Professor Boatswain-Kyte: Black children five times more likely than White children to be placed in out-of-home care

In a study published this month in a leading international journal, Professor Alicia Boatswain-Kyte and colleagues tracked child protection services over a ten-year span for a group of close to 16,000 children involved in an urban agency in Quebec. They found that “while representing 9% of the general population in 2011, Black children represented 24% of children receiving child protection services for the corresponding year. When compared to White children, Black children’s protection reports were five times more likely to be screened in, substantiated, and brought to court. Black children were also five times more likely than White children to enter out-of-home placement”.