Works in Progress Group 4: Family Regulation System

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Session Type: Works-in-Progress

Session Capacity: N/A

Hotel: N/A

Room: Franciscan C

Floor: Ballroom Level

Group #4: Family Regulation System

Disabling Families
Sarah Lorr, Brooklyn Law School

Building on my article, Unaccommodated: How the ADA Fails Parents, 110 Calif. L. Rev. 1315 (2022), which examines the extent to which the family regulation system has remained insulated from cannons of anti-discrimination law, this Article will examine how the family regulation itself constructs disability. Using the lens of disability critical race theory, I illuminate how the family regulation system both polices who can raise their own children and affirmatively harms the parents and families it was ostensibly created to protect. Simultaneously, by examining the use and construction of disability in the family regulation system, this Article will excavate the extent to which disability as a social category—like race and class, and often in combination with these identities—is used to justify the subjugation of certain groups deemed “unfit” for parenthood and family life.

To make the family regulation system’s construction of disability concrete, this Article locates three sites at which disability is constructed within the system: the incipient stage, where allegations of abuse and neglect are crafted, including who to identify as a neglectful parent and how and with what language to describe such alleged neglect; the moment of family separation and its impact; and the termination stage, which mark some parents as “unfit” and certain families are permanently destroyed.
Moderator and Discussant: Wendy Seiden, Chapman Fowler School of Law

The Runaway Train of Mandated Reporting
Katie Louras, University of Michigan Law School

Mandatory reporting laws funnel children into the child welfare system, but fail to serve their intended purpose and, paradoxically, they impose harm on the young people they purport to protect. That is, the nearly singular gateway to a multibillion-dollar governmental function persists despite no data of its efficacy and ample evidence of its harms.

The legally mandated reporting of suspected child abuse and neglect has proliferated since first broadly enacted in the 1960s. Some states have expanded to universal mandated reporting—deputizing every individual as a reporter, a far cry from the much narrower recommendation of the medical journal article that animated the first generation of these laws. And, yet, in the decades elapsed, there continues to be no evidence to support the efficacy of these laws in rooting out or preventing harm to children. Conversely, there is ample research demonstrating the harm these laws cause, both by their mere existence, and in practice as a mechanism that unnecessarily sweeps millions of children into systemic harm’s way. This article provides a historical and current overview of mandatory reporting laws, recounts the harms they cause, and proposes practical approaches to ending mandated reporting.

Repealing these laws would protect children: by making those who need help easier to find, by allowing helping professionals to help, and by reducing the trauma that the child welfare system currently inflicts. Repealing these laws would also reduce unnecessary government spending, allowing those funds to be reallocated to the communities that the current child welfare system inhabits.