Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost Its Way by Mical Raz (review)

A mid the satanic ritual abuse panic of the 1980s, congresswoman Patricia Schroeder (D-Colorado) explained why such scares resonate with the American public. "You don't need to convince people that child abuse is bad," she proclaimed (114). Indeed, efforts intended to stamp out child abuse remain virtually unassailable. Yet, as historian Mical Raz illustrates in her terrific new book, understandings of child abuse—and thus the measures enacted to limit such abuse—have changed dramatically over the past half century or so.

Abusive Policies explores the politics of child abuse from the late 1960s through the present, arguing that definitions of child abuse, neglect, and exploitation have expanded in the intervening years, while state and private mechanisms designed to curb abuse have grown more extensive, coercive, and punitive. Children and families of color, as well as poor and working-class families, have borne the brunt of these transformations, Raz shows, even as the racial, gender, and economic inequalities that enable and exacerbate child abuse remain largely unaddressed by the state and its private auxiliaries.

Raz's story begins with the establishment in 1969 of Parents Anonymous, "a self-help group for parents who either abused or were concerned they might abuse their children." Originally called Mothers Anonymous—in keeping with the larger political and cultural "belief that mothers posed the greatest danger to their children"—Parents Anonymous "played a pivotal role in changing perceptions of child abuse" in the United States (9, 40). Specifically, Parents Anonymous helped shape the discourse surrounding the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA). Signed into law in 1974, CAPTA "intentionally circumvented discussions of race and class" by "presenting child abuse as a scourge of all walks of society" (10, 11).

As appealing as this framing might have been—particularly during the "post-civil rights" moment in which CAPTA passed—the act disregarded research that proved "that child abuse was more common in low-income families" and also foreclosed more robust, redistributive policy solutions (11). Raz reveals how such "social welfare" approaches—touted by researchers and advocates cognizant of the ways in which "poverty and social inequities" precipitated child abuse—ultimately went "unheeded by politicians and policymakers" (32). These elite actors opted instead for ostensibly race- and class-neutral child abuse measures, a decision that reflected not only public skepticism of anti-poverty initiatives but also the increasing pathologization of poverty and crime, including the offense of child abuse.

While supposedly race- and class-neutral, mandatory child abuse reporting requirements—which proliferated in the mid-to-late 1970s—"led to significant increases in reporting of low-income and minority families," even though "only a fraction of the[se] reports involved physical harm to children" (62). Many of these reports stemmed from alleged incidents of emotional or verbal harm, a consequence of the expanding definition of child abuse in the twentieth century's second half. This surge in reporting also prompted more muscular, more coercive, and more consistent state interventions in the lives of poor and working-class children and families, disproportionately those of color. These interventions often resulted in the criminalization of family members, the removal of children from familial and extended kinship networks, and the placement of children in foster homes.

Further, such interventions offered little in the way of material support or other services for needy children and families. As Raz describes the situation in New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s, "Foster care placement involved taking children from suboptimal homes that could have benefited from further support and placing them in homes where there was a greater danger of physical abuse and death" (84). Indeed, the placement of poor and working-class children in public foster care became increasingly common just as the foster care system desegregated and just as public assistance mechanisms grew more punitive and less generous, as scholars like Julilly Kohler-Hausmann...