Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World

by Dorothy Roberts

Overview

An award-winning scholar exposes the foundational racism of the child welfare system and offers a “a brilliant and impassioned call for abolition” (Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow) 
 
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. 

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541675469
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	10/03/2023
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	169,083
Product dimensions:	8.10(w) x 5.50(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Dorothy Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. The author of five books, including Killing the Black Body, she lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.   

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

Introduction: A Benevolent Terror 13

Part I Terror

1 Destroying Black Families 33

2 "They Separate Children at the Harlem Border, Too" 47

3 Professional Kidnappers 63

Part II Design

4 Rotten at the Root 85

5 Strong-Armed 125

6 The Foster-Industrial Complex 141

Part III The Carceral Web

7 Family Surveillance 161

8 Carceral Entanglements 191

9 Structured To Harm 221

10 Criminalizing Black Children 249

Part IV Abolition

11 Care In Place of Terror 277

Acknowledgments 305

Notes 309

Index 361

Editorial Reviews

Mind-blowing…a devastating indictment of the [child welfare] system.”—Ibram X. Kendi, Guardian

“Roberts’s work [is] grimly essential as both prophecy and cautionary tale…It’s not unusual for an academic to say they want to inspire movements, but to an extent more sweeping and durable than most, Roberts has accomplished that.”—Irin Carmon, New York

"This compelling narrative delivers data rich analysis that reflects decades of research, observation, and advocacy for Black children and mothers. It exposes the ugly demographics and politics of America’s destructive family policing child welfare system...Necessary reading."—Library Journal

"Compassionate, clear, and compelling."—Kirkus

"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."—Publishers Weekly

“Torn Apart is a brilliant and impassioned call for abolition of our racist and disastrous systems of family policing. Better than anyone else could, Dorothy Roberts shows convincingly why we must reimagine child welfare and develop new systems for meeting human needs, preventing violence, and caring for children, families, and communities."—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

"Dorothy Roberts has brilliantly illuminated the Black experience in America for decades. Her new book on America's punitive child welfare system is a bold and critically important reimagining of how to better protect children. Her thesis on how the legacy of slavery and carceral systems have impacted Black families is rooted in decades of rigorous examination, research, and reflection. This is a compelling, thoughtful, and urgent work."—Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy

“Once again Dorothy Roberts offers us a bold, visionary critique of the contemporary institutional consequences of colonialism and slavery. Her penetrating analysis of the family policing system and its masquerade as child protective services not only persuades us that reforms alone will forever reinforce the system’s racist and repressive foundations, it also compels us to imagine new modes of care and frameworks for abolitionist futures.”
 —Angela Y. Davis, author of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

From the Publisher

02/14/2022

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. Agent: David Halpern, the Robbins Office. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 03/01/2022

The U.S. child welfare system is so fundamentally flawed that abolishing it is the only way to end its destruction of Black children and Black families, argues Roberts (law and sociology, Univ. of Pennsylvania; Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare). The system rests on racist myths and operates with a long legacy of oppressive policies originating in slavery to monitor, regulate, and punish Black families, she explains. Her chapters reveal the disproportionately racial dimensions of government agents invading poor and low-income communities, casting children into a foster-care-industrial complex where they are routinely entangled in the carceral state. Punctuated with poignant cases of systemic horrors, the compelling narrative delivers data-rich analysis that reflects decades of research, observation, and advocacy for Black children and mothers. It exposes the ugly demographics and politics of America's destructive family-policing child welfare system that Roberts conjoins with oppressive policies of mass incarceration and welfare-restructuring that seek to entrench Black subordination. VERDICT Readers at every level, especially policy-makers and -implementers, might well embrace this work as a primer for moving past a harmful system and creating a reimagined ideology and infrastructure to humanely care for families and keep children safe. Roberts's latest is necessary reading.—Thomas J. Davis

Library Journal

Janina Edwards's voice is direct and concise. Her narration captures the author’s tone of serious consideration. While the mainstream public may view child protective services as benevolent, if underfunded, state agencies seeking to provide support and care for children at risk, Roberts provides insight into their systemic racism and bias. These entrenched interventional models lead to traumatic family separations arising from children being needlessly placed in foster care. Worse, Black families are disproportionately affected by a wide margin. Roberts’s audiobook makes the case for abolition with a vision of how a different system could actually help families without criminalizing them. Edwards's performance gives the appropriate level of gravitas to this difficult subject. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2022 - AudioFile

Janina Edwards's voice is direct and concise. Her narration captures the author’s tone of serious consideration. While the mainstream public may view child protective services as benevolent, if underfunded, state agencies seeking to provide support and care for children at risk, Roberts provides insight into their systemic racism and bias. These entrenched interventional models lead to traumatic family separations arising from children being needlessly placed in foster care. Worse, Black families are disproportionately affected by a wide margin. Roberts’s audiobook makes the case for abolition with a vision of how a different system could actually help families without criminalizing them. Edwards's performance gives the appropriate level of gravitas to this difficult subject. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2022 - AudioFile

2022-02-09
A professor of law and sociology renews her well-founded criticism of the child welfare system in the U.S.

Picking up threads from—and updating the analysis of—her work in Killing the Black Body (1998) and Shattered Bonds (2001), Roberts writes that, “this time…I argue for completely replacing [the system], not with another reformed state system, but with a radically reimagined way of caring for families and keeping children safe.” Rather than providing “protective” services, the author argues that the current system delivers “policing” services similar to law enforcement, and “family policing is most intense in communities that exist at the intersection of structural racism and poverty.” Of course, this means that “Black families are disproportionately subjected to state intrusion.” In many underserved communities, writes the author, “all it takes is a phone call from an anonymous tipster to a hotline operator about a vague suspicion to launch a life-altering government investigation.” Despite the fact that most accusations are frivolous, investigations proceed as if the parents are guilty. As a result, parents and other caregivers must support their families while also meeting numerous government-imposed requirements, including parenting classes, psychological evaluations, counseling, and supervised visits. Roberts also discusses the lifelong consequences for families that are separated, including the link between foster care and future incarceration, and she recounts the history of the nation’s “destructive approach to child welfare.” The author, director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society, demonstrates how the current system serves as a continuation of the widespread earlier policies that perpetuated Black enslavement and Indigenous displacement. A compassionate guide, Roberts clearly explains the relevant research and includes heartbreaking testimonies from accused parents. Not content to merely criticize, she lays out the elements that must be addressed in any new system: income support, housing, nutrition, education, child care, and health care.

A compelling argument that will hopefully prove useful to policymakers, activists, and concerned citizens.

Kirkus Reviews