Local police shooting of man suffering from mental illness inspires student reaction

  On March 5^th of 2021, police in Chatham, Illinois, responded to a call that a mentally unstable man was wielding a knife. During the interaction, the police officer shot Gregory Smalls, leaving the 30-year-old black man in critical condition. This senseless tragedy, which took place a stone’s throw from our own community in Springfield, illustrates the desperate need for reform in law enforcement policy and practice.

One policy that I think should be implemented to prevent similar tragedies involves adding a mental health department to the police force and changing how officers are outfitted during routine patrols. Police officers are armed with guns but sorely lacking in the kind of training needed to deescalate volatile situations. While police officers do face danger situations, most of their interactions in the community would be better served by providing them with nonlethal means of subduing suspects. Instead of ready access to guns, police should be outfitted with Kevlar protection to minimize their risk. Possession of a gun does not actually reduce their risk; if their assailant has a weapon as well, they have no protection against the bullets. Thus, having a gun available in the vehicle as a last resort and body armor for protection is likely to result in less danger to both officers and suspects.

However, no amount of body armor can provide the kind of training that would enable them to handle situations such as Gregory Small’s. Instead, trained social workers or other mental health professionals should be available to respond alongside their militant counterparts. If someone had been present who had knowledge of mental illnesses and how to resolve conflicts safely, Gregory might have ended the night in a mental health facility, getting the help he needed, rather than in critical condition in the emergency room.

However, I also think that police training needs to focus on serving the community and bringing suspects to justice rather than the current mentality they seem to express, that of viewing members of the community as potential criminals to be uncovered rather than citizens who deserve respect and protection. Another important element to include in this new training is anti-bias education. I believe that many police are unaware of the implicit biases they hold that cause black citizens to be targeted and incarcerated at disproportionate rates as compared to their white counterparts. 

As a member of the African American community, the discrimination rampant in our criminal justice system is a source of anxiety and fear for me. Although I am lighter skinned and rarely experience being targeted by law enforcement, I have a family that is not. My brother, my nephews, and my cousins all have darker complexions, more obviously African hair textures, or both, and each news article reporting the assault or murder of Black citizens fills me with fear for my loved ones, and empathy for the survivors. Although being a target is rare for me, I too have been singled out by police in small rural towns. Black Americans face discrimination in many forms, and one of the single best ways America could show its commitment to ending racism would be to take decisive steps to prevent more black deaths at the hands of police. 

It needs to be said: the treatment your brother, nephews, and cousins have experienced is wrong, and we should not accept it, and law enforcement professionals who care about their mission of protecting the public and the Constitution should also not tolerate this.  You have been singled out by authorities because of your background, and that is wrong.  

The situation of Greg Small, Jr. hits close to home.  He and his brother and dad were active in the Scout Troop I've volunteered with, and my sons camped with him and his little brother on many occasions. 

There are a variety of biases that come into play in police interactions with persons who experience mental illness and also have African heritage. Anti-bias education that is based on good scientific evidence that it can reduce bias should certainly be part of training and professional development for law enforcement personnel. I think we also need to change the way police create a professional self-image.  If they had more focus on "protect and serve" and a deeper ideological commitment to public safety, I think that would help. Other goals and ideals seem to be too powerful in may law enforcement sub-cultures.

Here are some good articles about this issue:

https://policy-class.blogspot.com/2023/04/reaction-essay-on-child-poverty.html

https://www.wandtv.com/news/springfield-police-department-begins-new-co-responder-initiative/article_76c8a624-9774-11ed-98f3-8b6e05363ae0.html  and https://bja.ojp.gov/funding/awards/15pbja-21-gg-04324-ntcp describe the new initiative in Springfield, Illinois

Peoria is doing something similar: https://www.wcbu.org/local-news/2022-02-14/peoria-police-unitypoint-mental-health-staff-could-respond-to-911-calls-together 

Here is what is going on in Nashville, TN: https://www.nashville.gov/departments/police/executive-services/alternative-policing-strategies/partners-care 

Eileen Molloy Langdon wrote an article about this for an Illinois law-enforcement trade magazine (see page 12: https://www.ilchiefs.org/assets/Command/2020_November_Command_FINAL_optimized.pdf 

VICE did an article on this a few years ago: https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3zpqm/these-cities-replaced-cops-with-social-workers-medics-and-people-without-guns  

Reaction Essay on Child Poverty Documentaries

 After watching the documentaries regarding child poverty in America, I had a lot of strong emotions. My first emotions had to do with the most obvious issues of children being poor, hungry, and homeless. Nobody, especially children, should have to experience those kinds of things in a developed country like the U.S. I also got strong waves of emotion watching children take on adult stress and roles. Shaun, for example, admitted that at age 13, he had already taken on a father figure role in his home. He, as well as some of the other children across the documentaries, also admitted to suppressing their feelings when it came to their hardships. These children felt not only the stress coming from their parents, but also took it upon themselves to hold in their own stress in order to save their parents from that added despair. You could just see how pained their parents’ pain made them. It was also striking to hear these children describe adult things such as making money/food stretch and timing and foregoing bills. The children’s stress was so visible, and it hit home. 

When thinking of solutions to the issues surrounding child poverty, child tax credits come to mind. While I’m sure these provide periodic bursts of relief for struggling parents, I also realize that the money they are refunded cannot be saved and applied to the coming year’s worth of expenses. There are bills to pay, necessities to buy, etc. Even more, the child tax credit program was implemented far before either of these documentaries were filmed, and not one person mentioned them as being helpful at all. In my opinion, families, especially those headed by single parents, need a more frequent, reliable form of stimulus. For families such as the ones featured in these films, anything helps. An extra $50…$100…$300 dollars would’ve kept food on their children’s plates, or maybe it would’ve kept the hot water on. I truly believe that families below and near the poverty line need more of a cash safety net. Not only could it help provide life’s necessities, as people in a developed country should have, but it can also help stimulate the economy. More cash means more dollars spent in the market. 

Speaking of the market, I also couldn’t help but notice the fact that some of the families in the documentaries lived in what appeared to be ghost towns. One of the children walked through her town scrounging up aluminum cans for money, and she could point to countless empty buildings and say, “this used to be…”. As she did this, I realized that the absence of businesses in her town also meant the absence of jobs. This child in particular talked a lot about how her mother had to be very careful when it came to using her car’s gas, but what if she didn’t have to go far to make money? Similarly, another family drove two total hours a day to get their father to his job. Unsteady unemployment is a huge contributor to poverty. We need more well-paying jobs, especially in under-stimulated areas of society (which also happened to have the most poverty). 

We’ve talked about adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and how detrimental they can be on a child’s development into adulthood. The children in these films dealt with bullying, food insecurity, housing insecurity, and parents’ tempers. These children had already experienced as much, if not more, stress than others see over the course of their entire lives. It was clear, to me at least, that these children were extremely pessimistic about their own life outcomes. In the film that revisits some of the children 5 years later, not a single one showed up happy and full of life. They were tired. They wanted out. They hadn’t seen success. Having a happier, healthier society begins with improving the lives of children. And to do this, I think we need to offer families and local economies more support. 

Documentaries we watched included:

Growing up Poor in America (2020)

Poor Kids (2017)

Poor Kids (2012)

I am so glad you mentioned the child tax credit.  Increasing that and making it refundable was done as the 2020 documentary was being filmed, so the documentary did not capture the way this increase in consumption affected the lifestyles of those families. We know statistically that the increases in SNAP benefits and the child tax credit made a tremendous improvement (decrease) in child poverty (if we use the measure of poverty that examines post-tax / post-benefit actual consumption).  Having been in farmers markets selling produce in the summer of 2021 I can testify to the huge increase in purchasing power the benefits created (money that partly came to me as I was selling expensive peaches, berries, and cherries to families that now could afford them for their children). 

You also point out the importance of considering the environment and community economic life. As social workers who are interested in ending poverty, we must be concerned with the well-being of employers, businesses, entrepreneurs, local banks and credit units, and we must support main street civic boosters and chambers of commerce (up to a point), because we have common interests in the well-being of our local economies, for it is the local economy that offers a good chance for people to find their way out of poverty. 

You also paid attention to the way poverty inflicted ACEs on the children, and you are aware of how this torment and stress experienced by the children degraded their quality of their human existence. By tolerating the existence of poverty for children in our society, we are stealing years of life from them.  The stresses of poverty raise health problems, which in turn shorten the lives of adults who experienced poverty as children. 

When our society finished the project of defeating the ethno-nationalist imperialism of the Nazi and Japanese empires, there was a near consensus that we should create a world in which all people would be free from the tyranny of poverty and deprivation (one of the four freedoms: freedom of speech; freedom of worship; freedom from want; freedom from fear). We have lost our way, and instead of conquering the belligerent dictator "poverty" and his goons "want", we accept them as useful allies in our society to compel workers to take unpleasant jobs and submit to the caprice and whims of their employers or would-be employers.  We have the power to end poverty in our society, and with it, we would end a significant portion of the social ills and medical or behavioral problems our citizens face. The quality of our workplaces would improve, and our tax burdens would not substantially increase in a way that altered our standards of living.  Yet, we lack the vision and political will to end poverty, and the children in these documentaries damn us all by the tragedies we force them to experience by our unwillingness to restructure our economy to remove the scourge of poverty.

The End of the Pandemic

 On January 30th of this year the Biden administration announced that COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE) and national emergency declarations would be ending on May 11, 2023. These pandemic declarations were announced at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. They helped with various policies such as the expansion of telehealth and free COVID testing. It helped with coverage with Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP, as well as private insurance, speeding up the acceptance of medications and treatments so that patients can be treated.

To say that the last 3 years have been hard is an understatement. 2020 was one of the roughest years of my family’s life. We tried our best to stay safe. We stayed home that whole year except for trips to the grocery store. The following year I lost my mother due to complications resulting from COVID-19. Shortly after she died, my brother died similarly. As vaccines began to roll out, we became more and more comfortable out in public. We finally got COVID at the end of 2022. The recovery was not bad and we were testing negative relatively quickly. In 2023, my family and I are so ready to move on and live our lives. We wear masks less often. We keep them close by for trips to the store or if we’re not feeling safe in our environment.

Despite being fed up with COVID-19 and the precautions, ending emergency declarations is scary. Sure, if I only account for how my family is doing, it makes sense. We are well equipped to deal with our health thanks to our insurance and decent jobs, but only considering my family would be short-sighted. The problem is, there are plenty of people out there who cannot get insurance. There are plenty of people out there who either cannot get the vaccines available or flat out refuse them. People who mask in public are in the minority. I cannot count how many times I’ve heard nasty coughs around me. I’ve had that nasty cough. We are living in highly infectious times and the people who will be most affected by the end of these declarations will be the poor. All of this is scary. We need to support each other as we continue to live with COVID-19.

I had hoped that the pandemic would change our culture so that persons suffering from cold symptoms (or any signs of illness) would adopt the habit of wearing facemarks to protect those around them from the particles exiting their bodies as they exhale, sneeze, or cough.  Sadly, the pandemic seems to have made many people lose their rational faculties (or did they ever have any?), and the wearing of masks became a political and identity issue. 

One thing I learned from the pandemic was that medical science isn't nearly as good as I had supposed, and the tribal cognitive biases that make people dismiss any facts or findings that contradict their beliefs are strong within the scientific community.  I used to have respect for editorial boards at top medical journals, but they published some fake articles in 2020, and had to retract those.  Faculty at Stanford University were publicizing so many findings based on ridiculously bad studies that I started to think Stanford must now be a joke. With Ivermectin, there were many promising studies and findings, and people rejected those as if they were 16th Catholics rejecting some heresy (faith and tribal loyalty guided their rejection of the evidence, I believe).  But then, as the evidence for Ivermectin weakened to a point where it now seems to have generally only a trivial benefit, if any, the true-believers in Ivermectin continued to hold to their faith. With masks, there was likewise a tribal division. Even the Cochran Collaboration, for which I had previously held the highest respect, published a review led by Tom Jefferson that was of very dubious quality, showing us that we don't really know what effect wearing masks has.  People who supported Ivermectin and were opposed to masks then started saying things like, "there is no evidence that masks work" when in fact there is quite a bit of evidence that they do, just as there was for a time quite a few promising studies about Ivermectin. They hated it when people ignored the evidence in favor of Ivermectin or cited flawed studies to claim Ivermectin was useless, but then did exactly the same when it came to considering the evidence for the benefits of masks.  My conclusion is that people's attraction to tribal identities around controversial issues clouds their judgement even more than I had assumed, and I've always thought of myself as fairly doubtful about the rational abilities of humans (I always look both ways when crossing 6th and 5th, although they are one-way streets).

  I'm so sorry about your loss of your mother and your brother in the Pandemic.  Many students in my classes lost family members to COVID, and my friends in some of the hardest-hit areas (like New York City in the first months of the Pandemic) lost a huge percentage of their friends and acquaintances.  It was like the AIDS thing in the 1980s, but compressed into weeks rather than years.  I think of the over 1 million extra deaths we had in the USA from COVID and medical complications related to the pandemic, and the scale of the pain is beyond my comprehension.  I liked listening to those obituary stories NPR and the PBS News Hour was providing to look at the lives of people who were lost in the pandemic, and hear about all these wonderful people and the grieving relatives who mourned them. COVID was a horrible way to die, and my tendency to approach the problem as an intellectual game of numbers and forecasts helped distance me from the horror, and these stories on NPR and PBS helped bring me back to my humanity.

Student is alarmed by child welfare inadequacies

 I began doing research on the social welfare system’s policies and practices out of curiosity and found some interesting information. As the system is growing, the agencies are failing to meet the demands to provide the services needed. The Child Welfare Information Gateway says that the “system was never intended to serve the vast numbers of children and families that are involved in the system today” (Chibnall et al., 2003). The number of children that are being neglected and abused are increasing each year.

With the child welfare system not being able to fulfill the needs of the number of children who are neglected and abused, children are suffering and dying. The system needs to find a solution and provide better practice due to them reaching their capacity of the children they can help. I believe more policies must be put in place to better the chances of more children being helped. The Child Welfare Information Gateway believes that the difficulty working for the agencies plays a role in the issues of the system (Chibnall et al., 2003). The system needs to be further looked into and given more attention for them to better their agencies.

If the system got more attention, I believe the policies and practices could be much improved. A possible policy that could help better the system is having improvement on the ability for relatives to care for the children. This would allow for less children to enter into the system and be taken care of by relatives that they may already know. This would also benefit the children because it would make them more comfortable and in a less intimidating environment.

Works Cited

Chibnall, Susan, et al. “Children of Color in the Child Welfare System: Perspectives from the Child Welfare Community.” Implications for Policy and Practice - Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2003, https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/otherpubs/children/implications/. 

Your key point is that we do not put enough public attention on the situation in DCFS, or child welfare and child protection services in general. Yes, the people of Illinois essentially have custody of the 19,000+ children in foster care within Illinois. These are our children.  And, we should all be concerned that we have problems attracting and retaining child protection and child welfare workers. I wonder how we can make more citizens care about this issue? How would public concern manifest?  Would public alarm lead to an increase in funding for DCFS so that that agency would be staffed with 3,400 social workers instead of 2,900, and salaries would increase and caseloads would decrease to make the work more attractive? Could DCFS hire 100 specialized child carers to act as foster parents for children who have such extreme behavior problems that only specialized and highly trained persons should serve as foster parents to these children? I wonder what the target should be for improving the child welfare system in Illinois, and more widely throughout the nation.

There are some good resources for finding some facts about the child welfare system.

First of all, since you mention children dying and suffering, you should consult the most recent Inspector General's Report on child deaths in Illinois. Last year (2022) had a huge spike in children dying while being involved with DCFS. There were 171 such deaths, but 134 of those were just the normal deaths attributable to disease and accidents that you would expect anyway.  However, in 37 cases, the child welfare system did something wrong that may have contributed to the situation. Between July 2021 and June 2022 the DCFS examined 97 child deaths in Illinois and found that 18 of those children were murdered and 30 died in accidents.  By the way, the state spends about $1.5 billion on DCFS, and the agency has approximately 2,900 employees. 

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/dcfs-inspector-general-report-child-deaths/

https://dcfs.illinois.gov/content/dam/soi/en/web/dcfs/documents/about-us/office-of-the-inspector-general/documents/oig-annual-report-2023.pdf

The Annie E. Casey Foundation seeks to maintain its strong reputation for having good information about indicators of children's well-being in the United States, and you can examine the situation in each state.  I see that their most recent count of children in foster care showed 376,926 children in foster care in 2021. That is the lowest number since 2012, so the trend is for fewer children to be in foster care (in 2017 there were 428,133 children in foster care). We're back down to about 1 in every 200 children in our society living in foster care. 

 https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/6242-children-ages-birth-to-17-in-foster-care?loc=1&loct=2#detailed/1/any/false/2048,574,1729,37,871,870,573,869,36,868/any/12985,20455

The Children's Bureau at the Administration for Children & Families hosts the website you mentioned: the Child Welfare Information Gateway.  It doesn't have so many statistics and facts and figures, but you can find many reports on children welfare services and protective services. 

https://www.childwelfare.gov/catalog/topiclist/?CWIGFunctionsaction=publicationCatalog:main.dspTopicsDetail&topicID=6

Student Reflection: I, Daniel Blake

 So far, this semester has been packed full of very useful information. We have read a lot of different information this semester. We have also watched multiple videos and films. However, the thing that stood out most to me of all was I, Daniel Blake. This was a film about an older gentleman named Daniel Blake. Daniel had lost his beautiful wife. Daniel had also suffered from some health issues such as heart problems. Daniel had to take quite a bit of time off of work per doctor’s orders. Therefore, he was struggling a little bit financially. He went to apply for benefits to help get him through this time. At the time he was going to apply, he saw a younger woman with her two children getting kicked out of the office. She was a little bit late to her appointment, so they told her that they could not help her. Ultimately, she would have to come back at a different time. This really upset Daniel, so he ended up talking to this girl. Her name was Katie and her children were Daisy and Dylan. Katie was struggling. She had to move away from her family and they were new to the area. Daniel and Katie formed a bond, and he helped her fix up her house. He got to know her and her children more. They both struggled to get the benefits they needed. Daniel did get the help of a lady named Ann; however, she got in trouble for helping him. He had to fill out the information and go hand it out to employers just to get benefits. We see Daniel and Katie go to the food bank at one point. Katie was so hungry that she just opened up a can and started eating. This seemed like a breaking point for her. Daniel was always there for her. She ended up shoplifting feminine products because those were not available at the food bank. Ivan was the security guard who caught her. He said he could help girls like her. He ultimately got her to be an escort. When Daniel found this out, he did not take it lightly. He confronted her about it and did not want her doing this at all. She got upset and did not want him to come around anymore. However, Daisy came to Daniel’s apartment and wanted him to come back. Katie and Daniel ended up talking again and she was going to his appeal with him. As he was in the bathroom he collapsed and died. The ending showed Katie reading Daniel’s testimony at his funeral. 

This film was extremely eye-opening to me. I was skeptical at the beginning since it was a British film, and things are different there than in the United States. However, this film was so good. I never really thought of older widowed people struggling to get benefits. Daniel did not really know how to use the Internet. He struggled a lot in that aspect and had to ask for help more than once. The social worker that made Daniel look for all of those jobs knowing he could not work was really horrible. Ann was so helpful to him. The rest of them however were not. They were hostile towards him for no reason at all. I felt so terrible for Katie. She was trying so hard to be a good mother. She even made Daniel a plate instead of herself. She just ate an apple. She was starving herself to make sure that her kids were fed. It broke my heart to see her break down in the food bank. Then Daisy told her that the kids were making fun of her for that. Katie was really struggling, but Daniel was always there just out of kindness. The fact that Katie resorted to stealing feminine hygiene products was absolutely heartbreaking. As a woman, I hate to think about all the people that cannot afford those products needed. When Daisy told Katie that her shoes were broken, she knew she was going to have to find the money somehow to get her a new pair. Seeing the paper say escort was so sad. She knew she somehow had to provide for her babies. I could not imagine feeling like that. I think she was so embarrassed that Daniel found out. Daniel’s statement was so powerful. The system is so BROKEN, and this shows that is not just in the United States. 

I actually loved I, Daniel Blake. This film gave me a much better understanding of how difficult it truly is to get benefits. These benefits are not just handed out as easily as people think. I am so lucky that I do not relate to either of these stories. However, I know as a social worker, I will have to see situations like Daniel and Katie’s all of the time. I think that this film did a wonderful job of preparing me a little bit more for my future as a social worker. I would definitely recommend it to anyone pursuing a degree, or interested in, social work. 

I hope that the persons in the welfare office portrayed in I, Daniel Blake were not supposed to be social workers. I think one point of the film is that persons with skills and knowledge who could have helped Daisy or Daniel are often not present.  Instead of a nurse or physician assessing Daniel's disability in the opening scene with the phone call, a “qualified medical professional” who is clearly not qualified for any sort of interaction with a client is pushing Daniel along through the survey in a confrontational and dehumanizing manner. Instead of social workers with ethics and a client-centered approach in the welfare office we have officious bureaucrats who offer no sign of compassion or concern for the people they serve. 

People seem to hold either of two types of approaches to the welfare safety net: one approach is to deny benefits as much as possible, and be very strict.  The assumption is that people probably do not deserve benefits and many of these people need to be pushed to become self-supporting and independent, instead of demanding that they ought to be supported through the work of others (taxes redistribute money earned so that it can go to the public benefit such as welfare services, right?).  The other approach is to point out that most people seeking benefits genuinely need help, and the economic system and health care system cannot offer some of these people any decent opportunity to become self-reliant. Therefore, we ought to be generous and meet people's needs with courtesy and respect.  The film is trying to point out that the abstract idea of being "tough on people who are relying on welfare" so that they can "achieve self-reliance and independence and get jobs" may sound laudable (surely when possible for adults, being self-supporting is better than being dependent on others), but in practice is inflicts brutal attacks on the dignity and human rights of suffering souls. 

Daniel has been ordered by doctors and real health experts to avoid stress or exertion.  He certainly must not work.  But Daniel was for years a care-giver to his wife, who evidently had a long decline in her health, and he spent his life savings taking care of her, despite living in a country where health care is provided by a National Health Insurance scheme. He is a hard-working carpenter and care-giver, and he can't help himself but use his skills and labor to help others (like Katie and her children). He is clearly deserving.  Yet, the system torments him with rules and requirements that make no sense in his circumstance.  Katie is caring for two children, and seems to have little education (she has tried to attain a university degree, but has been thwarted by lack of support for that endeavor) or any special skills beyond housekeeping and cleaning. She is honest, clever, and hard-working, but cannot find a job because the economy does not offer her any work that would suffice to support her family. Both Katie and Daniel clearly deserve the benefits of a social welfare system.  Both are willing to work, but are unable to do so because of forces beyond their control (health problems for Daniel, and a bad economy without opportunities for Katie).  Rather than helping them achieve a dignified life or recognizing the equal value and rights of these two, the welfare system denies either of them the access to basic human rights or dignity.  The system essentially kills Daniel.

Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is worth recalling here:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

A student writes about bias in child protective services

 I have always been quite passionate about this field as my future career, but as of the past two years, I have found an even greater interest in policy practice and advocacy in social work. My interests were sparked by my research into the child welfare system and the need for reform, and they have only grown with the courses I've taken here. While looking online for articles on the topic, one stuck out to me that shared many of my concerns and connected to more ideas I’ve been focusing on in my child advocacy courses. In the news article, "The Child Welfare System Needs an Overhaul," by the ACLU, they point out the extreme economic hardships and systemic racism at the root of many issues in child welfare cases at the federal, state, and local levels. The author points out the correlation between child welfare and poverty, as well as trends in cases relating to race. For families experiencing extreme poverty, statistics show they are more likely to be charged with neglect. Children of color are more likely to be reported, despite making up a smaller percentage of children overall.

Disproportionality can be caused by factors other than racial bias, although we ought to suspect racial bias is a factor.  For example, their are 4.1 million African-Americans (9.3% of all African-Americans) living under 50% of the poverty rate, and 7.6 million non-Hispanic European-Americans in the same condition of desperate deprivation (3.9% of all non-Hispanic European-Americans).  Using the supplemental poverty index, about 4.5% of “white alone” children were in poverty in 2021, whereas for “Black alone” the childhood poverty rate was 8.1%.  If living in desperate poverty is a strong predictor of childhood maltreatment (either because of poverty or because the conditions that lead to poverty also lead to heightened risks of child maltreatment) we might expect child maltreatment to be about double the rate among African-Americans than it is among European-Americans.  One of the key sources used by the ACLU report was the excellent work of Maguire-Jack, Font, and Dillard (2020), which somewhat controls for bias in actual incidence of maltreatment due to poverty by using only a sample of investigated cases. In their multivariate model (see pages 54-55), where they controlled for other possible causes (child and county and reporter characteristics), they found that substantiated maltreatment was 3% higher for Black children, 20% higher for American Indian, 15% higher for multiracial, and nearly 8% higher for Hispanic children.  For the decision to make out-of-home placements among children with substantiated abuse, again in the multivariate model that controls for other things, Black children were 15% more likely to be removed, American Indian children were 23% more likely, and multiracial were 43% more likely, but Hispanic children were nearly 3% less likely to get an out-of-home placement.

The county context in which CPS workers investigate child maltreatment reports also influences whether they substantiate or decide on out-of-home placements.  Again, this is the study by Maguire-Jack, et al. (2020) in which only investigated cases are used, so the bias in reporting should mostly be controlled for aside from the possible biases in having lower or higher thresholds for deciding to report and deciding to investigate. Counties with higher rates of single-parent headed households had higher rates of substantiated maltreatment. Counties with higher poverty rates generate lower findings of substantiated maltreatment for African-American children (a 15% drop) whereas rural counties raise rates of substantiation for Black children by 7% (but also raise substantiation rates for white children by 10%).  Having a high percentage of single-parent households increases out-of-home placement. Having high poverty rates in a county lowers rates of out-of-home placements (for Black children by 15%; for White children by 7%).  

There are probably several things going on with the high association between poverty of a household and neglect.  Persons with mental or physical health problems that would make them more likely to remain poor may also have impaired parenting abilities. Single parents who are forced to earn a livelihood to support their children while also trying to live normal lives of dignity may not have adequate time or resources to meet social expectations of good parenting, and having a single parent (one income-earner in the household) makes a family far more likely to be poor than having two parents. Poverty may impose difficulties and stresses on parents that diminish their ability to be adequate parents, either directly by limiting their resources or indirectly by stressing them out so much that their brains are damaged by the stress. The association between poverty and unemployment and substance addiction runs both ways as well, and substance abuse is a leading contributing factor in child maltreatment.  And, yes, social workers and family court judges may have a bias against persons who are poor. Americans tend to dislike poor people, so I expect some bias there.  Hopefully in our classes at UIS we are diminishing the biases our students may have. 

Some of the disparities are probably caused by bias, other disparities are caused by a system that prioritizes “personal responsibility of the parents” over the well-being of children in a way that violates my ethical principles about the inherent dignity and equal value of all persons. Other aspects of the disparities are probably attributable to conditions that are not caused by cruel systems or bias, but are rooted in individual characteristics that contribute to poverty and to a risk of maltreating one’s children. 

Maguire-Jack, K. (2014). Multilevel investigation into the community context of child maltreatment. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 23, 229 –248. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10926771.2014 .881950

Maguire-Jack, K., Dillard, R., & Font, S. A. (2020) Child protective services decision-making: the role of children’s race and county factors. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 90 (1), 48-62. https://doi.org/10.1037/ort0000388 

The ACLU report has this:

Neglect, as defined by the child welfare system, is often a proxy for poverty-related circumstances and is the primary reason for child welfare involvement in the overwhelming majority of cases.

Neglect is far more common than abuse.  People more often fail to meet social standards for parenting by failing to do what is expected rather than doing something that is considered horrible (e.g., physical, psychological, or sexual abuse).  Yes, neglect is often caused by a parent’s poverty, but it is often caused by other factors that are indirectly related to poverty or are not related at all to poverty.  Persons should not lose custody of their children because they are poor, and we should not create systems in which poor parents are unable to reasonably provide for the basic and essential needs of their children.  

The main case made in the ACLU and Human Rights Watch report is that children can be removed from parents or guardians who fail to provide adequate food, clothing, shelter, medical care, hygiene, nutrition, and supervision. Low income parents may not have the financial means to supply adequate levels of these things, and they may be so busy trying to earn the money required to supply these things that they are unable to find the time or mental attention to give adequate supervision or ensure that hygiene and nutritional standards are met. Considering that the United States has no laws to enforce Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we put the burden of supplying an “adequate standard of living” for children on their parents.  Parents who cannot do this can lose custody of their children as a result.  It would be more in line with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights if the state (society in general) ensured that children (and their parents) received an adequate standard of living, or the means of attaining such a standard, and then neglect would mean that a parent had actively failed to distribute the materials essential to an adequate standard of living that they had received from the state.  But, as things stand, we have a system in which parents really can lose their children because they have not been able to find adequate and affordable housing or cannot afford adequate and nutritious food. 

Should a poor family that refuses to seek medical treatment for their children and also refuse to register for Medicaid be considered perpetrators of maltreatment through medical neglect, or does this undermine parental autonomy?  How about a family that qualifies for SSI, or SNAP benefits, and yet the parents are too proud to apply for those supports, and so their children go hungry and are malnourished? 

There is a great disproportionality among children of color in the foster care system, and a racial bias perpetuates even further harm. This is seen within the child welfare system as well as society as a whole. Our history has caused disparities in income, education, employment, and more for POC communities. This racism has been embedded in the policies of our system, and institutional bias contributes to this inequality. The article states that indigenous and black families have a higher percentage of investigations than white families. This, among other statistics, confirms the trends of disproportionality within the system, thus harming more children than helping. The article also mentioned that despite an already high rate of investigations for families in poverty, numbers still show black families are more likely to be investigated even in communities with low poverty. Poverty plays a significant role in these trends: poor families have a higher rate of investigations and welfare interventions. However, there is often a misinterpretation of poverty vs. neglect:

"The overwhelming majority of cases, nearly 75 percent in 2019, include allegations of state-defined neglect, which is inextricably linked to poverty. Parents struggling with limited resources, unable to pay rent or secure stable housing, or working long hours to make ends meet, are judged unfit and neglectful" (Naveed, 2022).

The child welfare system needs to support parents struggling rather than being judged and punished. Families in poverty are often lacking the resources they need; it isn’t that they can’t take care of their children or that they are purposefully neglectful; it’s that they need more assistance and can thrive much better with a system that lifts rather than punishes. This is a system that pushes families into the impossible situation of "having to overcome poverty to stop being monitored and to reunite with their children, without providing them the resources necessary to do so" (Naveed, 2022). Although the evidence for the link between poverty and maltreatment is overwhelming, poverty is the result of long-term racism and structural adversity that have fostered risk factors that contribute to mistreatment in POC families. There is much work needed to undo the systemic biases within these services; policies must be created to better serve these communities. Reform is needed. The information in these articles and documents from my classes about the child welfare system reinforces the idea that change is desperately needed. I have always felt this way, and learning more about it in class makes me feel more strongly about it. These inequalities were what intrigued me most about the child welfare system and further encouraged me to look into policy practice within this discipline. As I reflect on the curriculum, I hope to learn more about what actions can be taken and how I can incorporate that into my future career goals.

“Reform is needed”.  Yes, we want to extinguish the biased determination of maltreatment and the biased tendency to remove children.  But what about this—what if the objective situation is that instead of a negative bias against Native American and Black families, those families are being treated exactly as they ought to be, and instead what we have is a positive bias, where European-American families are too often getting away with maltreatment by having cases as “not determined” or “unsubstantiated” and the real problem is that we ought to be removing more European-American children out of their households?  What is the logical basis for thinking the bias is mainly a negative one against certain groups, and not so much a positive bias favoring European-American parents?  The research cited in the article you read is convincing that there is bias, and the bias is influenced by county characteristics as well as household characteristics, but should we be “more lenient” with Native American and Black households or “more stringent” with European-American households? 

I conceive of the determination to remove a child or substantiate an allegation of maltreatment as being in many cases quite easy to make, and bias wouldn’t enter into the picture.  Probably we have the tail end of a normal curve of parenting quality.  Given that the National Incidence Surveys tend to show maltreatment is experienced by about 2% to 3% of children each year, that fits fairly well with the idea that parents who are behaving two standard deviation lower than normal in “parenting quality” are generally maltreating their children.  So, probably parents who are 2.2 standard deviations or more below median parenting are easily substantiated, and parents who are more than 2.8 standard deviations below normal are also cases where it’s easy to see the the child should be removed—no bias need enter the picture. The problem arises with parents who parent at a quality level that is 1.9 to 2.2 standard deviations below median: it’s a closer call there, so bias could cause systematic error in determinations or substantiations of maltreatment allegations.  And likewise with the decision to remove: that’s going to be an issue in the cases that are around 2.6 to 3.0 below median in parenting quality. Given the expected slope at the tail end of a normal distribution, we’re looking at a situation where bias can enter the picture at a narrow band along the continuum of parenting behavior quality, but this narrow band is at the level where the greatest number of cases will occur.  (A lot more parents are parenting at 1.9 or 2.0 standard deviations below median quality than are parenting at 2.4 or 2.6 standard deviations below median quality).  

The tricky thing about these reforms that are going to reduce the bias is that they are going to address how the child protection workers deal with the cases that are close calls or in an area where the decisions are tough.  The cases that are clear-cut and easy to determine are not the cases where bias gets a chance to enter the decision-making, at least normally (no doubt there are occasional cases of egregious bias, but child protection workers are generally well-enough trained that these should be exceptional cases).  

A student urges support for reducing the age children can be left alone.

 House Bill 4305

At what age can children be left at home? Families consisting of two working adults may find this question challenging. Even so, a single adult household might contemplate leaving a young child in the care of older siblings. Illinois statutes offer guidelines families are obliged to follow as Illinois residents when they decide who may watch young children when no parent can be home. The guidelines set by DCFS help establish and create a safe transition for leaving a child at home. 

Parents face many circumstances when they may opt to leave their child at home. Situations may arise when school is not in session, after-school programs are not readily available, or a last-minute family emergency demands that a parent be elsewhere. Other external reasons include employers failing to offer flexible work schedules, which can contribute to a parent needing to leaving a minor at home. Also, employers may not offer personal time off. Families facing financial hardship are more likely to be desperate to persist in jobs where work hours are inflexible and inconvenient, and these same economic circumstances may encourage them to leave children at home unsupervised at earlier ages, given the cost of babysitters and child care. The demands to provide for the economic well-being of a household can conflict with other duties to children and compel a parent to leave a child alone at home to meet family expenses.  

Parents should assess the child's mental, physical, and emotional well-being and abilities (Illinois Department of DCFS Children & Family Services [DCFS], 2014). Children with special needs can heighten risks of immediate danger if left unattended for a lengthy time. Parents should determine situations that warrant risk at home. For example, can windows be easily opened? Older homes might have metal cranks or hinges that can adhere tightly due to age. Also, does a minor have access to a responsible adult in case of an emergency (DCFS, 2014)? 

Currently, the Illinois DCFS constitutes that leaving a minor, 14 years and younger, alone for an unreasonable period could be regarded as neglect (DCFS, 2014). State Rep. Sue Scherer, D-Decatur/Springfield, introduced House Bill 4305 after families urged age modification for minors allowed at home independently (Sharkey, D. 2022). The age change would impact many dedicated working families. House Bill 4305 hopes to amend the Juvenile Court Act of 1987 and change the minor age to 12 years (2022). 

According to Illinoispolicy.org, Illinois tops the nation's age for minors allowed to stay home alone (Sharkey, D. 2022). Single adult households might face circumstances that merit DCFS's input based on child welfare situations. DCFS can decide if a child has been neglected and is at risk (DCFS, 2014). Families working hard should not have to face penalties in raising a family. House Bill 4305 will allow the state to modify the age to stay at home from 14 to 12. Families then decide if a child is capable and responsible at home alone. 

Many 12-year-old and 13-year-old children already return home from middle school and find the house empty until their parents return home from work after 5:00pm.  A practice that is so widespread and usually harmless should not be grounds for finding that parents have been neglectful. The age at which children are mature enough to handle themselves at home without their parents presence is set by cultural expectations and social conventions, and as such, the law should be permissive with a preference for erring on the side of allowing parents to overestimate their children’s abilities rather than erring on the side of coercively punishing parents for making reasonable decisions. There should be some lower limit to allowable ages to leave children home alone, but that limit ought to be at the low end of a reasonable range, around age 12, and not so high as age 14. If you agree, please contact your State Senator and State Representative and urge them to see that House Bill 4305 is passed during the upcoming lame duck session before the new legislative assembly is seated.