In the final episode of the Torn Apart podcast, Dorothy Roberts makes the case for the abolition of the child welfare system and lays out a vision for the more just and equitable society that could replace it. Roberts discusses why abolition, and not reform, is the necessary path forward. In conversation with Professor Anna Arons of St. John’s University, Roberts uses how New York City is a case study for what could happen if family policing ends. During the pandemic, New York City limited its child protection agency. This resulted in an over 40% decrease in the number of children sent into foster care, and data found that rates of child abuse did not rise. Abolition of the child welfare system will help us build a safer world.

Meet Dorothy Roberts

Dorothy Roberts is a distinguished professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Founding Director of its Program on Race, Science & Society. An internationally acclaimed scholar, public intellectual, and social justice activist, she is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, American Philosophical Society, and National Academy of Medicine. She is the author of the award-winning Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty ; Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare; and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century , as well as more than 100 articles and book chapters, including “Race” in the 1619 Project. Her latest book, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World , culminates more than two decades of investigating family policing, calling for a radically reimagined way to support children and families.

With Guests

- Joyce McMillan is the founder and Executive Director of Just Making A Change For Families, an organization in New York City that works to abolish the child welfare system and to strengthen the systems of supports that keep families and communities together. Joyce’s mission is to remove systemic barriers in communities of color by bringing awareness to the racial disparities in systems where people of color are disproportionately affected. Her ultimate goal is to abolish systems of harm–especially the family policing system (or the so-called “child welfare system”)–while creating concrete community resources. Joyce leads a statewide coalition of impacted parents and young people, advocates, attorneys, social workers, and academics collaborating to effect systemic change in the family policing system. Joyce also currently serves on the board of the Women’s Prison Association.

- Anna Arons is an Assistant Professor of Law at St. John’s University. She teaches evidence, criminal law, and courses related to family law. Arons writes about the government's regulation and policing of families and the intersection of parental rights and identity along dimensions including race, poverty, and gender. Her scholarship has appeared in publications including the Washington University Law Review, the N.Y.U. Review of Law and Social Change, and the Columbia Journal of Race and Law and has been cited in publications including MSNBC, the New York Times, Pro Publica, USA Today, and the Washington Post.

In this episode, Torn Apart reveals the child welfare system’s deep entanglements with the criminal legal system. It exposes how state child protection caseworkers collaborate with police and use a carceral logic to surveil families. It investigates how the system treats Black children like criminals, resulting in Black children being more vulnerable to arrest, incarceration, and early death. Foster care is traumatic for both children and parents, and often leaves lasting damage on children. In this episode, Torn Apart turns to examining what it will take to end family policing,

Meet Dorothy Roberts

Dorothy Roberts is a distinguished professor of Africana Studies, Law, and Sociology at
University of Pennsylvania. An elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, American Philosophical Society, and National Academy of Medicine, she is author of the best selling book on reproductive justice, Killing the Black Body. Her latest book, Torn Apart, won the 2023 American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Book Award Honorable Mention, was a finalist for an LA Times Book Prize and C. Wright Mills Award, and was shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice.

With Guests

· Sixto Cancel is a nationally recognized leader driving systems change in child welfare, working across tech, service delivery, research and data, and state and federal policy to improve outcomes for youth and families. He spent most of his childhood in foster, which informed his activism for child welfare. In 2017 Sixto founded Think Of Us, a nonprofit organization that uses technology and research centering people who have experienced foster care to transform the child welfare system’s fundamental architecture. He currently serves as the CEO, where he advises state and government officials to improve child welfare policies. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he led a campaign that disbursed $400M in Federal pandemic relief funds to former foster youth.

· Joyce McMillan is the founder and Executive Director of Just Making A Change For Families, an organization in New York City that works to abolish the child welfare system and to strengthen the systems of supports that keep families and communities together. Joyce’s mission is to remove systemic barriers in communities of color by bringing awareness to the racial disparities in systems where people of color are disproportionately affected. Her ultimate goal is to abolish systems of harm–especially the family policing system (or the so-called “child welfare system”)–while creating concrete community resources. Joyce leads a statewide coalition of impacted parents and young people, advocates, attorneys, social workers, and academics collaborating to effect systemic change in the family policing system. Joyce also currently serves on the board of the Women’s Prison Association.

· Erin Miles Cloud is a cofounder and codirector of Movement for Family Power in New York City. Cloud worked at the Bronx defenders, representing families and working with advocates, for nearly a decade.

· Lisa Sangoi is a cofounder and codirector of Movement for Family Power in New York City. Sangoi has previously worked at the NYU Law Family Defense Clinic, National Advocates for Pregnant Women, Women Prison Association Incarcerated Mothers Law Project, and Brooklyn Defender Services Family Defense Practice.

In this episode, Torn Apart shows that the child welfare system was designed from its beginning to oppress marginalized communities. The episode explores how the child welfare system's roots in slavery, settler colonialism, and white supremacy, taking listeners on a journey to the separation of enslaved children from their mothers on plantations and the return of freed Black children to former enslavers as court-ordered apprentices. It uncovers how over time, the child welfare system went from neglecting Black children to over policing, surveilling, separating and punishing Black families.

Meet Dorothy Roberts:

Dorothy Roberts is a distinguished professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Founding Director of its Program on Race, Science & Society. An internationally acclaimed scholar, public intellectual, and social justice activist, she is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, American Philosophical Society, and National Academy of Medicine. She is the author of the award-winning Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty ; Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare; and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century , as well as more than 100 articles and book chapters, including “Race” in the 1619 Project. Her latest book, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World , culminates more than two decades of investigating family policing, calling for a radically reimagined way to support children and families.

With Guests:

· Laura Briggs is an expert on U.S. and international child welfare policy and transnational and transracial adoption. She is a professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Briggs' latest book, Taking Children: A History of American Terror, examines the 400-year-old history of state removal of children from marginalized communities—from the taking of Black and Native children during America’s founding to Donald Trump’s policy of family separation targeting asylum seekers.

· Daniel Hatcher is a professor at University of Baltimore School of Law and author of The Poverty Industry: The Exploitation of America's Most Vulnerable Citizens and Injustice, Inc: How America’s Justice Style Commodifies Children and the Poor. His scholarship reveals how state agencies commodify vulnerable populations they exist to serve, often with the assistance of private contractors—violating ethics, laws, constitutional requirements, and agency purpose.

· Kelley Fong is an assistant professor of sociology at UC Irvine whose work focuses on state intervention into motherhood and families. Her first book, Investigating Families: Motherhood in the Shadow of Child Protective Services, was published with Princeton University Press in 2023.

· Kathleen Creamer is the Managing Attorney of the Family Advocacy Unit at Community Legal Services, which uses a holistic family defense model to help parents involved with the child welfare system maintain custody of or reunite with their children in Philadelphia. Ms. Creamer led the coalition that developed and lobbied for the successful passage of the 2010 Healthy Birth for Incarcerated Women Act, which curtailed the practice of shackling incarcerated women during childbirth in Pennsylvania’s jails and prisons.

In this episode, Professor Dorothy Roberts opens Torn Apart with a first-hand account from a young Black mother, Vanessa Peoples, who became the subject of a government child welfare investigation when a stranger accused Peoples of neglecting her young son who had wandered away from her briefly in a park. Professor Roberts brings the listeners through the horrors that the child welfare system inflicts on families by invading homes, targeting low-income families, and threatening to separate parents and children. With the help of guest experts, Professor Roberts argues that the family policing system is designed to terrorize low-income, majority Black families.

Check out this episode’s landing page at MsMagazine.com for a full transcript, links to articles referenced in this episode, further reading and ways to take action.

Meet Dorothy Roberts
Dorothy Roberts is a distinguished professor of Africana Studies, Law, and Sociology at
University of Pennsylvania. An elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, American Philosophical Society, and National Academy of Medicine, she is author of the best selling book on reproductive justice, Killing the Black Body. Her latest book, Torn Apart, won the 2023 American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Book Award Honorable Mention, was a finalist for an LA Times Book Prize and C. Wright Mills Award, and was shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice.

With Guests:

• Vanessa Peoples is a young Black mother from Aurora, Colorado, who was targeted in 2017 by child protective services and forced to plead guilty to endangering her child, despite no evidence that she endangered her child.
• Kathleen Creamer is the Managing Attorney of the Family Advocacy Unit at Community Legal Services, which uses a holistic family defense model to help parents involved with the child welfare system maintain custody of or reunite with their children in Philadelphia. In addition to individual representation of parents in dependency court, Ms. Creamer has focused much of her advocacy on supporting incarcerated parents and their families. From 2011-2013, she served as a Stoneleigh Foundation Fellow dedicated to Improving Reunification Outcomes for Children of Incarcerated Parents. Ms. Creamer also led the coalition that developed and lobbied for the successful passage of the 2010 Healthy Birth for Incarcerated Women Act, which curtailed the practice of shackling incarcerated women during childbirth in Pennsylvania’s jails and prisons.
• Kelley Fong is an assistant professor of sociology at UC Irvine whose work focuses on state intervention into motherhood and families. Her first book, Investigating Families: Motherhood in the Shadow of Child Protective Services, was published with Princeton University Press in 2023.
  
  Background Reading
  - Fostering tragedy: Experts say system designed to protect children can break up families
  - One in Ten Black Children in America Are Separated From Their Parents by the Child-Welfare System. A New Book Argues That’s No Accident
  - Benevolent Terror: Dorothy E. Roberts on Reimagining the Child Welfare System

Welcome to Torn Apart, a podcast hosted by Professor Dorothy Roberts. Journey with her as she brings listeners front and center with the oppressive child protection system and what we need to do to reimagine child welfare. Hear from families at the center of this travesty as she welcomes guests and narrates this gripping series. Launching November 13th at Ms. Magazine.