Should We Defund the Child Welfare System?
I’ve been slowly making my way through the harrowing documentary; Immigration Nation, which is a six-part exposé of US immigration enforcement under the Trump administration. Through this documentary, we see many of the bureaucratic steps, small tasks and people involved between confronting an undocumented person and putting them on a plane out of the US, or to a prison-holding center. After watching someone process documents (or, what they may see as ‘pushing paper.’), Becca Heller, the Executive Director of the The International Refugee Assistance Project would say “The brilliance of the system is that their job has been siphoned off in such a way that maybe what they see on a day-to-day basis seems justified. But when you add up all of the people ‘just doing their job’ it becomes this crazy, terrorizing system.”
I think the same could be said of other ineffective and punitive systems that are currently in place in the United States - policing, education, healthcare - all of them have one thing in common; they have a web of bureaucratic jobs that everyone makes up a small cog in the large wheel of a faceless system. I know folks in each of these sectors and they all would consider themselves well-intentioned, good people who just want to help society. These very people who work within all of these systems throw around big words to assign fault to why “the system” is the way it is. They say; “it’s because the core curriculum doesn’t allow for flexibility in teachiing ,” or “it’s the fault of the zero tolerance policies which have resulted in a school-to-prison pipeline,” "the healthcare system is broken because of the medical model! We shouldn’t be treating biological issues without also the psychological!” The problem is the “prison industrial complex,” “structural racism,” “white people!” (I’m also currently listening to the Nice White Parents podcast)…etc., etc.
Having worked within the child-welfare system for more than a decade, I think this desire to blame ideas that are too big to be attributed to any individual also rings true within this system, too. It’s common to hear phrases such as “the system is failing our children,” and “no one wants to adopt older children,” “caseworkers are under-educated and overworked,” “there is too much pressure to reunite families.” And within this behemoth of an agency who is financially responsible for caring for children I have never heard anyone take personal responsibility for a child languishing in foster care, for adoptive parents re-homing their adopted children, for the increase in adoptee suicides and the staggering amount of youth who age out of foster care and then experience homelessness. It can’t be the Investigator Specialist II, because they were only responsible for checking to see if there was any abuse or neglect. It can’t be the fault of the After-Hours On-Call Family Caseworker IV because they aren’t the primary support worker for the family, their job is to keep everyone safe until the Family Transportation Lead can be available to take the child to a safer place.
The child-welfare system is guilty of doing essentially what ICE has been doing; breaking families apart through minute day-to-day decisions that are seemingly insignificant so that it’s impossible to thread the needle of how your decision led to that child being placed in 6 foster homes in 7 months.
What the brilliant, Becca Heller stated works here, too; there are so many cogs in the wheel that no one individual feels responsible for upholding the structures of racism and participating in the continuation of unnecessary trauma.
So, should we defund the child welfare system? Well, it does seem that more money only increases the policies and procedures that support new ways to surveil and patrol people. So, yes - less money would likely allow us to hone in on and break down those big words and hefty concepts. However, I’m afraid we might lose lots of vulnerable children while we do it.