Durable Paternalism: Institutions and Racial Inequality in Child Welfare

• In Event: 065 - Regular Session. Social Welfare Programs

Abstract

State child welfare agencies are tasked with receiving, screening, and investigating reports of child maltreatment. Unlike other agencies tasked with social control, child welfare bureaucracies rarely have the capacity conduct active surveillance. Instead, they almost entirely rely on community members and professionals from other domains that have routine contact with families for the detection of child abuse and neglect. Child welfare agencies' organizational dependence on external actors for a necessary cause of service delivery or intervention, the generation of a maltreatment report, likely creates powerful dependencies between the scale of child welfare surveillance and the rules and resources that structure the provision of collective goods in neighboring domains. Put simply, child welfare bureaucracies depend on street-level bureaucrats, like police and social workers, to be the front-line detectors and reporters of child abuse and neglect. This study investigates why some states have higher volumes of child maltreatment reports than do others. I suggest that the resources available to these external monitors and the rules and norms that govern their behavior are a key cause of variation in the detection of child maltreatment. This paper examines the relationships between place-level maltreatment reporting rates and the characteristics of public service bureaucracies, such as police forces, school districts, and social service agencies.

Author

• Frank Edwards, University of Washington