Moral Injury Within the US Child Welfare System

"Child welfare systems evolve within complex sociocultural contexts reflecting understandings of child maltreatment, resources and challenges of their times. Around the world child welfare systems provide essential services to protect the lives of children who are abused and neglected. Yet these systems can also do great harm. Moral Injury in Child Welfare is based on over 30 years of in-depth comparative, social work ethnographic research and historical analyses of the experiences of parents, children and frontline professionals involved in child welfare systems over time in the U.S., and across cultures in informal African American and Indigenous systems and formal Japanese and Scottish systems. It argues that U.S. child welfare policies and procedures are overdetermined by adversarial justice system values and practices and underdetermined by social work values and practices. This lack of balance leads to the relative silencing of children's, parents' and frontline professionals' voices and experiences, i.e., to epistemic injustice. When the voices of those within the system are silenced, then systemic racism and other biases remain unchecked, and interventions offered may be irrelevant or ineffective, introduce additional obstacles to already stressed families, and miss incidents of ongoing maltreatment. A system characterized by epistemic injustice creates vulnerabilities for psychological harm to those within it, i.e., to moral injury. Such psychological harm can, in turn, weaken the child welfare system itself by undermining parents' and children's abilities to engage in services, experienced professionals' motivation to remain in the field, and communities to thrive. We consider the implications of various ways of "doing" child welfare that prioritize psychosocial and community well-being alongside of physical safety for creating a more epistemically just, effective U.S. public child welfare system"-- Provided by publisher.