From four leading abolitionist organizers, a much-needed intervention arguing that the systems and services that purport to protect children make our communities less safe and more precarious.
Based on decades of shared organizing, study, and lived experience, the contributors to How to End Family Policing argue that the criminal legal system cannot build genuine safety. Rather than the misleading language of “child welfare” and “child protective services,” scholars and activists use the term “family policing” to name the fact that these institutions and practices are neither neutral nor benign.
Black, Indigenous, and Latinx parents do not mistreat their children at higher rates than white parents. Yet 53 percent of all Black children in the United States will experience a child protective services investigation before the age of eighteen. In New York City, 90 percent of reports made to child protective services involve Black or Latinx children. In Minnesota, Indigenous children are 1.7 percent of the total population yet 25.8 percent of the young people in foster care.
With first-person testimony, examples of campaigns to build alternatives to family policing, and definitions of key concepts, this is an urgent call to build authentic and flourishing communities.
With contributions from Dorothy Roberts, Shira Hassan, Brianna Harvey, and Jasmine Wali, Corey B. Best, jaboa lake, zara raven, Ignacio G. Hutía Xeiti Rivera, Leah Plasse, E. Zimiles, Annie Chambers, Margaret Prescod, Arneta Roger, jasmine Sankofa, Noran Elzarka, Elizabeth Ling, Kylee Sunderlin, Shawn Koyano, Lisa Sangoi, and the editors.
2 We hold the deep trust of a young person who shares with us their experience of struggling to survive and heal from sexual violence perpetrated by an intimate family member. Yet we teeter. We are legally bound to report this harm, but we know – intimately – that doing so will thrust this young person into a system that will do more harm and does not have the capacity to support this young person’s decisions about their body and their healing pathway. […] We cry/laugh, surrounded by our bio-family at our uncle’s funeral, reminded of a core fact: Every one of our mother’s ten siblings experienced investigations by child welfare services. And in none of these cases did these investigations and the resulting actions make our lives, or the lives of our cousins and our aunts/uncles, safer of better. 3 Perhaps the family of origin was a site of harm, but the state’s response was as bad or worse – group and foster homes are often rife with violence. Resources always seem to flow for people to teach mandated parenting classes, caseworkers to inspect apartments, and lawyers to interview children – but not for rent, health care, childcare, food, or vacations. 6 […] our vision should start from the position that no kinship network benefits from investigations, surveillance, policing, or forced separation. 12 Build and practice experiments that grow safety. Stay with the messiness, together. While we are beyond outraged and heartbroken, we are also organized. 20-1 At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of child abuse reports and investigations significantly decreased, because kids weren’t in school and school personnel weren’t surveilling and reporting young people. Instead, children were at home with their family members. There was no increase in child deaths or substantial maltreatment, debunking this idea hat we need this system to surveille and police families for “child safety.” 52 For two years I had the joy of coordinating Queenie’s Crew, a program of Project NIA that engaged children in learning to build communities of care without prisons of policing. Each month, children took an action to bridge the gap across prison walls and to build the world that we need. Kids created pod maps, mapping out whom in their communities they can turn to if they cause or experience harm. 58 Systems like family policing reinforce and justify parenting from a place of authority. The very systems that have punished parents become the tools we use to punish our children. 59 This rigid parent-child dichotomy echoes the legacy of colonialism, prioritizing efficiency and order over our innate humanity. 62 I’m uncertain if my parents were ever truly in love, or if they even liked each other. 67 […] families serve as training grounds, preparing individuals to navigate and thrive within colonial and capitalistic societal structures by instilling obedience, conformity, and achievement of predetermined milestones. 68 We learn that relationships are not about curiosity and care but about a fastidious compatibility checklist or about ownership and the reproduction of colonial ideals. In the pursuit of finding a life partner and potentially starting a family, individuals often confront the realities of these learned familial dynamics. 71 We are told to “just make a report.” […] I have never once seen the system make things better for a survivor. 72 As community-based domestic violence advocates, we weren’t therapists, we weren’t social workers, we were peer survivors supporting people experiencing violence in their own self-determination and safety. 80 People shut down when faced with domestic and sexual violence. Domestic and sexual violence continues because of our collective inability to face the harm we are capable of doing to each other. […] To live in a world where children experience massive rates of sexual violence is a reality that most of us find intolerable. […] If every person […] could truly take in the scale of harm, the reality of sexual violence so many children are experiencing, [..t]he urgency to act would be undeniable. 91 Child maltreatment and protection are viewed as individual matters. Historically, this was not the case. In the early twentieth century, progressive social work activists like Jane Addams conceived of their child welfare crusade as a social reform movement that addressed a range of children's problems." Rescuing children from maltreatment by removing them from their homes was part of a broader campaign to remedy social ills, including poverty, that harmed children. Early crusaders established pensions for widows and single mothers to reduce the need to remove their children. These reformers should be faulted for judging poor immigrant families by elitist standards and excluding Black children altogether. However, they also advocated a view of child maltreatment as an urgent social problem best addressed through society-wide reforms. A simultaneous but lesser-known campaign by Black club women made improving the welfare of structurally disadvantaged mothers and children a central response to racial injustice. By the 1970s, efforts to label child maltreatment as an individualized problem for dysfunctional families defeated the social vision of child welfare. The government promoted, and the public accepted, a medical model of child maltreatment-harms to children as the symptom of individual parents’ pathologies. 99 Mandated Reporters Against Mandated Reporting (MRAMR). Mental health workers and social service advocates work with antithetical philosophies and mandates: to build trust and create safe spaces for families while also policing and referring families to punitive systems. This tension leads to impossible choices and moral binds – and causes harm to families and practitioners. 100 MRAMR recognizes the mandate to report as a critical part of the surveillance, criminalization, and separation of Black, Indigenous, and low-income families. Our duty to report is a fundamental conflict in our field meant to support and engender trust. From firsthand experience, we have seen how mandated reporting does not keep children and families safe. Reporting is ineffective, punitive, and leads to further harm and instability. […] We share how we collectively work to move from a social work culture of compliance and surveillance to one of consciousness, resistance, and intentional support. 101 Are social workers an alternative to or an extension of law enforcement? […] “Open Letter to NASW and Allied Organizations on Social Work’s Relationship with Law Enforcement.” [ READ] 102 We recognized that mandated reporting is a pernicious requirement for all social workers across institutions and a central way the field perpetuates racism, oppression, trauma, and family separation. Mandated reporting is the gateway into family policing and other carceral systems, including foster care and the criminal justice system. 103 Yet mandated reporter trainings do not discuss the process of investigations and the traumatic effects it has on families. 105 […] 82 percent of families report that involvement in the family policing system made their situations significantly worse or led to no change. […] Since our inception, two big themes continue to surface in our monthly meetings. One is the high numbers of reports of neglect, which we came to understand as the criminalization of pov-erty, and the other is the racial implications of reporting given the impact of anti-Blackness at all stages of the family policing system, including reporting. [….] In New York City, 80 percent of reports are for neglect […] 113 In our meetings we ask ourselves: What does it look like to pause in the face of urgency? To ask more questions and to center joint decision-making with the children and families we work with? […] We have to hold the tension that the consequences of reporting are often ineffective and harmful, and that if we do not report we might lose our licenses or jobs. We are pitted against the people we are called to serve. 114 We see firsthand how reporting leads to relational trauma among family members and within communities, and ruptures the trust we seek to build as social workers. […] MRAMR members created Alternatives to Mandating Reporting Guide 144 The advice I would give a new organizer is what I was given as a young organizer: “Be the person who you needed.” 158 […] also continuing to organize so that others, such as social workers, do not continue the work of uniformed officers and become cops in cardigans. 161 We start to discuss how the foster care system also relies on myths about protection, but in reality often shields Black children from their own families. […] As a survivor of violence, I understand the deep-rooted desire for protection and the profound disappointment when it fails to materialize. I remember what it means to sit in a room as a child and be hurt and wish for some protection. 162 To genuinely protect children, we must rethink our approaches to both protection and punishment. I emphasize that the foster care system, contrary to its intended purpose, exposes children to further harm. All available research consistently demonstrates that children in foster care are more likely to experience sexual assault than are their peers outside this system. Most children are removed from their home for reasons classified as neglect, not abuse, and placing them in foster care only increases their vulnerability. The system fails to protect—it punishes. Children in foster care face higher rates of running away, teen pregnancy, self-harm, and ultimately, entry into the juvenile justice system. This experience is not one of protection but of continued harm. 163 What does eliminate or reduce child sexual abuse? 164 Reproductive justice is the right to look ourselves in the mirror and love who we are and know that the social structures in this world reflect that love. 168 Adoption is not a neutral birthing choice. When the Dobbs decision reversed Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court proposed a "simplified" solution to forced birth—adoption. Supporters of reproductive choice were outraged that the government's decision to abandon women's health care would then justify the intervention of the family policing system. This should have been a revelatory moment for the reproductive rights movement. It should have been the moment these advocates joined the fight to resist the family policing system, but they didn't. How could they still not understand that the foster system was not about safety but control? 169 Perhaps for some this is a personal and difficult conversation, but when Amy Coney Barrett reversed Roe, she probably considered her role as an adoptive parent to sustain the anti-choice narrative. We recognize this is sensitive, calling many families into uncomfortable truths, but our goal is not shame—it is radical honesty. We cannot ignore the ways the state defines what it means to be a family. 171 The family policing system is designed to isolate people. It is designed to leave young people with fewer people to support their decisions. […] We don’t have all the answers. There will be tensions, but if we just stay siloed, we will never build the future our children deserve. 172 This new framework must radically acknowledge that if there is some sort of rift between a parent and a child, that is a normal part of relationships. State intervention makes this conflict worse, closing the space for the parent or the child to make the decisions that are best for themselves. 173 We know that when we root our analysis in self-determination, we will have disagreements. We are not arguing that everyone has to agree to move forward. However, these short-term conservative partnerships harm the relationships that we’re building and destabilize our intimate connections across movements. 178 […] requests for support from abolitionist organizers who work inside nonprofit structures and experience mandated reporting as crushing. The number one strategy that that transformative justice relies on to interrupt violence is relationship building. 179 […] our communities survive using a careful alchemy of care, practice, and rebellion. 181-2 Building relationships as a violence-prevention strategy is something that offers a clear container to address violence – since all violence happens in relationships and violence can, many times, be transformed, contained, and healed within them. Investing in relationships has become a staple for many who work to end the family policing system. Relationships, not reporting , has become our mandate. 184 Investing in long-term accompaniment and relationship building is a unique gift that community-based crisis response teams must prioritize. 187 Is there an immediate harm happening that requires an immediate response or is the pressure from the state to force a report generating the wrong emergency? 191 […] we need to choose each day to fall in love with each other’s survival (and survival strategies) […] 193 We attempt to mitigate bad outcomes within systems designed for us not to thrive. And honoring our understanding of these systems and their deep and wide impact on families, not just our own, is necessary to our collective survival. 195 There is scarcity in violence and abundance in community. […] When one of us needed rest and collective care, we honored this and offered as much support as we could to each other. 196 Our group leaned into patience with each other. This meant that decision-making was slow and intentional. We listened to each other, even as it meant not moving quickly to respond to those in power. 206 We, and many others, were nervous about the calls to replace cops with social workers because we knew that the social work profession is infected with police logic, with mandated reporters responsible for reporting families and placing children in the foster system. 217 Building an economy requires vulnerability and trust in people. It’s important to be thrilled with follow-through when it happens and not be heartbroken or defeated when it doesn’t. 219 A leader should not hesitate to take a break from leadership. The Ayni Institute teaches us that, in order to sustain our efforts and continue to push forward, we must recognize and respect our personal leadership seasons. 224 She knew that liberation needed everyone at their maximum potential for the longest period of time possible. To have that type of longevity, we needed to seriously reevaluate where we learned how to work and consider other ways to understand effort that aren’t rooted in trauma or capitalism. 226 We also know we need to rest and not be in charge of anything. That has nothing to do with giving up. Giving up is abandoning the vision for a new world. Giving up is not leaving a nonprofit, stepping down from a leadership role, or even taking a yearlong nap on the floor.
“The systems and services that purport to protect children actually make our communities less safe, more precarious. The very real forms of violence experienced by young people - particularly gender and sexual violence - are the repeated justifications for the consolidation and expansion of carceral or punitive logics. Far from protecting young people or resourcing care networks, all the tentacles of these punishing systems… do not create safer communities. These punishing systems distract us from asking core questions/ What does make our communities stronger and safer? How can we respond to the different needs of specific communities and individuals without privileging some over others?” (p. 3)