How to End the Family Policing System: From Outrage to Action

(Paperback)

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From four leading abolitionist organizers, a much-needed intervention arguing that the systems and services that purport to protect children make our communities less safe and more precarious.

argue that the criminal legal 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. In New York City, 90 percent of reports made to child protective services involve Black or Latinx children. In Minnesota, Indigenous children are 1.7 percent of the total population yet 25.8 percent of the young people in foster care.

With first-person testimony, examples of campaigns to build alternatives to family policing, and definitions of key concepts, this is an urgent call to build authentic and flourishing communities.

With contributions from Dorothy Roberts, Shira Hassan, Brianna Harvey, and Jasmine Wali, Corey B. Best, jaboa lake, zara raven, Ignacio G. Huta Xeiti Rivera, Leah Plasse, E. Zimiles, Annie Chambers, Margaret Prescod, Arneta Roger, jasmine Sankofa, Noran Elzarka, Elizabeth Ling, Kylee Sunderlin, Shawn Koyano, Lisa Sangoi, and the editors.

Author Bio

Erin Miles Cloud is a civil rights attorney. She is the cofounder of Movement for Family Power, and a former family defense public defender.

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is a queer, mixed-race Latina, founding member of the Accountable Communities Consortium and a core member of the Mandatory Reporting Is Not Neutral project. Perez Darby works to create the conditions to support loving, equitable relationships and communities while focusing on issues of domestic and sexual violence, accountability, and abolition.

is a Black poet, abolitionist, parent, and Chicago native. They have been organizing for more than two decades on issues ranging from sex education, health and reproductive rights, housing, immigration, abolition, education, and mass incarceration.