Search Results

Chapter Four focuses on the removal of children from their homes and placement in substitute care such as foster homes and institutions, which increased notably in the mid 1970s. Furthermore, the removal of large numbers of Native American children from their homes captured the attention of civil rights activists, who helped set the stage for the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act. ICWA helped restore child welfare and placement decisions to tribal jurisdiction. Yet for African American families in urban cities, who were also disproportionately removed from their parents and spent longer in substitute care, there was little respite. African American children were not afforded similar protections as those Native American children and their families had gained. In fact, most debates focused on the need to increase adoption, rather than reduce foster care placement. No one cautioned that the expansion of child abuse definitions might be leading to unnecessary child removal. This chapter examines the processes leading to the over-removal of urban African American children, and the shift in discourse towards incentivizing adoption.

This chapter discusses how children at risk of maltreatment are removed from home in the United States. We discuss the legislative framework and the processes and agents involved in the decision-making process around removal, including child protection agencies and courts. The chapter presents evidence on several major blind spots in the system, including bias and delays in decision-making. Thus, it reveals the need for further research on how these blind spots impact children and their families, as well as on the impact of programs that aim at improving them. Further, this chapter also underscores the need for systemic change to ensure that bias can be eliminated and children and parents, especially those with the least amount of resources, also can be engaged and empowered users of the system.

This chapter examines historical confinement via the example of homes for Indigenous children in Australia. Between 1910 and 1970 Indigenous children were removed from their families and placed in children’s homes in order to assimilate and ‘civilise’ them. Frequently, this removal was forcible. This chapter explores how these homes are remembered and imagined in oral history testimonies, as well as in the cultural representations, Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence (2002), Doris Garimara Pilkington’s life narrative and its film adaptation, Rabbit Proof Fence (Noyce, 2002).