Gender Biases in Child Welfare

Substance-abusing child welfare parents: treatment and child placement outcomes.

The authors present findings from their study of 167 child welfare parents referred for substance abuse assessments. Relationships between gender, prior treatment, court-ordered intervention, significant others' support, and treatment and placement outcomes are examined. Findings indicate significant others' support positively influences all outcomes while court-ordered intervention is not pred...

Transgender children and youth: a child welfare practice perspective.

Using an ecological framework, the existing literature and research, and the authors' combined 60 years of clinical practice with children, youth, and families, this article examines gender variant childhood development from a holistic viewpoint where children, youth, and environments are understood as a unit in the context of their relationship to one another. The focus is limited to a discuss...

Racial and Gender Justice in the Child Welfare and Child Support Systems

Has the child welfare profession discovered nepotistic biases?

A major trend in foster care in developed countries over the past quarter century has been a shift toward placing children with "kin" rather than with unrelated foster parents. This change in practice is widely backed by legislation and is routinely justified as being in the best interests of the child. It is tempting to interpret this change as indicating that the child welfare profession has ...

Racial bias in child protection? A comparison of competing explanations using national data.

OBJECTIVE Cases of child abuse and neglect that involve black children are reported to and substantiated by public child welfare agencies at a rate approximately twice that of cases that involve white children. A range of studies have been performed to assess the degree to which this racial disproportionality is attributable to racial bias in physicians, nurses, and other professionals mandated...