Child Welfare Hurting Blacks

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Part One:

In the Sunday, October 29th, 2006 edition of the Columbus Dispatch, a news paper publication for the capital city of Columbus Ohio, the head line for the Metro State section of the paper was Child welfare hurting blacks. To give you a brief summery of what this article was about, a national study found that there is a higher proportion of black children in the in the nation’s child-welfare system than white, and they suffer worse consequences, according to this study. Let me give you a few staggering details mapped out by the article. Although black children make up about 15 percent of all children in the nation, they account for nearly 37 percent of the 500,000 children in foster care. In the state of Ohio alone, blacks make up 42 percent of children in temporary care and 52 percent of those in permanent custody who will never return home. To look at a few counties in Ohio, in Franklin County blacks make up nearly 55 percent of the children in the welfare system and even more staggering than that Cuyahoga County has the worst overrepresentation of black children in foster care with blacks making up 70 percent.

In another case study it was found that despite there being no differences in the rate of child abuse and neglect between races, black families are more frequently the subjects of abuse and neglect reports, and their children are removed from their homes more often. This strikes the question of where are these reports of abuse and neglect coming from. Here again we another case study to answer the question. This particular case study was done by Case Western and the study found that black children who live in poor, inner-city neighborhoods are referred to a child-welfare agency more often at several points in their lives, including at birth, when they enter preschool and kindergarten. This is where I find the first of my problems. Where does a doctor working in a hospital that caters to people that live in a manner that foreign to his socio-economic norms get off at saying that a specific family or mother is unfit to raise a child because the way in which she lives is sub-par to the type of life that he/she is accustomed to, and the same goes for the pre-school and the kindergarten teacher. (Let me clarify myself: I myself and the news paper are not saying that we should discourage people from reporting suspected cases of child abuse and neglect, but what I am saying is that the public should be better educated about the signs of abuse and neglect so that they may understand that there is a difference from just being poor.)