CHARLESTON, W.Va. – Child welfare systems like West Virginia’s often treat poverty as the basis for charges of neglect and decisions to remove children from their parents, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union found in a recent report.
In fact, West Virginia terminates parental rights at twice the rate of any other state, the report found.
The 146-page report, “‘If I Wasn’t Poor, I Wouldn’t Be Unfit’: The Family Separation Crisis in the US Child Welfare System,” documents how a family’s struggle to pay rent or maintain housing are misconstrued as neglect and interpreted as evidence of an inability and lack of fitness to parent.
“Parents need resources to help provide for their families, but what they are getting is surveillance, regulation, and punishment,” said Hina Naveed, Aryeh Neier fellow at Human Rights Watch and the ACLU and author of the report.
More than 250,000 children entered the nation’s foster system in 2019. The parents of nearly 61,000 children had their parental rights terminated that year. Parents said their families were “torn apart” or “destroyed” when parental rights were terminated.
“They took my life the day they took my girls,” said Emily Jones, a West Virginia parent who was interviewed for the report.
The report also found West Virginia parents in recovery who had their children taken away simply for taking substance use disorder (SUD) medication as prescribed by a doctor.
Significant racial and socioeconomic disparities in child welfare involvement were also found. Nationally, Black children are nearly twice as likely to be separated from their families as white children. In West Virginia, Black and multiracial children account for more 11.5 percent of foster system entries, but just 8.6 percent of the overall child population.
ACLU-WV Advocacy Director Eli Baumwell said what is commonly referred to as West Virginia’s child welfare system should more accurately be described as a family regulation system.
“It’s clear from this report that West Virginia’s family regulation system is broken and needs to be rethought,” Baumwell said.
The report analyzed national and state data on income and poverty levels, child maltreatment, and the foster system, and interviewed 138 people, including affected parents and caregivers, attorneys, government workers, local, state, and national advocates, and others. The report covered every state but takes a deep dive into four select states including West Virginia.
An estimated one in three children in the US will be part of a child welfare investigation by age 18. Nearly eight million children were referred to a child maltreatment hotline in 2019, with investigations resulting for three million of them. More than 80 percent were found not to have faced abuse or neglect.
Investigations are often highly stressful and traumatizing for children and their families, including unannounced home and school visits and body checks.
Broad and vague state definitions of abuse and neglect allow caseworkers to make subjective determinations. If a caseworker or agency determines that abuse or neglect has occurred, the parents or other caregivers are listed on a state central registry, often for years. This adversely affects their employment and ability to foster other children, including their own relatives.