Community members across New York City gathered at the People’s Forum on March 1 to discuss the harms of the family policing system and learn more about growing demands for reparative justice.
Family policing comprises a consortium of agencies and government organizations, including Child Protective Services (CPS), the foster care system, and other services mandated by the court system. Family policing has disproportionately harmed families of the most marginalized backgrounds and has roots in a welfare system that was fashioned in the mid-20th century to target Black families following monumental civil rights victories.
Hosted by Black Families Love and Unite (BLU), a grassroots organization dedicated to helping empower Black and brown families, the event featured a keynote address delivered by legal scholar and activist Dorothy Roberts and speeches from parents directly impacted by the family policing system. The event also served as an introduction to BLU’s new report “Families Belong Together, Families Demand Repair,” which details the group’s demands for reparations on behalf of those who have been directly impacted by family policing. BLU’s report also shares in-depth insights on what form reparations might take.
In addition to the emotional impacts that forced separation brings, the family policing system also levies both immediate and long-term effects on the parents and children involved. One often underexplored issue touched upon in the report is the higher likelihood that children within the foster care system will enter into the criminal legal system. BLU points to national data showing that over half of young people in foster care will be arrested, convicted, or detained, and 70% of youth in foster care experience at least one arrest before turning 26 years old as evidence of this “foster care-to-prison pipeline.”
Despite these glaring harms, advocates at BLU’s event underscored the idea that the system has been working as intended and thus, cannot be reformed out of its perceived dysfunction.
In the “Families Belong Together, Families Demand Repair” report,BLU Co-Founder and Executive Director Imani Worthy underscored the idea that the system cannot be reformed because of her belief that its goal is to separate vulnerable families “under the guise of child protection.” The report goes on to argue how welfare policy has both historically and in the present day been fueled by harmful stereotypes about the incapacity of Black parents—often mothers—to properly raise their children.
“You cannot fix something where its very foundation is to destroy,” said Roberts shortly after reading an excerpt from her 2022 book “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World,”which features Worthy’s story. “You can only dismantle it while building its alternative.”
This reframing is akin to the messaging of those who seek to abolish the carceral system. Another similarity between the movements is their push to interrogate existing support systems, or lack thereof, that bring people into contact with the policing apparatus. For example, BLU’s report highlighted the importance of parents being able to seek support for mental health issues, substance dependency, or protection from domestic violence without being alerted to CPS via mandatory reporting.
While BLU’s overall work centers on dismantling a host of punitive systems that jeopardize the safety and wellness of Black families, its focus on those impacted by family policing and a call for reparations emerged last year. In February 2024, BLU hosted a convening in partnership with CUNY Law’s Family Defense Practicum as a way to begin a dialogue with directly impacted victims and survivors of family policing. Through listening to their experiences and thoughts, the organization began to piece together a sense of what meaningful repair might look like. BLU also gathered insights via a 60-person focus group and a survey of over 200 directly impacted children and parents. “Families Belong Together, Families Demand Repair”is a distillation of some of the information gleaned from these outreach efforts as well as an overview of what reparations means overall and within the context of family policing specifically.
BLU, alongside other advocates and scholars, has situated family policing within a longer historical timeline that links present-day family separation to chattel slavery in the U.S. The larger freedom struggle Black Americans have waged throughout the nation’s history can inform the movement to abolish the family policing system and achieve reparations for those impacted by it.
To help readers and potential future advocates better understand how reparations for family policing might take shape, BLU utilizes the five elements of reparations defined by the United Nations in 2005 in its guidelines for reparations. In addition to restitution and compensation—the elements perhaps most often associated with reparations—this model also includes rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition. BLU’s report both defines each of these elements and outlines possible actions in the context of family policing. For example, the idea that reparations must include “satisfaction” means that reparative efforts must seek to address the “moral damage” incurred to the impacted party. In the case of family policing, this refers to the ways that the system often dehumanizes families and stereotypes them as being incapable of providing love and support. BLU suggests that formal and public apologies from federal policymakers, state and local policymakers, CPS agencies, and CPS agents be made in addition to monetary payments.
Accountability was a recurring theme throughout BLU’s launch event, as directly impacted parents spoke of the necessity of meaningful apologies for their own healing and for assuring that such harm would not continue.
Roberts discussed the significance of accountability when suggesting that a truth and reconciliation process could be applicable in the case of reparative justice for survivors of family policing. She also highlighted that while the momentum of reparations in the context of family policing is still growing, other reparations campaigns have been successful and should be viewed as a template for what’s possible. Roberts cited the 2023 announcement that the Canadian government would be paying out $23 billion to compensate an estimated 300,000 First Nations children and families for the decades of harm incurred by the country’s welfare system, as well as the successful reparations campaign waged by organizers in Chicago on behalf of those tortured by former Police Commander Jon Burge.
BLU’s report also featured calls to action for allies in the legal, policy, and philanthropic sectors. As demonstrated by the myriad of voices that shaped the recommendations made in the report, BLU highlighted the need to listen and center people with lived experience. They also encouraged allies to fold in demands for reparative justice into their larger body of work.
BLU recommended fostering spaces for relationship-building for survivors. That space-building can be as simple as making more intentional effort to know your neighbors and brainstorm ways to collectively meet one another’s needs in a way that resists government interference.
“Reparations invites us to design and implement strategies to disrupt cycles of violence in our communities by unrooting the systems responsible for this violence,” the report’s authors write. “In doing so, we not only prevent future family separations, but we also create opportunities for families that have been separated to reunite and heal together.”
BLU plans to host teach-ins soon that take a more in-depth look at the reparations process for community members.
Editorial Team:
Carolyn Copeland, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor
