Protecting the sacred: Assessing Indigenous child welfare outcomes in Oklahoma using inclusive data practices

Little empirical research exists on child welfare outcomes of Indigenous children in the US.

To determine if cases involving Indigenous children have higher odds of substantiation and child removal compared to cases involving non-Hispanic White children when controlling for public assistance, caregiver substance use, domestic violence, child demographics, and allegation types.

Child welfare cases from Oklahoma reported in the federal fiscal year 2019 National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System's child file.

Cases were classified as involving children who were either non-Hispanic White, Indigenous alone, or Indigenous along with other ethnoracial identities (i.e., Indigenous and White, Indigenous and Black, etc.). Descriptive statistics and logistic regression with clustering were conducted with a significance threshold of p < 0.05.

Lower odds of substantiation were observed for cases involving Indigenous and White children (AOR: 0.91, 95%CI: 0.85, 0.97). Higher odds of removal were observed for cases involving Indigenous and White (AOR: 1.18, 95%CI: 1.07, 1.31), Hispanic, Indigenous, and White (AOR: 1.53, 95%CI: 1.25, 1.88), Indigenous, White, and Black (AOR: 1.64, 95%CI: 1.28, 2.10), Hispanic, Indigenous, White, and NHOPI (AOR: 5.15, 95%CI: 2.46, 10.77), Indigenous and Black (AOR: 1.41, CI: 1.03, 1.93), and Hispanic, Indigenous (AOR: 1.54, 95%CI: 1.13, 2.09) children.

A better picture of Indigenous child welfare outcomes was obtained by disaggregating multiracial data including lower odds of substantiation and higher odds of removal for specific Indigenous subgroups.