Publication Date
Summer 2025
Abstract
Since its inception, federal “child welfare” policy has focused on the regulation, surveillance, and policing of Black, Indigenous, and immigrant families. Rooted in the legacies of slavery, U.S. settler colonialism, and the nineteenth century child labor “Orphan Train” movement, modern foster care functions to “save” children by removing them from indigent families to be “placed out” with strangers that the government deems more deserving of support. Although this is done under the guise of “child safety,” the real threats to children’s well-being stem from systemic failures—such as unaffordable housing, lack of access to healthcare, and entrenched poverty. Rather than invest in addressing these root causes, federal policy coerces states to implement a family regulation system that commodifies children and creates a market sustained by private agencies and adoption subsidies. Sacrificing public health for government surveillance, mandated reporting laws then make hospitals and doctors’ offices sites to initiate children into this harmful system.
Research shows that mandated reporting for healthcare providers reinforces the scapegoating of parents of color for social ills and poverty, while shielding institutional and individual racism. By turning healthcare providers into a tool of the police state, mandated reporting also deters families from seeking help and undermines the relationships needed to deliver adequate medical care. While some jurisdictions have recognized and attempted to curb these harms of mandated reporting, their efforts are constrained by strict requirements of the federal law’s funding scheme.
Abolition of the federal mandated reporting apparatus is needed. This Article discusses how the adoption of sound, evidence-based policy would instead lead to funding communities and protecting public health, in replacement of our continued investment in a broken family regulation system—a system that consistently harms the very children it claims to protect.
Recommended Citation
Kara Sheli Wallis, Harmful Reports: How Federal Mandated Reporting Policy Entrenches Racism in Healthcare Delivery and Undermines Public Health, 28 CUNY L. Rev. 394 (2025)