ABSTRACT

The child welfare system ostensibly exists to protect children. However, its methods—investigating allegations of abuse and neglect, filing cases against parents in court, removing children from their parents, and, in thousands of cases each year, permanently severing the legal relationship between children and their parents—have been shown to inflict great harm on children, despite the system’s stated goal. This Article looks at the system’s impact from a different angle: the harm to parents. It is both common sense and a proven fact that a child’s well-being depends in large part on the health and well-being of their parents. Yet the law fails to account for—or even permit consideration of—the harms parents experience during these legal proceedings.

This Article argues that the reason the law fails to acknowledge or account for the grave harms inflicted on parents is because of a false perception that some parents are “bad” and therefore deserve to be punished. By combining legal analysis and social science research with the words of impacted parents, this Article situates the harm that parents experience within the larger structure of the system. It catalogues the behavioral, social health, emotional, mental, and physical harms parents endure throughout the various family policing stages including surveillance, investigation, the threat of child removal, actual family separation, and termination of parental rights. In doing so, it illustrates that the health, well-being, and dignity of parents—and therefore, their children and their communities—is attacked when the state intervenes and takes control of their parenting.

To meet the stated goal of the “child welfare” system—ensuring children’s well-being—this Article concludes that the law must acknowledge and honor parents’ dignity. Accordingly, it recommends a two-step process. First, it proposes policy changes that would reduce harm to parents and children in the long and short term. Second, contributing to the crucial work already begun by parent activists and scholars, this Article details how, and the extent to which, the child welfare narrative must shift to create empathy towards parents and recognize their dignity.