Does Poverty Cause Child Abuse?

Any child protective attorney can attest to the truth of this statement. New York City Family Courts, which handle child protective cases, are courts of the poor where white families are a significant minority. White families are given the benefit of the doubt when allegations of abuse and neglect arise, and, as noted in the statistics, they simply do not suffer the same scrutiny by mandated reporters. In addition, they have less contact with the mandated reporters at schools, mental health facilities, welfare offices and hospitals, resulting in fewer calls to the Administration for Children’s Services. Factors such as homelessness, unemployment and welfare enrollment bring poor families into greater contact with more bureaucracies and caseworkers. In addition, living in a poor neighborhood with drug use and street crime where there is greater police presence increases a family’s visibility to police scrutiny.

One of the only cases in which I represented a young white child of white parents involved a mother from England who was addicted to heroin. I came to call it my “heroin chic” case. Three times, the mother was found with the young child on a street in the classic “heroin high” pose—a blissful and euphoric state in which she was nodding out while standing up, slowly falling forward and displaying seemingly amazing acts of balance before slowly standing straight up again, her child by her side.

Was this mother immediately arrested and the child removed from her care by the Administration for Children’s Services? No, not the first two times. Emergency personnel who responded escorted the mother home and ACS offered the mother drug-rehabilitation services , with which she refused to cooperate. It wasn’t until the third time when the mother passed out on the street and the child was injured that a case was finally filed against the mother in family court. Had this been a child of color, it is much more likely that the child would have been immediately removed from the mother’s care when she was first found nodding out in the street.

I had this case during a time where there were hundreds of neglect cases being filed in family court involving allegations of marijuana use under the theory that marijuana was the gateway to hard drugs. Frequently, neglect charges were brought solely based upon recreational use and then other allegations were added later to bolster the neglect claims. And a small portion of these marijuana cases involved children being placed into foster care. Needless to say, these cases all involved families of color.

The racial and socio-economic prejudices, biases and assumptions that result in a disproportionate amount of children of color being placed into foster care in New York City are systemic and institutional issues, and they are larger issues than those of us in the family court who work on child protective cases can address. This bias that exists goes beyond foster care and implicates society as a whole.

Certainly, as the Cornell study shows, poverty is a strong risk factor in abuse and neglect cases. But it should never be assumed that abuse and neglect predominately occurs in poor homes or that children will be better off in foster care than in so called “impoverished enclaves” where they may live.

With contributions by Sarah McCarthy, a Kirkland and Ellis Fellow at the Children’s Law Center of New York. The views expressed are of those of the author and not of the organization.