System Failures and the Realities of “Reform”: A Practical Understanding of Decision-Making in Child Welfare

How exactly is the child welfare system failing children? Abolitionist perspectives have centered the failures and harms inherent to and reproduced by the system. Despite voicing disagreement with abolition as a path forward, advocates/proponents of reform have not done the painstaking work of analyzing failures of the system itself. We begin to address this gap by examining the persistent phenomenon of critical thinking errors in child welfare, putting into context how and why the child welfare universe not only fails to ameliorate them but actively creates environments conducive to faulty thinking. We conclude that improving outcomes for families can only be accomplished through honest reckonings with current system dynamics and a radical recalibration in child welfare tolerance for child harm.