Family Policing as Counterinsurgency and the Gathering Abolitionist Force

I spent the first year of the pandemic writing a book about abolishing the so-called child welfare system—what I call the family policing system. When I heard Dylan Rodríguez’s remarkable presidential address, I was already proofing the galleys of Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.¹ Every word Rodríguez spoke resonated with my thinking and activism around the need to dismantle the child welfare system and replace it with a radically reimagined way of caring for families and keeping children safe. The invitation to write a response to his address gave me the opportunity to frame my arguments in terms of his valuable conceptualization of counterinsurgency and the gathering abolitionist force. Conceptualizing family policing—US government surveillance and destruction of politically marginalized families—as state counterinsurgency usefully illustrates and illuminates his key points.

A central theme of Rodríguez’s address is that “counterinsurgency not only is directed by the state’s repressive military, policing, and political might but—especially in moments like this—is commonly performed through narratives, aesthetics, rhetorics, and institutional solicitations of a scrambling reformism.” This seemingly contradictory stance of simultaneous repression and reform is essential to US family policing, characterized by inflicting violence on politically marginalized families under the pretense of protecting children from parental maltreatment. The US child welfare system has historically terrorized Black and Indigenous people in the United States by forcibly removing large numbers of children from their homes and placing them in state custody. It regulates even greater numbers of families by subjecting them to intense supervision under the threat of child removal. The legitimacy of family policing depends on maintaining the mirage that its brutal intrusion in families is a benevolent service for needy children.

The origins of the US child welfare system lie in the oppression of Black, Indigenous, and impoverished white families by powerful white elites.² The ideology of violent supervision of Black families by white people can be traced back to the separation of enslaved family members at the whim of slaveholders, who had absolute legal authority over them. The mass removal of Native children from their tribes and their consignment to boarding schools was literally a weapon of war developed by the US military in the nineteenth century to overpower tribal resistance to its settler colonial project. The establishment and expansion of the formal foster care system were counterinsurgency initiatives against Black liberation struggles. After the Civil War ended, white judges ordered thousands of Black children to be apprenticed to their former enslavers in conjunction with other white supremacist mechanisms, such as convict leasing, designed to return newly emancipated Black people to a subservient status. In the 1950s and 1960s, southern states began dropping Black families from the welfare rolls and placing their children in foster care as part of a white supremacist backlash against gains won by civil rights activists and Black freedom fighters.

The terror of family policing continues today. According to a 2014 study, 15.44 percent of Native children and 11.53 percent of Black children were placed in foster care before their eighteenth birthday.³ The rate for white children (4.86 percent) was much lower, reflecting America’s racial hierarchy, but still remarkably high. Almost all the children the state takes by force come from impoverished or working-class families. State child welfare systems engage in tactics akin to what Rodríguez refers to as “the military protocols for neutralizing resistance to US occupation,” which include “‘integrating civilian and military activities.’” Family policing operations—warrantless home investigations, intensive monitoring of families by state agents and civilians deputized to report on parents (“mandatory reporters”), forcible seizure of children followed by placing them in foster care, and permanent severing of family ties for failing to comply with agency dictates—reflect a carceral logic with parallels in the criminal punishment system. State child protection authorities increasingly use modern surveillance technologies and coordinate with law enforcement agencies to manage regulated populations more efficiently. Family policing is part of the prison industrial complex...