Week 5
shattered bonds
Key Questions
How does the child welfare system surveil families? In what ways do case workers act as deputized agents?
What is the relationship between the child welfare system and the criminal legal system? How are the two intertwined and interconnected?
How does the child welfare system result in the criminalization of children? How does foster care act as a pipeline to prison?
Required Materials:
Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, “Family Surveillance”
Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, “Carceral Entanglements”
Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, “Criminalizing Black Children”
Supplementary Materials:
Samantha Michaels, “She Never Hurt Her Kids. So Why Is a Mother Serving More Time Than the Man Who Abused Her Daughter?”
Mother Jones, “The Racist Law Targeting America’s Mothers”
Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, “Rotten at the Root”
Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, “The Foster-Industrial Complex”
Dorothy Roberts, “Prison, Foster Care, and the Systemic Punishment of Black Mothers”
Victoria Copeland and Maya Pendleton, “Surveillance of Black Families in the Family Policing System”
Erin Miles Cloud, “Toward the Abolition of the Foster Care System”
Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present, “Destroying Black Families”
Theresa Beardall and Frank Edwards, “Abolition, Settler Colonialism, and the Persistent Threat of Indian Child Welfare”
Addie Rolnick, “Assimilation, Removal, Discipline, and Confinement: Native Girls and Government Intervention”
Gwendoline Alphonso, “Political Economic Roots of Coercion”
Roxanna Asgarian, “She Supported Her Child Being Trans. So the State Separated Them.”
Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, “The Allegheny Algorithm”
J. Khadijah Abdurahman, "Birthing Predictions of Premature Death"
exercise
View the data tool below. How much does your state spend on foster care? How much does it spend on prevention and preservation services? Compare your state’s spending with the spending of other states. What do these spending priorities reveal about the nature of the so-called “child welfare system”?
Next, use the data tool below to determine the percentage of children separated from their families as a result or abuse or neglect. How should these statistic be viewed in light of spending priorities?