Richard Gelles, scholar of family violence
Richard Gelles, a leading scholar of domestic violence and the child-welfare system who broke with many of his colleagues — and reversed his own long-standing beliefs — when he declared that it was more important to protect children from abuse than to preserve families, died June 26 at his home in Philadelphia. He was 73.
The cause was brain cancer, said his son David Gelles.
A prolific and high-profile sociologist, Gelles wrote more than two dozen books, testified before Congress, gave evidence as an expert witness and taught at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy & Practice, which he led for more than a decade as dean.
Gelles conducted pioneering studies on family violence in the 1970s and later worked to shape public policy, notably helping draft the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, considered the most significant change in federal child-welfare policy in nearly two decades. The law was partly informed by Gelles’s view that the child-welfare system was biased in favor of biological parents, with an emphasis on reuniting families that too often resulted in further abuse.
For most of his career, Gelles had held the opposite view, believing that it was best to keep families together, with children removed from violent, neglectful or exploitative households only as a last resort. But by 1996, when he published his book-length essay “The Book of David,” he had changed his mind, swayed by what he described as “the accumulation of 20 years of research.”
“All things being equal, I think it would be great for kids to be brought up by caring biological parents. And two of them,” he told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 1995. “But that doesn’t mean by definition that every biological parent is equipped to be a caring, nurturing parent. Some kids do better in foster homes; some kids do better in adopted homes. There are some households where kids ought not to be.”
Gelles marshaled an array of statistics to make his case. He found that of the 2,000 children who are killed nationwide each year by their parents or caretakers, half died after the state got involved, often after children spent time in the foster-care system.
He also drew on harrowing anecdotes, including a few real-life cases that inspired “The Book of David,” about an infant given the pseudonym David Edwards. The boy remained with his parents even after they lost custody of an older sister because of abuse, and died of suffocation at 15 months.
Gelles chronicled the boy’s story “without painting David’s parents as malicious or blatantly psychotic,” psychologist Michael Lamb wrote in the Journal of Marriage and Family. “Indeed, it is their ordinariness that makes David’s fate so sad and the dilemmas so compelling.”
Other reviewers criticized Gelles for altering facts about David’s background, turning the character into a “composite” drawn from several cases. Opponents argued that family preservation was safer than foster care and accused Gelles of advocating a system in which children were unnecessarily taken from their families.
Gelles remained steadfast in his views, taking a sabbatical from his professorship at the University of Rhode Island to work as a congressional fellow on the House Ways and Means Committee.