Lyra Walsh Fuchs | DissentMagazine.org
Over 630,000 children, who are disproportionately Black and Indigenous, were “served by the foster care system” in 2020, according to the federal Department of Health and Human Services. That number doesn’t account for the many families placed under informal supervisory plans, or who received surprise knocks on their doors from caseworkers, often accompanied by police.
Dorothy Roberts and a growing number of activists across the country have another name for the child welfare system: family policing. Like prison and police abolitionists, they think that decades of reforms intended to improve the system have only entrenched its power, and that family policing should be abolished and replaced with redistributive policies and a true social safety net.
The idea that the U.S. child welfare system endangers children may seem surprising, especially to those who haven’t interacted with it, or to those who have read the tragic headlines that appear when a child is harmed. But as Roberts argues in her new book, “tragic cases of child abuse continue to appear even under the watch of the toughest child protection regimes. Children fall through the cracks not because child welfare agencies are devoting too many resources to family support. Children fall through the cracks because agencies are devoting too many resources to investigations and child removal.”
We spoke about the book, the contemporary child welfare system and its history, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s attack on trans kids and their families. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Lyra Walsh Fuchs: A lot of agencies and organizations in the “child welfare” realm have origins in the Progressive Era, when they formed out of concerns about child labor and living conditions in tenements. You write that there’s a different, longer history. How do you think we should situate Child Protective Services within the history of the United States?
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