Study offers evidence that racial bias is at play in overrepresentation of Black youth in Canadian child welfare systems

(Press-News.org) Researchers who examined Canadian child welfare data found that Black children were not only investigated at a higher rate than their white peers but were also more likely to be taken from their homes, even when the only difference between cases was the child’s race.

“We know that Black children, and Black people generally, are more likely to face socioeconomic hardship because of systemic racism. And, so, what we wanted to do here is address the question, with all things similar, is it economics or racial bias?” explained Alicia Boatswain-Kyte, lead author of the study and an Assistant Professor at the McGill School of Social Work.

The researchers used 2019 data collected from child welfare authorities across the country and published as the Canadian Incident Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect (CIS). New data is gathered every few years. The first Incident Study was conducted by McGill Professor Nico Trocmé, director of the School of Social Work, and the work is now led by University of Toronto Professor Barbara Fallon; both are co-authors of this paper.

Higher investigation and placement rates The final weighted data set, focusing on cases involving youth under 16, included 134,925 white families and 28,415 Black families. Quebec data was excluded for methodological reasons, as certain types of investigations were not captured in the data set.

The researchers found that maltreatment investigations centred on Black children at 2.27 times the rate for white children.

The team then compared out-of-home placements resulting from investigations. To isolate the role of race, they matched cases involving Black children to cases involving white children that had similar clinical and economic profiles.

In this matched sample, involving 55,458 cases, Black children were placed out-of-home at twice the rate of their white peers, despite their cases being otherwise similar.

Racial differences “Our results show that these disparities cannot be explained by poverty or economic hardship alone. They point to racial bias, specifically anti-Black racism, as a key factor driving these outcomes” said Boatswain-Kyte.

The professor also highlighted other differences revealed by the study, such as Black children being more likely to be reported as having suffered physical abuse, despite no significant differences in actual physical harm compared to white children. This may speak to bias regarding perceptions of Black parenting.

“I think it's important to understand and demystify this topic, because a lot of the general public see child welfare as something that's positive—because we're protecting children, right? But for Black children, this protection, it often translates into heightened scrutiny and disproportionate system involvement,” she said.

“We can't assume that once a child enters the child welfare system, they're going to come out being unscathed and perfectly OK. It remains an invasive system, one that can itself be a source of trauma,” she added.

The importance of data Many studies using CIS data had previously revealed differences in treatment regarding Indigenous youth in the child welfare system, but no study had previously looked at Black youth, Boatswain-Kyte said.

Noting that she admires the work done by Indigenous communities and researchers around the issues affecting Indigenous children within the systems, the professor said she hopes this study and future research can also lead to concrete changes in the experience of Black children, and to generally more just Canadian child welfare systems.

“Relying solely on CIS data is not enough, we urgently need comprehensive provincial-level data to fully understand these disparities. The more access we have to this data, the more we can publish these types of studies, the more awareness grows among the general public that we have to do something, because this is unjust. It's unjust that we have a system that's treating one group of children differently from another group of children,” she concluded.

About the study Racial disparities in child welfare: A propensity score matched analysis of Black and White children in Canada, by Alicia Boatswain-Kyte et al., was published in Child Abuse & Neglect.

The research was partly funded by the Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Child Welfare.

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