The Law vs. Black Children and Families

Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World

When “Defund the Police” became a political catchphrase, many advocates suggested state social services agencies to partly replace the police’s role. University of Pennsylvania law professor Dorothy Roberts balks at this substitution. To Roberts, the police and most child protective services agencies suffer the same problems: profound power in Black communities, scanty oversight, and only one violent tool to solve every problem.

Operating under the premise of preserving youth from dysfunctional homes, Roberts writes, child services agencies have broad authority to enter private homes, vet parents’ choices, and make decisions about families’ future. Their evaluation criteria are subjective, which leaves them vulnerable to abuse. In many jurisdictions, they have only one recourse for effecting change: taking children from their families and putting them in foster care.

Roberts calls these agencies “family policing,” and claims they’re part of the same prison-industrial complex we’ve heard so much about. She doesn’t make this claim frivolously. Like uniformed police, family police have a cloak of benign motivation, and use language of peacekeeping and community. But like the police, family services disproportionately target Black, poor, and Indigenous communities, regularly breaking up families.

We’re taught early that child protective agencies rescue children from violent or sexually exploitive circumstances. Yet, as Roberts demonstrates, family police agencies regularly miss these cases. The preponderance of children removed from homes are justified behind “neglect,” which usually means insufficient food or clothing. Yet agencies seldom have authority or resources to provide families with housing, healthcare, or cash. Their first, and often only, recourse, is seizing children.

Reading Roberts’ descriptions, a pattern emerges: family policing agencies see non-White parents as adversaries, not only to state agencies, but to children. Because social workers often travel accompanied by police, they often answer even nominal resistance with arrest and trial. Because these supposedly neglectful parents often just need assistance, the result is that they treat cash-strapped parents as literal criminals.

Moreover, the criteria that family police use to identify neglectful families are remarkably targeted. House too small? Cupboards too bare? Can’t afford childcare while parents are working? These all supposedly indicate unfit parents. Coupled with a tendency to overpolice poor and BIPOC communities, these criteria mean Black and Indigenous children enter the system in wildly disproportionate numbers.

Dorothy Roberts

This racialized outcome isn’t incidental. Child protective laws are often written to target things people of color do: for instance, sharing childrearing among a network of grandparents, cousins, and other kin is common in Black and Indigenous communities. But in many jurisdictions, that’s a designated neglect criterion. That’s just one example Roberts cites of how family policing sees Blackness as inherently damaged, and damaging.

Nor is this tendency new. Family policing became widespread only after other racial regulations were repealed. Black children were frequently “apprenticed,” against their parents’ will, to former slaveholders, while Native American children were sent to boarding schools that explicitly aimed to expunge their Indigenous traditions. Forced family separations only preserve the tendencies these overpowered state agencies have always used in Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities.

The consequences remain universally disastrous. Scholars have done only limited research into long-term effects of family separation (perhaps because scholars rely on state agencies for funding), but what research they’ve conducted indicates that children moved into foster care suffer PTSD, oppositional-defiant behaviors, and nightmares. They’re also more likely to wind up subject to human trafficking. This applies even when home environments are quantifiably bad.

I have friends working in child-related social services, so I anticipate their objections. How will we ensure that legitimately unfit parents don’t repeat generational abuse? Roberts answers that, in terms too nuanced to repeat here, but the salient point is: when circumstances have forced family police agencies to stand down, community and kinship networks have stepped up. Abuse reports have, not surprisingly, gone down.

Many people enter child protection careers with benevolent motivations. They want to improve the communities where they work; Roberts quotes many such great souls. But before long, social workers, like schoolteachers and police officers, discover they can’t fight a system that devalues non-White lives. Most of Roberts’ sources either quit, or find themselves forced to adapt their ethics to suit the institution.

Dorothy Roberts identifies largely the same problems with family policing that Alex Vitale finds in regular policing: they’re more cause than solution. The problems both agencies create could be ameliorated by fighting poverty and lifting racial barriers. But in both cases, that’s unlikely to happen, because powerful people profit from them. Maybe, if we ordinary people care more and act accordingly, we can reverse the damages.