A comparison of four countries with histories of settler colonialism has found they all place Native children in foster care at “substantially’’ higher rates than non-Indigenous children.
The study looked at “out-of-home care” placements for Indigenous children in Australia, Denmark, Greenland and the United States between 2010 and 2023. Such data are defined as placements with kinship caregivers, or in foster homes, group homes or residential institutions.
The study outlines historical moments when government policies authorized the forced separation of Indigenous children from their families. These included Indian boarding schools and adoption projects in the U.S. that stripped Native children of their cultural connections and heritages, and the removal of children from Aboriginal mothers in Australia. In Greenland, a former colony that is now an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, several hundred Inuit children were adopted by Danish families during the mid 20th century.
These “historical legacies cast shadows over discussions” regarding child welfare systems today, the authors state.
Of these four countries, the study found that the United States had the lowest rates of out-of-home placement: About 1.5% of Indigenous children are in the U.S. child welfare system in any given year, compared to around 6% of Native children in Australia and Greenland, and around 4.5% in Denmark.
Non-Indigenous annual out-of-home care rates ranged from 0.6 to 0.9%.
Canada, which also has a history of settler colonialism and an over-representation of Indigenous children in foster care, was not included in the study because there was a lack of comparable data, said Martin Eiermann, one of the study’s four authors.
Eiermann, an assistant sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is also a senior research associate at the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect. As part of his work, he investigates whether “the state’s propensity to intervene unevenly in the lives of vulnerable populations shape health and family outcomes” according to his biography.
Discussing the study with The Imprint, Eiermann said he was most struck by the study’s findings that despite disparities in these “very different societies, we see these continuous patterns.’’
The peer-reviewed study, titled “Out-of-Home Care Rates Among Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Children in Countries with Histories of Settler Colonialism” was published in the Child Maltreatment journal last December. The study found that infants and young children are “generally at a greater risk” of being placed out of home in the U.S. and Australia, but the opposite is true for Denmark and Greenland.
The report authors say the findings suggest a need for additional research that follows Indigenous children over their lives, to evaluate the long-term effects of out-of-home care.
Follow-up studies will look at other stages of child welfare system contact including screening and maltreatment investigations, he said.
Eiermann spoke about what he believes still needs to be more fully understood about the comparisons of these countries.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
How did you come to study what you describe as “contemporary institutions of care and social control” including child welfare and youth justice systems?
We have a lot of studies on the criminal legal system, but we know comparatively little about child welfare, so understanding that is super important and consequential.
People will disagree very emotionally on whether the foster care system should be seen primarily as an institution of care, because it removes children from vulnerable, risky home environments. Or, whether it should primarily be seen as a sort of system of social control, because it disrupts lives, families and puts the state in a position where it can intervene very aggressively in ostensibly private domains of life. So the child welfare system straddles all these different boundaries, which makes it, to me, even more important to try to understand.
How were you able to come up with comparable statistics across all these countries — and what are the key differences when it comes to data collection for Indigenous people in child welfare settings?
In the United States, we use the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System or AFCARS, which is a comprehensive national data set, and that’s as ready-made as it comes. You can download very high-quality data at the state level, and then they’re aggregated at the federal level, and it’s one of the organizations that makes those data sets available to policymakers and researchers.
Australian government agencies don’t like to make individual-level data available to outside researchers. Instead you will tell them what you need, and they will aggregate it and give you what are called summary statistics.
The situation of Indigenous populations in Denmark is based on individual anecdotes, because we just don’t have any good national-level data. In Denmark we worked with government agencies and population registers to identify paternal or maternal lineages and birthplaces, and use that to track people back to Greenland.
Right now, AFCARS only includes child welfare system data from eight tribal nations. Did this limitation — and the fact that out-of-home care rates in U.S. tribal child welfare systems are unknown — hinder your study, and if so how?
It certainly imposes a limitation.
One of the big populations that AFCARS does not cover are Indigenous children who only come into contact with tribal agencies, especially if those agencies do not receive federal funding. It’s a very fragmented system — there’s no standardized reporting process.
Given the history of children’s removal for Indigenous families, and everything we know about the adoption projects of the 19th century, 20th century, there’s a lot of very justified hesitancy to make data available. This means that, from the research side, we’re facing this big limitation — not capturing a subset of Indigenous children that are likely to differ in meaningful ways from the children that we do cover. And we have not yet, as a research community, found a way to combat that limitation.
The study states that for Greenland and Denmark, the use of out-of-home placements is “a preventive measure” against youth criminal activities. Can you talk a bit more about that?
In Greenland and Denmark, some of the categories that they have available to classify children really relate to things that the United States would not consider foster care placement, placements dealing with teenagers that maybe have struggled in school, struggled with substance abuse.
Do any particular child welfare policies and practices stand out to you when comparing the U.S. to these other places?
One of the things we know about Australia is they do try to place Indigenous children that are removed from their biological parents within kinship networks. This is partially motivated by the history of scandals in Australia about Indigenous children being forcibly removed.
The other consequence is that the average length of a foster care placement in Australia tends to be much longer for Indigenous children than in the United States. In the United States, foster care placements tend to be relatively short and children, if anything, children cycle through multiple placements.
