Week 5

Key Questions

• What is the family policing system? How has its development been entrenched in anti-Blackness and settler colonialism?

• How can caseworkers be considered cops? What does this reveal about the connection between the carceral system and supposedly benevolent, welfare-oriented institutions?

• What are the various myths that allow for the perpetuation of the family policing system? How are many of these myths reliant on anti-Black and anti-poor tropes?

Required Materials

• Dorothy Roberts, “I Have Studied Child Protective Services for Decades. It Needs to Be Abolished.”

• Molly Schwartz, “Do We Need to Abolish Child Protective Services?”

• Eli Hager, “A Mother Needed Welfare. Instead, the State Used Welfare Funds to Take Her Son.”

Supplementary Materials

• Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law, Prison By Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms, “Policing Parenthood” (AUDIO)

• Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, “Destroying Black Families”

• Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, “‘They Separate Children at the Harlem Border, Too’”

• Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, “Professional Kidnappers”

• 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, "How COVID Revealed the Folly of Our Child Protection System"

• Dorothy Roberts, “Abolishing Policing Also Means Abolishing Family Regulation”

• Dorothy Roberts, “Prison, Foster Care, and the Systemic Punishment of Black Mothers”

• Dorothy Roberts, “Abolish Family Policing, Too”

• 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.”

• The Intercept, “Indigenous Children Are Being Forcibly Removed From Their Mothers in Brazil”

Exercise

Use the tools below to view data on family policing in your state. How many children are investigated and separated by the family policing system? How much money is invested in prevention and permanency services compared to investments in separating children from their families? What percentage of children are separated from their families as a result of abuse? Consider what this data shows about the purpose of the family policing system, along with its connection to racial capitalism.