Expanding State Research Capacity in Child Welfare: The Need for State Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

In 2018, funding for child welfare programs drastically changed under the Bipartisan Budget Act: Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA). To pull Title IV-E funding for prevention programs, all states must evaluate outcomes of children and families involved in child welfare. To meet these guidelines, state agencies need research structures, including internal Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). IRBs allow state governments to conduct ethical research, and expand research within the discipline. As researchers pursue careers outside of academia, these structures are pivotal and lead to policy contributions and knowledge in the discipline. This study evaluates the following in all 50 US states: How many states have internal IRBs? How many states have IRBs that are accessible to the state’s child welfare agency? How have states set-up internal IRBs to function within a government context? The analysis found 34 states have at least one federally registered IRB of which 31 appear active within the state. However, only 11 of the 31 states have an IRB accessible to child welfare departments. These 11 states provide a blueprint for how to establish and maintain an IRB that supports child welfare agencies. Three distinct set ups emerged: holistic multi-department IRB, singular department/agency IRB, or those governed by an inter-agency sharing agreement. These findings show multiple states use an internal IRB to support state researchers. However, these IRBs are not currently accessible to the child welfare agency. For agencies to meet the requirements of FFPSA, IRBs must be expanded to the child welfare agency or built within the state.

Mechanisms of American Indian and Alaska Native Inequality in Child Welfare Across U.S. States.

American Indian and Alaska Native children are separated from their families by state child welfare agencies at exceptionally high rates. This study connects contemporary trends in Native family separation to histories of Indian child removal, and provides insights into the geographies and institutional sites where inequalities emerge. We find that the total number of AIAN children in foster care or adoptive homes in states with large Native populations has increased since the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978). We find that risks of child welfare system contact are highest for AIAN infants, and that risk is highly variable across states. Our estimates show that in high risk states at 2014 - 2018 levels of risk, more than half of AIAN children will ever be investigated by a child welfare agency, more than one in five will experience a substantiated maltreatment case, and more than one in five will ever enter foster care. We further find that child welfare agency case processing exacerbates inequality. AIAN children are more likely than white children to enter foster care, conditional on experiencing a substantiated maltreatment case, than are white children. These exceptionally high levels of risk indicate that the crisis of Indian family separation is ongoing. For AIAN children in states like Minnesota, Alaska, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Oklahoma, contact with the child welfare system is a routine part of growing up.

Speaking bodies – silenced voices: Child protection and the knowledge culture of ‘evidencing’

Using the metaphors body and voice and drawing on critical contributions on biopolitics, this article interrogates children’s participation rights in a knowledge culture of ‘evidencing’. With child welfare and protection practice as an empirical example, I analyse written assessment reports from a Swedish child welfare agency, all exemplifying how social workers evidence needs for protection and reasons for removing children from the home. I discuss how ‘evidencing’ equals a knowledge culture of seeing-believing and predicting-believing and the search for visibly damaged bodies and underdeveloped minds. I furthermore problematise how such conceptualisation of evidencing foregrounds children’s ‘speaking’ bodies while silencing their voices. By showing these manifestations of evidencing, this critical contribution discusses some wider epistemic concerns for fields influenced by the knowledge cultures of ‘the evidence-based’.

Social change in developmental times? On ‘changeability’ and the uneven timings of child welfare interventions

While temporality has been addressed in the context of child welfare, the temporal dimensions of differentiation and othering remain unacknowledged. This article draws on material from a Swedish child welfare agency and is theoretically inspired by postcolonial and queer theories and critical childhood studies. It is based on an analytical juxtaposition of care order applications recommending immediate child welfare interventions versus interventions that are recommended after long ongoing assessments. Such recommendations are addressed as unequal in terms of timing. The article discusses temporal themes related to permanency versus temporary, which guide assessments of changeability. I show how immediate interventions respond to chronicity—the temporality of incurability, permanency, and underdevelopment. However, social problems in long ongoing assessments are assessed as permanent only after long ongoing observations or passage of time. The article discusses how ideas about change reproduce wider societal and intersecting inequalities. This becomes visible when considering time as allocated to parents and their potential to bring about change. I argue that even though permanency differs from chronicity, it still limits a discussion about change as societal, and the detection of problems remains within a developmentalist and neoliberal framework. In the concluding remarks, I offer an alternative reading of allocated time that can manoeuvre developmentalist logics, while balancing responsibilisation between the individual and the society.

Ten Answers Every Child Welfare Agency Should Provide

A university-child welfare agency partnership between the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work at the University of Toronto and Highland Shores Children’s Aid (Highland Shores), a child welfare agency in Ontario, allowed for the identification and examination of ten questions to which every child welfare organization should know the answers. Using data primarily from the Ontario Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (OCANDS), members of the partnership were able to answer these key questions about the children and families served by Highland Shores and the services provided to children and families. The Ontario child welfare sector has experienced challenges in utilizing existing data sources to inform practice and policy. The results of this partnership illustrate how administrative data can be used to answer relevant, field-driven questions. Ultimately, the answers to these questions are valuable to the broader child welfare sector and can help to enhance agency accountability and improve services provided to vulnerable children and their families.