Structures of Oppression in the U.S. Child Welfare System: Reflections on Administrative Barriers to Equity

In the United States, child welfare reform efforts have dominated three decades of landscape. With glimmers of systemic promise and innumerable individual success stories, data suggest insufficient improvements, resulting in calls for transformation and even abolition. In this article, the authors illustrate structures of oppression that bolster the system’s tentacles, in regulating family life, contributing to racial disparities, reinforcing economic hardships, and supporting policies of family separation. Some of the structures take the form of practices, policies, laws or regulations. Individually and collectively, these structures may serve to oppress and harm those that the child welfare system intends to help. In this article, we include mandated reporting, substantiation decisions, central registries, decision-making processes, background checks, ongoing service delivery frameworks, conservative interpretations of confidentiality statutes, and how immigration status interplays with child welfare. Each of these structures could warrant an individual article, delving into the inner workings of how each oppresses families and the professionals who work with them. We also recognize that there are other structures of oppression that this article will not address. We encourage other scholars to not only continue the identification of oppressive structures, but to also work collaboratively, to generate solutions that dismantle these mechanisms that continue to perpetuate harm and unnecessary family separation.