Abstract
The 2001 book, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, by Dorothy Roberts, called out the racism of the child welfare system and the harms that system perpetrates on families and communities. Twenty years later, despite numerous reform efforts, the racism and profound harms endure. It is time for transformative change. In this foreword to the symposium Strengthened Bonds: Abolishing the Child Welfare System and Re-Envisioning Child Well-Being, honoring the 20th anniversary of Shattered Bonds, we highlight Professor Roberts’ articulation of her development as a family policing abolitionist and summarize the articles and comments contributed from scholars in numerous disciplines and well as impacted parents, family defense advocates and systemchange activists. These contributions help us learn from history and political theory; focus on the unique and shared circumstances of Native American families; critique, and call for repeal of, much of current law; condemn the punitive, and racially disproportionate, surveillance of families; and demand a new approach that diverts the massive funding of the foster-care industrial complex into support, services, and healing for families, tribes, and communities. We call for abolition of the family regulation system, the term we use as a more accurate description of what is commonly called the child welfare or child protection system. We situate this call in the context of the more developed movement for prison abolition. The current system is predicated on seeing individual parents as a risk to their children. It fails to see the strengths and resilience of parents and families; the harms of surveillance and removal; and the structural forces that harm children by failing to invest in adequate housing, income, child care, health and mental health services, and educational opportunities for all families. Abolition provides the transformative mind-set that will enable loving and strengthened families to raise happy, healthy, safe, educated, and imaginative children.
Highlights
State removal of children from their parents is an act of violence and cruelty
With this symposium, Strengthened Bonds: Abolishing the Child Welfare System and Re-Imagining Child Well-Being, we call attention to the enduring, devastating, American practice of separating parents and children through state agency and court procedures cloaked under the misleading name of the child welfare system
The Articles and Comments in this and the subsequent symposium issue seek to contribute to abolishing the system that allows those separations to continue, and to reimagining and replacing it with policies and practices that facilitate the flourishing of all children within their families, tribes, and communities
Summary
State removal of children from their parents is an act of violence and cruelty. That is why the Trump administration faced near universal condemnation for its 2018 policy of separating parents and children at the US-Mexico border.[1]. Even the most recent federal legislation, the Family First Prevention Services Act, which purports to shift services for families into community-based agencies, applies only to children who are “candidates” for foster care but could remain safely in their homes with preventive services.[11] This means families cannot just appear at a community agency and say they need some assistance They must first submit to state surveillance and obtain a determination that without services their child “would be at imminent risk of entering foster care,” a condition that exposes them to continued state monitoring and that most families in need of some assistance would contest.[12] In other words, this law, widely heralded for its focus on keeping families together, requires a parent who wants substance abuse treatment, for example, to voluntarily submit to the very system that has the power to remove her children and terminate her parental rights.
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