Moral Injury within the US Child Welfare System

Child welfare systems around the world provide essential services to protect the lives of children who are abused and neglected. Yet these systems can also do great harm. These negative consequences of system involvement are primarily borne not by adults who are willfully neglecting or seriously abusing their children, but by families and communities who are struggling under generations of poverty, racism, and genocide. The harm is also to the professionals committed to helping families who find themselves in an adversarial system that, too often, compounds the problems of families and communities.

Moral Injury within the US Child Welfare System presents a fresh perspective on how we can create a US public child welfare system that both protects children physically, and minimizes the psychological harm it causes to the professionals and the families they serve. This perspective emerged from the lived experiences of young people, parents, and professionals involved in the system. It also emerged from decades of on-the-ground social work practice and research experience; and from lessons learned from history, and child welfare systems around the world (African American, Indigenous, Scottish and Japanese). In this book, Haight and Kingery identify the significant psychological harm experienced by those within the US public child welfare system and consider implications for creating a more humane, just, and, ultimately, more successful child welfare system.