Law Commons^™

Fostering Faith: Religion In The History Of Family Policing, Elizabeth D. Katz

UF Law Faculty Publications

Each year in the United States, approximately 700,000 children live in foster care. Many of these children are placed in religiously oriented homes recruited and overseen by faith-based agencies (FBAs). This arrangement—as well as the scope and operation of child welfare services more broadly—is at a crucial moment of reckoning. Scholars and advocates focused on children’s rights and family integrity maintain that the child welfare system, increasingly termed the “family policing system,” harms children, families, and communities through unnecessary and racist child removal that is partly motivated by perverse financial incentives. Some call for abolition. Meanwhile, in a largely separate …