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  • Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost Its Way by Mical Raz
  • Jeffrey P. Brosco
Mical Raz. Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost Its Way. Studies in Social Medicine. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. xvi + 164 pp. Ill. $26.95 (978-1-4696-6121-6).

Child abuse policy in the United States is broken, according to Mical Raz, who presents a forceful argument that the root of the problem lies in our recent past. In her compact and incisive book, Raz uses published documents and some archival material to recount key episodes in the 1970s and 80s that led to a punitive approach to child abuse: policy-makers focused on individual family "perpetrators" rather than following the research suggesting that broader social and economic issues were the cause of child maltreatment. Instead of supporting families living in poverty, policies separated children from their caregivers. Raz is particularly critical of the decision to label instances of child neglect as child abuse, with all the emotional weight that comes with highly publicized but relatively rare examples of physical or sexual abuse. By casting such a wide net in reporting laws, one in three children in the United States has been the subject of a child abuse investigation. The number is even higher—nearly one out of two—among Black children (p. 1). That Black families have suffered disproportionately is not surprising, given Raz's detailed description of implicit, and sometimes explicit, racism in nearly every decision regarding child abuse policy.

Raz begins with a description of the group Parents Anonymous, founded in the 1970s on the model of Alcoholic Anonymous. With support from the federal government, the group grew to over 500 chapters nationwide, raising awareness about child abuse and offering support to parents who wanted to stop hurting their children. Raz takes a dim view of their methods and holds the group largely responsible for the view of child abuse as unrelated to poverty and solely a problem of individual psychopathy. Key politicians such as Senator Walter Mondale embraced this notion of child abuse as affecting all races and classes, and explicitly rejected data showing higher rates among Black families and poor families. Despite research suggesting a causal role of poverty, Raz notes that policy-makers chose "seemingly neutral measures that neither explicitly targeted low-income families nor tied abuse to socioeconomic status," thus depriving families of the material support they needed (p. 54).

In another chapter, Raz describes trends in the 1960s and 70s to place children in foster care. Native American children were separated from their families at extraordinarily high rates, including most, if not all, children from entire tribes; criticism led to a 1978 law returning control over child removal to tribal authorities (p. 79). Black children were also removed at higher rates than white children; rather than worry that too many children were being separated, critics promoted adoption to help children who were "languishing" in foster care. In later chapters, Raz uses two moral panics in the 1980s, "crack babies" and "ritualistic child sexual abuse," to reinforce what she sees as the destructive pattern of child abuse policy: a few vocal individuals exclaim, the eager media amplifies, worried politicians overreact, sober researchers warn, and nameless bureaucrats ignore better solutions. Raz argues that policy-makers, child welfare experts, and popular media [End Page 145] expanded and mobilized the concept of child abuse to become a "public threat and cultural phenomenon"; as such, they failed to protect and instead harmed thousands of children and their families (p. 92).

Raz's judgments throughout the book are harsh. Are they fair? For example, Raz excoriates Mondale yet notes that he and his allies chose race-blind policies that did not focus on socioeconomic issues because they faced widespread political reaction against the 1960s war on poverty. Another scholar could plausibly applaud Mondale for refusing to blame Black families and for supporting legislation that avoided President Nixon's veto and therefore became law. Indeed, throughout the book Raz highlights critics and uses hindsight to demonstrate how policy went wrong. We hear little about the struggle to predict which children are in danger...

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