Abolish Family Policing, Too Dorothy Roberts (bio) Imagine if there were an arm of the state that sent government agents to invade Black people's homes, kept them under intense and indefinite surveillance, regulated their daily lives, and forcibly separated their families, often permanently. the left would put toppling this regime high on its agenda, right? this racist structure exists in the United States today, and yet the left pays little attention to it. the child welfare system–the assemblage of public and private child protection agencies, foster care, and preventive services–is a crucial part of the carceral machinery in Black communities. Many Americans view the child welfare system as a benign social service provider that safeguards children from abuse and neglect in their homes. though it may bungle its responsibilities, they tell themselves, it is an essential safety net for children whose parents are unable to care for them. the left should be contesting, not buying into, this misguided perspective. The child welfare system is a powerful state policing apparatus that functions to regulate poor and working-class families–especially those that are Black, Latinx, and Indigenous–by wielding the threat of taking their children from them. In 2018 alone, Child Protective Services (CPS) received referrals of nearly 8 million children suspected to be victims of maltreatment. Intake workers weeded out reports regarding 4.3 million of these children as inappropriate for CPS involvement. But the screening process still leaves millions of families subject to state investigation each year. In cities across the nation, CPS surveillance is concentrated in impoverished Black neighborhoods, where all parents are ruled by the agencies' threatening presence. Fifty-three percent of Black children in America will experience a CPS investigation at some point before their eighteenth birthday. During CPS investigations, caseworkers may inspect every corner of the home, interrogate family members about intimate details of their lives, strip-search children to look for evidence, and collect confidential information from schools, healthcare providers, and social service programs. If caseworkers detect a problem, like drug use, inadequate medical care, [End Page 67] or insecure housing, they will coerce families into an onerous regimen of supervision that rarely addresses their needs. More disruptive still is the forcible family separation that often follows CPS investigations. Every year child welfare agencies take over 250,000 children from their parents and put them in the formal foster care system. At the same time, these agencies informally separate an estimated 250,000 more children from their parents each year based on so-called "safety plans"–arrangements parents are pressured to agree to in lieu of a formal court proceeding. In 2019, the national foster care population stood at 423,997. Hundreds of thousands more children were removed from their homes and kept in foster care at some point during the year. Black children have long been grossly overrepresented in the national foster care population: although they were only 14 percent of children in the United States in 2019, they made up 23 percent of children in foster care. Most of the money spent on child welfare services goes to keeping children away from their families. In 2019, the federal government alone devoted $8.6 billion to maintaining children in foster care–more than ten times the amount allocated to services aimed at keeping families together. While President trump's cruel policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the Mexican border drew national condemnation, hardly anyone on the left connected it to the far more widespread family separation that takes place every day in Black neighborhoods. For centuries, the United States has wielded child removal to terrorize, control, and disintegrate racialized populations–enslaved Africans whose children were considered white people's property and sold away at will, European immigrant children swept up from urban slums by elite charities and put to work on farms, and Indigenous children kidnapped and confined to boarding schools under a federal campaign of tribal decimation. today's child welfare system still revolves around an ideology that confuses poverty with child neglect and attributes the suffering caused by structural inequities to parental pathologies. It then prescribes useless therapeutic remedies in place of radical social change...
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Aug 31, 2021
Sunyia Hussain + 3
Open Access
