The Truth About Child Abuse and Poverty
Racial prejudices, biases and assumptions contribute to the fact that 97 percent of children in New York City foster care are children of color. According to a leading researcher in the field, Dorothy Roberts, author of “Shattered Bonds,” “[t]he fact that the system supposedly designed to protect the children remains one of the most segregated institutions in the country should arouse suspicion.” This is most clearly demonstrated by the documented decisions that medical professionals make when they encounter abuse and neglect in families of color. The data in the books “To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care” (Cris Beam) and Roberts’s “Shattered Bonds” illustrates this point:
+Black women have been reported to health authorities at delivery 10 times more often than white women, even though studies show that drug use is relatively equal, for instance, between blacks and whites (9.5 percent and 8.2 percent respectively), and that more pregnant white women use drugs than pregnant black women (113,000 versus 75,000).
+Doctors failed to detect abusive head trauma twice as often in white as compared to minority children.
+Even reviewing neutral e-rays for fractures, hospitalized minority toddlers were five times more likely to be evaluated for child abuse, and three times more likely to be reported for child abuse, than white children.