For Dorothy Roberts, a scholar of race and gender at the University of Pennsylvania law school, there is nothing well-meaning or compassionate about the child welfare system. Roberts views the system as racist and oppressive to Black families, a tool of white supremacy more concerned with controlling Black communities than it is with protecting kids.
That’s why Roberts has been advocating for a quarter of a century to dismantle the child welfare system altogether. Instead of even calling it the child welfare system, Roberts and other abolitionists prefer the term “family policing system” or “family regulation system.”
While the abolitionist movement as a coherent effort as a whole is still relatively new, Roberts pointed out that people have been resisting the state taking their children away for centuries. In recent years abolitionist efforts have been gaining traction as more organizations have emerged, raising funds and distributing information through online webinars, Twitter and advertising on billboards about the harms caused by the child welfare system.
Roberts has a book coming out this April, “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.” The book builds upon her two decades of research and activism, bolstered by data, scholarly articles and reports laying out the case for how the child welfare system is akin to a policing and surveillance agency, and why abolition is the only answer.
The Conversation
How did you get into the child welfare abolitionist movement?
I entered legal academia in 1988. My first research projects had to do with the prosecutions of Black women for being pregnant and using drugs. That led to a book I wrote, published in 1997, “Killing the Black Body,” which is about the long-standing devaluation of Black women’s childbearing.
While working on that book, I became aware of racism in the child welfare system. I learned that more Black mothers have their children, their newborns, taken from them by child protective authorities as a result of having used drugs while they were pregnant. I soon discovered that Black mothers were hugely over-represented in the child welfare system, and were far more likely than white mothers to have their children taken from them — both for using drugs while pregnant, but also for other reasons mostly related to poverty and related to racist devaluations of their relationships with their children.
As soon as I finished working on “Killing the Black Body,” I started working on another book called “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,” which documented the gross disparities in the child welfare system. I argued that those disparities were a result of the very design of the system that was rooted in racism, classism and sexism, and that we should work toward abolishing it. That book was published more than 20 years ago and I have been advocating against the system ever since.
What does it actually mean to abolish the child welfare system?
Abolishing the child welfare system means completely dismantling it. It means fundamentally ending its philosophy and design, which is to threaten families with taking their children away in order to blame the families for the hardships their children may face, and to control them and their communities. So abolition, to me, means ending the system, but the important part of it is ending the logic of the system.
It is equally important to simultaneously build a reimagined approach to child welfare that actually supports families and doesn’t rely on child removal. This new approach should support the welfare of families in a way that is effective and caring and in a way that doesn’t ignore the structural inequities that produce the problems that families have.
Tell me more about how the logic of the system is flawed and impacts families and kids?
The system we have now doesn’t deal with the inequities that lead to families being homeless, children malnourished and families being deprived of adequate health insurance and income. The system calls that neglect and blames families for it. The system is focused on accusing parents for harming their children and controlling them instead of ending the reasons why many children in America need more than their families are able to provide for them.
It’s not only a logic that punishes poverty, it’s also a logic that is deeply racist, and white supremacist, because its roots are in the control and separation of Black families. It continues to target Black families, not just because Black children are more in need — which is because of structural racism — but also because it’s a way for the state to exert enormous control and disruption in Black communities.
What would it be replaced with?
It has to be an approach that would truly meet the needs of children and truly keep them safe. That requires radical changes to society and ending the inequities that exist. It requires providing for people’s needs without the threat of coercion or violence, as well as abolishing the prison industrial complex. It’s about providing guaranteed income, health care and housing, and finding ways of building up community-based ways to support families.
What’s a common misconception people have of the child welfare system?
That it’s a benevolent service provider. That the child welfare system protects children and serves families. This misconception has allowed the child welfare system to continue largely unscrutinized, despite all the power it has. It’s really shocking that this system routinely takes children away from their families, often based on anonymous accusations, which then leads to a search for evidence that then traumatizes families — interrogations of family members and even strip-searching children to look for evidence of maltreatment. The system has the power to take children away, and keep them in foster care, a damaging system, for years, and even, in some cases, to terminate parental rights. For many, many people, especially people living in poor and low-income Black and indigenous communities, the child welfare system is as brutal and devastating as the criminal punishment system. And so it’s shocking that this violence isn’t seen by so many people, because the wool has been pulled over their eyes.
What are strategies that the movement is employing to dismantle the child welfare system?
That’s a first step: Disseminating knowledge to change the narrative. One example is the National Coalition for Child Protection, which contacts journalists and writes blogs and other media posts, to show the public that many of them have been fooled into thinking that the child welfare system is a benevolent service provider.
Many of us are tweeting about the movement, and there are webinars online. Joyce McMillan’s JMacForFamilies has been putting up posters and billboards around New York City with messages like “some cops are called caseworkers.”
We’re also taking concrete action to dismantle this system piece by piece. We are supporting legislation in New York State to give parents Miranda rights and end anonymous reporting to CPS, a bill in Minnesota to stop the targeting of Black families, and the repeal of the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently issued a landmark decision making it clear that caseworkers can’t barge their way into people’s homes based on an accusation phoned into the hotline. They have to show a judge probable cause for the search. We are also advocating for guaranteeing parents high-quality, multidisciplinary legal defense at every stage of the CPS process, including at initial contact with caseworkers.
The movement refers to the child welfare system as the family regulation or family policing system. What do you say to all the child welfare workers who aim to do good, many of whom come from the same communities and have lived experiences in the system, and who are also overworked and underpaid? Do they take offense at being called a police officer?
There are definitely people who bristle at the position that they are working for a racist, harmful system. They take personal offense, but I think we have to understand that pointing out the racism, classism and sexism in a system isn’t necessarily a personal attack. You should only feel offended if you’re in that system to harm people. Otherwise, if you’re actually dedicated to helping families, I think you should be open to learning about whether or not that’s what the system you’re working for is doing.
There are many people who work in the child welfare system who recognize full well that they’re not providing true, concrete help to families. And I think the abolition movement gives them a way of leaving and doing something that will help.
The Details
Location: Philadelphia
Currently employment: University of Pennsylvania
Family: Lives with her husband; has four grown children who live in Atlanta, Boston, and Toronto; and two granddaughters (to whom she dedicated Torn Apart).
Job Title: George A. Weiss University Professor of Africana Studies, Law & Sociology and Raymond Pace & Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights, University of Pennsylvania
Hobbies: Long walks and yoga
Reading right now: The new edition of Angela Davis’s Autobiography
Education: BA, Yale; JD, Harvard.
Abolitionist to follow on Twitter: Mariam Kaba @prisonculture
Twitter: @dorothyeroberts
Prior employment: Kirkland & Ellis Professor, Northwestern University School of Law; Professor, Rutgers University School of Law-Newark; Associate (litigation), Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
Volunteer work: On the Board of Directors of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform; on the Advisory Boards of the Center for Genetics and Society, and Still She Rises.
Author: Killing the Black Body; Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare; Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century; Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World
