Abstract

Excerpted From: Shanta Trivedi, The Hidden Pain of Family Policing, 49 New York University Review of Law and Social Change 131 (2025) (493 Footnotes) (Full Document).

The “child welfare” or family policing system purports to exist to keep children safe and ensure their well-being. However, numerous impacted parents, scholars, advocates, and foster children have detailed the harms that this system causes to children, families, and communities due to its punitive nature. To date, most of the scholarly focus, including my own, has been on the harms that children experience when they are involved in the system and ultimately removed from their parents.
Until recently, far less attention has been paid to the negative effects that family policing has on parents.

Harms to parents are grave and plentiful. Parents face psychological harms, assaults on their dignity, and violations of their constitutional rights. Marginalized parents face additional racial and class-based harms. Further, involvement in the family policing system inflicts multiple overlapping harms at each stage of the proceedings and through interactions with different system actors, including mandated reporters, caseworkers, lawyers, and judges.

To start, Child Protective Services (CPS) investigations alone can be incredibly invasive and traumatizing. Once enmeshed in the family policing system, parents live in fear of CPS workers rummaging through their personal belongings and coercing cooperation, using their children as bargaining chips, and threatening to take the children if their parents do not comply.

If parents ultimately lose their children after an investigation, their pain and suffering is magnified. In other contexts, such as when losing a child to death, parents are generally met with empathy and care, surrounded by loved ones who want to support them. Society rallies to their side. However, when parents involuntarily lose their children to the state after allegations of abuse or neglect, the response is typically the polar opposite. Many Americans believe that child abuse and neglect is “typically intentional.” Parents are often blamed, stigmatized, and isolated--left to deal with their grief alone. While some may be fortunate enough to have support, others are too ashamed to seek comfort or may become isolated from family and support networks due to the stress of state intervention. Even if one is compelled to blame parents whose children are removed by the state, the pain they feel is still real, and we ignore it at our own peril.

Yet the law makes no provision to consider the harm to parents caused by family policing. Given that in most family policing cases the stated goal is rehabilitation--to address the identified problem through services and supports and either keep the family together or reunify the family after temporary separation--it is crucial that we focus on the health and well-being of the parent. Failing to do so increases the likelihood of family separation, reduces the likelihood of reunifying children with their parents, and leaves parents without support in the wake of their devastating loss.

Once their children are removed, many parents face the possibility of the permanent destruction of their parent-child relationship through termination of parental rights (TPR). If TPR does occur, parents face additional humiliation and shame. They also may experience the possible adoption of their children into new families. Indeed, they must reckon with the fact that they have lost their children forever, while knowing their children are still alive--just somewhere else.

Already marginalized groups suffer in distinct ways because of racism, classism, and negative stereotypes about their character. Black and Native parents, for example, suffer unique harms due to the history of child removal in the United States. To be sure, Black and Native parents are not the only groups subjected to discrimination by the family policing system, but these two groups are continuously overrepresented in the system and will therefore be the primary focus of this Article.
The intergenerational and historical trauma of slavery and Native American boarding schools makes child removal today especially difficult for parents who are part of these groups. Furthermore, children who grow up in the foster system, disproportionately Black and Native, face heightened risks of having their own children enter the system--clear evidence that CPS intervention is not helping the children it targets.

Throughout these proceedings, the family policing system encroaches on parents’ dignity because it intervenes in families’ most basic decisions--what children should eat, what their bedtimes should be, who should be around them, and, in many cases, where they should live.
Because “[a] person has liberty as dignity only insofar as [they] can make autonomous choices,” family policing assails parents’ dignity by undermining parents as capable decisionmakers for their children.

It is crucial to understand that “a person does not lack capacity because [they] make[] decisions that people disagree with or do not understand or because [they] make[] risky decisions.” Many of the choices parents make are simply choices that the family policing system may not agree with, but they are not inherently dangerous or harmful to their children. Some decisions are not even choices, but rather circumstances thrust upon parents by systemic forces such as racism and poverty. Many poor, single, and non-white parents are stereotyped as monsters, “drug addicts,” or welfare queens. They are scorned because they are minorities, destitute or single mothers. These marginalizing labels make parents easy targets for the family policing system. The system’s lack of empathy for parents and its constant assaults on their dignity underly the harms that it perpetrates against them.

Many parents have powerfully told their stories through their own writing or to journalists, and numerous scholars have relayed the stories of individual parents who have lost their children through extensive social science research. These impactful stories have already begun to offer a different perspective of family policing than has been traditionally explored.

This shifting perspective allows those who have never had contact with the family policing system to understand how parents feel when they are under constant surveillance and accused of abuse or neglect. It also educates outsiders on how the system disproportionately targets racially marginalized and impoverished families. In this way, more people will hopefully be able to empathize with accused parents and understand that the narrative that surrounds them is not always accurate and, at the very least, is usually incomplete.

This Article examines the wide-ranging effects that family policing intervention can have on the behavioral, emotional, mental, physical, and social health of parents, while incorporating parents’ experiences in the family policing system.

Part I of this Article explores the detrimental effects that each distinct stage of a family policing case has on parents: when the state surveils them, investigates them, forces them to participate in court proceedings, removes their children from their care, and, in some cases, permanently terminates their parental rights. Part II probes why both the law and our society fail to acknowledge the harms that the family policing system inflicts on parents and why we focus almost singularly on children. Part III explains how reducing harm to parents is a two-step process: first, implementing policy changes that address some of the greatest harms that the system inflicts on parents, and second, changing the narrative that surrounds parents who are forced into the system. It explains that the only way to create real change is to center the dignity and humanity of parents and show them empathy. It explores how agents of the family policing system can cultivate empathy within themselves to eventually increase systemic empathy. It suggests that in addition to reducing the harms of family policing on parents, these measures will also better meet the stated goal of the “child welfare”
system: ensuring children’s well-being.

[ . . . ]

Marginalized parents have long been the targets of blame, shame, and hatred. Our laws codify the idea that punishing parents is the best approach to child protection. This Article demonstrates that family policing interventions cause immense and overwhelming harm to parents that in turn reverberates through the community and across generations without accomplishing the purported goal of keeping children safe.
Parents enmeshed in the family policing system deserve respect, support, and empathy. Changing the narrative surrounding parents impacted by the family policing system to one that centers their dignity and autonomy is a crucial component of any approach to child welfare. To ensure that children are safe, healthy, and well, we must first take care of their parents. What would you want if it were you?

Assistant Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Sayra & Neil Meyerhoff Center for Families, Children & the Courts, University of Baltimore School of Law.