Investigating Families

Book excerpt: "For many parents, a knock on the door from a state agency with the power to take their children is their worst fear. This experience is widespread and concentrated overwhelmingly in poor communities and communities of color. One in three children nationwide-and over half of Black children-come into contact with Child Protective Services during childhood. This book draws on in-depth fieldwork to examine the U.S. child welfare system, providing a window into the inner workings of CPS and the lives of mothers drawn into its orbit. Kelley Fong draws on extensive, multi-perspective qualitative data across two states, Connecticut and Rhode Island. Child Protective Services investigations have largely eluded ethnographic observation, but Fong had the opportunity to observe investigative visits and interview assigned investigators as well as mothers involved in these cases. She also reviewed case records, conducted follow-up interviews, and attended staff meetings and trainings for investigators. In examining the data, Fong demonstrates how CPS reports are socially produced, and in a context of austerity and structural racism, how CPS reporting becomes a solution to the dilemmas and constraints faced by frontline educational, medical, law enforcement, and other professionals, offering an outlet for their rehabilitative aspirations and a way to compensate for their limitations. Challenging Motherhood argues that CPS reports reframe adverse experiences often rooted in trauma and marginality-such as domestic violence, substance use, and homelessness-as child mistreatment. Ideologies and inequities of race, class, and gender place poor mothers of color in particular under CPS investigation"--