Ideally, in America, people would not be punished simply because they are poor. And yet we know the reality is that many systems and structures in society are designed so that people with money and influence can navigate life in ways that allows them to escape certain forms of punishment. This has been well documented in many instances like bail reform, punishment of the Wall Street bankers who helped create the 2008 economic crisis, and our current president, his son, and son-in-law who have clearly colluded with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election—despite their claims to the contrary.
One way we don’t often think of how this manifests is when it comes to parenting. Yet many women, most often women of color, find themselves the victims of children’s services agencies who can take custody of their children for child endangerment—often with little evidence to support those claims.
[In New York City, the Administration for Children’s Services] requests for removals filed in family court rose 40 percent in the first quarter of 2017, to 730 from 519, compared with the same period last year, according to figures obtained by The New York Times.
In interviews, dozens of lawyers working on these cases say the removals punish parents who have few resources. Their clients are predominantly poor black and Hispanic women, they say, and the criminalization of their parenting choices has led some to nickname the practice: Jane Crow.
There’s no denying that some people shouldn’t be in charge of the welfare of any children—theirs or otherwise. But poor parents who are struggling to make ends meet, who overwhelmingly love and take care of their children, and have no history of abusing them should not be penalized for making mistakes that do not warrant removal. This can disrupt the lives of their kids for long periods of time or even permanently. It can also be devastating for parents—who end up spending hours fighting for custody. Even worse, it seems as if several thousand of these families have their children returned to them in a month or less, which means the cases weren’t as dire as the agencies made them out to be.
Vivek Sankaran, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, has examined short-term placements of children in foster care. He learned that in the 2013 federal fiscal year, 25,000 children nationwide were in foster care for 30 days or fewer, about 10 percent of the total removals.
“We’ve inflicted the most devastating remedy we have on these families, then we’re basically saying, within a month, ‘Sorry, our mistake,’” he said. “And these families are left to deal with the consequences.”
One black woman in Brooklyn, Maisha Joefield, had her 5-year-old daughter taken away from her after she wandered off to find Joefield’s grandmother who lived across the street. Joefield had simply put her daughter to bed after a long day and got into the bathtub with headphones on. When she got out, her daughter was gone. She was a young single mother, working and enrolled in college, on a tight budget and living in a poor neighborhood, who was actively engaged in her child’s life. Her daughter’s father was also employed and actively involved, even though they were no longer together and she had child care support from her grandmother. This is someone who was not abusing her child and administrators from her child’s school said as much.
Yet she was placed in jail and her daughter was in foster care for four days. Her case remained open for a year and she endured routine caseworker visits. Her name also went on a registry for child abusers and stayed there for several years, which impacted her ability to obtain employment in her chosen field as a day care worker. This is the opposite of fairness and demonstrates a serious flaw in the system.
They asked me if I beat her,” Ms. Joefield said. “They’re putting me in this box of bad mothers.”
“It’s a slap in your face to have someone tell you what you can and cannot do with a child that you brought into this world,” she said, wiping tears away.
“I still get nervous,” she said. “You’re afraid to parent the way you would normally parent.” [...]
“This is my opinion: they factored in my age” — she was 25 at the time — “where I lived, and they put me in a box,” Ms. Joefield said.
Protecting children is of vital importance, but foster care should never be used as a punishment for poor parents. And much like other racial and economic disparities in our society, the impact of taking away kids who are already in loving and stable homes is disproportionately greater on women of color who are less likely to have disposable economic resources for lawyers to fight these cases.
If we want to end child abuse, this is not the way to do it. Poor women are demonized enough. Assumptions about their parenting choices, simply because they are poor, are based on stereotypes and are not justification for this kind of abuse within the system. “There’s this judgment that these mothers don’t have the ability to make decisions about their kids, and in that, society both infantilizes them and holds them to superhuman standards.” Let these mothers who are struggling live with respect and dignity—the same way we allow women who have greater financial means .