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Shumita Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation" from Apple News. I’m Shumita Basu. Today, reimagining a child welfare system that supports families instead of separating them.
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Basu, Narrating: If you’re a parent, or if you’ve even just watched kids for an afternoon, you’ve almost definitely been in a situation like this. You're out with the kids, you’ve got your back turned for just a few seconds, and before you know it, a kid Is missing. Your stomach drops. Mild to medium panic. You search around, and sure enough, they didn’t get too far. You're reunited, you breathe a sigh of relief, and that’s the end of it.
That’s what happened to a woman named Vanessa Peoples. But for her, it wasn't the end of a story; it was just the beginning. In 2017, she was at a family picnic in a park in Aurora, Colorado with her two sons, a two-year-old and a four-year-old. The two-year-old wandered away and Vanessa went running after him.
Dorothy Roberts: But by the time she got there, a passerby had grabbed her toddler.
Basu, Narrating: Vanessa told the woman, "That’s my son." But the woman had already called the police and refused to give him back until the officers arrived.
Roberts: And the police officer initially didn't believe it was Vanessa's son.
Basu, Narrating: Vanessa’s family vouched for her, and she got her son back. But the officer didn't let her go right away.
Roberts: The police officer gave her a ticket for child abuse because of that minute-long lapse in her care for her son when he strayed away. And so, now she became under the supervision and surveillance of the child welfare system.
Basu, Narrating: We’ll come back to what that meant for Vanessa and her family in a little bit. But the person you’ve been hearing tell her story is Dorothy Roberts. She’s a professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the book "Torn Apart." She’s spent more than two decades studying the way that the child welfare system affects families, disproportionately Black families like Vanessa’s.
Roberts: A recent study showed that more than half of all Black children will experience a child welfare investigation by the time they reach age 18.
Basu, Narrating: More than half of all Black children. Think about that. In total, three and a half million children are the subject of a child welfare investigation every year, and about a quarter million are removed from their homes.
Those statistics, stories like Vanessa’s, and the dire consequences these kids and families face afterwards made Dorothy question this entire system. We call it "child welfare," but Dorothy says, the system doesn’t prioritize children’s well-being. Instead, it punishes parents for things largely outside of their control.
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Roberts: The terms that are used by the government for this apparatus that accuses, investigates, separates, destroys, terminates family relationships are all so benevolent sounding. Child welfare system, child protective services, foster care. They imply that this is a system that supports and cares for and improves the welfare of children, when in fact what it does is accuse family members of harming children for harms that are actually caused by structures of inequality in our country. By childhood poverty, by lack of income that families have, by structural racism and all of the stereotypes about Black families that stem from that. And so, if we look at what the system is designed to do and what it actually does, it does not approach families from the standpoint of: What do these families need to care for their children, and how can we provide that? You know, how can we reduce childhood poverty in America so that families have the means to provide for the needs of children. That's not at all how it approaches it. It approaches the struggles of families by accusing their caregivers of harming children, and then investigating them, looking for evidence, prosecuting them after charging them with child abuse or neglect. Most of the money this system spends is on taking children away and maintaining them in foster care, not providing supports for families. And in too many cases, completely destroying the family relationship, legally terminating the relationship that children have to their family caregivers. So, what does that describe? It's not care. It's not support. It's not protection. It's not improving welfare. It’s policing families. And that's why I say we should call it what it is, a family policing system.
Basu: In your book, you describe so well this relationship between poverty and the child welfare system, and you argue that what CPS might call child neglect is actually just explained by poverty. And that being poor means that you’re probably interacting with all these different bodies of oversight, like social services and public housing. And in fact, you give this really striking analogy. You say that it’s like living in a neighborhood that has multiple speed traps while the rest of the town has none. So, can you explain that idea a little bit further?
Roberts: Yeah. So, there I'm making a couple points. One is that this is a system that discriminates against impoverished and low-income families because they are the ones that are being watched the most by mandated reporters. People who are wealthy and have private services that they can afford don’t have to fear being turned in by the service providers to child protective services. And so, this is a very discriminatory system. Now, another important point though is that it has turned the very professionals, teachers, and doctors and social service providers, daycare workers, who could provide support for these families, and instead, they become deputized agents for the state, and their ability to provide services is weakened. And it's weakened in part because they're told that their response is supposed to be to report these families, not to provide care for them. And it's also weakened because the families know that they're at risk of being reported. So, they don't either go to these services at all for help. But if they're forced to, they limit what they tell these service providers about their lives. They limit the amount of support they could get. And so, again, this isn't a system that enhances the welfare of children, that expands the supports that families and children can get. It does the opposite.
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Basu, Narrating: Back to Vanessa’s story. About a month after the incident at the family picnic, she was at home with her sons. She had just given them a bath and left them upstairs to go straighten up the basement, when a caseworker from social services showed up, knocking at the door.
Roberts: Vanessa, who is hard of hearing in one ear and was down in the basement, didn't hear. And the case worker noticed that the same little toddler was in a front window in the house.
Basu, Narrating: So, the caseworker decided to call the police.
Roberts: Three police officers arrived. And the door was unlocked, so they entered, one of them with a gun drawn, and confronted Vanessa as she came up from the basement steps. And that began a horrific incident.
Basu, Narrating: More police officers showed up to Vanessa’s home. She tried to get them to leave, and the officers ended up arresting her.
Roberts: They hogtied her. In other words, they rammed her arms together, dislocating one of her shoulders, shackled her legs, chained that together, led her out of the house. She remained in this excruciatingly painful position for half an hour. And then she was put in jail for child abuse and resisting the arrest of these officers.
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Basu, Narrating: Vanessa was put under long-term supervision by the Colorado Child Welfare department. Her name was added to a child abuse registry. It’s been five years, and it still affects her life, and her sons’ lives, every day.
Roberts: She can't get a job as a nurse now, which is what she trained for. So, her income is dramatically affected, she's had trouble renting an apartment because the landlords look up and see she's on this child abuse registry, and her family's been traumatized. Her children are terrified of the police, terrified she's gonna be taken away from them again.
Basu, Narrating: Vanessa ended up receiving a settlement from the police department for their use of excessive force that day, although the department did not admit fault. And her sons were ultimately not taken away from her. But that’s not the case for hundreds of thousands of families who are separated by CPS agencies every year. And Dorothy says, this path can be incredibly harmful to many children.
Roberts: We have very clear evidence that children in foster care have poor outcomes. They have high rates of high school dropout. They have high rates of lower income. They have high rates of mental health problems, high rates of juvenile detention, and high rates of incarceration. That's not to say that all children who spend time in foster care will have these outcomes. But on average, children who spend time in foster care, especially long periods of time, especially if they're put in congregate care and institutions, and especially if they move to multiple placements, which is much more likely in the lives of Black children, those children suffer very devastating consequences from time in foster care.
Basu: I'm curious whether you've spoken to many people who work in child protective services, because I would like to assume that people end up in this line of work because they genuinely wanna help children. So, what do they have to say about what they think is working and what's not working?
Roberts: Yeah. I've spoken with a lot of people. I've given trainings to whole departments of social workers over the years. I've been working in this field for more than 20 years. And I have been very involved with efforts to reform it, which include engaging with many people who are working in the system. That's why I've come to the conclusion it can't be fixed. But I know that many people, if not most people, who work in the system enter it because they think they're going to help families, they're going to protect children. There's a high rate of burnout of case workers for various reasons. But one of the reasons is they're frustrated that they haven't been able to provide the care they anticipated they would be providing in that profession.
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Basu, Narrating: Dorothy says separating kids from their caregivers might seem like it’s solving an immediate issue, but it often doesn’t address the underlying root of the problem.
One example she gave was from her teaching days at Northwestern Law School. She used to take her students to observe real family court proceedings in Chicago. She says in one of the most memorable hearings, a judge approved the child welfare department’s request to keep a Black mother’s kids in foster care because the apartment where the family had been living was still infested with mice and cockroaches. The judge said he wouldn’t allow the children to live with their mom in this kind of environment, so they would have to stay separated.
After the hearing, the judge allowed Dorothy’s law students to ask him some questions.
Roberts: And one of the first questions was, "Why did you continue to separate this family instead of ordering the landlord to get rid of the roaches and rodents?" It's not the mother's fault that this apartment was uninhabitable for her children. And the judge's response was, "I don't have jurisdiction over the landlord. I can't tell the landlord what to do. I'm a family court judge. All I have jurisdiction is over this family." And I think that story really exemplifies how this system operates. It doesn't actually meet the needs of the family. The family needed a secure place to live, that was a habitable, high quality living environment for the entire family. And that's not what this system provides. It's tool, and I would call it its weapon, is to take children away and hold them hostage and then force parents to fix up their lives, fix the problem themselves. Mandate services, so-called services, which usually have nothing to do with the problems of the family. And that's the main reason why parental rights are terminated, simply because parents are unable to jump through all the hoops and comply with all the requirements that the child protection agency and judge impose on them.
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Basu: I understand that you argue that the child welfare system, as it currently exists, needs to be abolished. And that's the term that you use, "abolish." What does that mean to you? What does that look like to you?
Roberts: So, by abolishing it, what I mean is dismantling the unjust system we have right now that is designed to target the most marginalized communities, and always has, that is based on accusation and investigation and surveillance and punishment and destruction. And simultaneously, as we're dismantling that unjust system piece by piece, we're building up an alternative approach, a replacement for it.
Basu, Narrating: The child welfare system costs the United States more than 30 billion dollars a year. And Dorothy argues that a replacement for the current system would move funds away from interventions that involve separating children and caregivers.
Roberts: And instead spends that money, and more, on what we know would be better for children's welfare, what we know would reduce childhood poverty, and that's income supports to families, that's providing paid, free healthcare, that's providing child care so that parents don't have to leave children unsupervised to go to work or to look for a job.
Basu, Narrating: Now, some of the pushback to abolishing the child welfare system is that there are children in dangerous living situations, children who are abused and who need help. But Dorothy says the current system isn’t working for those children either.
Roberts: This isn't a system that prevents violence. It's a system that reacts and often reacts too late after violence occurs in families and even deters family members from seeking help. So, for example, mothers who themselves are surviving domestic violence often are afraid to seek help because they're concerned that child protective services will take their children away and put them into a possibly more harmful foster care system. And we know from studies that this is a deterrent to women to get the help that they need.
Basu, Narrating: Dorothy says a reimagined system, one that actually prioritizes child welfare, would lead to better, safer outcomes for families.
Roberts: Building up community-based resources for families that don't rely on weaponizing children and threatening to take them away but provide supports on a voluntary basis for what families actually need, that also looks to transformative justice approaches that seek to prevent domestic violence and provide the survivors of domestic violence with the healing and the concrete supports they need to be able to get out of violent situations. But more deeply, to examine the roots, why we have such a violent nation, and attend to them.
Basu: Is there any meaningful support in Congress or at state legislature levels for abolishing CPS and developing something new? And in all your years of studying the child welfare system, what would you tell lawmakers is most needed, highest priority?
Roberts: Well, there is support now, including in the Biden administration, for reforms in the child welfare system. Spending more money on preventative services to families and less focus on removing children and placing them in foster care. There's also support for reducing the number of children who are placed in institutions, which are especially damaging to children. So, those are good efforts. The problem, though, is that they fall short of really addressing the fundamental design of family policing. And so, I would like to see moves by policy makers that reduce the power of child protection agents to investigate and take children away. We have to move away from the very design of accusation, investigation and separation and move toward providing for families non-coercively. And this is something that, in the design of reforms, we need to look at is how do we untether the supports that we give families from this coercive, accusatory, punitive, disruptive system.
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Basu: Dorothy, thank you so much for your time. It's really been a pleasure speaking with you.
Roberts: Sure! Thank you for this opportunity to talk about this subject. I really appreciate it.
Basu, Narrating: You can read an excerpt of Dorothy’s book, "Torn Apart," in "Mother Jones." We have a link for you on our show notes page.
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