affect them. Her research and teaching interests include poverty, inequality, social policy, children and youth, education, and family life.
Fong applied the “Page 99 Test” to her first book, Investigating Families: Motherhood in the Shadow of Child Protective Services, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Investigating Families captures the oftentimes unspoken – yet always looming – power that U.S. Child Protective Services (CPS) has over parents, especially poor parents and parents of color. This page is part of a section describing how CPS gets parents to disclose personal information and open up their homes to a government agency that can take their children. Parents have the right to decline to speak with investigators, so why do so many do so given the risks? As page 99 details, mothers under investigation ascertain – correctly – that not cooperating with CPS can have dire consequences. As one mother told me, she never considered denying the investigator entry to her home, “because I know what could happen… They can get ahold of a judge. They can get orders… I’m going to cooperate with you because, at the end of the day, you’re not going to take my kids.”Visit Kelley Fong's website.
This page speaks to a key theme of the book overall. On paper, CPS may seem kindler, gentler, more service-oriented than, say, police. After all, CPS investigators do not carry guns or handcuffs. As such, parents under CPS investigation typically do not enjoy the same legal protections as people questioned by the police, such as the right to an attorney. And yet, as this page underscores, CPS holds immense coercive power. Investigators do not have to wield this power through direct threats or force, as parents know what the agency can do and decide that complying will best serve their families’ interests. CPS is thus able to gain entrée into the intimate, private lives of the families it investigates.
From reading this page alone, however, readers might not see some of the broader context in which these investigations are taking place, described elsewhere in the book. Specifically, the families subject to CPS’s surveillance are not few and far between, nor are they a random draw. CPS investigates millions of families each year, primarily poor families and disproportionately Black and Native American families. The agency is largely responding to situations involving family adversity, such as domestic violence, addiction, and homelessness. The book draws on my fieldwork with CPS investigators, mothers, and mandatory reporters to show how turning to CPS in these situations ultimately perpetuates families’ marginality and reinforces existing inequalities.
--Marshal Zeringue
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