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From leading abolitionist organizers, a much-needed intervention arguing that the systems that purport to protect children make our communities less safe for them.
Based on decades of shared organizing, study, and lived experience, the contributors to
How to End Family Policing argue that the child welfare 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.
Offering first-person testimony, alternatives to family policing, and definitions of key concepts, this book is an urgent call to build flourishing communities.
List of contents
Introduction: From Outrage to Action
1. It's Never Been about the Welfare of Children: The Origins of the Term Family Police by Brianna Harvey and Jasmine Wali
2. Who is Safe? Who is Protected? by Corey B. Best
3. Prevention, Reparations, and Reunification Black Families and Healing the Harms of Family Policing by jaboa lake
4. Young People Deserve Community Care by zara raven
5. Abolish the Family by Ignacio G. Hutía Xeiti Rivera
6. Who Do You Tell? by Shannon Perez-Darby
7. The Community Dimensions of State Child Protection by Dorothy Roberts
8. Beyond Mandated Reporting: Organizing from the Inside Out by Leah Plasse, LCSW, and E. Zimiles, LCSW
9. "I'm not an Organizer, I Just Organized" by Amanda Wallace, Annie Chambers, Charity Tolliver, Erin Cloud Miles, and Margaret Prescod
10. Change Everything? Notes on Abolitionist Strategies by Erica R. Meiners
11. What About Child Sexual Abuse? by Hope Tolliver
12. Bigger than Roe v. Wade by Arneta Rogers, jasmine Sankofa, Erin Miles Cloud, Noran Elzarka, Elizabeth Ling, and Kylee Sunderlin
13. Relationships not Reporting: The Transformative Justice Help Desk by Shira Hassan
14. Everyday People Build Extraordinary Possibilities: Parental Organizing as Key to Ending Family Policing by Shawn Koyano
15. Movement Building and the Experiment of Movement for Family Power by Erin Miles Cloud and Lisa Sangoi
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Appendix
Endnotes
About the author
Contributor
