Poverty and Decision Making in Child Welfare and Protection: Deepening the Bias-Need Debate

The influence of socio-economic background factors, such as poverty, on the risk of children to be disproportionately represented and placed in residential care has increasingly been the subject of international research. This article reports on the findings of a research project that focused on the relationship between poverty and child welfare and protection (CWP) interventions in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium). Using logistic regression models (N = 33,423), we examined which specific socio-economic risk factors in the total population of children enhances the risk of CWP interventions. The results show that all included socio-economic variables, except one, show an increased risk of CWP interventions. The results also reveal that a rather dominant social, cultural and historically rooted construction of middle-class family life seems to be an important ground for interventions. Based on these findings, it is argued that the current debate on bias might mask implicit assumptions within CWP decision making.