Child Welfare or Family Policing?

More than one in ten Black children in America will be forcibly separated from their parents and placed in foster care by the time they reach age eighteen. 

Professor Dorothy Roberts joins us to discuss the racialized history of parenting, family autonomy, and the child welfare system. From the role of slavery in framing the Black mother to disastrous 90s legislation rooted in racial stereotypes, Professor Roberts makes the case that child welfare was designed to punish the most disenfranchised communities instead of to protect children. After over thirty years of research, Roberts concludes that abolition is the only way to end the trauma caused by what she calls family policing. 

Guest: Dorothy Roberts (@DorothyERoberts) is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology, the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights, and a professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her newest book, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families– and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World is available today. 

If you enjoy this show and want to help fight poverty and injustice, consider making a donation to Community Legal Services today! You can also follow us on Twitter @CLSphila to stay connected. 

Transcript

Kee Tobar:

Hello everyone. And welcome to How Is That Legal. The podcast where we break down examples of systemic racial inequity in the law and policy and talk to experts whose stories of injustice will make you ask how in the world is that legal? I'm your host, Kee Tobar. I'm a legal aid attorney, history enthusiast, and chief equity and inclusion officer at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia.

Kee Tobar:

Today, I'm really excited to welcome Professor Dorothy Roberts to the show to discuss the racialized history of parenting, family autonomy and the child welfare system. Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology, the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights and a Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare and Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty and her newest book Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families is available today.

Kee Tobar:

Today, you'll hear some pretty startling examples of racism in the child welfare system. Why Professor Roberts believes child welfare is better described as family policing and how she came to be an abolitionist. From the role of slavery and framing the black mother to disastrous legislation that negatively impacts black families to this day, Professor Roberts makes the case that child welfare does not and never has protected children from abuse. Personally, I've been a big fan and avid reader of Professor Roberts for some time now. So I was beyond thrilled when she agreed to join us.

Kee Tobar:

Our conversation today touched on my three favorite things, history, policy and the law. So let's dig in. Welcome Professor Roberts to the show. We're here to really dig into the child welfare system and how it's racialized and how it evolved from slavery into the present. And I'm really excited to talk the history of that with you and excited to learn about your vast knowledge. I was so happy when we were able to get you on here. I was like, oh, I'll be able to talk history. I'll be able to talk the law. I'll be able to talk policy. I'm so excited about that. So kin, I'm a big fan of you, but could you introduce yourself to the audience?

Dorothy Roberts:

Oh, sure. Thanks so much for inviting me to be on this podcast. I'm a big fan of Community Legal Services and all that it does. And I won't start naming names, but love a lot of people there. And so it's just really a thrill and honor to be on this podcast. So I am a professor of Africana studies, law and sociology at University of Pennsylvania. And I teach there a big course on reproductive rights and justice to law students. And I teach a course on race science and justice to undergraduate students. And I have been doing research on the child welfare system, what I prefer calling it a family policing system for a long time, really since the early 1990s, because I first became aware of how violent and racist it is as I was doing research for my book Killing the Black Body, which was published in 1997.

Dorothy Roberts:

And that book was about the regulation of black women's childbearing, which has still continued to be a major focus of my research and activism. And while I was doing that research, I learned about the so-called child welfare system and its removal of thousands and thousands of newborn babies from black mothers who were pregnant and accused of using drugs while pregnant. And so that was my first introduction to it. And I have been working on that issue ever since I wrote a book in 2001 called Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, which focused on racism in the system and how it was designed to oppress black communities and other marginalized communities.

Dorothy Roberts:

And then I also wrote a book in 2011 called Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century. So I've done a lot of research and advocacy around ending the legacy of racism in medicine and all of these topics, I think, intersect with each other. They all are about punitive systems that regulate and punish black communities. And with me a special focus on, as I said, the surveillance and devaluation of black women's mothering in particular.

Kee Tobar:

Thank you. So the name of this show is How Is That Legal. Professor Roberts, is there a specific instance maybe earlier in your life as a young attorney or scholar where you researched or had some sort of experience related to racially discriminatory child welfare policy or law that shocked you and made you think to yourself like how is that legal?

Dorothy Roberts:

Well, one rather early experience I had was when I was teaching a course on contemporary issues in child welfare policy at Northwestern University in Chicago. And I was able to get permission to bring my class to watch child welfare proceedings. And I distinctly remember one proceeding where there was a black mother before a judge in family court whose children were in foster care. And this was a hearing to determine whether she could get them back and all the evidence against her was that her apartment was still infested with roaches and rodents. And the judge held that she could not get her children back, delayed the return for another six months when she would come back and have to prove that her apartment was safe for her children to live in and afterward, my students would always have a chance or usually have a chance depending on the judge to ask the judge questions about the proceeding that they had just witnessed.

Dorothy Roberts:

And so one student said, why would you keep this mother's children in foster care because of the conditions of her apartment, it's not her fault. It's the landlord's fault. The landlord has an obligation to make the apartment habitable so she could have her children back. And the judge said, "well, I don't have jurisdiction over the landlord. That's for housing court to deal with. I only have jurisdiction over her and her children and I can't let the children back." And I knew that this was a terrible system that punishes people for being poor, especially being poor and black. And I was still shocked though, that this judge would just brazenly admit that this system was keeping this family separated for something that was the fault of the landlord and he just couldn't do anything about it. And so, yes, the response of my students and myself was how can that be legal? How can that be legal?

Kee Tobar:

We often talk about the legacies of slavery connected to these country's framing of race and particularly around black people. But I'd love for you to talk a bit more intersectionally and discuss the legacy of slavery and how the legacy of slavery informs the framing of black mother in this country specifically?

Dorothy Roberts:

Yes. Oh boy, well that would take hours. And by the way, if your listeners are interested, I did write about that extensively in Torn Apart, but I also have a chapter in the 1619 Project on this topic as well. It's the second chapter in the 1619 Project book. But yes, the really gross devaluation of black motherhood goes all the way back to slavery and the way in which white enslavers denied black mothers any authority at all over their children and separated black mothers and fathers from their children at will. There's a particular way in which black mothers were vilified and controlled during the slavery era, which reverberates all the way into policies and practices today. And that is, number one, early on in the 1600s, the Virginia Colony first, and then other colonies in attempting to create a racial category, the black race that could be enslaved.

Dorothy Roberts:

They passed a law that asked or answered the question, whether the children born to black mothers, but fathered by white men, and this would be by sexual assault because of course, black women had no legal right to consent or not to consent to sexual violence. And they had to determine what's the status of these children. And they decided that the children born to a black woman are black and therefore could be enslaved. They had the status of the mother. And I see this as an early way in which the law embedded the idea that black children's disadvantage that's caused by white supremacy and structural racism is born by their mothers.

Dorothy Roberts:

It's passed down to them in their mother's wombs. So to me, the very first laws in the colonies, the origin of the United States were laws about controlling black women's reproduction and creating this myth that black women's reproduction was responsible for the subordinated status of their children and all the hardships that flowed from that. That is one of the main principles of family policing today is we should blame black mothers for all the hardships and problems and deficits that their children have, which are actually caused by structural racism and the way in which our society denies them opportunities and criminalizes them, both the mothers and the children.

Kee Tobar:

Right.

Dorothy Roberts:

Then also there was the myth that developed during slavery of the black jezebel. And this is a black woman who's supposed to be naturally sexually licentious. She's a temptress. And this was developed to excuse white men from sexually assaulting, from raping black women on grounds that while black women always want to have sex, they're unrapable because they are innately sexually promiscuous. Again, those ideas continue to today. And then they got conflated with the idea that black women are bad mothers, because a woman who is sexually promiscuous, who doesn't care about the result of her sexual activity is a bad mother. Now that idea of black women being bad mothers was then continued during the post-slavery era, including what the image of the black mammy. Now you might think, well, the black mammy, wasn't she a good mother? No, she was a good mother to white people's children.

Kee Tobar:

Exactly, she was absent for her own children.

Dorothy Roberts:

She was absent from her own children, right. She didn't care about them and nor did society care about them. What the focus of the mammy is her care for white people's children and at always under the supervision of a white mistress. She's not a good mother on her own, even to white people's children. She has to be supervised. She has to be controlled, plus she was presented as the opposite of the jezebel, who was this licentious temptress. The black mammy was made to look very domestic. Usually heavy set with very clear African features, a head rag on her head, and she wasn't supposed to be appealing to white men. That's why she was safe to be inside the home, but again, only under the control of white women. So I just want to mention two more contemporary, which also are so related to why black mothers are so disrespected and devalued by family policing agents.

Dorothy Roberts:

And one is the black welfare queen. I could just say the welfare queen, because she was painted as black all the time. And this is the black mother who had babies just to get a welfare check. And she didn't really care about her children. She was doing it for the money, not because she wanted children. So then when she got the check, she didn't spend it on her children. She spent it on herself. This idea emerged in the 1980s in particular. I mean, it was building up, but the particular icon of the welfare queen emerged in the Reagan administration and then continued into the 1990s when it fueled the abolition of the federal entitlement to welfare. And then the other image I would mention, there are others, there's so many negative images of black mothers, but the other I'd mention is the pregnant black crack addict.

Dorothy Roberts:

And this was supposed to be a black woman because only black women are under this stereotype, trade sex for crack and have babies, so-called crack babies who also were portrayed as black. And she cared more about crack cocaine than her baby. And so she would get pregnant from trading sex for crack, and then produce these monstrous babies who not only were supposed to have terrible medical problems, but were predicted to lack social consciousness. So they would become criminals and welfare cheats and just social pariahs. I mean, just think about all of those negative images about black mothers passing down depraved lifestyles to their children. And this supports the idea that black children are better off with anybody than their black mothers. And so it's not harmful to them to take them away from their black mothers because they must be better off without them.

Kee Tobar:

Right. I really appreciate the fact that you bring up the necessity of that framework of detachment that black women don't feel as deeply for their children and so on and so forth. And so connected to that when we're talking about the legacies of slavery, there's particular way that we talk about them and we don't actually focus as much, I think, as we should, as it relates to black families, the legacies of families and how families were harmed and how also these new systems were formatted or created with a lot of the bad policies of the past. So sometimes we talk about convict leasing as a policy that's an extension of slavery in the criminal legal system. This is where states leased people who were incarcerated to provide private companies like coal mines and railroads without paying them for their labor. What is not discussed as much is the apprenticeship system and its effect on black parents' ability to function as an autonomous family. Can you discuss what apprenticeship was and its effect on the black families?

Dorothy Roberts:

Sure. So just like after emancipation and the civil war, white supremacists wanting to take over domination of the south again and re-enslave black people, pass black codes and also used criminal codes that were on the books to arrest and incarcerate black men, women, and children, and put many of them on chain gangs or lease them out to corporations to work them to death. There at the very same time was the youth of apprenticeship. And this is a system that existed already where children were leased out really to other families, other people in order to learn a trade or to learn certain skills on grounds that their families couldn't provide that and it already existed, but it was exploited during the post civil war era. In addition to some black codes, including provisions that apply to black children in particular, but it was used as a way of transferring black children back to former white enslavers.

Dorothy Roberts:

In fact, sometimes back to their own former white enslavers, and this happened to thousands and thousands of children immediately after the civil war, where white people would go into court and petition to apprentice black children on grounds that their parents were neglecting them. And these laws provided for judges to be able to order children into the care of others in order to supposedly train them because their parents couldn't do it. But in the case of black children, they were put to work just like they were put to work during the slavery era. And they were not given the education that they were supposed to be given under the apprentice laws. In fact, I talk about in Torn Apart, a lawsuit that a black mother brought because her daughter was just being forced to work and wasn't being given an education by her former enslaver that she was apprentice to.

Dorothy Roberts:

And they actually won because it happened that a judge who was an abolitionist judge was on the Maryland circuit at the time. And he was actually a Supreme Court judge, [inaudible 00:21:14] became a Supreme court judge, but he was on the Maryland circuit. And he decided this as a violation of the equal protection clause because white children were given an education and black children weren't. And so what this allowed the white supremacists in the south, and they were all supremacists. I mean, I'm not trying to isolate a few aberrational people, but the power structure in the south, the white power structure that wanted to take back domination of black people after the civil war, they were able to use this apprenticeship law to take back the labor of black children. Now, this meant not only that black children were denied freedom, but also that their families were denied the help of their children's labor.

Dorothy Roberts:

I mean, think about it, these are families coming out of enslavement who were struggling to survive in the new south. And this was a way of, again, exploiting black labor in the form of child apprenticeship. And to me, the way in which it mirrors so much the process of child welfare proceedings today, where petitions are brought against black parents, claiming that they are negligent because they don't have the means to take care of their children the way that they would like to, right. And that is now determined to be parental unfitness and grounds for a judge ordering that their children be transferred to the care of someone else. To me, the way in which apprenticeship worked to re-enslave black children and disrupt black families is the true origin of the child welfare system for black families.

Kee Tobar:

So to bring it to present day, right? So we were saying like, that's the historical context and frameworks, right? So let's talk about the '90s. I am always astounded that we don't talk about the three big pieces of legislation together, which are the crime bill, the child welfare restricting law, and the Adoption and Safe Families act. To me, those have profound effect on black people. Can you kind of discuss those three for me or that connection?

Dorothy Roberts:

Sure. Yes, you're absolutely right. The three major bills passed under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, one right after the next, show how these punitive carceral policies, whether they're in the criminal legal system, the family policing system, or the welfare public assistance system are completely entangled. And they're entangled in terms of their philosophy, their aim, who they're targeted at and just their historical coincidence which is not an accident.

Kee Tobar:

That's right.

Dorothy Roberts:

So we see in the 1990s, a move to assault black communities and to blame black people for the continuing economic and social and political devastation caused by structural racism and the policies under Reagan of the 1980s, Reagan and Bush policies. But now in the 1990s under a democratic Congress and President, there is a move for the Democrats to appear tough on crime and also to adopt neoliberal principles, that's market-based principles for solving social problems.

Dorothy Roberts:

And what the fallout of that is three laws that were passed one right after the other. First, the crime control bill of 1993, that stepped up the incursion of police into black neighborhoods and increased penalties for crime. And so this was, in my opinion, an assault by law enforcement supported by this law right into black communities to prove that the Democrats were tough on crime and to gain bipartisan support for these measures and more support for the Clinton administration. Then we see in 1996, the passage of the welfare restructuring law with which ended the federal entitlement to public assistance to take care of children. This is major, this is an abolition of a law and also of a philosophy that the federal government since the 1930, since the new deal was supposed to entitle impoverished families with some minimal support to care for their children, this law in 1996, abolished that idea.

Dorothy Roberts:

It ended the federal entitlement and gave states wide discretion to restrict welfare benefits. I say that what it allowed states to do was turn welfare into a behavior modification program. Because Congress made it very clear, this is in the preamble to the law, that the way to address childhood poverty was to not support families with guaranteed income. No, no. It was to force single mothers into low wage work, pressure them to get married. And that was Congress' solution to female poverty, especially in black communities was if, well, if these single mothers would just get married, that would solve the problem, which is absurd because they are not going to end poverty by black single mothers marrying impoverished black men, which is what they had in mind, but that doesn't work. And then finally, and maybe most importantly, getting them to have fewer children as this was the kind of eugenicist thinking behind the law as well, that the reason why there are so many black children being born in poverty is because their mothers are having too many children.

Dorothy Roberts:

And so this allowed for states to pass what's called family caps or child exclusion policies that deny to people on welfare any increment in their benefits, no additional benefits for children born while they're on welfare and this was explicitly to deter them from having more children. So that was the welfare restructuring law. Again, relying on the market to take care of impoverished children rather than supporting families. And then the third, passed just a year later in 1997, was the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which was based on the myth that the way in which to solve the problem of the exploding foster care population, including children who were neither returned to their families or placed for adoption, that the solution to that was to speed up termination of parental rights, to so-called free children in foster care for adoption, and then give incentives, monetary financial incentives to states to increase their adoptions of children in foster care.

Dorothy Roberts:

So again, we see this market-based punitive solution, and all three of these bills are punitive and market-based, denying support, and turning to punishment of the people suffering the most from almost from economic inequality and racial inequality by bringing police into their communities, arresting them, incarcerating them by denying them any guaranteed support income for their children. And then by terminating their parental rights and putting their children up for adoption. None of that actually works of course to solve the problem of poverty in black communities, but this is a way of pretending that this can solve the problem instead of the radical social change that we would need to actually end childhood poverty in black communities.

Kee Tobar:

I really appreciate bringing up the Adoption and Safe Families Act and shout out to Community Legal Services Family Advocacy Unit for all the work that they do. Connected to that, I would love for you to talk about how we need to kind of reframe safety and reframe child welfare.

Dorothy Roberts:

Yes, absolutely. So it always amazes me when people say, oh, but there's some children who are protected. There's some children who need this system ignoring all the children who are harmed by it, children and their families. The trauma of family separation, which we recognize in other circumstances, there was a huge outcry against the Trump administration's increase in family separation at the border with people noting, experts noting that this is extremely traumatic for children. It has lifelong negative effects on children and on their family caregivers who see them taken from them. And some even pointed out, it violates UN conventions. It's a form of torture. So those same traumas happen to black children. What they [inaudible 00:32:25] taken from their families, despite all the stereotypes that black people don't have, loving, caring, family ties, that's a lie. There's trauma inflicted on these children. And then they are put into a system that also has very high rates of violence, even death, and lots of negative outcomes on the lower likelihood of going to college or getting a high school diploma, because it disrupts children's education.

Dorothy Roberts:

PSTD, one study found it was higher among children in foster care than of veterans of war, the children who run away from foster care and end up living in the street without homes, making them subject and at risk for all sorts of terrible outcomes and violence. I could go on and on with the harms including as you mentioned black teenagers at high risk of being put into congregate care, or even so-called therapeutic residential facilities, which are like prisons and where we have cases of children killed by staff for minor infractions in those prison-like facilities. And it's also, as you pointed out, important to recognize that the vast majority of children taken from their families are taken on grounds of neglect, which is, look at how it's defined, its state statutes. It's defined sometimes vaguely as just not providing the needs of children or for their wellbeing.

Kee Tobar:

Right.

Dorothy Roberts:

And sometimes it lists not providing clothing, food, medical care, education, material things that some families just can't afford and could be, this is the other part of it, could be provided to them, but that's not what this system does. It doesn't provide the concrete resources that they're blaming families for not providing, it takes children away. And then mandates a set of tasks, sometimes completely unrelated to the problems the family's having, like seeing this therapist that's paid for by the state and not solving the problems at all. And it's not that children don't have material needs that are being unmet, although that's not always the case. I mean, as I mentioned earlier, sometimes children are taken because of perceived deficits of the family that are based in racist and anti poor and ableist stereotypes. But it is the case that children have needs that are being unmet, but it's not the parent's fault.

Dorothy Roberts:

And the best way to provide those needs is just to have community resources and a national policy that provides them, not separating them from their families, separating from their families is just a way of assaulting and oppressing the most disenfranchised communities. This isn't a system for wealthy, powerful people who have problems and conflicts in their families as well. It's not a system for them. It's a system for the most disenfranchised communities. And that's what it's designed to do. And that's why it doesn't meet children's needs. And that's why it doesn't keep children safe because it's not designed to do that.

Kee Tobar:

So hopefully through this conversation and after they read your book Torn Apart, and all of your other books, [inaudible 00:36:34] people are able to see the problems with the current foster industrial complex and the child welfare system. But part of what I want to do with this podcast is to also provide people a possible solution, possible new framework. So I love to talk to you about abolition, and I actually really love your story about your journey because all of us are not necessarily, as you know, you've been doing this work for 20 years. All of us are not immediately coming to abolition. There's a journey to getting to that point. So I'd love for you to discuss that.

Dorothy Roberts:

Sure, sure. Well, it's interesting. When I went back to Shattered Bonds, which was published in 2001, now over 20 years ago, and I saw in the introduction that I used the word abolition, and the only time I used it in the book, but I did say in the introduction that this system should be abolished. And then I said, and replaced with another system and at the time, I didn't really understand what abolition would entail. This was before I really delved deeply into abolitionist theory and practice and organizing. And I remember distinctly coming to the last chapter and thinking, oh, I got to figure out some reforms that would work and putting some of them in the last chapter.

Dorothy Roberts:

But then in the next 20 years, one thing that changed my thinking was, or expanded my thinking about what abolition truly means and what it would require was that I did engage in a lot of reformist efforts to improve the child welfare system. I became known as an expert on this subject and especially on what came to be coined racial disproportionality. And I found that there were a number of child welfare departments and task forces and foundations and state commissions that were dedicated to reducing racial disproportionality. But what that meant was decrease the gap in the statistics of how many black children are taken from their homes versus white children, not change anything really, but just figure out ways to reduce it or reduce the numbers of children in foster care, but not really fundamentally change the design of the system. And so I spoke to so many of these places, I wrote reports and probably the most intensive thing I did was I was appointed as an expert on a panel that was charged with implementing a plan to reform foster care in Washington state.

Dorothy Roberts:

This came out of a big class action lawsuit, where it was alleged by child advocates and proven that the State of Washington was violating the constitutional rights of children in foster care. For example, by placing them in multiple homes, the name plaintiff, Jessica Bram, this was a case called Bram versus the State of Washington had been moved more than 30 times while she was in foster care. The judge found that foster parents were not adequately caring for the children, case workers had huge caseloads. So they couldn't possibly be really supporting families and keeping children safe, problems like that. And we devised this huge plan that had multiple steps that the state had to do. It had benchmarks, it had outcomes they had to reach and this lasted for nine years. It was supposed to last for seven years. We looked at after seven years, the problems were still there.

Dorothy Roberts:

So we said, okay, extended two more years. And then they finally ended it after nine years. But there's a little bits of change, but fundamentally the state was treating children in foster care the same way that it was before. And so through all of this, it became clear to me that it's the very design of this system, that's the problem. It is designed to oppress communities. It's designed to accuse, investigate and punish. It's designed to disrupt. It's not designed to support families. It's not designed to keep children safe. It's not designed to promote children's welfare. So it's going to have the outcome that it was designed to do. And until we abolish the whole system and it's carceral logic, it's logic of blaming the people who are the survivors of structural racism and patriarchy and classism and ableism. Until we abolish that very design, we are going to keep reproducing for another 400 years, this same essential way of blaming and punishing people instead of radically changing our society.

Dorothy Roberts:

So I came to understand that. And then I'll just mention a couple other things. One was learning about what abolition actually means from abolitionists seeking to end the prison industrial complex and replace it with a society that doesn't rely on caging people. And I came to understand what abolition is. You have to dismantle the oppressive system at the same time that you're building its replacement. They have to happen at the same time. And it's not about tearing down a system tomorrow and just leaving everything else as is. It's about incrementally moving toward a horizon of a society that doesn't cage people and separate families and punish as a way of meeting human needs and pretending to care for people, pretending to keep people safe by inflicting violence on them. It's about having a vision of a society that is truly caring and humane and supportive that deals with the root causes of violence instead of just coming in after it's occurred and inflicting more violence.

Kee Tobar:

Right.

Dorothy Roberts:

That's what abolition is. So I learned about that and then finally, the movement to abolish family policing had grown astronomically over those 20 years. I mean, even in the last two years it's grown more, I think than the 18 years prior. And so, I was able then to work with people who are on this same mission and I'll include family defenders in that as well. The family defense practice has mushroomed and developed into a multidisciplinary practice that is working alongside abolitionists to radically transform how we support families and care for children.

Kee Tobar:

I really liked how you framed it, the non reformist reforms, right? And so there are people who may look and say, I'm digging what you're putting down, Professor Roberts. And I believe that there does need to be abolition and that needs to be completely destroying the current system that we have, but there are kids who are in that system now and like, what are the steps, right? So you talked about that there has been this version of movement of family defense and the movement for abolitionist in the child welfare context. Can you give us some direct examples of that so that people can kind of try to tap into what is happening beyond the theory, but on the ground?

Dorothy Roberts:

Sure, sure. So, one thing that abolitionist organizations like JMacForFamilies in New York city founded and headed by Joyce McMillan and there are others as well. I always like to give a shout out to her and her organization because she's thought so strategically about how to chip away, dismantle this system piece by piece. And she and others are working collectively on a legislative plan in New York that would reduce the power of this system. And therefore also reduce the suffering of people in the system and prevent more people from going into it.

Dorothy Roberts:

So those are the kind of concrete things we can do, like passing a law to give parents Miranda rights, to actually enforce the fourth amendment, which is already in the constitution and already applies, but it's not enforced. And many parents don't know that they have this constitutional right, like ending mandated reporting, which only leads to limit what professionals can do to support families, because they think, many of them think they have to call up CPS and report children in need instead of working to help meet those needs, which would be much more effective and less traumatic than getting CPS involved, like ending anonymous reporting on child abuse hotlines and making them confidential, but at least have people state who they are and have some backup to what they're saying.

Dorothy Roberts:

As we know, most of those are frivolous, even retaliatory calls. And then also giving parents high quality family defense, parents and other family caregivers, family defense that involves multidisciplinary that social workers and peer advocates to even prevent children from going into the system in the first place, we all know, the legal experts, professionals who have worked in the system and the people impacted by it know that once the child is removed, it's a whole lot harder to get them back than having strong legal defense at the beginning before the child is removed. And that's what wealthy people do with their fancy lawyers and family defenders are successfully doing this to prevent the harm of family separation. Those are just some examples of concrete things we can do.

Dorothy Roberts:

And then at the same time, we need to be building up these replacements for family policing that are better at supporting families, preventing violence and keeping children safe and improving their welfare. And those are things like mutual aid networks, which already exist around the country, but we need more of them. We need to support them. And also transformative justice. Ways of truly dealing with the causes of domestic violence, getting at the roots of it, holding people accountable, but not relying on taking children away and caging people as the only response when we know that there are more effective responses that actually deal with conflicts and families and why there's violence in families and actually keep family members, including children safer than the failed systems we have now that are based on carceral logics.

Kee Tobar:

Thank you so much for joining us today. This has been an extremely informative conversation. And again, thank you for being here. And hopefully the audience also received all the information that I believe that I received today. So thank you again, Professor Roberts.

Dorothy Roberts:

Thank you to, I really appreciate it. You're a great interviewer.

Kee Tobar:

Oh, thank you.

Dorothy Roberts:

I loved our engagement. So thank you. And I'm really honored and privileged to be on this podcast.

Kee Tobar:

So that was my conversation with the one and only Dorothy Roberts, believe it or not, we barely scratched the surface of the child welfare system and the negative effects it has on black children and their families, specifically black mothers. To learn more, be sure to grab a copy of Professor Roberts new book Torn Apart. And you can also follow her on Twitter @DorothyERoberts.

Kee Tobar:

That's all for now, but we're not done with the child welfare conversation just yet. Next week, I'll be talking to my colleague and CLS Director of Client Voice, April Lee. April has lived experience in the child welfare system, and she's a force to be reckoned with as she fights to keep families together. To make sure you don't miss next week's episode, be sure to subscribe to How Is That Legal wherever you get your podcast. How Is That Legal is produced by Rowhome Productions. Jake Nusbaum is our producer and editor, executive producers are Alex Lewis and John Myers, music provided by Blue Dot Sessions. Special thanks to Zakya Hall, Caitlin Nagel and Molly Pollak. I'm your host Kee Tobar.