Dreaming of Abolitionist Futures, Reconceptualizing Child Welfare: Keeping Kids Safe in the Age of Abolition

Drawing on the wisdom of prison abolitionists past and present, as well as evidence from interviews and analysis of Illinois’ Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) procedural documents, this work argues that Illinois’ DCFS and the child protection system more broadly are an extension of the carceral state. Both the criminal punishment system and the child protection system (henceforth referred to as the family regulation system) use a diffuse network of actors to surveil, regulate, and punish the behavior of queer subjects: impoverished people and people of color. The present-day family regulation system builds on a long history of family regulation that predates the founding of the U.S., as is seen in chattel slavery, the cultural genocide of Native Americans, neoliberal and anti-welfare policy regimes, and continues today at the U.S.-Mexico border and in the formalized family regulation system (child protective services). This work explores how to keep children safe in the age of abolition, focusing on non-carceral responses that center strong, accountable communities and divest from dependence on the state

The Empty Promise of the Fourth Amendment in the Family Regulation System

Each year, state agents search the homes of hundreds of thousands of families across the United States under the auspices of the family regulation system. Through these searches—required elements of investigations into allegations of child maltreatment in virtually every jurisdiction—state agents invade the home, the most protected space in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Accordingly, federal courts agree that the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement applies to family regulation home searches. But almost universally, the abstract recognition of Fourth Amendment protections runs up against a concrete expectation on the ground that state actors should have easy and expansive access to families’ homes. Legislatures mandate searches and loosen warrant requirements; executive agencies coerce consent from families and seek court orders that violate the Fourth Amendment; and the judiciary rubberstamps these efforts and fails to hold the executive and the legislative branches to their constitutional obligations. Families under investigation—who are almost all poor and are disproportionately Black, Latinx, and Native—are left with nowhere to retreat. This Article argues that the casual home invasions of the family regulation system are not just another story of lawless state action carried out by rogue actors or of an adversarial system failing to function. Instead, this is a story of a problem-solving system functioning exactly as it was designed. The problem-solving model emphasizes informality, information-gathering, and cooperation—values that sit uncomfortably with the individual rights-based principles underlying the Fourth Amendment. By uniting each branch of government in a project of surveillance, the problem-solving model reduces the potency of the separation of powers as a check on government overreach, while at the same time undercutting checks and balances outside the separation of powers. Protecting individual rights and preventing government overreach in the family regulation system will require more than rejecting the problem-solving model in favor of an adversarial model, as the criminal legal system shows. Guided by the heuristic of non-reformist reforms, the Article suggests a continuum of measures—some immediate, some over the course of generations—that will unravel the family regulation system’s wide net of surveillance and safeguard the welfare of children in a holistic sense. Ultimately, we must fundamentally rethink “child welfare services” and move from a model that holds individuals responsible for large-scale societal problems to one that addresses those problems on a societal level

California’s Failure to Protect Families: Statutory Reform to Better Serve Families Experiencing Domestic Violence

Los Angeles County is home to the largest child dependency system in the world. A significant portion of the families involved in this system have experienced domestic violence. Because the system is ineffective in responding to domestic violence, families experiencing domestic violence are especially vulnerable to the harms of the family regulation system. The harm that results is the separation of families, leading to irreparable harm and trauma which hurts, rather than helps, families. This Article’s findings are based on qualitative legal and social science research, including deidentified data from a 2021 UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Families study regarding domestic violence and the child welfare system., Drawing from this research, this Article argues that California’s statutory definition of neglect and mandatory reporting scheme work together to encourage mandated reporters, social workers, and judges to find that exposure to domestic violence, without more, is child neglect. Consequently, despite the protective capacity of non-offending parents, families are ripped apart. In conclusion, this Article proposes two reforms, (1) a revision of California’s neglect statute and (2) the replacement of mandated reporting with mandated supporting of families that come to the attention of the family regulation system. These reforms seek to alleviate this problem and reduce the unnecessary surveillance of families experiencing domestic violence in the Los Angeles County family regulation system while advocates, scholars, and leaders in Los Angeles County continue to work towards abolition

The New Jim and Jane Crow Intersect: Challenges to Defending the Parental Rights of Mothers During Incarceration

Family law scholars and advocates have expressed the importance of providing counsel to parents in the family regulation system, especially parents who are incarcerated, because of the system’s complexities. This article establishes, however, that when mothers must navigate both the family regulation and criminal legal systems, the protections appointed parents’ counsel are supposed to provide are weakened. These harms are heightened especially for Black mothers within the carceral state. As this article shows, appointed lawyers in family regulation cases cannot properly protect the due process rights of mothers who are incarcerated because of the added challenges both mothers and their lawyers face. As a result, families are destined to experience trauma, and are likely to end with the termination of parental rights. This article offers concrete recommendations to address these critical issues and demands a reduction in the number of mothers who are incarcerated and in the family regulation system

An Unintended Abolition: Family Regulation During the COVID-19 Crisis

In a typical year, New York City’s vast family regulation system, fueled by an army of mandated reporters, investigates tens of thousands of reports of child neglect and abuse, policing almost exclusively poor Black and Latinx families even as the government provides those families extremely limited support. When the City shut down in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, this system shrunk in almost every conceivable way as mandated reporters retreated, caseworkers adopted less intrusive investigatory tactics, and family courts constrained their operations. The number of reports fell, the number of cases filed in court fell, and the number of children separated from their parents fell. At the same time, families found support elsewhere, through suddenly burgeoning mutual aid networks and infusions of new government entitlements. This large-scale reconfiguration of the family regulation system represents a short-term experiment in abolition: in this period, New Yorkers moved away from a system that oppressed poor Black and Latinx people and not only envisioned but built a more democratic and humane model to protect families. As this Piece demonstrates, under this new model, families remained just as safe. Data from the courts and from the city’s Administration for Children’s Services reveal that there was no rise in child neglect or abuse during the shutdown period. Furthermore, once the City began to re-open, there was no perceivable “rebound effect,” that is, no delayed, compensatory rise in reports. This Piece positions the COVID-19 shutdown period as a successful case study, demonstrating one possible future absent the massive, oppressive apparatus of the family regulation system

The White Supremacy Hydra: How the Family First Prevention Services Act Reifies Pathology, Control, and Punishment in the Family Regulation System

Fundamentally, the so-called “child welfare system”—more appropriately named, the family regulation system—is a policing system rooted in white supremacist ideologies and techniques. From its earliest iteration, the family regulation system has functioned to pathologize, control, and punish the families entrapped in its web, most especially Black families. Nevertheless, among many, the myth persists that the family regulation system is one of child protection and family support. This is especially true when discussing the Family First Prevention Services Act of 2018, which—for the first time since the establishment of the modern family regulation system—opens up federal funding streams previously reserved for the removal of children to the foster system to provide prevention services for families in which children have not yet been removed to the foster system. While the Act is a course change in federal family regulation policy, this Article traces how it leaves undisturbed the pathology, control, and punishment central to the policies that preceded it

Re-Envisioning Child Well-Being: Dismantling the Inequitable Intersections Among Child Welfare, Juvenile Justice, and Education

Twenty years after Shattered Bonds, Dorothy Roberts\u27 indictment that the family regulation system polices, disrupts, and restructures Black families and communities remains urgent. Black families remain overrepresented in foster care with enshrined disparate treatment and outcomes. Black children are more likely to be removed from their homes, and their longer stays in foster care are characterized by placement instability, overly restrictive placements, the risk of abuse and exploitation, and inadequate mental health and other services. Black children also have worse educational outcomes than even other children in foster care, are over-referred to the juvenile justice system, and are more likely to age out of foster care to face disturbing future outcomes. Given this dismal record, if our goal is to maximize the well-being of Black children, the last thing we should do is place them in foster care. Rather than improving life chances, foster care involvement fuels the cycle of poverty, undereducation, criminal justice involvement, housing instability, and poor health outcomes plaguing low-income Black communities. The family regulation system interacts with two other systems marked by stark racial inequity-education and juvenile justice. These systems, individually and in concert, adopt approaches that result in and compound structural denials of opportunity. Each system uses seemingly neutral policies and practices that obfuscate the role of race and class and operate in particularly pernicious ways in the same poor communities of color. The mechanisms by which they disadvantage Black children share a common pattern. Black children are pathologized and labeled as defective and deviant, subjected to harsh and traumatizing treatment, and separated from their families and communities-which taken together destroys relationships, opportunities for healthy development, and educational access. The intersecting operation of these systems contributes to racial subordination by exacerbating trauma and leaving children without the educational and social-emotional skills to break out of the cycle of poverty, and further depletes neighborhoods with concentrated poverty of the human capital to be resilient. It is important to illuminate the mechanisms by which these systems intersect to entrench structural inequality, so that they can be dismantled. This Symposium spotlights the burgeoning call for abolition of the family regulation system premised on the idea that the primary function of the system is punitive control of families of color and that meaningful reform is impossible. The carceral and family regulation systems are deeply interconnected, and Roberts and others advocate for abolition of all these systems in favor of radically different ways of meeting families\u27 needs. The goals articulated by prison abolitionists coalesce with child welfare abolitionist calls that envision healthy communities where families have the resources to thrive. As we work towards that vision, it is important to get a more holistic understanding of Black children in the family regulation system, within the context of their communities and the multiple, inter-connected systems that work together to limit opportunities. This Piece unpacks how the family regulation system magnifies harm to Black children through its interactions with the juvenile justice and education systems. By exploring the structural mechanisms through which these systems work together to compound disparity and perpetuate inequity, this Piece provides further evidence of the family regulation system\u27s failings and contributes to thinking about how we help children and families in the communities where they live, rather than through punitive practices. This analysis is consistent with an ecological perspective that situates the child in their full environment, including their family, school, and neighborhood. The ecological perspective considers the reciprocal relationship between the child and their environment as well as the interlocking systems that produce the negative outcomes that Black children experience. The other theoretical frame emerges from scholarship on the ways state structures and cultural forces create racial hierarchies that endure for generations. To contribute to the child welfare abolition discussion, this Piece extends analysis beyond the family regulation system to understand how systems created by the state relegate poor children of color to the lowest rung in society, rather than helping children and families. This Piece will then offer solutions grounded in a vision of dismantled child welfare and juvenile justice systems, well-resourced educational systems, and strengthened communities with the capacity to foster the healthy development of children. Part I will discuss the racialized outcomes in each system and the relevant features of the architecture by which U.S. society is organized around hierarchies. Part II will describe each system\u27s role in perpetuating disparity, focusing on the common themes of isolation, trauma, and the use of stereotypes and bias to dehumanize children. Part III will explore the harmful intersections among the child welfare, education, and juvenile justice systems underscoring the ways that interaction between these systems compounds harm. Part IV offers some community-centered strategies that account for intersecting systems and advance the move towards abolition

Pathology Logics

Every year, thousands of marginalized parents become ensnared in the family regulation system, an apparatus more commonly referred to as the child welfare system. In prior work, I examined how the coercion of domestic violence survivors in the family regulation system perpetuates harmful knowledge production and serves to legitimize family regulation intervention. This Article focuses on another logic deeply embedded in the family regulation system: the pathologizing of impoverished and racialized groups. Scholars have discussed the pathologizing of marginalized groups to describe a host of different phenomena. In this Article, “pathology logic” refers to a logic that produces notions of individual responsibility, renders the structural conditions of poverty and racism invisible, and obscures resistance. Three key elements contribute to this logic. One, the policing of emotions by family regulation actors through ostensibly neutral behavioral descriptors. Two, the coercion of mental health evaluations and treatment that produce a formal clinical label. Three, the exacerbation and exploitation of emotional distress linked to family regulation intervention. The pathology label legitimizes intrusive state intervention into marginalized families’ lives and reifies their subjugation. This piece makes three significant contributions to the ongoing debate over the family regulation system’s role in the carceral state. First, it provides a definition of pathology logics in “child welfare.” Next, it examines the procedural and institutional drivers of pathology logics. Finally, this Article traces the language of pathology logics by showing how ostensibly neutral behavioral descriptors are used to police emotions and label marginalized families “deficient.” Pathology logics distract from the structures that render families in marginalized communities hyper-visible to the state, conceal the interconnectedness of carceral systems, obscure the destabilizing effects of poverty and racism, and erase the expertise of directly impacted families by equating resistance with pathology. Pathology constructs who is and is not “capable” of parenting without state intervention. Instead of centering incremental reform, this Article concludes by highlighting ways to shift power