Protecting children, destroying families
Sarah Karp, Kimiyo Naka and Micah Holmquist
The Chicago Reporter : Investigating Race and Poverty in Chicago since 1972
February 2002

A child welfare law that pushes for parental rights to be quickly terminated so foster children can be adopted has become a new, more expedient way to tear black families apart, writes Northwestern University Law Professor Dorothy Roberts in her new book, “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare.”

The problem with the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, Roberts argues, is that it has carried on the system’s “most glaring injustice — the racially biased removal of too many children from their homes.” It has also created a new, mostly black group of “legal orphans” whose biological parents have been given up on.

Roberts refers to two investigations by The Chicago Reporter. In January 1999 the Reporter found increasing terminations of parental rights in Cook County, with black families facing the highest rates. And an October 1999 investigation revealed that Illinois encouraged caseworkers to terminate parental rights and quickly push foster parents into adoption.

She contends that even when a relative takes in the child — as is often the case in Chicago — the family is unfairly subjected to state intrusion.

A Chicago woman named Devon, for example, had taken care of her four nieces and nephews since they were toddlers. When a new caseworker was assigned to her, Devon was told that her apartment was too small. Soon afterward, the children were removed from her home and weren’t returned for more than a year.

Roberts acknowledges that some will argue the system justifiably protects the rights of children rather than their parents. But, she adds, “the enormity of the racial gap suggests that at least some significant portion of children are removed from their homes unnecessarily.”

“Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare” is published by Basic Civitas Books in New York.

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