“You Don’t Do That to a Mother”: Moral Understandings of Child Welfare Reporting Among Low-Income Mothers

• In Event: 1444 - Emerging Topics in Deviance and Social Control

Abstract

Tasked with responding to child abuse and neglect, Child Protective Services (CPS) accepts reports from community members such as relatives, friends, and neighbors. Given strong associations between poverty and child maltreatment stemming from the hardships of parenting amidst scarcity, low-income mothers may both learn about maltreatment in other families and also recognize the risk of being reported themselves. In in-depth interviews, low-income mothers in Providence, Rhode Island expressed ambivalence about summoning CPS, often disavowing this possibility. Their justifications for not reporting child maltreatment revealed a moral sensibility that it was not “right” to report, framing reporting as incompatible with moral virtue. First, mothers felt reporting could inflict further harm upon children, violating, rather than upholding, mothers’ moral commitments to child protection. Second, mothers expressed empathy towards other mothers, expressing loyalty to the institution of motherhood and the idea that children belong with their mothers. Third, mothers perceived spiteful motives in CPS reports from social network ties such that equating CPS reporting with vindictiveness left little room for calls driven by concern for children and families. These findings extend research on the mobilization of formal social control, showing how people draw on moral understandings in explaining their (lack of) mobilization.

Author

• Kelley Fong, Harvard University