The Color of Child Protection in America: Antiracism & Abolition in Child Mental Health

This paper illuminates the color of child protection by exposing the risks of racist and white supremacist harm intrinsic to the child welfare, public education, and juvenile injustice systems, specifically when they intersect with the child mental health system. Relying on bold and radical frameworks, like abolition, critical race theory, and decolonization, it positions child mental health providers to confront the color of child protection while protecting minoritized children against these systems of harm. These frameworks inspire a daily antiracist practice whereby child mental health providers challenge racist inequities and the historical arcs driving them; protect minoritized children and families against the systems of care designed to harm them; and work towards the longer-term goal of abolishing these systems altogether. In a white supremacist society, child mental health providers have no choice but to engage in such antiracist practices in order to uphold their fundamental oath to first do no harm. The failure to do so amounts to negligence and malpractice.