[ZainRiz]

> Over 50 percent of Black children in the U.S. will experience a child welfare investigation before their eighteenth birthday (nearly double the rate of white children). Nearly 10 percent of Black children will be removed from their parents and placed into foster care (double the rate of white children)

While the numbers above sound horrendous (and they really are!) I wish they normalized the data to only consider poor households. That would give a much better picture of how much of the existing system is biased against a given race vs being biased against poor people in general.

[kwhitefoot]

>> Over 50 percent of Black children in the U.S. will experience a child welfare investigation before their eighteenth birthday (nearly double the rate of white children).

So more than 25% of all children experience a child welfare investigation?

That's mind boggling.

[dragonwriter]

>> Over 50 percent of Black children in the U.S. will experience a child welfare investigation before their eighteenth birthday (nearly double the rate of white children).

> So more than 25% of all children experience a child welfare investigation?

Yes, 37.4%.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5227926/#:~:tex....

[TheRealDunkirk]

This is precisely like the situations which are present in every large company, where people fight to protect stupid, manual processes and digital paperwork in the name of justifying their existence at the company.

After cities fund these departments, people work very hard at justifying their employment, and trying to increase their metrics, to make it look like they're having an impact.

"We" recently ran afoul of the police because my son was caught having been handed an illegal substance in the high school bathroom. The investigator threatened us with prosecution for possession, then admitted it probably didn't rise to this action, and then ran down a litany of programs and counselors she could get our son involved with. I could tell she was salivating at the thought of getting our son put into these programs, just to be able to say something like, "We 'helped' 17% more kids this year; we need more funding!"

The investigator seemed to be on the hunt for names; we declined to have our son give a statement at all.

My wife is a counselor herself; we're dealing with that side of it.

[PeterisP]

This number seems crazy. I would have expected something like ten times less, I wonder how that compares to other countries.

[baryphonic]

My wife's parents had a child welfare investigation because my sister-in-law was somewhat clumsy in middle and high school and had some "odd" bruises. Of course, my in-laws hasn't done anything abusive, and the investigator concluded as much, but I'm sure it counts as one of those >25%.

[crazygringo]

EDIT: dang fixed it, thanks! Orig comment below

----

What/who are you replying to?

Your quoted text isn't in the article and also isn't in any of the comments on this page.

[Jtsummers]

They're responding to the article kyoob linked in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34916150

[dang]

Ok, we've moved the GP to be a child of that one now. Thanks!

[joe_the_user]

Your quote isn't from the article but a link in a post by kyoob (currently below this) that you aren't even replying to (were you so eager to beat hn's post throttling you put this on the main thread?). Kyoob's post already acknowledges this is also a poverty issue so your complaint seems a bit off the topic at hand.

[Robotbeat]

It doesn’t sound like complaining. I think it could be a good faith point (and not someone just trying to find a way to downplay modern racism), although kyoob acknowledged it.

Obvious confounding factors should also be controlled for (or at least controlled in a side note).