Racism Drives Overrepresentation of Black Children in Canadian Child Welfare, Review Finds

A sweeping synthesis of three decades of Canadian research has concluded that racism is the central force propelling Black children and youth into the country’s child welfare system, where they remain disproportionately represented, surveilled, and separated from their families. The findings come from a scoping review published in SN Social Sciences, led by Gervin Ane Apatinga of the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine, with colleagues at McGill University, the University of Toronto, and Memorial University of Newfoundland. Drawing on thirty peer-reviewed empirical studies published between 1994 and 2024, the team mapped how Black children and youth experience and fare within a system that, the evidence shows, has repeatedly failed to treat their families equitably.

The review was guided by two methodological anchors: intersectionality, the theoretical framework pioneered by Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins that examines how overlapping identities such as race, class, gender, and immigration status jointly shape lived experience, and Arksey and O’Malley’s widely used scoping review framework. The researchers searched seven databases, including Ovid MEDLINE, EMBASE, APA PsycINFO, Web of Science, Scopus, Academic Search Complete, and SocINDEX. Studies were eligible only if they appeared in peer-reviewed journals and focused on Black children and youth aged zero to thirty living in Canada. After screening, thirty studies met the inclusion criteria, and their findings were synthesized thematically to extract recurring patterns across heterogeneous research designs.

The geographic and methodological profile of the evidence base is itself revealing. Twenty-one of the thirty studies were conducted in Ontario and five in Quebec, leaving most of the country essentially unmapped. Qualitative methods predominated, with eighteen studies relying on interviews, focus groups, and narrative approaches, while eleven studies used quantitative designs. This imbalance matters technically: qualitative work excels at documenting how racism is experienced and interpreted, but the review notes that research on Black children and youth in Canada’s child welfare system remains limited, geographically uneven, and methodologically constrained, which hampers the kind of longitudinal, nationally representative data needed to track outcomes over time and across provinces.

Across the synthesized studies, racism emerged as the central driver of overrepresentation, shaping the broader context in which socioeconomic inequality and cultural bias operate. The review frames this as a layered mechanism rather than a single point of failure. Anti-Black racism structures the conditions that bring Black families to the attention of authorities in the first place, including heightened surveillance by schools, police, and health services. Socioeconomic inequality then compounds the risk, because poverty and material hardship are themselves strongly associated with child maltreatment and placement, as scholars such as Leroy Pelton have argued. Cultural bias completes the circuit, as parenting practices, disciplinary norms, and family structures rooted in African and Caribbean traditions are misread through the lens of White, Euro-Canadian child protection standards.

These intersecting factors were linked in the evidence to a cascade of concrete outcomes: increased surveillance, child welfare involvement, placement instability, long-term disparities, and mistrust among Black families. Quantitative longitudinal work in Quebec by Alicia Boatswain-Kyte and colleagues found that race shaped family reunification, with Black children experiencing different exits from the child welfare system compared with their peers. Related analyses documented racial disparities in child welfare investigations and outcomes in Ontario, and traced how Black children transition from child welfare into the youth justice system, a pathway researchers describe as crossover trajectories that deepen long-term disadvantage.

Qualitative studies in the review give technical precision to how these mechanisms operate at the level of casework and legislation. Research by J.M. Cénat and colleagues identified seven reasons caseworkers and community facilitators cite for Black children’s overrepresentation in Ontario, with race mattering in admission decisions. Other work analyzed Ontario’s child welfare legislation itself through a critical race discourse analysis, finding that the statutory language is effectively race-neutral in ways that obscure its differential impacts on Black families. Studies of Black parents raising children in Toronto, Winnipeg, and St. John’s documented what researchers call the fragility of goodness, in which parents report navigating child protection rules written for White families, and youth placed in White homes described growing up as Black children without cultural mirrors or identity connections.

The review’s intersectional lens showed how race, class, gender, immigration status, culture, and institutional power overlap to reinforce child welfare contact and unequal outcomes. This is not merely additive; the framework reveals compounding effects. A young Black mother facing racial stress and inadequate social policy support, as documented in research on young Black motherhood in Canada, encounters a different configuration of risk than a Caribbean immigrant family whose transnational disciplinary practices are misclassified as abuse. Emerging Black adults aging out of care reported being pushed, dropped, or fleeing from the system, with narratives of adultification in which they were treated as more mature and self-sufficient than their years warranted, a documented mechanism that shortens support and worsens post-care outcomes.

The mistrust dimension of the findings has particular technical significance for system design. When Black families perceive the child welfare system as an instrument of surveillance rather than support, help-seeking behavior declines, and the system’s stated protective function is undermined for the very population it disproportionately contacts. The review connects this to broader documented patterns, including racial profiling research by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, reports of interrupted childhoods among Indigenous and Black children in Ontario, and international scrutiny, including the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, which in its 2017 mission to Canada called attention to anti-Black racism in Canadian institutions.

The review’s conclusions point toward a technically specific reform agenda. Addressing racial disproportionality, the authors argue, requires confronting anti-Black racism, socioeconomic inequality, and institutional bias simultaneously, while strengthening empirical research centered on Black children and youth. That means expanding research beyond Ontario and Quebec, building longitudinal quantitative infrastructure alongside community-grounded qualitative work, and implementing race-based data collection that can dramatically improve child welfare services, as the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies’ One Vision One Voice initiative has advocated. The study was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through the Transforming the Lives of Black Children and Youth in Canada project, and the authors declare no competing interests.

For a system that touches the lives of hundreds of thousands of Canadian families, the review’s synthesis delivers a blunt technical verdict: the overrepresentation of Black children and youth is not an accident of individual caseworker error but a predictable output of intersecting structural forces. The evidence assembled here, spanning thirty years and thirty studies, shows that until the system confronts the racism embedded in its surveillance practices, its assessment standards, and its placement decisions, Black families will continue to experience contact with child welfare as a source of harm rather than protection, and the disparities documented since 1994 will persist into the next generation of Canadian childhood.

Subject of Research: The experiences of Black children and youth within the Canadian Child Welfare System: A scoping review

Article Title: The experiences of Black children and youth within the Canadian Child Welfare System: A scoping review

Article References: Apatinga, G. A., Maduforo, A. N., Umezurike, U., Boatswain-Kyte, A., McCready, L. T., Mullings, D., & Salami, B. (2026). The experiences of Black children and youth within the Canadian Child Welfare System: A scoping review. SN Social Sciences, 6(8), Article 345. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01623-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01623-1

Keywords: experiences, Black, children, youth, within, Canadian, Child, Welfare, System, scoping, review, scientific research