Why Abolition?
The so-called “child welfare” or “child protection” system is a carceral system that surveils, controls, punishes, and separates families.
Forcibly separating families is cruel and inhumane. Yet everyday, the family policing system tears Black, Latine, Indigenous, and low-income children away from their parents and funnels them into the foster system for allegations of child abuse and neglect. Operating under the guise of child safety, the system relies on racist narratives that paint BIPOC parents as “dangerous” and “unfit” to care for their children. This system is presumed to be a benevolent use of state power. However, its history proves otherwise.
Forced family separation isn’t a new form of state violence. The modern family policing system is a troubling extension of the US’ long history of systematically separating families. From the buying and selling of Black children away from their parents during chattel slavery; to the kidnapping of poor and immigrant children for indentured servitude during the orphan train movement; and to the forced removal of Indigenous children from their communities to facilitate cultural genocide.
The anti-Black racism and white supremacy embedded into the foundation of the modern family policing system fuels the racial disproportionality that exists today. Similar to the criminal legal system, the family policing system subjects BIPOC and low-income families to more surveillance, more reports to the family police, more investigations, and a greater likelihood of losing their parental rights.
1 in 2 Black children will experience a family policing investigation. 1 in 10 will experience family separation. 1 in 41 will have their parents’ rights terminated.
The system isn’t broken. It was built this way.
The vast majority of families are reported to the family police because symptoms of poverty—like housing instability, unmet medical and mental health needs, and inaccessible childcare—are framed as child neglect. By design, families are threatened with forced separation and are not provided with the resources they may need.
When harm happens, the family policing system does not keep families safe—it puts children and families at risk. The system does not address the structural conditions—like poverty, inequity, and isolation—that underlie interpersonal harm, nor support families in healing and repairing relationships after harm happens. Instead, the system traumatizes children and parents with invasive investigations and forced family separation, inflicts violence on children through myriad abuses in the foster system, and punishes parents with arduous, expensive tasks in the quest to reunify with their children.
Abolition is more than dismantling harmful systems. It is building the world we deserve.
Safety begins when family policing ends.
Decades of failed attempts to reform the family policing system show it is beyond repair. Abolition is a framework and practice that allows us to reimagine how we support families and respond to harm without systems of policing and punishment.
Imagine how the trillions of dollars spent on family policing could be used to support families, rather than separate them. Protecting children requires that parents have access to the life-sustaining resources that truly keep families safe. This includes permanent housing, culturally competent and non-compulsory medical health services, voluntary substance use treatment programs rooted in harm reduction praxis, sustainable education and gainful employment, and affordable child and respite care.
Abolition requires that we actively address the root causes of systemic injustice and interpersonal harm, and build networks of community care to bring into being the world we deserve—where families are safe and supported and all systems of policing and punishment cease to exist.