Welcome to the fall edition of the Family Justice Initiative newsletter. We hope you will find these resources helpful to your practice.
Confronting Racism in the Child Welfare System: A Lawyer’s Role
In August 2022, the American Bar Association (ABA) adopted Resolution 606, which calls on all legal professionals to recognize how oversurveillance of and underinvestment in Black families have shaped the child welfare field for centuries. The ABA Commission on Youth at Risk authored and sponsored the resolution. The resolution first notes that racial disparities are present at every point in the child welfare continuum–from investigations to family separation to termination of parental rights–and recognizes that child welfare laws rooted in the devaluation of Black families have created and perpetuated this disparity.
In an in-depth look at the history of child welfare policymaking, the resolution identifies two types of laws that have harmed Black families: those that encouraged surveillance and separation, and those that encouraged underinvestment in Black families. The report identifies six key legal areas where the historical impact of anti-Black racism reverberates today, and urges the field to consider legislative change in these areas:
- linking foster care funding with aid eligibility;
- defining abuse and neglect;
- policing families through mandated reporting;
- removing children based on parental incarceration;
- prioritizing cultural identity; and
- terminating parental rights.
The resolution concludes with a call to action to judges, attorneys, legislators, and other legal professionals to challenge current laws that devalue Black families, and invites these professionals to follow the lead of Black families with lived experience of the child welfare system to do so.
We believe that Resolution 606 should be understood as a call to action for child and parent attorneys. We each have a professional obligation to disrupt patterns of racial harm and oppression in the lives of our clients, and to challenge unjust laws that perpetuate this harm. We must use our privilege to confront the beliefs, practices, and laws that encourage devaluing Black family bonds. We must bring humility and critical self-reflection to our understanding of our own work in seeking what is “best” for children and families. While much work remains to develop concrete action steps for the field, Resolution 606 begins a vital conversation, one we are eager to continue in our work within the FJI and beyond.
The ABA has begun making presentations on how to implement Resolution 606 in different parts of the country. If you would like to talk about how to incorporate this policy into your own community’s child welfare work please reach out to the ABA Center on Children and the Law’s director Prudence Beidler Carr for more details.
Cathy Krebs
Committee Director
Children’s Rights Litigation Committee
ABA Litigation Section
Kathleen Creamer
Managing Attorney Family Advocacy Unit
Community Legal Services of Philadelphia