Iris Marion Young Responsibility For Justice Summary

I argue that Iris Marion Young’s ideas about responsibility for justice, applied to questions about child welfare, can be used to devise a system that provides for children who are abused and neglected. Foster children in America are rarely talked about by politicians, despite relying on government programs for their survival. Because they are children, they don’t have the resources to create organizations and lobby politicians for better aid. This means that we all have a responsibility to do these things for them and change the current system that is failing them, whether we are directly in contact with the child welfare system or not.
We have tried to set up a working child welfare system that meets the needs of the children for over

160 years. But as a national political concern, America’s child welfare system is almost always put on the back burner. The only times that these issues come to national prominence is when there is a child death that enrages the public. But these cases are not rare. There were 3.3 million reports of child abuse in 2005. 899,000 of those reports were found to be legitimate. According to these reports, the rate of child maltreatment is 12 out of every 1,000 children. This makes sense given how many parents believe that they have the right to punish their children freely as long as they don’t physically wound them. Four children die from maltreatment every day. Neglect, which is usually connected to poverty, actually leads to slightly more child deaths every year than abuse does. 22% of people under the age of 18 live in poverty, according to the 2010 United States Census.
One thing that we can do to is push for a reestablishment of the White House Conference on Children and Youth. This was a series of conferences that were “devoted to improving the lives of children across the Nation. Each conference focused on issues relevant to the decade in which the conference was held.” They were the first White House conference ever held, starting in 1909 under Theodore Roosevelt and being held every decade for 70 years, before being discontinued by Ronald Reagan in 1980. The conference brought together national experts from around the country and the 1929 conference created the most comprehensive report on the needs of children ever written. We should be pushing for a modern report that is just as comprehensive. Another thing that we can do is push the government to create perks for social workers who focus on cild welfare.
Young argues that we should not assign blame to each other. She does argue though that we “can and should be criticized for not taking action, not taking enough action, taking ineffective action, or taking action that is counterproductive” (Young, pg. 144). The child welfare system is one area where we should be criticized for not taking enough action. Young also understand that it is easy to get so overwhelmed by daily struggles that you can’t get involved with moral demands beyond your immediate circumstances. One way she proposes to solve this is by having loved ones join together in the fight for social justice, so that “the attention and energy we put into being personally responsive to others is at the same time attention and energy devoted to political responsibility for justice” (Young, pg. 165). If families join together in support of child welfare, we can finally address many of issues that face children in our society.