DEE WILSON CONSULTING
Abolition, Reform and Redesign in Child Welfare Services
(Originally published June 2026)
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A special issue of Children and Youth Services Review (CYSR), ‘New Approaches to Care,’ (available online, March 31, 2026) addresses the tensions between child welfare abolitionist perspectives and reform and redesign agendas. The editors, Michelle Johnson Montoya, Elizabeth Fernandez and Darcey Merritt, comment: “Across North America, and in other settler societies, the legitimacy and design of child protective services continue to be scrutinized” due to “the persistent overrepresentation of Black, indigenous and socioeconomically disadvantaged children, and the limited progress achieved by decades of incremental reform. Others counter that, while improvements are necessary, a child protective response remains essential to safeguard children from harm. This special issue was intentionally situated in the tension between these perspectives …” And: “the contributions in this special issue neither romanticize abolition nor defend the status quo, instead, they seek to advance an actionable agenda.”
Most of the scholars who have contributed articles to this special issue of CYSR are neither abolitionist or reformers. Their main goal is to redesign child welfare systems to be more pro-active, prevention oriented and voluntary, rather than reactive and coercive. In “Suiting up”: Preparing workforces to take on the mantle of preventing child maltreatment from a public health perspective,” Russ, et al state: “We advocate for the re-design and reform approach rather than the abolition route. Although we acknowledge that the racial disproportionality … is a fundamental problem that has plagued system outcomes for too long, there will always be some requirement for state intervention to protect children and young people from egregious maltreatment.” These scholars “advocate for a public health approach to ensuring the safety and well-being of children.” They assert that “Public health approaches focus on primary prevention and population wide delivery of interventions,” and, by doing so, reduce the need for involuntary state intervention in the lives of troubled families.
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This is not a new orientation. In 1995, “A Nation’s Shame: Fatal Child Abuse and Neglect in the United States. A Report of the U.S. Advisory Committee on Child Abuse and Neglect” advocated for the development of “community-based family services and primary prevention efforts” to complement U.S. child protection programs. The recommendations of this prestigious committee of advocates and experts went nowhere, in part because during the mid-1990s state child welfare systems were overwhelmed by the large increase in foster care associated with a substance abuse epidemic. The immediate challenge was to move large numbers of children out of foster care through improved permanent planning. There were no resources for primary prevention.
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In 2016, David Sanders, Chair of the federally appointed Committee to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities, in his introduction to the Committee’s final report commented on the “need to dramatically redesign our approach to eliminate child abuse and neglect fatalities.” Sanders stated: “Members of Congress have taken the lead on proposing an emphasis on prevention and early intervention in order to mitigate the need for late-end, crisis oriented, intrusive and expensive interventions.” And: “Involvement of health care and public health agencies and professionals is vital to safety for children.” The Commission’s final report recommended that “Congress should establish a multi-year innovation program to finance the development and evaluation of promising multi-disciplinary prevention initiatives ….”
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Many advocates and child welfare leaders believed that the Family First Prevention Services Act passed in 2018 was transformational legislation, only to find implementation of the law bogged down in bureaucratic obstacles for years, and limited in effect by the reluctance of state governments to provide state matching funds to create new services. Family First has had a modest effect (at best) on prevention/early intervention services that seek to reduce child maltreatment.
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Advocates, child welfare leaders, and scholars in the U.S. and other English-speaking countries periodically rediscover or reiterate the need to build a system of preventive services to reduce the need for too little/too late involuntary services, seemingly with little effect due to lack of public pressure to use limited resources for this purpose. However, editors of the CYSR issue, ‘New Approaches to Care’ are proposing something different, i.e., to reallocate existing resources to create child welfare systems oriented around primary prevention rather than as a back-end response to severe maltreatment; and with a different goal - to do less harm to low income families - especially Black and indigenous families, by giving persons with “lived experience” of child welfare services a voice in the design and oversight of these systems and services.
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This is an ambitious, controversial agenda, the elements of which are articulated in several articles by various scholars rather than a comprehensive detailed proposal of a new legal and service delivery framework for child welfare. Some authors propose economic interventions and concrete services to address poverty related needs. Other scholars emphasize the need for easy access to a wide range of prevention services delivered in Family Support Centers, service navigators to assist families in finding and connecting with services, use of collaborative interagency service delivery models, engagement skill training of caseworkers and other professionals in multiple agencies, and participation of persons with “lived experience” of child welfare involvement in community oversight of services and service delivery.
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In this special issue of CYSR, there is much abolitionist inspired criticism of child protection systems as they currently function, but very little discussion of reforms of these systems, with the exception of a proposal to scale back mandatory reporting requirements to the most serious cases of alleged child maltreatment. The abolition movement would eliminate mandatory reporting, as well as all other legal mandates in child welfare. However, Russ, et al, (Australian scholars) would retain “statutory services,” including a limited version of mandatory reporting, while creating primary prevention services based on public health principles, along with a value framework they believe would eventually make involuntary services less necessary.
What Russ, et al, and other contributors to this special issue of CYSR do not do is offer guidelines for how to transition from the current system of child protection in Australia and the U.S. that includes mandatory reporting, investigations/family assessments, involuntary child removal in extreme cases, court structure, etc., to a practice framework that lacks most or all of these elements. How would these countries’ child welfare systems alter the ratio of involuntary practices anchored in investigations of families to prevention services with much reduced coercive elements? Is this possible, or is this aspiration a pipedream?
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One child welfare system vs. two?
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The idea that state governments in the U.S. that have understaffed and underfunded their child welfare systems for decades would fund two systems, one for prevention of maltreatment and the other for child protection following maltreatment, is far-fetched, to put it mildly. The legislative resistance to large new child welfare expenditures is as true in blue states as in red ones, as indicated by the response to Family First and also by the unwillingness in Washington to reinvest savings from the 50% reduction in state’s foster care population since 2019 in substance abuse treatment, family support services and an infrastructure for in-home safety planning essential for child safety.
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If, in some radically altered social environment a progressive state was willing to create two child welfare systems, one for prevention and the other for child protection, this dubious experiment would likely result in two underfunded systems fighting each other for scarce resources. No governor with administrative experience would support an initiative that would lead to constant interagency turmoil.
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In future years, a state such as Washington might decide to fund anti- poverty programs, e.g., to eliminate severe poverty in families with annual incomes less than half the federal poverty standard; or to greatly increase funding for substance abuse and domestic violence prevention due to the wide range of costly social harms associated with these phenomena. Child abuse and neglect prevention would be folded into an initiative with much broader goals. This type of initiative would bring multiple agencies together in an interagency collaboration rather than creating a new agency for prevention. An ambitious initiative of this type would likely leave the state’s child welfare agency and its child protection mission intact.
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Abolitionists are not advocating for a different type of public child welfare agency that rejects family policing/surveillance and involuntary family separation. Rather they are advocating for the adoption of public policies that would (taken together) create a better and more just society, one that resembles the social welfare states of Northern Europe: “In addition to direct material supports – including a universal basic income, permanent child allowances, and other direct cash transfers – we also advocate for broader structural changes necessary to end poverty and advance the safety and well-being of all children, including a housing guarantee, access to quality food, free public transportation, and free and accessible child care, health care and mental health care.” And “abolition is not about simply ending the family policing system; it is about creating a new society …” (Dettlaff and Pendleton, 2025)
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Public child welfare systems in the U.S. and Australia must respond to reports of child maltreatment in communities, states and societies that lack even the aspiration to support low-income families with public benefits proposed by abolitionists. In addition, child welfare agencies are challenged to assist many families struggling with substance abuse, chronic mental health conditions and/or domestic violence, factors Dettlaff and Pendleton do not mention in their chapter. How would abolitionists, post-abolition, deal with conditions faced by the child welfare agencies they attack in the absence of any of the anti-poverty policies and family support services they advocate for?
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The current cost of the U.S. child welfare system, $30-35 billion dollars annually, is a tiny fraction of the cost of the policy agenda proposed by abolitionists. If all of this funding was used to create community-based services, the result would not come close to meeting the basic needs of low-income families in the U.S., or develop an effective community response to serious child maltreatment or threat of maltreatment.
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The idea of some abolitionists that a society with greatly reduced income inequality and much increased public benefits would not need a child welfare system is mistaken. The social democracies of Northern Europe have large child welfare systems and rates of foster care higher than in the U.S. However, these child welfare systems have a strong preference for provision of voluntary services and deep resistance to permanent family separation, i.e., adoption, for one main reason, i.e., their child welfare agencies have far less involvement with infants, toddlers and other pre-school children than in the U.S.
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Abolitionists are right that countries’ socio-economic conditions and social welfare policies shape their child welfare systems. In the U.S., high rates of child poverty and inadequate social welfare benefits have resulted in child protection systems inundated with reports of child neglect (Dettlaff and Pendleton put “neglect” in quotes) associated with substance abuse, mental illness and domestic violence; and foster care systems in which almost half of children placed out-of-the-home are 0-5. It is the vulnerability of infants and other preschool children and their need for permanency, along with the difficulty of engaging troubled parents in therapeutic services that has led to a public policy preference for legal mandates and permanent planning timelines in the U.S. Any serious proposal for reform, redesign or abolition of child welfare must address how agencies – or communities in the absence of a public child welfare agency – would better protect young children living in dire circumstances resulting from the combination of poverty, parental substance misuse and mental illness, and often domestic violence as well. It is not enough to envision a better world in which such circumstances do not exist.
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Redesigning child welfare systems
Public child welfare agencies in the U.S. need to be redesigned to better protect infants and toddlers through early intervention (not primary prevention) and to increase the expertise and mutual support of caseworkers and other professionals who work with chronically neglecting families. Redesign requires a reimagining of how to best utilize community agencies such as public health, substance abuse and mental health treatment agencies, along with domestic violence crisis intervention specialists and parent advocates in collaborative relationships with child welfare offices.
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The most urgent need is to legally empower – and fund – public health agencies to reach out to parents of infants and toddlers and pregnant mothers already receiving publicly funded therapeutic services with offers of assistance before a CPS report is received. The public policy guideline should be: “A CPS investigation should never be the first, or only, contact that a troubled family has with a helping professional.” Referrals of prenatal substance misuse should always result in personal outreach to a family rather than an online referral for services. Waiting for infants to be at ‘risk of imminent harm’ before taking action to protect them is a formula for child fatalities and near-fatalities. This is too little, too late in many instances of infant and toddler deaths from ingesting dangerous drugs or unsafe sleep practices.
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The idea that public child welfare agencies have, after decades, figured out the best response to prenatal substance abuse is false. This is an issue that requires ongoing research and careful evaluation of child outcomes, not ideological responses. In the meantime, public health professionals, CPS caseworkers and substance abuse treatment specialists should make safety decisions and develop service plans in multi-disciplinary formats.
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The CPS response to chronic neglect in Washington State has been a miserable failure for decades, in part because an assigned caseworker quickly becomes overwhelmed by the multiple challenges presented by chronically referring families and by the history of the failure of services to improve family functioning. Chronic neglect cases should be assigned to four or five-person case management teams that include a CPS caseworker, mental health therapist, substance abuse assessment specialist, parent advocate and public health nurse. All medium and large child welfare offices should be funded to develop and house at least one of these case management teams, both to sustain the morale of professionals working with chronically referring families and to utilize a wide range of expertise.
The redesign of child welfare should take a collaborative path in which responsibility for child protection is shared among multiple agencies, rather than resting with a single agency poorly equipped for the task.
References
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Dettlaff, A. & Pendleton, M., “How Reforms Stabilize Policing, Surveillance and Terror,” Chapter 12 in Policing, Not Protecting Families: The Child Welfare System as Poverty Governance (2025) ed. by Randles, J. & Woodward, K., New York University Press.
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Marisal, E. S., Victor, B.G., Elliot, J. M., Smith, J., Commodore-Mensah, M. & Sabina, C., “Preventing foster care entry at the community, systems, and societal levels: Recommendations from the child-serving workforce” (2024), Children and Youth Services Review, 163, pp. 6-10.
Johnson- Motoyama, M., Fernandez, E. & Merritt, D., “Envisioning new approaches to child welfare and social care for marginalized children” (2026), Children and Youth Services Review, 185, pp. 1-2.
Russ, E., Morley, L., Higgins, D., Harries, M. & Lonne, B., “Suiting up: Preparing workforces to take on the mantle of preventing child maltreatment from a public health perspective,” (2025), Children and Youth Services Review, 168, pp. 1-9.
A Nation’s Shame: Fatal Child Abuse and Neglect in the U.S. (1996), Diane Publishers, Collingdale, Pa.
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Within Our Reach: A National Strategy to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect Fatalities, Final report of the Commission to Eliminate Child Abuse and Washington, D.C.
​See past Sounding Board commentaries
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©Dee Wilson
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