A roundup of The Imprint’s most impactful stories in 2020
The killing of George Floyd, and the summer of protests that followed this tragedy, spurred new conversations about the appropriate role of law enforcement. Child welfare systems, which lack the lethal force component of law enforcement but do police communities with the ability to break up families, got no amnesty from the discussion.
Lead Read: Organizations and collectives on the national and local level are trying to build a drumbeat for abolition. The Movement for Family Power, started by two attorneys for child welfare-involved parents in New York, has focused its efforts on an issue at the crossroads of child welfare and racism: the U.S. drug war. Meanwhile, the upEND Movement campaign is attempting to build an argument that child welfare as we know it is not salvageable from racism and bias, and must be dismantled to be fixed.
Also Read: In the weeks following George Floyd’s death, University of Pennsylvania law professor Dorothy Roberts argued in an Imprint op-ed that shifting some police responsibilities into the work of child welfare would be a mistake.
upEND Movement leaders described what they mean by abolition in the context of child welfare, and joined The Imprint Weekly Podcast to discuss the idea further.
A group of child welfare researchers agreed with abolitionists on several reform needs, but disagreed with the premise that child welfare services are inherently harming Black children.