By Emma Williams, The Imprint, July 28, 2020
In a recent webinar about racism and policing hosted by the Northwestern Prison Education Program, abolitionist scholar and educator Erica Meiners noted that “avoiding the state’s language is a key tool for practitioners of reform and abolition.” Perhaps an area where this point is most salient is the debate over how to talk about the child welfare system.
Parents, attorneys, advocates, abolitionists, and reformers of all stripes agree: The child welfare system has a stronghold over the public eye. Attorney Tanya Gassenheimer, an advocate at Chicago’s Shriver Center on Poverty Law, refers to the system as a “shadow system” for two reasons: First, people who are involved in and critical of the system may not speak out due to the shame and stigma the system makes them feel for having their parenting – a very personal and intimate aspect of individuals’ and families’ identities – called into question. Parents face this stigma all while having to fight the system’s very real and traumatizing threat of permanently separating them from their children. The system may also retaliate if and when parents speak out while they are in one of these fights for the future of their families.
Second, those who are not involved in the system often know little about it but have high confidence in it. An agency whose mission is to protect children from harm and maltreatment naturally evokes consequential public sympathy. Opposing an agency that has such a benevolent public image requires a substantial, grassroots movement led by impacted families who can correct the narrative. The first step to building such momentum is changing the way we talk about the child welfare system.
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