Disproportionality: Addressing Overrepresentation in Child Welfare Systems of Historically Oppressed Groups Around the World

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Disproportionality: Addressing Overrepresentation in Child Welfare Systems of Historically Oppressed Groups Around the World

Child welfare systems disproportionately impact families and communities of racial and ethnic groups with long histories of oppression and low-income families of all backgrounds. That includes Indigenous families in countries around the world, as well as Black families in the United States and Roma families in Europe.

In this section of the library, you will find efforts to address racial and class disproportionality in child welfare as well as efforts to increase the decision-making power of the communities that these families come from. Some of these efforts have been made through legislation; many are at the level of guidance or calls for reform from independent government bodies.

One distressing fact is that major initiatives in Canada and New Zealand that aimed to increase the role of indigenous communities in child welfare decision-making in order to reduce the number of indigenous children in out-of-home care had the opposite effect, with more children entering out-of-home care after reforms than before. Racism is a main reason for these failures as well as inadequate funding, inadequate power-sharing, and a failure to re-envision and invest in better approaches to child and family safety and well-being. As Michael Champagne, of Canada’s Fearless R2W, explained: “We still have the exact same system of family separation but with an Indigenous face.”

In this section, you can find information on efforts to address racial and class disproportionality in:

  • New Zealand
  • Canada
  • Eastern Europe
  • The United States

New Zealand

Māori Families and the Child Protection Act: How groundbreaking child protection legislation hurt Māori families, and current calls for Maori control

“Nothing short of a revolution will do.”

-Judge Andrew Becroft, Children’s Commissioner

In New Zealand, the indigenous Māori are greatly overrepresented within the child welfare system. Though they comprise 30% of all children born in New Zealand, Māori children make up 60% of all children in state care. And while Māori make up 16.7% of the total population of New Zealand, Māori parents are investigated in more than 50% of all cases. Like in the United States, Canada and Australia, New Zealand has its own horrific history of forced removal of Maori history and placement in abusive residential schools, which is currently the focus of a Royal Commission of Inquiry on Abuse in Care. Though legislation was passed in 1989 and amended in 2017 to address the overrepresentation of Māori children in out-of-home care, their numbers have grown rather than diminished.

In this package, you’ll read:

  • The history and impact of The Oranga Tamariki [Ministry of Children] Act of 1989 and the 2017 amendment to the act that tried and failed to address overrepresentation of Maori families in the child welfare system.
  • Recent efforts and ongoing debates in the effort to change New Zealand’s child welfare policies and address Maori overrepresenation.

The Oranga Tamariki Act of 1989 (Children’s and Young People’s Well-being Act of 1989)

At the time of its approval, the Act of 1989 was seen as a groundbreaking initiative in child protection. The Act legislated direct involvement of extended Māori kin in child welfare decision-making, and called for the implementation of child welfare policies that would align with Māori social structures, practices and principles. Some of those principles included that:

  • Each Māori child has rights he or she is born with.
  • Māori children must be permitted to maintain connections with their family and culture.
  • Maintaining relationships is crucial for children’s well-being.

The legislation was premised on the belief that extended family (whanu), clan (hapu) and tribe (iwi) “would provide adequate care for their children if provided with respect, authority, information and adequate resources.”[1]

Children in New Zealand face challenges, with New Zealand reporting some of the highest rates of child maltreatment in the developed world; UNICEF ranks New Zealand 35th out of 41 developed countries for child well-being outcomes, just slightly better than well-being for children in the United States.

Poverty is at the root of many of these challenges, but as New Zealand’s government implemented fiscal austerity measures similar to changes in the United States and the United Kingdom under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, extended families, often living in poverty, were asked to care for children with minimal financial support from the government.[2] Critics of the law also contend that its passage undermined natural community and family supports by turning them into bureaucratic functions of the child welfare system.

With inadequate financial support, and with a continued focus on protecting individual children but not on addressing larger social and economic drivers of child harm, including the ongoing impact of colonization and continued bias and racism against the Maori people, the number of Maori children placed in out of home care continued to rise.[3]

In 2016, the Ministry of Social Development acknowledged that there was no evidence that the Act of 1989 had any positive impact on Māori families at all. Instead it noted that “the overrepresentation of Māori children and young people in the system has progressively worsened.”[4]

Read the Oranga Tamariki Act of 1989 here.

The 2017 Amendment

In 2016, legislators introduced The Children, Young Persons, and Their Families (Oranga Tamariki) bill into parliament in an attempt to once again address continued overrepresentation of Maori families in the child welfare system.

The amendment required New Zealand’s Ministry for Children to set measurable outcomes for Maori children taken into out-of-home care with the goal of reducing disparities, and encouraged the Ministry for Children to partner with Maori tribes and organizations to develop strategic methods of Māori participation in child welfare policies and practices, and where appropriate, delegation of child welfare responsibilities to tribes and Maori organizations. The amendment also required the Ministry for Children to report to the public on its efforts to improve outcomes for Maori children on an annual basis.

Following the ratification of the bill, Former Minister for Children AnneTolley stated, “I’ve travelled the country meeting a large number of iwi [tribes], Maori organizations and community groups to discuss this bill. Everyone agrees the child’s safety must come first – but this doesn’t need to be at the exclusion of wider whānau [extended family] who are able to provide a safe, secure and loving home. I’ve always said that wherever possible a child should live with their family, whānau, or hapū [clan] provided it’s in their best interests, safety and wellbeing.”

However, the amendment was passed almost exclusively with the support of right-leaning parties, while Maori, Green and Labour parties formally opposed the final version of the bill. Their concerns included:

  • The removal of “whanau-first” (family-first) provisions in the final draft of the bill.
  • The lack of consultation with Maori members prior to the final drafting of the bill.
  • Concerns that the bill did not do enough to re-envision child safety and well-being or to address drivers of child welfare involvement, including bias, social and economic inequality, and breakdown of community supports.

Marama Fox, Co-head of the Maori Party, stated:

“What we do is we write legislation with the worst possible scenario in mind, and try to protect against it, which means we are always penalizing dumb stuff that happens, rather than encouraging better stuff to happen. We think that by making the penalties stronger or harder, that will somehow incentivize people to do better. Has that worked? No, it has not. So now we are faced with a bill that everybody wants to work. Everybody wants to get this right. It is widely talked about that this is a largely Māori issue—disproportionately—and it is.

Hurting our children—physically, mentally, sexually—is not our way. It is not our cultural custom. If we were able to create a piece of legislation that ensured we always kept our children safe, then that is exactly what we would be wanting to do. We do not believe that this does it. We want it to, and we want to help, but it is not cognizant of the issues that have plagued us.”

Read the amendment here.

2019: Disproportionality and the Crisis of Baby Removals

In the summer of 2019, the New Zealand-based investigative reporting outlet Newsroom obtained footage of social workers from the New Zealand Ministry for Children surrounded by armed police officers attempting to persuade a Maori mother to give up her 6-day-old newborn while still in the hospital bed of the maternity ward. The shocking video, which can be found here, shows footage of the 19 year-old-mother clinging to her newborn, while officials repeatedly press her to give the child up to the state. The officials arrived at the ward to carry out a ‘without-notice’ removal order, meant to be used only in emergency cases, but, as Newsroom reported, there was little evidence that the infant in question was in any imminent danger.

Two Maori midwives working with this mother were refused entry into the maternity ward by police and subsequently had their swipe card access to the ward temporarily revoked by the Ministry for Children. Jean Te Huia, one of the mother’s midwives and head of the Maori Midwives Association, told Newsroom, “I believe Māori women in this country have a right to be frightened. I believe these women are racially profiled. They have a right to ask why this is happening to us.”[5] In a separate interview, Jean Te Huia continued: “Another mother was alone in the hospital room, still numb from the hips down from her Caesarean section birth, when her baby was taken away for ‘a quick check,’ only to be told a couple of hours later that the baby had in fact been taken by Oranga Tamariki [Ministry for Children]. I believe this is cruel and inhumane, as this strategically targets the mother when she is at her weakest, physically, spiritually, and emotionally.”

Following the Newsroom bombshell report in 2019, a review of the Ministry for Children’s baby removal policy by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, released in 2020, found that:

  • As of June 2019, of the 6,429 children in state custody, 4,420 of them were of Maori descent, making up a full 69% of children in care.
  • Maori newborns aged 0-3 months were taken into state custody at five times the rate of non-Maori babies.
  • Though findings of child abuse by Ministry for Children decreased over the previous three years, decisions to remove unborn Maori babies increased two-fold.
  • An intergenerational pattern: 48% of pregnant Maori mothers that the Ministry for Children decided to take into state custody before birth had been taken into state custody themselves as babies.

The report stated that:

  • Māori do in fact experience racist practices from the Ministry for Children.
  • Unprofessional “statutory social work” and practices are harming mothers and children.
  • Māori people need specialized support from the “right” people.
  • The Ministry for Children needs to work in partnership with Māori tribes and organizations to ensure that their rights are protected.

Following the 2019 Newsroom bombshell report, Maori leaders pressured the Ministry for Children’s chief executive, Grainne Moss, to step down to facilitate major institutional changes within the ministry. In late January of 2021, Moss resigned from her role in a move that Maori leaders called “a principled and responsible decision by the chief officer.”

Moss was replaced by the agency’s first head of Maori descent, Wira Gardiner, who was also the founding director of the Waitangi Tribunal, a government body that hears cases of discrimination against the Maori people (see below).

Read the Office of the Children’s Commissioner’s review here.

Read highlights of the review’s findings.

Learn more about Sir Wira Gardiner and the significance of his appointment to the Ministry here.

Present Day: Renewed Calls for Maori Control

In January 2021, in the wake of the baby removal scandal, and following reviews of numerous complaints against the Ministry for Children over several years, the Waitangi Tribunal,[6] an official government body created to look into issues of discrimination against the Maori people, published “an urgent inquiry” into the causes of overrepresentation of Maori children in out-of-home care.

Its report, which runs more than 250 pages, documented the disparities, as well as the historical and present-day causes of them, with a focus on the ongoing impact of colonization and discrimination on the Maori people. Most significantly, the report calls for the establishment of a Māori Transition Authority, supported and funded by the government but independent of it, with a broad mandate to identify changes within and outside of the Ministry for Children necessary to eliminate the need for state care of Māori children. The report also calls for the Maori Transition Authority to have the power to transfer of government functions, where appropriate, to the Maori community and Maori organizations to oversee the safety and well-being of Maori children.

In other words, the report calls for a fundamental overhaul of New Zealand’s approach to the protection of Maori children, funded by the government, but designed and implemented by representatives of the Maori community, thought the authors recommend that “for at least the foreseeable future,” the Ministry for Children would continue to play a role in in cases where Maori organizations met “resistance to an intervention considered necessary for the safety of a child or children.” In the wake of a similarly critical Waitangi Tribunal report on Maori health, the government created a Maori health authority that did not replace but works parallel to the mainstream Ministry of Health with an explicit goal of addressing racism in New Zealand’s health care.

It is important to note, however, that the tribunal plays solely an advisory role, and none of its recommendations are binding. Furthermore, a subsequent report by the Ministry for Children, published in September 2021, made far more modest recommendations that critics have called more of the same.

Read the full Waitangi Tribunal report here.

Read the Ministry for Children report here.

Read an op-ed critical of the Ministry for Children’s report in The Guardian.

Canada

Addressing Overrepresentation of Indigenous Families in the Child Welfare System in Manitoba, Canada: An Interview with Michael Champagne of Fearless R2W[7] 

The overrepresentation of Indigenous children in Canada’s child welfare systems can be traced back to the Indian residential school system that forcibly separated Indigenous children from their families with the express intent of breaking their ties to their culture and communities and which operated in Canada from the 1870s through to the 1990s.[8]

In the early 2000s, in attempt to address the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in out-of-home care, the Canadian government established the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry-Child Welfare Initiative. That body oversaw changes that were meant to better provide services to indigenous families that respected their cultural and linguistic heritage and give Indigenous communities greater governance over and autonomy within child welfare systems. The process was known as devolution.

 In 2000, the government of Manitoba province and Indigenous leaders there also signed agreements to restructure its child welfare system to recognize indigenous rights and authority. Despite these changes, inadequate funding left indigenous agencies understaffed and unable to adequately meet families’ needs and agency mandates, while the provincial government maintained the power to set child welfare standards and to decide which children came into care. As a result, devolution in Manitoba was a failure, as the number of children in out-of-home care doubled in the decade after its implementation. Today, 29% of children in Manitoba are Indigenous, while indigenous children make up almost 90% of children in out-of-home care.[9] [10]

 In December 2017, Manitoba’s Minister of Families created a child legislative review committee to once again formally review Manitoba’s child welfare policies. Michael Champagne, co-founder of the parent advocacy organization Fearless R2W, care-leaver, child of a boarding school survivor, and active member of IPAN, was asked to sit on the review committee, but Champagne came away disillusioned with committee’s 2018 report, fearing that real change would once again be illusory.

In this section you can read:

  • An interview that IPAN conducted with Michael Champagne of Fearless R2W about his experience on Manitoba’s legislative review committee and his concerns about the committee’s final report. 
  • The Manitoba committee’s report.
  • Fearless R2W’s recommendations for community and government change.

Interview with Michael Champagne

Q: What led this government panel to meet and create these recommendations? 

Champagne: Towards the end of the previous government in 2015, community members including myself went on the attack to say that it’s been nearly ten years since devolution in Manitoba, a process that supposedly gave the power of child welfare away from government and moved it to Indigenous communities. People all around the world will still reference the devolution process as a gold standard in terms of sharing power with Indigenous groups. But at the time of devolution, around 2005, there were approximately 5,000 children in care in Manitoba. By 2015, there were 10,000. It had doubled. What had happened was that we still have the exact same system of family separation but with an Indigenous face.

In 2016, our current government was elected and many indigenous leaders began telling the new government that what they were doing in child welfare was unacceptable. In 2017, Fearless R2W scheduled a meeting with the Minister of Families and delivered our recommendations on how to improve the child welfare system.

Those recommendations were developed by parents with lived experience in child welfare. We made it so there were 10 government recommendations and 10 community recommendations — a 10 by 10 rule.

Some of our recommendations for the government included increasing addiction services, providing increased funding for community and child drop-off centers, and the development of a housing plan, so that when children enter out-of-home care, parents don’t automatically lose their public housing, making it harder for them to regain custody of their children.

Some of the recommendations that parents at Fearless R2W developed for themselves included increasing safe social opportunities for families, increasing communication with child welfare groups around possible reforms, parents’ continued focus on attending programs required to reunify with their children, and building their own system literacy and communication skills.

We deliberately made our community recommendations items we believed we could achieve and that our parents would be empowered to work on. We had faith that parents would definitely get their recommendations done because it was in their and their families’ best interests. We felt that if we split the responsibility half-half, we could shame the government into action.

I don’t know if it was from parents and the community speaking up, or because Manitoba is nationally known as the worst province when it comes to child welfare, but the minister created a child legislative review committee and I was invited to be a member of it.

Q: What was it like representing Fearless R2W on a government panel? 

Champagne: I was impressed when I was invited to the panel. Of the seven panelists, five were Indigenous leaders. I thought that was appropriate. For me, it was important to be on the panel as a product of the child welfare system myself and because my mom went to Indian residential schools. An immediate red flag though was that the chair and vice chair was a white male minister and another white man.

As a panel member, representing Fearless R2W was relatively simple because Fearless R2W has values that are so clear. Our values align with our culture, and one of our values is that if someone asks for help, we should help rather than punish. I would hope that any group that wants to do parent advocacy would develop values that parents identify. Once those values are identified, everyone—volunteers, staff, and parents—must adhere to them.

While I was on the panel, my role was to listen to other people’s testimony. Separately, Fearless R2W also gave a presentation. Mary Burton, who co-founded Fearless R2W and was impacted by the system as a child, parent and grandparent, along with an impacted youth, talked about the Fearless R2W values and our government recommendations.

Our panel wasn’t reinventing the wheel. Our report references other reports that had been written but not been implemented. My dream was to use our report as a tool to get all the other reports implemented. I wanted to speak to the government’s desire for efficiency: I wanted to say: If you follow this panel’s recommendations, you will also be completing requirements of three other reports.

Q: How did you ultimately feel about the panel’s final report? 

Champagne: It’s frustrating to me that there’s very little in the way of rights for parents in this report. From a legislative perspective, in Manitoba, the Minister of Families, social workers, agencies, grandparents, foster parents, and even children have rights. But according to all Manitoba child welfare legislation [CFS Act, CFS Authorities Act, and Adoption Act], parents do not have rights other than the right to know when their child was apprehended.

Even from the perspective of rights for youth, that’s the smallest section of the report. Historically, there’s been a lack of local documentation that says what children’s rights are. We have had to rely on two international documents—the UN Convention on the Rights of Children and the UN Declaration of Rights on the Indigenous People—to communicate to children in the inner city of Winnipeg that they do indeed have rights.

To see how small a space the rights of parents and the rights of children ended up occupying in the report was very disappointing.

I also think that some of the most important recommendations in the report are at the end of it. That’s problematic because most people are not going to read an entire report all the way to the very end.

What I’ll highlight—what I believe is one of the most important recommendations in the report–is the section at the end of the report that talks about addressing the funding formula for Manitoba child welfare. Right now, the government allocates financial resources once a year to child welfare agencies based on the number of children each agency has in its care. What that creates is a financial incentive for those agencies to apprehend children and get them in their care. Unfortunately, we don’t really see in the report a lot of conversation around the funding formula. I wish that this section—found on page 33 of the report–was Section 1 of the report because that would emphasize the importance of removing that financial incentive to separate families

There’s also another point in that same section—found on page 34—that talks about profit-based entities. There are a number of for-profit agencies in Manitoba that provide ‘boutique’ services. They are financially raking it in from government contracts but providing substandard care that lack cultural sensitivity to Indigenous children. These for-profit entities are primarily staffed by and owned by non-Indigenous people. And the young people that we’ve connected with that have been in these facilities don’t use the polite term ‘lacking in cultural sensitivity.’ They just say that they’re racist.

One positive item in the report—found on page 30—is a call to write child welfare policy in plain language. Too often there’s a deliberate hiding behind legal language that happens within child welfare. It’s almost as if this legal language is used on purpose to confuse the parents so that they don’t know what’s happening and what’s expected of them.

Q: Why does this report matter?

Champagne: The government has made a number of changes in child welfare and will say it’s because of this report. But they are still allocating money based on the number of children those agencies have in their care. They are not financially incentivizing family reunification.

From our perspective at Fearless R2W, it’s cheaper for the government to have children living with their families. There’s so much cost related to child welfare. We need to cut those costs in half and give some of that money to parents for specific things they need to let them raise their own children.

Read the Manitoba report here. 

Find Fearless R2W’s recommendations here.

Eastern Europe: Pro-Family Legislation, Inadequate Implementation

As in other countries around the world, in Eastern Europe, families living in poverty make up the vast majority of families with children in out-of-home care, with a sizable number of children in care due to issues related to extreme poverty, including abandonment and situations in Romania, the Ukraine and Moldova, in which one or both parents are forced to by dire circumstances to go abroad for work. In Hungary, Romania, Czechia (the Czech Republic) and Slovakia, Roma children are overrepresented in out-of-home care. Data on the number of Roma children in out-of-home care are not systematically collected, in part because of misguided concerns that doing so would violate anti-discrimination laws. The best estimates, however, come from data collected on Hungary by the European Roma Rights Center, which found that 40% of children in out-of-home care are Roma and an additional 18% are half Roma, while Roma people make up only 7% of the Hungarian population and 13% of the Hungarian child population.[11]

Starting in the 1990s, as countries in Eastern Europe began a political and economic transformation following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Hungary and Romania also passed legislation aimed at dismantling the large institutions that had housed children throughout the decades of those countries’ command economies.  The progressive legislation called for increased investment in preventive services and community-based supports, removal of children from their families to be used only as a last resort, and placement of children in foster homes rather than institutions whenever possible. Some legislation also called for efforts to place Roma children with Roma foster families. Many institutions have since been closed down, starting with those in  Romania and Bulgaria that saw the worst atrocities of institutionalization. For many reasons, however, including countrywide economic hardship; insufficient tax income  and unequal redistribution of resources; the power of special interests that support continued investment in institutions; and continued bias against the poor and against Roma, progressive legislation has been followed by uneven implementation and inadequate investment in supporting families living in poverty.

In these countries, a child welfare parent advocacy movement has also yet to emerge that might advocate for greater support for families and Roma rights.

Read a history of both the legislative efforts to reform child welfare in Hungary and Romania as well as obstacles to implementation.

Read the 1997 law aimed at reforming child welfare in Hungary. [See attached.]

Read about efforts to reform the family foster care system in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. [See attached.]

Read an article about violations of Romani children in five countries in Eastern Europe published by the European Roma Rights Center, as well as an article about the violation of rights of Romani and disabled children in the Czech Republic.

Read this call by the European Roma Rights Center for the deinstitutionalization of Romani children.

The United States

From the Indian Child Welfare Act to the Poverty Is Not Neglect Bill

 The Indian Child Welfare Act

In the United States, the first federal effort to address the over-representation of Indigenous families in the child welfare system came in 1978, at a time when 25-35% of all Native children were being removed from their parents, the vast majority of whom were placed outside their families and communities. The federal Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) also came on the heels of decades of cultural genocide, during which Native children were removed from their families and placed in genocidal, abusive and neglectful boarding schools with the express goal of stripping them of their ties to their families and culture. The legislation aimed to ensure that efforts were made to keep Native children with their families, that placement preference was given to family and tribe, and it recognized tribes as the primary decision-making body in child protection cases involving Native children.

The passage of ICWA was a major step in addressing the devastation of Native American families by child protection. And yet, nearly 50 years after its passage, ICWA continues to be inadequately enforced, Native families continue to be over-represented in the child welfare system, while ICWA has come under attack in the courts.

Read the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) and related information here.

Read a history of Indian boarding schools in the United states leading up to the passage of ICWA.

Read about the history of the passage of ICWA and attacks on ICWA in the courts.

Read federal and state guidance for the implementation of ICWA.

State and Local Efforts to Address Racial Disproportionality

 Illinois: The Creation of a Racial Disproportionality in Child Welfare Task Force

Across the country, more than a third of all children will be the subject of a child protective investigation during the course of their childhood; that number rises to 53% for black children.[12] Throughout nearly every county in Illinois, Black children are overrepresented in every stage of involvement with the child welfare system; across the state they are investigated and taken into child protective custody at a rate almost three times higher than their representation in the general population.

In 2021, the Illinois state legislature passed Bill HB3821, which created a task force within the State Department of Children and Family Services to examine how race and gender impact mandatory reporting and child removal disparities, better understand the causes for and impact of involvement in the child welfare system, and identify needs of families and alternatives to foster care. The bill also sets up a mechanism for the state to review the department’s progress on implementing the Family First Prevention Services Act (see Investment in Prevention section of the library) and to explore protocols for race-blind protection screenings and removals.

This bill will also require the Task Force to submit a report with policy recommendations to the General Assembly of the Illinois House of Representatives within one year upon its first formal meeting that prioritize preserving and reunifying families, specifically Black families.

“The Shriver Center on Poverty Law conducted a work group with parents with lived experience, attorneys and other stakeholders who were involved in the child welfare system in some capacity,” explained Tony Lawlor, parent advocate, co-founder of the Family Justice Resource Center in Illinois and IPAN board member. “Together we identified this key issue and wanted to address it. The team was able to identify key data through extensive research and discussions that exposed this truth.… A few parents, including myself, provided testimony at the House committee hearing and Senate Committee Hearing, which attracted more politicians to support the bill after hearing our stories. Thus, having our parent testimonies really helped to push this bill to pass unanimously.”

Read Bill HB3821.

Read more about the Shriver Center on Poverty Law.

Minnesota: The African-American Family Preservation Bill

The racial disproportionality of Minnesota’s child welfare system has led to sustained efforts from parent organizers and their allies to raise public awareness, to pressure child welfare officials to implement changes on the frontline, and to work with legislators to pass the Minnesota African American Family Preservation Act.

Read the bill as originally introduced here.

Learn more about the bill

Read about the activism that led to the introduction of the bill in IPAN’s Toolkit for Transformation.

Efforts to Address the Overrepresentation of Poor Families in the Child Welfare System

The Poverty Is Not Neglect Bill

In 2019, Gwen Moore, a Democrat from Wisconsin in the House of Representatives and herself a system-affected parent, introduced the Poverty Is Not Neglect Bill to keep child welfare authorities from removing children based on poverty alone by banning states from drawing down federal dollars for these removals. Though the bill did not pass in the first two years that it was introduced, it is nonetheless significant in our library as it is the first federal legislation to explicitly state that children should never be separated from their families due to poverty alone.

Read the text of the legislation here.

Read this op-ed in support of the legislation.

An Abolitionist Movement Grows in the United States

In recent years in the United States, alongside the movement to end mass incarceration and the Black Lives Matter movement, a movement has grown that argues that the child welfare system not only doesn’t work but can’t work and that system-affected parents and their allies ought to be fighting to abolish it. This movement has renamed the child welfare system ‘the family policing’ and/or ‘the family regulation system,’ and they focus much of their attention on the disproportionate impact that the system has on Black and Native American families. While there is not one set of uniform policies that this movement advocates, some of their main goals are to do away with or greatly reduce mandated reporting, increase due process protection for families, and funnel money now spent on child welfare systems into community-based organizations.

Read an interview with academic and author Dorothy Roberts about this abolition movement published in Rise magazine.

Read more about the policy goals of this movement on the website of the Movement for Family Power, and local organizations like California Families Rise and JMac for Families.

[1] file:///C:/Users/Rachel/Downloads/NZCHILDPROTECTION.pdf

[2]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320857974_Child_Protection_in_New_Zealand_A_History_of_the_Future

file:///C:/Users/Rachel/Downloads/NZCHILDPROTECTION.pdf p. 10

[3]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320857974_Child_Protection_in_New_Zealand_A_History_of_the_Future/link/5b627212aca272a2d67b12fc/download

[4]Ministry of Social Development Regulatory Impact Statement Investing in Children: Legislative support for improving outcomes for Māori children and young people (New Zealand Government, November 2016) at [43]

[5] https://www.newsroom.co.nz/investigations/nzs-own-taken-generation

[6] The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi gave Māori citizens the same rights as British citizens. Despite this, Māori families have been fighting since the treaty’s enactment for those equal rights. One way they have done so is through The Waitangi Tribunal, a commission created by the New Zealand House of Representatives in the 1970s following numerous claims of breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi made by Maori leaders. The commission is made up of 10 prominent members of the Maori community and 10 non-Maori members, and includes journalists, legal experts, professors, physicians, activists and others. Though the Tribunal is limited in the kinds of cases it can consider and its findings are only advisory not binding, it nonetheless serves as an official government body that is able to speak out officially on issues of discrimination, something that most countries do not have.

[7] Interview conducted on July 14, 2021

[8] https://www.anishinabek.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/An-Overview-of-the-IRS-System-Booklet.pdf

[9] https://www.gov.mb.ca/healthychild/publications/hcm_2017reportsummary.pdf

[10]Manitoba Child Welfare Legislative Review Committee, “Opportunities to Improve Outcomes for Children and Youth” (Canada: Province of Manitoba, September 2018) 1.

[11] Anghel, Roxana, Herczog, Maria, Gabriela, Dima, “The Challenge of Reforming Child Protection in Eastern Europe: The Cases of Hungary and Romania,” Psychosocial Intervention 22. December 2013.

[12] Kim, Hyunil, Wilderman, Christopher, Jonson-Reid, Melissa, Drake, Brett, Lifetime Prevalence of Investigating Child Maltreatment Among U.S. Children, American Journal of Public Health, February 2017 https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303545