Prevention of Child Maltreatment in Early Childhood: The Role of Poverty in Racial and Ethnic Disproportionality

Child welfare systems in the United States have a long history of differential treatment for children of different races and ethnicities.  Currently, African American children are represented in the out-of-home care population at much higher rates than they are represented in the general population.  Researchers have long recognized the problem of disproportionality in child welfare, but moving from problem recognition to developing effective prevention strategies requires better understanding of specifically where and how disproportionality occurs.  Researchers have now embarked upon a more thorough investigation into this phenomenon.  Recent studies have examined the powerful role of poverty and explored a possible “Hispanic Paradox” that has been found in other maternal and child health outcomes and may also exist for child maltreatment. Better understanding of racial and ethnic disparities in child maltreatment victimization has direct implications for prevention research, policy, and practice.

This paper seeks to further advance knowledge regarding the over and under representation of African-American and Hispanic children in child welfare in the United States to inform prevention. A recent paper compared rates of disproportionality in child welfare to rates of disproportionality in poverty and other public health outcomes that were not subject to potential bias (e.g. infant mortality) on a national level (Drake et al., 2011).  The paper concluded that the rate of overrepresentation of African American children was not due to inherent biases in the system, and that Hispanic children may actually be underrepresented, and/or have protective cultural factors, considering their rates of poverty. 

Using data from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, Division of Vital Statistics, and the US Census Bureau, the current paper examines racial and ethnic disproportionality ratios in child welfare involvement, infant mortality, and poverty for African American and Hispanic children age 0-3, in all 50 states.  Young children were chosen as the group of interest because of their increased risk for child abuse and neglect and to reduce the risk of bias stemming from broader contextual variables such as school environment and peer group influences.  Results demonstrate a strong relationship between disproportionality in poverty rates and disproportionality in child welfare involvement for both African American and Hispanic children.  These findings suggest that poverty may be driving the overrepresentation of different racial groups in the child welfare system, and that effective strategies for reducing maltreatment among African American and Hispanic families must include strategies to reduce poverty.