Opening Remarks: Advocating for Change

• Author: Kurt Mundorff
• Pages: 353-358

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B.A. history, University of Oregon, 1992; M.A. forensic psychology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 2002; J.D. Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, 2004; currently LL.M., University of British Columbia Faculty of Law.

In preparing these comments I had one simple goal in mind: to say something substantive about child welfare without being offensive. It did not take me long to realize that this goal may be unfeasible. The field of child welfare is simply so polarized that any substantive statement is likely to be controversial. But, there are two points with which I believe everyone agrees: we all want to do something about child abuse and we all want to improve the system. As Walter Mondale observed at the time Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) was passed, "Not even Richard Nixon is in favor of child abuse."¹ And as the title of this symposium suggests, I think we are all dissatisfied with the current system. Some want the system to do more, others want it to do less. We all want it to do better. Thirty years after the enactment of CAPTA is an opportune moment to step back and examine the child welfare apparatus that we have put in place.

In Making an Issue of Child Abuse, Barbara J. Nelson provides important insight into the political movement that eventually culminated in the passage of CAPTA.² The groundswell of public attention to child abuse that finally resulted in CAPTA can be traced to a 1962 article by Dr. Henry Kempe on the battered child syndrome.³ Dr. Kempe, a pediatrician, gathered newly available x-ray data from seventy-one different hospitals. He discovered a shocking rate of parent-inflicted fractures in the bones of young children. Dr. Kemp characterized this phenomenon as a syndrome, thereby medicalizing the parents' abusive behaviors. This medicalization of child abuse has been a source of conflict ever since.⁴

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Does abuse result from a psychological defect within the parent? Or is it the result of a society that has for too long ignored familial violence? Or is it the result of a society that relegates so many of its members to conditions of poverty, which we know to be correlated with abuse.⁵ At the time Walter Mondale pushed CAPTA through the legislative process, it was politically untenable to ascribe child abuse to broader societal causes. CAPTA accordingly focused almost exclusively on the parental role and emphasized treatment.⁶ It ignored -and child welfare initiatives continue to ignore- the broader societal context of abuse. CAPTA had a swift and far-reaching impact on this country. It established the National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect and also provided model statutes for child protection programs. All fifty states eventually passed these model statutes, thus standardizing definitions of child abuse and neglect. These statutes also standardized methods for reporting and investigating maltreatment, provided guarantees of immunity for those making reports, and required the development of public education programs aimed at reducing the incidence of maltreatment.⁷

The intervening years have seen a lot of fine-tuning, but the basic structure of CAPTA remains. The result is a massive child welfare infrastructure. More than five million children were reported abused or neglected in 2001.⁸ More than a half-million children are in state care at any given time.⁹ New York City alone investigates fifty-five thousand reports of abuse each year¹⁰ and has about twenty-five thousand children in foster care.¹¹

In many ways, one's view of child welfare results from how the issue is framed. When we look into the eyes of a child who is hurt and scared, a child who has truly been abused, we want to act. We are mor-Page 355ally bound to act. We are morally bound to intervene and bring that child to safety. Viewed through this narrow frame, action is not only permissible, it is imperative. However, when the frame widens, things grow a bit murkier. When child welfare is viewed from the city level, one discovers that the vast majority of the kids in our city's foster care system are non-white children; this raises questions.¹² When one views child welfare from the national level...