See the work of JMacForFamilies and Movement for Family Power for more information on some current efforts to abolish the family regulation system.
Shorter Pieces
Roxanna Asgarian, “The Case for Child Welfare Abolition,” 2023.
Dorothy Roberts, “Abolishing Policing Also Means Abolishing Family Regulation,” 2020.
Erin Miles Cloud, “Toward the Abolition of the Foster System,” 2019.
Dina Ortiz, “Battling an Unjust System: How the War on Drugs Stole My Daughter,” 2019.
Dorothy Roberts, “Abolition is the Only Answer,” 2020.
Elizabeth Brico, “How Child Protective Services Can Trap the Parents They’re Supposed to Help,” 2019.
Center for the Study of Social Policy, “What Does it Mean to Abolish the Child Welfare System as We Know It?”, 2020.
Emma Williams, “‘Family Regulation,’ Not ‘Child Welfare’: Abolition Starts with Changing Our Language,” 2020.
Dinah Ortiz-Adames, “Uplifting Every Voice — Together We Can Change the Perception of Parents Created by the Child Welfare System,” 2018.
Kendra Hurley, “How the Pandemic Became an Unplanned Experiment in Abolishing the Child Welfare System,” 2021.
Victoria Copeland, Brianna Harvey, and Joyce McMillan, “Unlearning Punishment: Family Policing Abolition as Liberatory Praxis,” 2022.
Listening and Viewing
Dorothy Roberts, “Fighting for Family: Intersections of the Family and Criminal Punishment Systems,” 2019.
Charity Tolliver, Fallon Speaker, Shrounda Selivanoff, and Elena Gormley, “Policing by Another Name: Mandated Reporting as State Surveillance,” 2020.
Books and Longer Pieces
Dorothy Roberts, “Prison, Foster Care, and the Systemic Punishment of Black Mothers,” 2012.
Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families–and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, 2022 [interview with author linked].
Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, 2002 [overview of book linked].
Anna Arons, “An Unintended Abolition: Family Regulation During the COVID-19 Crisis,” 2021.
J. Khadijah Abdurahman, “Calculating the Souls of Black Folk: Predictive Analytics in the New York City Administration for Children’s Services,” 2021.
Theresa Rocha Beardall and Frank Edwards, “Abolition, Settler Colonialism, and the Persistent Threat of Indian Child Welfare,” 2021.
micah herskind 