Kinship Care Should Not Become Another Avenue for Blaming Survivors

Child WelfarePartnering With SurvivorsSystems Change
Written By Jessica Sisler

By David Mandel, CEO and Founder, Safe & Together Institute

Let me be direct: I have a problem with kinship care in cases where one of the main reasons for removal is domestic abuse. The problem I have is that the focus on kinship care as a positive solution for children is often emphasized before agencies tackle their failure to implement domestic abuse–informed policy and practice, which may allow more children to remain safely with a domestic abuse survivor who is also a protective and capable parent.

This is not theoretical. Data and research from disparate places, such as Florida, the United Kingdom, and Western Australia, show that even in high-risk cases, it may be possible to maintain a child safely with the survivor, who we can also think about as the protective parent. Practices like perpetrator pattern mapping, policies and practices of pivoting to the perpetrator, and partnering with survivors around the safety and wellbeing of their children are more ethical, efficient, safe, and cost-effective.

Let’s take a deeper look at how a focus on kinship care without fully implementing domestic abuse–informed practice is putting the cart before the horse, as they say.

The problem starts with the definition of kin and how we define the problem that kinship care is intended to fix. In a domestic abuse case, kinship policy should not treat the victim/survivor as simply “unable or unwilling to care” or as equivalent to the perpetrator. A domestic abuse–informed approach has to ask a different question: Can the child remain safely with the non-offending/protective parent, with the right safety planning, legal protections, housing, income, advocacy, and perpetrator accountability?

Kinship care is supposed to be a way to reduce trauma when children cannot safely remain with their parents. For example, United States federal and state child welfare guidance defines kinship care as care by relatives or emotionally significant adults when parents cannot safely provide care. But in domestic abuse cases, that phrase—“when parents cannot safely provide care”—can become dangerous if the system collapses the perpetrator’s abuse into the survivor’s “failure to protect.”

Here’s what a better policy frame would look like…

1. A policy of kinship care is not a substitute for a policy of keeping children safe and together with domestic abuse survivors whenever possible.

Before moving to kinship placement, the agency should assess whether the child can remain with the survivor through safety planning and concrete supports. Substantiating domestic abuse survivors as maltreatment perpetrators can lead to unnecessary foster placements instead of safely placing children with the non-offending parent, can revictimize survivors, and can further traumatize children.

2. The perpetrator’s pattern should be the organizing safety concern.

The primary worry or harm statement related to domestic abuse should not be formulated around “Why didn’t she leave?” or “Can she protect?” The primary worry or harm statement should be developed around the following question: What has the perpetrator done to harm the child, undermine the survivor’s parenting, sabotage safety, isolate the family, create housing/economic instability, or use systems and kin networks to maintain control?

This clarity means the case decision-making, including whether to use foster placement or not, will develop out of an understanding of who is creating the risk and danger for the children. This “pivot to the perpetrator” opens the door for partnering with the protective parent. Together, this may obviate the need for any foster care, kin or otherwise.

3. Partnering with survivors and all the related steps should be policy.

If we start with a policy of keeping children safe and together with the protective parent whenever possible, then policy should mandate partnering, instead of failure-to-protect practice. This starts with making it clear to the survivor that they are not to blame or responsible for the behavior of the abusive parent.

It also requires workers to assess, validate, and document the survivor’s protective efforts: calling police, seeking help, calming children, hiding money or documents, planning exits, maintaining routines, buffering children, engaging services, or managing the perpetrator’s volatility.

From this foundation, collaboratively planning to maintain children safely in their own home with at least one of their parents is a more likely outcome—and a much more desirable, child-centered, and cost-saving option than even kinship placement.

4. When kin foster care placement is being considered, kin must be screened for alignment with safety, not just relationship.

A relative may be loving and familiar but still unsafe if they minimize the abuse, pressure the survivor to reconcile, give the perpetrator access, blame the survivor, or are participants or enablers of the perpetrator’s pattern of violence and control.

In domestic abuse cases, “kin-first” has to mean safe kin-first, not automatic kin placement.

5. Kinship can support the protective parent, not replace them.

Sometimes kinship care is useful as a temporary safety strategy: a grandmother, aunt, adult sibling, close friend, or fictive kin may help stabilize the child while the survivor gets housing, legal help, medical care, or protection from the perpetrator. But the goal should often be safe reunification or safe continuity with the protective parent, not a drift into treating the survivor as the problem.

So the core answer is this: A domestic abuse–informed kinship policy should treat the adult victim as a potential protective parent first, not as a default failed parent.

This doesn’t mean that every child can stay with every domestic abuse survivor. Some perpetrators are too dangerous to the adult and child survivor, and foster placement that keeps the child away from the perpetrator may be necessary—and often that is not kin placement.

In other instances, the survivor’s parenting capacity may be so significantly compromised by substance abuse, mental health issues, or other problems that the child is not safe in their care either. But these need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. In many cases, those other intersecting issues are caused or exacerbated by the domestic abuse perpetrator’s behavior. In other cases, the perpetrator may be actively interfering with treatment and recovery. Address their behavior, and those other issues may become more tractable or even be removed.

As it relates to foster placements, safe kinship care should be used only after making real efforts to intervene with the perpetrator as a parent and partner with the survivor, guided by a policy of working to keep children safe and together with protective parents whenever possible, and after a thorough assessment of whether kin placement will increase or reduce perpetrator-created risk.

Additional Resources

Jessica Sisler
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