Sofia (not her real name) was a teenage mother living with the abusive father of her child. She made a plan with her high school counselor to move into a shelter with her baby far away from the abuse she was experiencing.
On the day she was supposed to leave, the baby’s father didn’t attend school so she was unable to put her plan into action. The school counselor became concerned and contacted child protective services (CPS), reporting that Sofia and her baby were in danger. When investigators responded, Sofia talked about the abuse freely and left the home with them, thinking they were there to help.
Instead, investigators took her to her parents’ overcrowded apartment where they disclosed information shared by Sofia with her parents, without the Spanish interpreter they needed. Before they left, CPS investigators left two indelible messages with Sofia — that she could not have unsupervised contact with her child, and that even when she was unaware of it, they would be watching her.
Despite Sofia’s honesty, her planning for safety and her attempt to leave, CPS opened a case for her ‘failure to protect’ her child. For three years, Sofia fought the finding and ongoing CPS surveillance through the agency and courts. She heard — repeatedly and clearly — that if she stopped resisting her case would close sooner.
Variations on this scenario play out across the country daily. Thirty-five years of advocacy to eliminate CPS policies and practices that burden and blame loving and protective parents like Sofia has yielded too little change. CPS continues to rely on a vast surveillance network of mandated reporters to bring survivors of domestic violence into the system, where their protective strategies are often misinterpreted as neglect. Their lives are constrained by unnecessary services, and too often their children are removed for ‘failure to protect.’ This practice continues despite the obvious harms caused by the system and extensive evidence that a loving parent-child bond is a critical protective factor for healing from trauma.
We all want children to be safe and protected from family violence, but CPS is not the place where that outcome is consistently achieved. CPS has a rigid and limited toolbox when it comes to survivors and their children. Forcing legal strategies such as restraining orders, requiring survivors to become homeless by going into shelters and mandating parenting classes are simply not the answers. It’s past time to rethink what protection means and to end the ineffectual and often negative impacts of CPS on families who experience domestic violence.
While there are exceptions, survivors are too often invisible in the current national dialogue on the future of CPS, both in reform efforts and in alternative community responses to child abuse. Each adult survivor’s needs are different depending on risks that the abuser poses and risks that systems create. Children who are exposed to domestic violence are impacted differently, and yet systems apply the same solutions — no contact, safe shelter and better parenting. It’s time for us to do better and create survivor-driven and community-based responses that actually meet the needs of families outside of the child welfare system.
Two strategies for keeping survivors and their children out of CPS are increasing resources for community responses for families exposed to domestic violence and enhancing universal knowledge on alternatives to reporting.
Take, for example, the teenage mother previously mentioned. Rather than filing a CPS report, what else could the guidance counselor have done to support Sofia and her baby? During the escape planning process, the guidance counselor could have helped Sofia make a plan about where she and her baby could be safer until the shelter bed was available. They might also have asked whether her parents could help, or connect her to a domestic violence advocate for safety planning. Survivors in other circumstances may only need cash assistance, a plane ticket to a sister’s house, crisis support, a car repaired, a legal consultation or a family member to intervene with the abusive partner.
Reforming, rethinking or redesigning CPS is complex but not impossible, and the potential payoffs for children and families are worth the effort. Parents who have survived domestic violence as adults or as children have a lot to add to the discourse, and we should invite them into co-design with open hearts and minds.
New or deeper partnerships are also needed, in particular with DV advocates and families in communities that the data shows are overrepresented in CPS. Domestic violence advocates hear survivors’ stories every day, and communities hold deep wisdom and knowledge about how to support and heal their own.
When we design with survivors and people in local communities, we are no longer treating them as service recipients to fix what they are doing wrong. Instead, we are engaging them and their advocates as thought partners and experts to develop strategies that make sense for domestic violence survivors and their children.
When we center their needs in this way, we honor their strengths, their survival and their problem-solving skills. And real system transformation becomes possible.
