrenched in textbooks and continuing education translated into the knowledge and curriculums used widely. This is problematic since less than 3% of study participants that contribute to knowledge of children’s psychological development come from Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East combined, though they contain 85% of the world’s population. Additionally, 80% of this research report their participants come from middle-to-high socio- economic backgrounds. More relevant research will recognize the limits of knowledge production, address the historical misuse of research and challenge historical assumptions regarding “objectivity.”
Eliminate Incentives for Child Removal
The inflexibility of federal child welfare funding is a major contributor to the lack of available services for families. Current funding structures, that spend ten times more on foster care and adoption than on reuniting families, can perpetuate decision-making dictated by financial incentives for states to place children into foster care rather than providing services to keep families intact. For example, the largest source of federal funds for a state’s child welfare services come from Title IVE of the Social Security Act, distributes billions of dollars annually for foster care, adoption, and guardianship. States cannot however be reimbursed for services for children who remain in their homes. Education and advocacy is needed to delink these incentives and reverse policies and practices that limit states ability to design interventions that meet families individual needs.
Commit to Antiracist Practice
The intersection of racism, domestic violence, and the child welfare system presents a complex web of challenges that disproportionately impact Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) survivors and their children. Although domestic violence is a pervasive issue that knows no boundaries, BIPOC survivors face unique challenges due to historical and structural racism, economic disparities, and overall limited access to culturally appropriate resources that hinder healing. While the child welfare system was designed under the premises of protecting children from harm, it can instead perpetuate it, due to inherent systemic and structural biases that influence decision-making in ways that have profound and long-lasting consequences for domestic violence survivors’ lives. It’s time to reimagine systems rooted in racial inequities that conflate poverty with child neglect, sever cultural ties, and exacerbate trauma and displacement for survivors of domestic violence and their children.
Get access now to a sample tool that will help you move from asking if racism is a problem to instead, commit to anti-racist practice that dismantle the structures that perpetuate it.
Sign up to be notified when we launch our full suite of strategies and resources to counter these challenges on November 9th
Help Families with Actual Needs
Families navigating domestic violence within the child welfare system require attention to their actual needs. However, interventions often become solely fixated on white centric notions of child safety with case plans that require survivors to jump through hoops to prove their worthiness rather than provide resources that actually address a survivor parent's safety and immediate needs. Survivors face a host of individual, social, and systemic barriers such as fear, shame, distrust of police and courts, and a lack of appropriate, trauma-informed, culturally relevant services. Amplifying these challenges is the notable absence of access to services such as housing, childcare, healthcare and basic food and clothing. Effective interventions would provide resources that meet actual needs rather than inadvertently destabilize families and intensify existing barriers.
Get access now to a sample tool that will help you identify the critical needs that systems frequently fail to provide to families experiencing domestic violence.
Sign up to be notified when we launch our full suite of strategies and resources to counter these challenges on November 9th
Advance Legal/Policy Protections
Lack of legal representation, cultural values codified in discriminatory policies and assessments, undefined methods of recourse, and abstract policies and terms (such as “conservatorship” instead of removal) in systems and across states perpetuate inequity. Survivors need access to legal representation and institutional and public policy advocacy to protect their rights and freedoms. Access to counsel, clear and transparent avenues for grievance and recourse for families, the elimination of the practice of using “safety plans” as signed legal documents to avoid due process, under threat of having children removed, and reevaluation mandatory reporting in ways that account for implicit bias are needed to promote public policy that prevents unnecessary removals and protects survivors.
Get access now to a sample tool that will help you identify and understand when parents have rights to a lawyer in child welfare cases.
Sign up to be notified when we launch our full suite of strategies and resources to counter these challenges on November 9th
Nurture Partnerships
Systems should create and engage in authentic partnerships with survivors and communities in investigations, interventions, services, and treatment to children and families who are exposed to or experiencing domestic violence (such as those in the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act Reauthorization Act of 2010 (CAPTA) (42 U.S.C.A. §5106(a). Traditional approaches to “partner” with survivors and culturally specific communities, often amount to little more than a feedback loop or referral network or struggle to foster genuine connections with superficial engagement and unaddressed power imbalances.The path to authentic collaboration requires a radical shift that ultimately paves the way for more equitable and impactful outcomes for all.
Generate Relevant Research
Responses to survivors of domestic violence in the child welfare system should be developed from research that directly pertains to the experiences, strengths, challenges of those most effected. The American Evaluation Association recognizes that evaluations cannot be culture free. Those who engage in evaluation do so from perspectives that reflect their values, their ways of viewing the world, and their culture; it shapes the ways questions are conceptualized and influences what and how data is collected, analyzed, and interpreted. Research has established, for example, that most parenting information is biased and based mostly on studies conducted on children in the U.S. and other western European countries. This bias becomes entrenched in textbooks and continuing education translated into the knowledge and curriculums used widely. This is problematic since less than 3% of study participants that contribute to knowledge of children’s psychological development come from Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East combined, though they contain 85% of the world’s population. Additionally, 80% of this research report their participants come from middle-to-high socio- economic backgrounds. More relevant research will recognize the limits of knowledge production, address the historical misuse of research and challenge historical assumptions regarding “objectivity.”
Download a tool that provides relevant research to support improvements in systems and services to better meet the needs of survivors and their children.
Sign up to be notified when we launch our full suite of strategies and resources to counter these challenges on November 9th
Eliminate Incentives for Child Removal
The inflexibility of federal child welfare funding is a major contributor to the lack of available services for families. Current funding structures, that spend ten times more on foster care and adoption than on reuniting families, can perpetuate decision-making dictated by financial incentives for states to place children into foster care rather than providing services to keep families intact. For example, the largest source of federal funds for a state’s child welfare services come from Title IVE of the Social Security Act, distributes billions of dollars annually for foster care, adoption, and guardianship. States cannot however be reimbursed for services for children who remain in their homes. Education and advocacy is needed to delink these incentives and reverse policies and practices that limit states ability to design interventions that meet families individual needs.
Download this tool to learn if the Family First Prevention Services Act helps to eliminate incentives for removal in domestic violence cases.
Sign up to be notified when we launch our full suite of strategies and resources to counter these challenges on November 9th
