Investigating Families: Motherhood in the Shadow of Child Protective Services

(Hardback)

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How our reliance on Child Protective Services makes motherhood precarious for those already marginalized

Its the knock on the door that many mothers fear: a visit from Child Protective Services (CPS), the state agency with the power to take their children away. Over the last half-century, these encounters have become an all-too-common way of trying to address family poverty and adversity. One in three children nationwideand half of Black childrennow encounter CPS during childhood.

In Investigating Families, Kelley Fong provides an unprecedented look at the inner workings of CPS and the experiences of families pulled into its orbit. Drawing on firsthand observations of CPS investigations and hundreds of interviews with those involved, Fong traces the implications of invoking CPS as a first responder to family misfortune and hardship. She shows how relying on CPSan entity fundamentally oriented around parental wrongdoing and empowered to separate familiesorganizes the response to adversity around surveilling, assessing, and correcting marginalized mothers. The agencys far-reaching investigative apparatus undermines mothers sense of security and shapes how they marshal resources for their families, reinforcing existing inequalities. And even before CPS comes knocking, mothers feel vulnerable to a system that jeopardizes their parenthood. Countering the usual narratives of punitive villains and hapless victims, Fongs unique, behind-the-scenes account tells a revealing story of how we try to protect children by threatening mothersand points the way to a more productive path for families facing adversity.

Author Bio

Kelley Fong is assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine.