An intense appetite for reforming and transforming child welfare services in the United States is yielding many new initiatives. Vulnerable children and families who become involved with child welfare clearly deserve higher quality and more effective services. New policies, programs, and practices should be built on sound evidence. Reforms based on misunderstandings about what the current data show may ultimately harm families. This review highlights 10 commonly held misconceptions which we assert are inconsistent with the best available contemporary evidence. Implications for better alignment of evidence and reform are discussed.

Barth et al. (2021) published an article in this journal identifying ten topics in the field of child welfare that are frequently discussed among professionals, advocates, and researchers in an effort to shape discussions of practice and policy reform. Concerned that these discussions are often poorly informed by the research evidence, Barth et al. intended to offer a corrective to these common, erroneous narratives. The Editor-in-Chief, Bruce Thyer, asked for suggestions for commentators and then invited some number of respondents to offer their perspectives on the original article. Here, we respond to each of the submitted papers, highlighting areas of agreement, and addressing other topics where we—sometimes sharply—disagree. We welcome an ongoing, fact-based, respectful dialogue to help shape child welfare reform. Efforts to improve the child welfare system are urgently needed; we stand by our view that large-scale practice and policy reform, in particular, must be guided by the best available research evidence.

Current calls to end structural racism in the US include proposals to abolish or radically transform child welfare services (CWS). While substantial research finds numerous poor outcomes following maltreatment, the efficacy and acceptability of CWS, particularly for children of color, has long sparked debate. This review summarizes the state of quantitative research across seven domains for children overall and by race with varying degrees of CWS contact. Current research with adequate comparisons provides no robust evidence to support the idea that children have worse outcomes from CWS involvement, but few studies focused on Black children. Implications for research and system change are discussed.

Abstract: Scholars and advocates are at odds about how to achieve higher levels of child safety and permanency. Calls for change include the recent upEND focus on eradication of child welfare services to a radical refocusing of the present system towards prevention/early intervention. To clarify the implications of reform over abolition, we seek to portray a future in which the abolition of child welfare has occurred, in juxtaposition to maintaining four core elements of established child maltreatment programmes around the world: (1) receiving and responding to community signals about the risk to children; (2) assessment of need coupled with a proportionate response; (3) rights protections to ensure fairness when placement outside the family is required; and (4) procedures for accountability and quality improvement. For each of these functions, we outline abolitionist advocates' positions and implications for children and parents. Across these elements, we delineate how assigning these responsibilities to communities, as suggested by upEND, would likely (1) exaggerate racial and economic inequities and (2) create structural barriers that would increase harm to children. We suggest several evidence‐informed enhancements to practice, research and policy that would mitigate these inequities while also increasing safety and permanency.

We used National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System and Census data to examine Black-White and Hispanic-White disparities in reporting, substantiation, and out-of-home placement both descriptively from 2005-2019 and in multivariate models from 2007-2017. We also tracked contemporaneous social risk (e.g., child poverty) and child harm (e.g., infant mortality) disparities using non-child protective services (CPS) sources and compared them to CPS reporting rate disparities. Black-White CPS reporting disparities were lower than found in non-CPS risk and harm benchmarks. Consistent with the Hispanic paradox, Hispanic-White CPS reporting disparities were lower than risk disparities but similar to harm disparities. Descriptive and multivariate analyses of data from the past several years indicated that Black children were less likely to be substantiated or placed into out-of-home care following a report than White children. Hispanic children were slightly more likely to be substantiated or placed in out-of-home care than White children overall, but this difference disappeared in multivariate models. Available data provide no evidence that Black children were overreported relative to observed risks and harms reflected in non-CPS data. Reducing reporting rates among Black children will require addressing broader conditions associated with maltreatment.