Why this book . Why now . I wrote a book on this topic turning years ago 20 years ago right after i discovered that the system called the Child Welfare system was a big state apparatus that monitored black communities and take children away. That was right actually i was finishing up my book, killing the blackbody. That book was about the regulation of the black womans child bearing. Mostly, i was focusing of the prosecutions of a black woman. I discovered that thousands of them were having their newborn babies taken from them because of a positive drug test, also because of a myth of the socalled, crack may be, which turns out to be a complete lie. I wanted to document this huge racial inequity in the Child Welfare system. I wrote that book. Then i worked in reaffirming the system reforming the system 20 years after that. We could talk about all of the kind of work that i was doing, training social workers, trying to reform foster care in washington state, which had been violating the Constitutional Rights of foster children in the states. A lot of other articles. I discovered after 20 years of this work trying to reform the system, it basically had stayed the same. In the sense that, it continues to be a system that relies on threatening to take the children of the most politically marginalized community in america, especially black communities and indigenous communities. Nothing had changed in terms of the foundational design of the system. It continues to terrorize families and injured children who are placed in a foster care system that harms many children, especially black children. Part of it was my realization that there has to be something more than these reforms. The other thing, white i think it is very timely why i think it is very timely, but also there has been a real increase in a movement to abolish it. Alongside the movement to abolish for the industrial complex, which is a larger and wellknown, there is this smaller movement to dismantle the Child Welfare systems. More and more youth has been involved with foster care who recognizes harms and wants to dismantle and replace it with something different. I was more familiar with abolitionist principles. Having read and advocated for the evolutions of the prison industrial complex. I had a better vision of what actually needed to take place, which is to end this system and work toward an approach in society that actually supports families and actually keeps children safe, which this system does not do. Such an important point you make. Theres this idea sometimes as scholars as they develop in their work and careers, they get less radical. You did not do that. He went from a critical analysis of the system to a abolitionist responding. Yeah. Theres this big movement to abolish the prison industrial i think one of the most interesting things about your book, you do not separate those two things. You talk about how you are in the prison industrial system. Because something i have became more aware of my the 20 years. It is the way that the socalled Child Welfare system, i called family policing system. That is what it does. It is entangled with criminal Law Enforcement imprisonment. And tingled both in the principal tingled both in the rentable that animates them, they tangled both in the systems that animates them. In cities like philadelphia, chicago, new york, san francisco, wherever you go, you will find that the vast majority of Child Welfare cases are in black communities. Other than there are areas where there is a native children, there is this concentration of child we for Agency Involvement with native tribes and indigenous children. That is one similarity. The communities that are targeted. Another is the principles behind them. They both look to punitive means that are targeted the most disadvantaged, disenfranchised group in order to solve social problems. In order to meet human needs. In order to resolve conflict. Instead of getting to the root of why, we have violence in our society, why there are children with unmet needs, we blame the people who are most disadvantaged by the destruction of actually causing these unmet needs and punishes them in some ways, in the cases of arrests, incarceration. Even for minor petty offenses that do not really harm anybody. We know that prisons do not respond to crime. They have other political reasons why they expand. That is very similar to the child where first system in foster care. Similar history. The expansion mirrors each other perfectly. The expansion of the foster care system is at the exact same time we see the expansion of the prison system. It is more and more black families became involved in both of these systems. We see them becoming more punitive. That is the historical parallel. We can delve into the history even more. They also work handinhand. It is not just that they operate in summer ways similar ways, they also work hand in hand. Caseworkers for example, especially when they go into black neighborhoods, frequently bring the Police Officers with them to scare families into letting them into their home without any kind of legal protection, without enforcing the Fourth Amendment, which applies by the way to any search of a Government Official of a home. It is not just police. Caseworkers. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently held that caseworkers cannot go into peoples homes based on a anonymous tip to child abuse hotline without first getting a warrant. That decision was based on the work of housing activist in philadelphia by jennifer. I hope i am pronouncing her last name right. Does anybody here know jen . I spoke with her in working on torn apart. She very tragically passed away of covid recently. Just to give you an example. I was going to ask you to give me a example. Just quickly come apart at the reason is because we always taken for granted that when the state comes, especially if they come before your kids, you got to let them in, you got to let them look to your bedrooms, look under the bed, these are things that person after person says that are part of the norm. Yeah. Searching your children because they are looking for evidence that you abuse them, even with the allegations have nothing to do with abuse. Most allegations are about neglect children in need. She was protesting in front of the Philadelphia Housing Authority. Someone called in a tip. It could have been someone who do not like her protesting. This is one of the ways in which the child abuse hotline often gets used, as a way of retaliating against people. Someone called in a tip to the child abuse hotline saying, this woman had been testing in front of the Philadelphia Housing Authority for eight hours has been protesting in front of the Philadelphia Housing Authority for eight hours. She had not done any harm to her child. Not any evidence that she had. Just that it was not clear that she had her child. Exactly. Cps sends a caseworker to her house later to investigate. She is an activist. She knows her. Her activism has tied together the housing crisis in philadelphia and in the taking of children in philadelphia. Housing and security being the main reasons why children are taken and put housing and to foster care. She said no, you cant come in. What do they do, they bring a Police Officer with them. Next time. She refuses. They go to court and get a trial judge to order her to let them in her house. This all the way up until the Supreme Court of pennsylvania. Largely because of her work. I was told that she drafted and everything. By the way i will give the a shout out to the Community Legal services. The acu of pennsylvania who drafted pointed out the racism in this system. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that it violated her Fourth Amendment right to insist on entering her home without probable cause. There was no probable cause. This was based on a anonymous tip, which often happens, mostly it is reporters who reports. Anonymous tips can trigger an investigation. Anybody could call and make something up. That should not be in reason why government agents should come search her home. Searching your home was irrelevant to whether shoe would have fed her to whether she had fed her child while she was in protest. Standard constitutional law. It does not get applied in the case of family policing. This is one of the connections with police, which is they get a pass if they go along and enter a house. With caseworkers, they do not think they need a warrant, they do not get a warrant, they would have needed a warrant in most cases if they were investigating a crime. There is exemption that is made for Child Protection because of the idea that is necessary to protect children. This idea that they are on a mission to protect children cant be a waiver of our constitutional right. That is how it is treated. And is happening to the most vulnerable people. Do you think that if you show up in a house of a wealthy person, who by the way, they also may not feed their children. They may not have food in the refrigerator. They are going to call cooper uber eats. Some of them boast about using drugs and drinking while caring for their children. There was a piece in the New York Times were someone wrote during covid, people talk about how they turning to alcohol in order to manage their children at home. They are too stressed to take care of their children. Statements like that by a impoverished black woman in philadelphia would be seen as making her unfit to take care of her children. Theres this double standard as well. We should be clear where they show up. If they show up in the rare occasion at the home of a wealthy person, that person is going to call their lawyer. I had caseworkers tell me, part of the reason we do not go into wealthy communities is because we will encounter lawyers, why bother. Too much work. Even if we acknowledge the Fourth Amendment protection, the main reason why families let caseworkers into their home to investigate, inspect. That is the first part they didnt go on to investigate every aspect of the private lives. That is being expanded by digital surveillance as well. Where they hire big corporations to collect massive amounts of data on families and do this automated decisionmaking where they predict where children are going to be harmed in the future and send it to those homes. As you probably know about digital surveillance, with police and other institutions, it is deeply racist. The data is embedded with racial inequality, the algorithms that art customer otori against poor people and black people in other marginalized people. All this surveillance is going on. Said something in the book you said something in the book that you know that Child Welfare system is a problem because white people do not access it and there is that are not overly i are white children want to be clear that there are white children in the system. Lets be honest, there are children in wealthy homes that have eating disorders and Suicidal Ideation and their parents neglect them and they arent the people the system are is designed to target. Some, it is hard to wrap their minds around us. These things sound good but when we unpack them, they do something else. Job welfare could sound more how do we get there . We have gotten there almost 400 years of u. S. History to so to understand how we get there, we have to go back to the enslavement of black people and the way in which family separation was an integral part of the slavery system. White slavers had total authority over the children of black parents. They legally owned the children from the moment of conception so they could do wherever they wanted. Bigger send children to another and slaver they could send children to another enslaver. Judges could order the slate sale of children. Each child could go to a separate plantation so there was a separation of families are part of the that was a part of that slavery system. It sets up the idea that when children are better off under the supervision of white people, that white families dont have to type bonds that are harmed dont have tight bonds that are harmed when you take children away. I am not making of these ideas. Of these ideas. Up these ideas. There are studies that show the buys of doctors and social workers and teachers and identify when a child is at risk. This the as opposed to a white child in a photo with exactly the same background. Multiple studies that show this and where does this idea come from . I think it come from slavery but i am not arguing that is just that it is just slavery. We can see policies that have devalued the bonds of black families and even after emancipation and this is where i think is the actual origin of the former Child Welfare system for black children, there was a white supremacist move to reinstate slavery and reinstate the power of white people in the south. You may have heard of the black codes that were passed to criminalize aspects of everyday black life so black people could be incarcerated and put on chain gangs and leased out to call mines and rail railroads and they were worked to death. Are of the black codes part of the black codes was the use of apprenticeship laws or to pass new laws to put my children black puts black children into the work of their former enslavers. Babysat the children were neglected and the children will be better off under the supervision of former enslavers and thousands of black children were sent by judges back into work for labor for whites former enslavers whites former enslavers. That is not exactly what goes on now but there are aspects of it, the idea that black children should be supervised by other than their families. The idea that courts can use neglect statutes. The basic ideas that were present in the apprentice just apprenticeship system we can see today and we can continue with this convergence of ways in which the black community has been assaulted by various punitive state systems like the Police System and the president and welfare system present and welfare system praising prison and welfare system. There is a neoliberal effort and bipartisan support by democrats and republicans to be harsher on black communities and that took the form of the crime control bill of 1993 that funded Police Departments more and sent more and more pleasing to black communities. That there was the United States law that restructured welfare. And abolished the federal entitlement to welfare. The first law was based on the idea that black super predators and black children who grow up to be criminals. Thank god those people arent aware around anymore. Exactly. The welfare receptor law was based on the image of the black welfare queen who supposedly had children just to get a welfare check end to their children and use the money on herself. Was nine there was a law all of these funded by president clinton in a bipartisan effort to be top on crime. Tops on crime tough on crime. This idea attained that black children were languidly came up that black children were languishing in welfare and they could be freed from their parents so they could be adopted by better families. Some people explicitly say white families could take better care of them and that led to a law that speeds up termination of rights and gives benefits to the state to place filtered out of foster care to place children who are foster home from a foster care to a foster home. There was an idea and that black communities and all of society will be better off as a result of this. I will point out that these are based on the idea that government shouldnt support us. That welfare is bad, that resources should not be generously given to families and other people in need. Instead, we should rely on lowwage work and marriage and not having so many children. These were explicit objective of welfare restructuring and there was an act that said if we are ending welfare and if families cannot survive and this is disproportionately black families living in poverty, like childhood party much later than white party although both are visible and should be an advertisement to the nation visible and should be an out of visible abysmal and should be an embarrassment to the nation. These are punitive but blaming them and punishing them instead of turning to what would actually be more supportive and safer for children. This is harm to children in america. Is not their parents neglecting them. It is society. We have to highest Child Poverty the highest child party rates in any western nation. The wealth is not distributed, certainly not to children in mind marginalized communities. Especially in black and marginalized communities. We are the nation that takes children away at the highest rate, that terminates parental rights at the highest rates. The stories in this text are so rich, they make you want to throw the book. The story you tell of a woman who child gets away from her. Youre tired and you might not get a 30 get to them and she could see them. A bystander we wont give a name. They decided to intervene and calls the police and refuses to give a shout back to her mother and the mother is too exhausted for all the reasons. She is undergoing testing for leukemia because she is then and she has asthma. She is a frail pushing 25 years old in Nursing Student and a Nursing Student. You know better than me. Her name is sf peoples vanessa peoples, trying to manage two little kids in a loving home with her husband and the little boy chases away when her cousin leaves the picnic. The little boy chases and vanessa can see this is happening. She has the other son so she runs after her little boy and she can see this woman on the phone calling 911. She says to her, i am the mother. The woman refuses to give a shout get the child back to her and the Police Believe her. In a wealthy neighborhood, they would not call the police but every sign the Police Officer gives her the ticket for child abuse. Child neglect. Shirtneglect it should have been neglect. Off he did was neglect the child. She didnt abuse a but in colorado, there is misdemeanor child abuse which doesnt require any evidence of harm to the child. Now she has a criminal ticket. Are much later, she is down in the basement, cleaning up. Her two boys are upstairs and a caseworker comes the door. He does not hear because she does not hear and one other the boys is in the window and the caseworker desires she is concerned that some neglect is going on in the home and she calls the police to assist her in answering the home. Entering the home. Three Police Officers show up. One of them with a gun pointed down the stairs, confronts her coming up the stairs. You can imagine the trauma the family has experienced. They start to interrogate her and she says you can see my children are fine. Can you leave . They wont leave. They inspect her house. Fee is a little mouthy she is a little rocky. Mouthy. She says i am sick but you are not helping me. They did not like the fact she was asking them to leave so she called her mother to come help and the mother arrives an officer says the mother takes the children to the bedroom to try to get them ready and separate them from the police and the Police Officer said you cannot be in the bedroom along with your get grandchildren. There are four Police Officers now. Vanessa yells at the Police Officer. Let me see my mother. He says, stand back. He grabs her by the throat and this is on a bodycam. You grabs her by the throat and throws her to the ground and three Police Officers jumped on top of her, lurch her arm to the back where she is to come up behind, dislocated her shoulder, handcuffed and chained her ankle and took a chain. They hobbled her so hard legs and arms are twisted to the back and a caring hurt like that. She says i felt like i was an animal and put her in the police car. Seven Police Officers have arrived at her home. This stems from her little boy straying away for a minute. Seven Police Officers arrive. She is told and advised to plead guilty for a child abuse charge to put into jail. She is put into jail so her mother can wait bail her out. She pleads guilty and she is supervised by a year. Two cuts to the term are ending to cut to the turbo ending, she cannot to be terrible ending, she cannot get a job as a nurse. She cannot get a apartment for on, because when she applies, she finds out they find out she is on the child abuse registry. Children have nightmares. She cringes every time she please see a Police Officer in this story and this story shows how police and caseworkers Work Together and terrorize families and they did nothing to help her children. All they did was from traumatized them and make it harder to it is a horrible story but it is not an aberration. We will take audience questions. We cannot stop on that note because this is an abolitionist and when i talk about abolition, i always say the question with what what the world would look like if all of our needs are met. As you go from shattered barns, what does the world wants . We dont want the world to continue to treat case childrens needs by taking children away from their homes and putting them in a violent foster care system. You can ask questions about that but there are children kills jill killed. A 16 euros boy was killed in Wordsworth Academy staff came in looking for a missing ipad and they ended up killing him. We dont want that. That hasnt stopped child neglect or maltreatment. It has caused a lot of suffering especially in black and indigenous communities and other impoverished communities. Marginalized people in general but i think of governor avenue Governor Abbott who has invested in cps to investigate in families that provide gender affirming care. You see how this could be used as an weapon against political dissent. We dont want that. We want to dismantle that. We want children to be safer and we want families to be supported. That is the goal. We need to be building a completely different approach that supports families with the Country Concrete meat resources they need. Web food and clothing and better education with food, clothing and better education. Part of the reason children suffer from educational neglect we have a School System that is deeply an equitable and equitable inequitable. When i came to w, my son was going to enter middle school in professor i met with while i was being recruited, told me, you cannot send your son to philadelphia public schools. That would be child abuse. You know, it is abused by the state, not by the parent. All of these needs, including income support. We know the biden administrations ways of getting cash into peoples hands during the covid pandemic which will probably end because congress will not fund it, but we note that that reduced counterparty Child Poverty. We know the best way to reduce job party Child Poverty is to increase income parents of parents. Studies show this. We dont waste that would support children and families better, including communitybased mutual aid that provides what families need. This is not what family policing systems offer. We know there are better ways to reduce violence in families. Taking children away or locking people up. Black feminists have been arguing for this. Survivors of violence. There are organizations and books you can read. By survivors of Family Violence who write that they wish there were a way to deal with the violence that did not cause a disruption of residence and family separation and it is called transformative justice. There are better ways and get at the roots on why we have violence in families. We know that locking people up and putting people in foster care this not end violence. Does not end violence. Most of the cases we care about that involve tragic deaths of children in their home should not happen but they usually that means the system failed. Some reason, the response when this happens in cities, is to say, we need our family intervention and more money get into the system and we be we need caseworkers to take away children. That has overwhelmed caseworkers so they are less likely to find the cases of extreme abuse that can lead to death or harm to visit children. We have to find a radically different way of how to address violence. It would help as well to relieve families of the stresses caused by deep property. Poverty. Philadelphia i believe is the poorest big city in the nation. At least as the statistics in 2017, it has the highest rates of child removal of any big city in america. The City Council Justice earlier this month reduced a report based on appearance and as it had on hearings had based on child separation and it calls for a massive including providing adequate, high quality legal representation to parents and family caregivers and other kinds of recommendations. That is the type of horrible powerful Vision Forward we need. Lets take a few questions. You ended looking at a forward view. A society in which needs are met, children are valued and it is soon during covid there was an example of government that could meet needs. Putting money in peoples pockets and improvement in peoples lives but that is not happening. My question is, get the likeliness given the likeliness of American Society as it is now, going to a big overhaul and becoming a Supportive Society that meets the needs of families. We need to talk about how i would like to hear you talk more about how you balance the process in a society that isnt going to provide the economics part, where there are kids who get abused and where poverty is a huge part of it, is not all of it and theyre all social there are social workers who care and are connected to the families and even more connected to mom then to the kids needs the community or the community. This is the classic question posed to abolitionists . What about the harm that happens . What do we do in real time at the same time we want to build to this other thing . Families are suffering in the system we have now so we cannot ignore the suffering that is going on now because we are afraid that we cannot build a society that would end that suffering, so i prefer to look at that as we have a system that is causing harm now. I want to stop the harm from occurring just as much i want to stop the harm that is occurring from home. Both i want to stop. I dont think we should say you have to protect children in their home so we want to put them in a system that also harms them. I want to stop the death of black teenagers that are put this portion very disproportionate. Disproportionately that is how they are treated. I want to stop the unnecessary separation and trauma to families including children who suffer because of this. I am not willing to say lets sacrifice all these children and families that are being harmed now because we cannot imagine a better way of doing not think td happen. Now i agree, it is going to take a lot of work and a lot of transformation to create the society that many of us would envision, that truly is equitable, that truly has gotten rid of Structural Racism and poverty and other forms of extremely harmful inequities. That takes a lot. In effect, there are some people who have argued with me that that is what we should do first, lets forget about fixing the systems. I dont agree with fixing them, but i gave a talk in new york city in harlem on sunday, and there was a revolutionary there who was saying, lets forget about these systems. We need a massive revolution in america. Well, i agree we need a revolution in america, but i am somewhere maybe in between you and this, where i say we need to stop the suffering going on right now by people who are entangled in this system. And we can do that. But i think we can do both. I think we can dismantle the system piece by piece, we can reduce the suffering of people in the system now, as we are simultaneously working toward a replacement for it. So, for example, there are many mandated reporters, teachers, doctors and others, who feel they have to call the child abuse hotline in order to get the services and the resources that children need. If there were another way of getting them, those resources and services, without having to call this investigative, accusatory, punitive system, they would prefer to do that. And this is something even the city council wrote in the report. They want to end mandated reporting. It is not true that ending it is going to limit the ability of people who are in caring professions to care. It actually frees them to care without having to subject families to a damaging system. That is just one example of the kinds of things we can do today to work toward it, and then at the same time, we can be working toward a massive transformation. Whether you want to call it a revolution, radical change. I happen to believe that radical change can happen. You may think this is a stretch, but certainly during the slavery era, there were many people, maybe most people in america, thought that america could not exist without slavery. It took a struggle of hundreds of years, of a lot of sacrifice to do it. But there was an abolition of slavery. Now, yes, we recognize that there are ways in which many of the ideas behind enslaving people continue today, that there are forms of forced labor and oppression that continue today. But we still should recognize that the Massive Movement and activism and sacrifice of black people who were enslaved, that despite that, fought further freedom, did for their freedom, did end up liberating black people from enslavement. It can happen. So my approach is to say we have a system that is oppressive, that is causing suffering. We need to end it as soon as we can. We need to work toward that, and we should maintain a vision. Maybe none of us will see it materialize. Hopefully some of us will. But a vision of a society that does not punish people to meet their needs. It does not excuse deep inequities by blaming the people who are most disadvantaged by them. I believe we can achieve that, or our children, greatgrandchildren, can achieve that. But only by doing that, only by doing that can we ever have any hope of ending the suffering that is taking place right now, right now, that people are rising up against. And i think we have to i am sorry to go on, but i think we have to appreciate that there are people who have been grievously harmed, parents and children who have been grievously harmed, who were calling on us to abolish the system. I dont want to ignore them. I would rather follow them than the people who say, oh, its flawed, but we need to keep it, we need to keep its design. No, i am with the people who have suffered and are telling us that we need to make a radical change in this system. In fact, we need to dismantle it and replace it with something that truly supports families and keeps children safe. Amen. The book is called torn apart. Dorothy roberts, please get a round of applause. [applause] thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me ladies and gentlemen, if you would, please join me in welcoming pete hegseth and David Goodwin to the reagan library. [applause]