Racialization and the Mandatory Power of the State: How Racialized Minority People Encounter State Child Welfare Systems

This dissertation examines the phenomenon of racial disproportionality within child welfare systems. It asks what explains the variation in interaction rates between racialized minority people and state child welfare systems. As the province with one of the highest proportions of racialized minority people, a decentralized child welfare model and the site of the first-ever child welfare institution established in English Canada, Ontario is not only a representative case, but also a key case to study how racialized minority people encounter child welfare services. Utilizing a historical analysis of archival data, document analysis, and interview evidence, I map how child protection affects intersectional marginalized communities, leading to varied outcomes. Drawing on King and Smith’s (2005) theory of racial orders, I characterize the competing orders as an Inequality order of structural racism and an Equality order. This dissertation reveals the extent to which the child protection system, a key arm of the state that asserts mandatory state powers and intervenes in families, is more characteristic of an Inequality order or an Equality order. I find that the experiences of racialized minority people in Ontario reflect historically institutionalized norms and structures that perpetuate systematic racism, reflective of an Inequality order. The decentralized nature of the child protection system in Ontario opens points of contestation, however, in recent years leading to the nascent emergence of an Equality order at the Peel CAS agency. Consequently, racialized minority people’s experiences with child welfare varies depending on the Children’s Aid Society (CAS) agency they encounter and the affiliations of those CAS agencies with other institutions from the government or civil society. I contend that the delegation of authority by the provincial government to CAS allows discretionary power to the administrative authorities of individual CAS agencies and their frontline child protection workers, allowing for increased or decreased discrimination by child protection staff. Discretion does not necessarily lead to discrimination but rather is the mechanism through which discrimination may occur. Therefore, discretionary power allows for the persistence of an Inequality order or contestation and the supplanting of the previous order to enable the emergence of an Equality order.

Department dc:contributor.department

Political Science

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Ganness, Anika

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• White, Linda A.

• child protection
• child welfare
• equality
• racial disproportionality
• social policy
• state

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1807/145121

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/145121