Racial Disproportionality in Child Welfare

The number of children of color entering the child welfare system in the United States is disproportionately high. This is especially true among African-American children, who, though they comprise 15% of children in the U.S., account for 37% of the total children placed in foster care. The numbers are also high for Native American and Latino children. Not only are children of color removed from parental custody and placed in care more often than their white counterparts, but they also remain in care longer, receive fewer services, and have less contact with the caseworkers assigned to them.

This book identifies the practice and policy changes required to successfully address the unequal treatment of children of color in the child welfare system and their implications for social work education, caseworker training, and institutional change. The work critiques many of the existing social welfare acts and policies in terms of their treatment of children of color, and it provides best practices for each decision point in the child welfare process and for cultural competency measures and training. The text offers extensive measurement instruments that agencies can use to assess and correct institutional racism. To improve social work education, the book includes several model syllabi for the social work curriculum, and to deepen the discipline's engagement with this issue, the text concludes with a discussion of future directions for research and policy.

Marian Harris is an associate professor of social work at the University of Washington Tacoma and a former Faculty Associate at the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on child welfare issues, including disproportionality. She was a key participant in the U.S. Children's Bureau's research roundtable on the topic, has testified before the Ways and Means committee, and is cochair of the Washington State Racial Disproportionality Advisory Committee.