Every year, Child Protective Services (CPS) agencies across the United States conduct more than 2,000,000 investigations into allegations of maltreatment—investigations that are invasive, traumatic, and disproportionately concentrated in poor Black and Brown communities. And yet 84 percent of these investigations fail to substantiate the allegations that prompted them. Of those that do, the overwhelming majority identify poverty-correlated neglect rather than intentional abuse. Why, then, does American society spend billions of dollars a year on this investigative apparatus, which can cause families significant harm, with so little to show for it?
This Essay introduces a novel framework for answering that question: welfare theatre. Drawing on the concept of security theatre—policies designed to produce a feeling of safety regardless of their actual effectiveness—this Essay argues that CPS investigations function as a welfare theatre: a system of agencies, practices, norms, and popular narratives that perform a collective concern for child welfare irrespective of its actual impact on the children it claims to protect or the families it targets. This Essay traces the origins of the welfare theatre to a particular political moment in which the organized abandonment of Black and Brown communities was reconstituted as a child protection imperative, and in which the tools of investigation and surveillance were substituted for structural investments that might have materially addressed the conditions now labeled as neglect.
This Essay identifies three central functions of family policing’s welfare theatre: communicating to the non-policed public that the government is committing its resources to doing right by its children, individualizing collective harm by scrambling structural shortcomings into parental failure, and securitizing race-class marginalized families—compelling their compliance as the theatre’s objects. This Essay concludes by surveying how impacted families have already begun to break the fourth wall and by proposing legal and policy reforms to shrink the stage.
