Upending the system to defend, not police families. Alan Dettlaff thinks poverty and racism have destroyed too many Black and brown families in the child welfare system. The University of Houston Professor wants to abolish it.
by Rachel Jones, National Press Foundation

In his prior career as a social worker, Alan Dettlaff said he was responsible for removing nearly 100 children from their families—and most of them were Black and brown. By the time he pivoted to academia, Dettlaff used a different lens to analyze the child welfare system and concluded that race and poverty fueled many decisions to separate more than 250,000 children each year from their families. He now helps lead what he calls an “abolitionist” movement called upEND—designed to “strengthen and support, not surveil and separate.” He told NPF fellows in McAllen why he risked—and lost—his position as Dean of the University of Houston Graduate School of Social work to defend his beliefs.

Most removals of children could be eliminated by providing financial support to families. Dettlaff decried what he called the “culture of removal” that’s deeply embedded in the existing system. “Many times those removals are done out of fear of liability on the part of the agency and on the part of the worker. In not one case that I removed a child did that child ever say to me, ‘Thank you very much for removing me from my horrible abusive parents.’” In fact, Dettlaff said, most of the children he visited after removal pleaded to go back to their families, regardless of what was happening in the home.

The numbers don’t lie. Child welfare hotlines are the source of most complaints that result in Black children entering the system, Dettlaff said, because teachers and medical providers overreport them. “There’s a lot of research that has shown that for similar issues, Black children are more likely to be reported to CPS than white children. Say two children, a white child and a Black child, go to a hospital with a head injury. The doctors, the medical staff are more likely to believe a white parent that it was an accident, and they’re more likely to refer the black child to Child Protective Services.”

Also, Black children are also more likely to be confirmed for maltreatment, and they’re significantly more likely to be removed and placed into foster care versus receiving services in the home. Once in foster care, Black children are much less likely to exit.

Three big myths fuel the way the system runs. As Dettlaff sees it:

The biggest misconception is that the child welfare system is a helpful, benevolent system that society can’t do without because it’s needed to protect children.
It’s necessary to separate children from their families when they’re being harmed.
When children are separated from their parents, they live in safe and loving foster homes. The child welfare system offers parents services to address whatever needs bring them to the attention of the system. If children can’t go back to their parents for whatever reason, it’s really the parents’ fault because all the services were offered.

There can be far more harm in removing children from their families. The number of children that were removed during President Trump’s entire “Zero Tolerance” immigration enforcement policy was about 3,000, Dettlaff said. However, “The child welfare system removes more than 30,00 children from their families every week in this country. And that pain and trauma that you all saw on TV during the Trump administration, that’s the same pain and trauma that children who are separated from their families by the child welfare system experience every day.”

Statistics show that nearly threequarters of children in foster care are there because of neglect, which Dettlaff said is largely associated with poverty. The failure to address issues of housing, clothing, shelter, educational needs, and things like that, results in taking the least complicated way out—removing children from their homes.

And then there’s the risk of far worse physical and sexual abuse that can occur in outofhome placements, Dettlaff said. “Those rates are even higher when you think about group home facilities. Texas is under a consent decree right now because of children being trafficked out of their group homes. Specifically, homes for girls who have experienced trafficking. That’s how bad the abuse is in foster care.

Speaker: Alan Dettlaff, Dean, Graduate College of Social Work, University of Houston

Takeaways, transcript and resources: https://nationalpress.org/topic/child...

This program was sponsored by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the HeisingSimons Foundation. NPF is solely responsible for the content.