On this edition of Your Call, legal scholar and sociologist Dr. Dorothy Roberts discusses her new book, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.
Drawing on decades of research, she argues the child welfare system can better be understood as a "family policing system" that collaborates with law enforcement and prisons to oppress Black communities. She says the only way to stop the destruction is to abolish the system and replace it with a radically different way of supporting families.
Guest:
Dr. Dorothy Roberts, Professor of Law & Sociology and Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania, founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science and Society in the Center for Africana Studies, and author of several books, including Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World
Web Resources:
Reimagining Child Welfare with Professor Dorothy Roberts: Thursday, March 23, 5:00pm, The Bay View Opera House in San Francisco
Dissent Magazine: The Carceral Logic of Child Welfare
New York Magazine: Dorothy Roberts Tried to Warn Us
TIME: Behind the Racial Disparities in the US Child-Welfare System
PEN America: Benevolent Terror: Dorothy E. Roberts on Reimagining the Child Welfare System
The Washington Post: Five myths about the child welfare system
