Strangers walk into a family home, expressing concern about the well-being of two children living there. The parent would like the strangers to leave, but knows she has no choice — they wield tremendous power. The strangers insist that “you cannot deny” their right to enter the home and check on the children, adding “with your permission, of course.” But this “permission” line feels like a threat: let us see the children, or else. So the parent relents.
That scene appears in pop culture’s latest television series about a CPS investigation, a failed adoption, and the trauma that results — the newest Star Wars show, The Acolyte. Any analogy between this world and the Star Wars galaxy is simplified and imperfect, but I defy anyone familiar with the family regulation system to watch The Acolyte and not see the parallels.
For the uninitiated: The Acolyte takes place during the High Republic, when the Jedi Order kept peace in the galaxy, 100 years before the fall of the Jedi and the rise of Darth Vader and the Galactic Empire. The prequel movies (Episodes I through III) showed that rise, and also laid out how family separations were a foundation of the Jedi Order. The Jedi identify children throughout the galaxy who are strong in the force, and take them from their parents to be trained on the planet Coruscant. The Jedi then assign young children as padawan apprentices to be mentored by a Jedi master parent figure.
These family separations would raise questions under earthly conceptions of parents’ and children’s right to family integrity – the Supreme Court has described taking young children from their families to serve the state as unconstitutional, offering a contrast to ancient Sparta (not the Star Wars galaxy). The prequels offer a too-easy answer to this tension. Episode I displays young Anakin Skywalker’s mother as understanding that Anakin was special and genuinely consenting to his leaving her to be trained as a Jedi.
But The Acolyte asks: Would anyone really trust a large and powerful governmental agency to replicate such family separations in a purely consensual manner? No, not here on Earth and not in a galaxy far, far away.
The Acolyte centers on twin sisters, Osha and Mae, the subjects of a flawed Jedi child protection intervention, and the harm it causes. Osha and Mae appear healthy and bonded to each other and their mother. One Jedi, Sol, sees them in the forest, and then with their mother, Aniseya, who is training them to use the Force. Sol pronounces a “fear for the girls’ safety. What if the girls are in danger?” He lacks evidence beside bad vibes, but sometimes bad vibes lead people to call CPS, regardless of the harms which result. And, as Sol insists, he has “noble intentions.”
So the Jedi enter — not only without permission or a warrant, as CPS agencies frequently do, but by breaking into Aniseya, Osha and Mae’s home.
Faced with this uninvited CPS intervention, Aniseya seeks to protect her children from the strangers. She insists, along with another adult in the home, that the Jedi leave and that the children should not be “raised by an institution instead of a family.” Just as parental assertions of rights are often construed as hostility or a lack of compliance rather than evidence of protective capacity, the Jedi do not take this well. They first insist on their “right” to evaluate the girls and threateningly obtain their mother’s “permission” to do so. Then, after that evaluation, when Aniseya continues to try to protect her children, they wrongly interpret her behavior as aggression and, before they can figure out what’s really going on, Sol ignites his lightsaber, killing her in front of one of the children.
Sol and the Jedi leave with Osha in their custody. (What happens with Mae is complicated, and involves an Empire Strikes Back reference, but I digress.) The Jedi know their intervention went horribly wrong. but they hide the full facts of the family separation to justify the continued custody of the child they have “rescued.” While I do not mean to suggest that CPS agencies routinely cover up misdeeds, they do frequently evade meaningful oversight of family separations they cause, as in hidden foster care.
Once Sol has Osha, The Acolyte becomes an allegory for permanency. Sol behaves like an over-eager foster parent who sees his role as seeking to adopt a child rather than help a parent and child reunify (a too-common reality). Sol has not been granted a padawan apprentice, and he “feels a connection to Osha, that she is meant to be my padawan.” As a Jedi colleague warns him, his desire for his own padawan blinds him. But after their misguided intervention, Osha has to go somewhere, so Sol takes Osha as his padawan, becoming the mentor and father figure to replace the family that has been destroyed.
But Sol cannot provide Osha with real permanency, echoing our field’s increasing consciousness of disrupted adoptions. The wounds from her lost family lead Osha to break away from Sol and never become a Jedi. As a young adult, Osha is left without her family and estranged from her adoptive Jedi family. Like legal orphans who have aged out of foster care, the intervention made with noble intentions leaves Osha intensely vulnerable. And that vulnerability makes Sol and the Jedi’s failure complete.
At its core, The Acolyte is about the lasting harm imposed by a single unwarranted CPS investigation gone wrong. Sol and the Jedi traumatize Osha and Mae, leading to death, family destruction, a failed adoption, and, this being Star Wars, a path to the dark side. Beyond the personal harm, The Acolyte strongly implies a connection between Osha and Mae’s distressing outcomes and the fall of the Republic and the rise of the evil Galactic Empire a century later.
There is a final element to The Acolyte’s family regulation system analogy: both the family regulation field and the Star Wars galaxy have a changing and more nuanced understanding of themselves. Star Wars began in the 1970s and 1980s as a good versus evil hero’s quest, but has grown more complex in the 21st century. The prequels showed a flawed Jedi Order – an Order so convinced of its own righteousness that it could not sniff out the villain under their nose as he plotted to destroy it and take power. In The Acolyte, the Sith are villains, but it is the Jedis’ misguided intervention that pushes the twin children into the Sith’s embrace.
Similarly, our field is now more aware of how CPS intervention can cause lasting harm. Even CPS agencies’ and investigators’ good intentions cannot shield children and families from the trauma that results. Authorities increasingly recognize that they must weigh the harm that comes from any CPS intervention and how to mitigate it — or how to avoid CPS intervention entirely. And media — both news and entertainment — are less likely to present the family regulation system superficially and uncritically (parents bad, foster families and adoption good), and more willing to provide some balance and nuance, and even explore the dark side of CPS interventions.
The dark side was the destiny for The Acolyte’s family separation. Happily, it need not be ours: we can learn from the harms of unnecessary CPS intervention, limit the frequency and scope of such interventions, and prevent the traumas to the Oshas and Maes of this galaxy.
