Despite decades of reform efforts in child welfare, justice for too many families remains elusive. We design programs, revise policies, and expand services without offering families a way to stand honorably inside their interactions with the system. What are we missing, and why does justice still feel out of reach for those living closest to its absence?
Civil Rights activist Bob Moses of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party introduced me to organizing as a way to pursue justice as a movement that must be built alongside those most affected by the injustice. In the early 1960’s in Mississippi, that work took place among sharecroppers, their families, their institutions and their culture.
Know this: When hundreds of poor Black people showed up demanding voting justice on the steps of courthouses that had delivered injustice to them for generations, that was not accidental. It was intentional organizing, a ground game built on the frontlines of injustice.
Instead of seeking justice in state legislatures and Congress, Americans from around the country who were committed to voting rights got off buses in Mississippi; they moved into the places and with the people where the injustice was happening. As The Clark Sisters sang, “Sometimes you gotta see it before you see it…”
Where does the organizing need to take place in child welfare? It is well documented that only about 20% of the families investigated for child abuse and neglect are found to have actually abused or neglected their children. That data presents us with a moral dilemma. An injustice is hiding in plain sight, a problem that families experience as the ever-present intrusions by a deeply flawed system. Flawed not because the people working in it or those who make its laws and rules want to inflict harm, and not because the public does not care, but because too many of us are operating from a place of relative privilege. We assume justice is the rule and injustice the exception to the rule. But for the families most likely to be reported to child welfare, injustice is lived and constant; justice is the exception.
As reformers, our proximity to and expectation of justice may be blinding us to how injustice shows up in the lives of others. Unlike those who stepped off buses in Mississippi in the 1960s, we have not stepped far enough away from our own assumptions and proximity to child welfare to experience what families in crisis live every day. We do not fear a knock on the door. We know our rights. We expect fairness and when we do not get it, we know how to fight back. This is not the reality for the families most likely to be pulled into the child welfare system.
Solutions designed by systems charged with uncovering maltreatment may not feel trustworthy to the people most in fear of being accused of maltreatment. Asking for help feels risky — as though it deliberately opens the door to surveillance, judgment and the loss of your children. Instead of engaging, families retreat.
We need a Mississippi moment, one in which our reformers seek out families and communities — not just because we are worried about the safety of their children, but because we are willing to join them inside the noble struggle they are already undertaking for themselves. Like Celie in the movie The Color Purple, in spite of all that has happened to them they are still here. Organizing alongside these families and communities, not programming for them, is the shift we need.
Just as it was in Mississippi, there is already work going on inside communities and families on the ground. We ignore the natural assets and anchors because our reformers cannot see what they do not look for — friends, neighbors, and organizations and institutions. To be standing on your feet in some neighborhoods is to be available to others who are not; everybody either has a “caseload” of relatives and friends and neighbors, or they are part of one themselves.
This reality is missed when we design and deliver programs. Even one of child welfare’s noblest reforms — policies aimed at placing more children with their kin when foster care is deemed necessary — will only work if this natural community infrastructure is there to hold that work. But systems do not often enough ask people in the community to weigh in or offer help. Rather they are asked to either report abuse when they are concerned or to become foster parents when children are removed. These roles feel more helpful to the child welfare system than to the wellbeing of their neighbors and their families.
Reforms that are proximate to families need to be anchored amongst the people and in the places where they live. The beginning of any viable reforms are relational, not transactional. Families need services, but they first need to be asked what brings them joy, what they are already doing for their children, and not just what they lack or need.
In child welfare reform, what we have is a failure of empathy, proximity and trust. We need to stop assuming there is justice, and start organizing around the truth of injustice experienced by families and communities. That is where our reforms need to live.
