“Child abuse crosses class lines” was the mantra in the 1970s and 1980s. In the effort to pass the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), discussion of poverty was suppressed. Unless parents — and not economic inequality — could be blamed, there was no way CAPTA was going to pass. Not surprisingly, the result was a law that has led us in the wrong direction for decades.
SPOILER ALERT
But then, when people noticed that nonwhite families were surveilled and had their children removed at vastly disproportionate rates, the child welfare establishment had a problem. There was no way they were going to admit to racial bias, so they said: It’s because those families are poor! (Spoiler alert: it’s actually both.)
That led people to look again at poverty. And though it’s taken far too long, at last we are talking about the fact that not only does poverty contribute to cases of abuse — which are a tiny proportion of what child welfare agencies (or as they should be called family policing agencies) investigate — but that poverty itself is routinely confused with neglect.
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