Torn Apart
How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
An award-winning scholar exposes the foundational racism of the child welfare system and calls for radical change
Many believe the child welfare system protects children from abuse. But as Torn Apart uncovers, this system is designed to punish Black families. Drawing on decades of research, legal scholar and sociologist Dorothy Roberts reveals that the child welfare system is better understood as a “family policing system” that collaborates with law enforcement and prisons to oppress Black communities. Child protection investigations ensnare a majority of Black children, putting their families under intense state surveillance and regulation. Black children are disproportionately likely to be torn from their families and placed in foster care, driving many to juvenile detention and imprisonment.
The only way to stop the destruction caused by family policing, Torn Apart argues, is to abolish the child welfare system and liberate Black communities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Roberts (Killing the Black Body), a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, offers a searing look at racial injustice in the U.S. child welfare system. Alleging that "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," Roberts explains that government funding for foster care far outstrips funding for family preservation efforts, that children are often placed in group homes or residential treatment centers instead of with families, and that abuse in these "prisonlike facilities" is rampant. Horror stories of parents trapped in the bureaucracy of the system include one cancer-stricken mother whose child wandered off in a park during a family picnic, causing a passerby to call the authorities. When a caseworker later knocked on the mother's door and she didn't answer right away, the police arrived and proceeded to hog-tie and arrest her, dislocating her shoulder in the process. Roberts buttresses her impassioned call for dismantling the child welfare system by skillfully situating it within a larger web of institutions intended to surveil, control, and punish Black Americans. This illuminating and alarming study shatters the "facade of benevolence" surrounding foster care.
