What is CAPTA?
The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) of 1974 is the federal law that creates a national framework for the modern family policing system, a more accurate term for the “child welfare” system.
In accordance with CAPTA’s framework, each state operates a "child protective services" or CPS system for reporting; investigation, prosecution, and “treatment” of alleged child maltreatment. These state systems involve government and private entities, agents, and employees; government and private social services providers; and state and local judges, prosecutors, and law enforcement personnel.
CAPTA fails to fulfill its stated purpose of preventing and treating actual child abuse, and causes tremendous harm to children and families. Under the guise of protecting children, CAPTA incentivizes the surveillance, criminalization, and separation of millions of disproportionately Black, Latine, Indigenous, and low-income white families.
CAPTA harms families by…
Incentivizing harmful mandated reporting laws.
In order to receive federal grants under CAPTA, states must enact mandated reporting laws requiring certain professionals (including social workers, doctors, teachers, and many others) to report suspected child abuse and neglect to Child Protective Services (CPS). Some states require all residents, regardless of professional status, to report suspected child maltreatment to CPS. However, there is no evidence that these laws reduce harm. In fact, evidence shows that mandated reporting actually causes direct harm to children and families.
Predictably, fear of CPS reports discourages families from seeking the services necessary for true child safety and well-being. A CPS report can trigger invasive investigations, violent family separation, and ongoing surveillance of disproportionately Black, Latine, Indigenous, and low-income white families.
Criminalizing Pregnant and Parenting People.
CAPTA requires medical professionals to set aside their professional judgment and report anyone giving birth to an infant “affected” by substance use to family policing agencies. This includes mothers who are using legally prescribed medicines as part of medication-assisted treatment for drug abuse. Ambiguous language indicates that someone—while not entirely clear who—is then supposed to create a “plan of safe care” for the infant.
CAPTA encourages the non-consensual drug testing of pregnant and parenting people, often resulting in family policing investigations and forcible family separations. This requirement deters pregnant people from seeking prenatal care and threatens newborns with the trauma of family separation—exposing them to health complications far more severe than those associated with exposure to a substance.
Black, Latine, Indigenous, and low-income pregnant and parenting people—as well as their newborns—are disproportionately harmed by these severe violations of bodily autonomy and family integrity and medical ethics.
Encouraging secrecy.
CAPTA generates double standards concerning secrecy. It requires child welfare agencies to disclose information about child abuse fatalities and near-fatalities as, in fact, they should. However, it also encourages agencies to keep their other faults and errors secret. As a result, the general public remains largely unaware of the harms of the family policing system—and the public becomes highly susceptible to the misimpression that horror stories, that are as rare as they are tragic, are the norm.