Abstract
In her new book, Torn Apart, Dorothy Roberts has shown herself once again to be a preeminent child welfare scholar and activist. She provides a scathing and trenchant critique of the child welfare system, compellingly insisting on the more accurate phrase of “family policing.” She makes a persuasive call for abolition, teaching us that we can co-create safety and well-being rather than having it imposed and regulated by the state. Using real-life examples and careful research, Roberts upends the functions of the child welfare system and sensitizes readers to the immediate and long-term consequences of child welfare involvement for families. Throughout each chapter, she expertly interrogates the foundation and logics of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and racial capitalism, which lie at the heart of the family policing system.
Part I expertly exposes the devastating impacts of family policing in Black communities. Roberts calls our attention to the ways in which political and economic factors shape the lives of children and families and connects involvement in family policing to the historical and ever shifting social, political, and economic conditions, rather than just blaming “bad parenting” and family-of-origin factors.
Part II centers a critique of history and the social conditions that construct certain bodies as dangerous and disposable. Roberts traces the ongoing legacy of slavery and the biological and cultural determinist arguments that have been used to construct Black mothers as unfit and to justify the removal of their children.
Building on this historical analysis, Part III illustrates how the family policing system functions as part of a wider carceral web of institutions created to surveil, regulate, and punish primarily Black and other communities of color in the U.S. Robert's arguments in these first three sections challenge common assertions that the system of family policing can be improved and humanized. Ultimately, the history Roberts outlines clearly shows that child welfare involvement is not the avenue through which the urgent needs of children and families is met. In fact, it is the primary vehicle for activating state intrusion into the lives of marginalized families.
In Part IV, Roberts shifts gears and invites us to reimagine how we might create safety for children through the lens of abolition. Abolitionist thinking involves both a strong social critique and an ability to imagine. In relation to child welfare, abolitionist thinking requires a critique of child maltreatment that centers an analysis of structural and historical inequities rather than individual parental failings. Further, it requires generating a social landscape in which children and families can thrive and enact nonpunitive, community-based responses to the problems they face. The abolitionist thinking that Roberts offers helps us consider how social workers can work to co-create safety and well-being with families rather than imposing it through the power of the state.
Torn Apart takes a strong and pointed advocacy stance while being solidly grounded in, and informed by, decades of research. Critics of her work may assert that the forceful advocacy tone of the book dismisses the reality of child abuse and neglect. I found the opposite to be true. Roberts does not deny that there are children and families who experience serious harm and neglect, yet she rejects simplistic narratives of safety and protection that locate the cause of child and family distress in individual parental pathology. And she refuses to accept that the well-being of children must come at the expense of the well-being of parents or through state-imposed interventions. Ultimately, she inspires us to ask more from our systems of care and to envision bold new ways to ensure the health and safety of children and families. Social work should heed these lessons and transform our strategies for supporting children and families from those defined primarily by the assessment and management of risk to approaches that acknowledge and imagine the countless ways families and communities thrive without state intervention.
Roberts’ book comes at a time when activists and abolitionists across the nation have begun to advocate for radical change in our country's approach to child safety and well-being, working to replace the current system with community-based responses to harm and need. This is a book with the power to strip away layers of innocence for well-intentioned social work students and practitioners who want to “help” and “protect.”
