In an all-too-common occurrence in the nation’s largest local child welfare system,a 37-year-old mother of five from Los Angeles County dialed 911 about two years ago, seeking protection from an abusive partner. That callbrought not only the police but the Department of Children and Family Services to her home.
Under the watch of social workers, Kenia Charles said, she moved into a shelter for domestic violence survivors, but still, the child welfare agency argued in court it had concerns about her mental health and ability to parent.
“I don’t do any drugs. My kids have never been in question of me harming them. I never hit them. I never did anything to hurt them,” Charles said in a series of interviews over several months, describing the torment of losing her two youngest children to foster care.
From her vantage point, social workers wrenched the family apart, in part because of her race. “They just looked at me as a Black woman, and they didn’t like what they saw,” Charles said.
Since the death of George Floyd nine months ago prompted America to re-examine entrenched racism in all its institutions – from police departments to corporations and colleges – the child welfare system too, has had to reckon with its troubled past and deeply flawed present. Driven by evidence that child welfare decision-makers judge parents of color more harshly and are more likely to remove their children, calls for systemic change have grown more urgentamong parent advocates, scholars and even agency leaders.
Against that backdrop, there is growing interest in a program that proposes to weed out racial bias when social workers weighing allegations of abuse and neglect decide whether to remove a child from their parents.
The method, known as “blind removals,” was pioneered a decade ago in Nassau County, New York, where Black children are the largest non-white group and represent a disproportionate share of who gets taken into foster care. The race-blind process works off a simple premise: If the race of parents and children is not known to the decision-makers, the bias of social workers won’t determine their fate.
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