Ending the Family Death Penalty and Building a World We Deserve

U.S. history is rooted in the rationalization of family separation to benefit white supremacy, capitalism and mainstream U.S. values. Because of this dark history, the U.S. history has become the world’s leader of legal destruction of families through termination of parental rights. It is the only country in the world that routinely pays people to adopt children whose parents, often women, very much want to be their parent. The Adoption and Safe Families Act, enacted in 1997, wildly changed the legal landscape of the family regulation system. At that time 47% of the children in the system were Black, and the drug war had been targeting Black men for low level offenses, and labeling Black mothers as “crack moms”. The result was an extreme attack on Black families, for which we have yet to recover. Abolition teaches us to unroot oppressive structures, disrupt and dismantle them while simultaneously supporting a praxis of imagination, healing, and building. In this paper, we encourage people not only to work to repeal ASFA, but to interrogate the imagination which entrenched the legitimacy of ASFA. Part I centers the discussion in our imaginations—the world we want to build, and the demands we are making. Part II moves into a discussion about the counter imagination, the ideas and mythology that created ASFA—the legal framework. In this section, we isolate ASFA as a target for abolition and organizing. Part III moves into a practical discussion about ethical ways to mobilize around ASFA. This section is intended to invite the reader to learn, and question, together. It invites questions, thinking, and problem solving in lieu of providing a recommendation.

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The White Supremacy Hydra

Columbia Journal of Race and Law ◽

10.52214/cjrl.v11i3.8751 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (3) ◽

Author(s):

Miriam Mack

Keyword(s):

Child Protection ◽

White Supremacy ◽

Black Families ◽

Regulation System ◽

Prevention Services ◽

The Family ◽

Regulation Policy ◽

Modern Family ◽

Family Regulation ◽

First Time

Fundamentally, the so-called “child welfare system”—more appropriately named, the family regulation system—is a policing system rooted in white supremacist ideologies and techniques. From its earliest iteration, the family regulation system has functioned to pathologize, control, and punish the families entrapped in its web, most especially Black families. Nevertheless, among many, the myth persists that the family regulation system is one of child protection and family support. This is especially true when discussing the Family First Prevention Services Act of 2018, which—for the first time since the establishment of the modern family regulation system—opens up federal funding streams previously reserved for the removal of children to the foster system to provide prevention services for families in which children have not yet been removed to the foster system. While the Act is a course change in federal family regulation policy, this Article traces how it leaves undisturbed the pathology, control, and punishment central to the policies that preceded it.

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The Surveillance Tentacles of the Child Welfare System

Columbia Journal of Race and Law ◽

10.52214/cjrl.v11i3.8743 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (3) ◽

Author(s):

Charlotte Baughman ◽

Tehra Coles ◽

Jennifer Feinberg ◽

Hope Newton

Keyword(s):

Child Welfare ◽

Social Services ◽

Child Welfare System ◽

Regulation System ◽

Medical Providers ◽

Family Separation ◽

Communities Of Color ◽

The Family ◽

Family Regulation ◽

Cross System

The family regulation system identifies families through the use of widespread, cross-system surveillance for the purported purpose of keeping children safe. But the system does not surveil all families equally, leading to the disproportionate impact of family regulation on Black, Brown, and Native families, and fails to protect while causing more harm to children and communities of color. We examine how institutions and professionals that are meant to provide necessary services to the community—medical providers, social services agencies, the police, and schools—act as tentacles of surveillance, entrapping families in the family regulation system. We argue that engineering service and community providers as surveillance agents perpetuates inequality and leads to unnecessary family separation and trauma, and that genuine support for families can only thrive outside of the family regulation system and its surveillance tentacles.

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Parenting From Afar and the Reconfiguration of Family Across Distance

10.1093/oso/9780190265076.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Keyword(s):

Family Life ◽

Transnational Families ◽

Long Distance ◽

Family Separation ◽

Parents And Children ◽

The Family ◽

The World ◽

Economic Migration ◽

Definition Of ◽

The Impact

The definition of family as a conjugal group consisting of parents and children living in the same household is in the process of a profound reworking, one that includes the constellation of family life that exists around the world. Increased migration and mobility have challenged traditional notions of what constitutes a family, yet much mainstream research relies on past notions of a cohesive unit under one domicile. Many families today are separated across distance and maintain ties in a multitude of ways. And although researchers have increasingly paid attention to this new picture of the family, much of this work has focused on transnational families separated in the context of overseas economic migration. In fact, family separation and long-distance parenting result from a multitude of reasons undertaken in various circumstances. This volume presents work from scholars who collectively show reasons that motivate parenting across distance, how families cope with separation and maintain ties, the impact of separation on family members, and how family is redefined and reconfigured in these various settings. By better understanding how we parent from a distance, this volume synthesizes ideas of kinship, relationships, and bonding and helps readers broaden their own ideas of parenting and family life.

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All in the Family

The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190281090.013.13 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Nichole Guillory ◽

Seneca Vaught

Keyword(s):

Hip Hop ◽

Black Family ◽

Black Families ◽

Black Mothers ◽

American Family ◽

Black Fathers ◽

Mothers And Fathers ◽

The Family ◽

Historical Discourses

Constructions of black mothers and fathers are often complicated intersections of gender, race, class, sexuality, and place. This chapter seeks to examine the contested representations of black mothers, black fathers, and the black family in hip hop discourses and offers a typology of hip hop families. Specifically, the chapter focuses on the ways in which hip hop texts are in conversation with historical discourses on the black family and the ways in which hip hop has challenged traditional notions of family, kinship, and familial love. The chapter examines representations of hip hop fathers and hip hop mothers, complicates notions of the “modern” American family, and frames new trajectories for how black families are imagined in hip hop discourses.

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Reimagining Schools' Role Outside the Family Regulation System

Columbia Journal of Race and Law ◽

10.52214/cjrl.v11i3.8745 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (3) ◽

Author(s):

Brianna Harvey ◽

Josh Gupta-Kagan ◽

Christopher Church

Keyword(s):

Public Schools ◽

Low Income ◽

Child Protection ◽

The United States ◽

Mandatory Reporting ◽

Regulation System ◽

Mandated Reporting ◽

The Family ◽

Family Regulation ◽

Low Income Families

The United States’ family regulation system often begins with well-intentioned professionals making child protection hotline calls, jeopardizing their own ability to work with families and subjecting the families to surveillance. By the system’s own standards, most of this surveillance leads to no meaningful action. Nowhere is this reality more present than in schools. Educational personnel serve as the leading driver of child maltreatment allegations, yet decades worth of data reveal educator reports of maltreatment are the least likely to be screenedin and the least likely to be substantiated or confirmed. In other words, education personnel— whether motivated by genuine concern, which may nevertheless be informed by implicit biases towards low-income families and families of color; fear of liability; or the desire to access services they believe families cannot acquire elsewhere— overwhelm our child welfare system with unnecessary allegations of maltreatment. This reality has fundamentally transformed the relationship between families and schools. Carrying the heavy burden of mandated reporting laws, public schools disproportionately refer Black and low-income families to the family regulation system, abdicating schools’ opportunity to serve these same families in the communities in which they reside. Rather than serving as the great equalizer, public schools increasingly contribute to the carceral state’s regulation of families. This Article argues that schools must shift their role away from the reporting and surveillance of these families, and instead directly provide and arrange for services for families. This change begins with sharply limiting or repealing mandatory reporting obligations (permitting voluntary reports in severe cases)—but that is only the start. Schools are well-positioned to create new pathways to the supports and services from which most families reported to the family regulation system might actually benefit. Schools are already a primary source of food for impoverished children, and can help ensure low-income families access all the public benefits to which they are entitled. Schools can largely refer children and families to the same services that the family regulation system can—such as mental health services and substance abuse treatment—but without that system’s coercive authority and its associated problems. Where some services are tied to the family regulation system’s involvement, then law should permit schools to refer families directly. Schools know which families need legal services to defend their housing, access benefits, obtain orders of protection—or any of the myriad of other supports that poverty lawyers can provide. This shift would tie schools to the families and communities that they serve and benefit those families and communities far more than the surveillance and policing they experience under the current family regulation system.

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Reimagining Schools' Role Outside the Family Regulation System

SSRN Electronic Journal ◽

10.2139/ssrn.3871483 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Brianna Harvey ◽

Josh Gupta-Kagan ◽

Christopher Church

Keyword(s):

Regulation System ◽

The Family ◽

Family Regulation

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Somali society's concept of stewardship: A study from Islamic perspective

Journal of Islamic Shariah ◽

10.46722/jis.1.2.21c ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 1 (2) ◽

pp. 59-86

Author(s):

Rahma Qassim Abdurahman ◽

Sofiah Bt. Samsudin

Keyword(s):

Deep Understanding ◽

Family Separation ◽

Inductive Research ◽

The Family ◽

True Meaning ◽

United Nation Report ◽

Family Regulation ◽

Somali Women ◽

Family Bonding ◽

United Nation

This research’s topic revolves around a sensitive and strange issue that usually causes imbalance in family bonding and undermining stewardship in Somali society, which is the issue of leaving maintenance of the family to the women due to lack of supporter and carer for them. Therefore, it makes the highest population of the women in that society engage in different kind of jobs, which gives them the power of controlling homes and the society. The researcher adopts the inductive research methodology to gather pieces of evidence on the custodian of stewardship and how to control the family from the word of Allah and the sayings of the prophet Muhammad, as well as books and articles written by Somali scholars and researchers and United Nation report regarding the women guardianship in Somali society. The researcher also adopts analytical method to analyse the texts gathered from the texts related to the topic, and followed by interview, which is used to collect data related to the topic from nine respondents; four among them are elites, another four are laymen, and the president of (Somali Scholars Association), then analyse the interview and derive the effects of misunderstanding the stewardship on Somali community. In conclusion, the research finds that the civil war is one of the factors contributed to strengthening women stewardship in the Somali community, and that the Somali men misunderstood the true meaning of guardianship due to lack of deep understanding of it. The researcher also observed that addiction of men to the “khat weed” is another factor contributes to the men unseriousness in the Somali community and results to family separation in the community, hence, it leads Somali women to go out for work and get more power over the men, which causes emotional and educational deprive for Somali children, and consequently leads to the behavioral deviation in them. It is also found through the research that lack of state’s security and protection for women, absence of a tangible family regulation, loss of moral supports from religious scholars.

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