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The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy
of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed
to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.
Read the other two briefs in this series
Foster
Care Placement Settings and Permanency Planning: Patterns by Child Generation
Title IV-E Funding: Funded
Foster Care Placements by Child Generation and Ethnicity
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Abstract
Over one fifth of all U.S. children have at least one immigrant parent. Social service systems are
encountering increasing numbers of these children, but few hard data exist. Three briefs in the Identifying
Immigrant Families Involved with Child Welfare Systems series provide some of the first data on Latin
American immigrant children in out-of-home care in Texas. Key findings include:
- Placement type: only 8 percent of Latin American immigrant children in out-of-home
care are living with relatives compared with 20-28 percent of U.S.-born children.
- Removal reason: Latin American immigrants are three times more likely to be removed
because of sexual abuse than children of U.S.-born parents.
- Title IV-E eligibility: only 5 percent of Latin American immigrants in out-of-home
care are eligible for reimbursement compared with over half of U.S.-born children.
Child sexual abuse rates have fallen dramatically in the United States since the early 1990s. Between
1992 and 2000, substantiated sexual abuse reports dropped from 150,000 to 89,500 cases, a decline of
40 percent (Finkelhor and Jones 2004). Much of this decline may be attributable to a declining pool
of older, previously unreported cases of child abuse that came to light in the late 1980s with rising
public awareness but were largely investigated by the mid-1990s. However, similar declines in selfreported
sexual abuse provide evidence that at least a portion of the change represents a real decline in child
sexual abuse, rather than increased caution on the part of Child Protective Services (CPS) agencies
that investigate and substantiate abuse allegations. Despite this encouraging national trend in child
sexual abuse, administrative data from Texas suggest that the share of Latin American immigrant children
in out-of-home care in Texas who were removed for sexual abuse is three times as high as the share
of children of natives removed for sexual abuse.
(End of excerpt. The complete report is available in PDF format.)
The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.
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