Parental Criminalization and the Overrepresentation of Black Families in Child Protective Services: The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act

Abstract Racial disparities within child protective services are widely known. However, little is known about how the language used in historical policy documents related to the passing of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974 ultimately criminalized parents along racialized, gendered, and class-based lines. Using intersectionality and stigma as the frameworks and critical discourse analysis as the methodology, the authors analyzed the language and identified four themes which aided in the later criminalization of parents: 1) egregious examples of child abuse, 2) racialized dimensions of parental criminality, 3) gendered dimensions of parental criminality, and 4) class-based dimensions of parental criminality. It is crucial to understand how the first federal child protective services policy in the United States utilized coded and biased language to criminalize parents along racialized, gendered, and class-based notions of inadequate parenting. Implications of how this language later led to the overrepresentation of Black families within child protective services are explored.