Based on decades of experience, organizing, and research, How to End Family Policing argues that the child welfare system cannot build genuine safety. In fact, rather than the misleading language of "child welfare," many scholars and activists describe these institutions as "family policing." Drawing on abolitionist principals, this much-needed intervention shows that no kinship network benefits from investigation, surveillance, policing, or forced separation. Contributors include community organizers, parents, civil rights attorneys, scholars, social workers, and survivors of family policing.

Dorothy Roberts, Andrea Ritchie, and Erin Miles Cloud will discuss the historical context of the family policing system and, vitally, how organizers have strategized against it.

Order a copy of How to End Family Policing here.
 

***Register through Ticket Tailor to receive a link to the live-streamed video on the day of the event. This event will also be recorded and captioning will be provided.***

Speakers:

Andrea J. Ritchie (she/her) is a Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people for the past three decades. She has been actively engaged in anti-violence, labor, and LGBTQ organizing, and in movements against state violence and for racial, reproductive, economic, environmental, and gender justice in the U.S., Canada, and internationally since the 1980s. Andrea is the author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, and co-author of No More Police. A Case forAbolition, Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women; and of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States. She co-founded Interrupting Criminalization and the In Our Names Network, a network of over 20 organizations working to end police violence against Black women, girls, trans and gender nonconforming people, and led INCITE!'s work on law enforcement violence. In these capacities and through the Community Resource Hub and National Black Women's Justice Institute she worked with dozens of groups across the country organizing to divest from policing and secure deep investments in community-based strategies that will produce greater public safety.

Dorothy Roberts is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology, and the Raymond Pace & Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at University of Pennsylvania. She is a 2024 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. She is also the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. An internationally acclaimed scholar, activist, and social critic, she has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues concerning reproduction, bioethics, and child welfare. Her latest book, TORN APART is about how the child welfare system destroys black families and how abolition can build a safer world.

Erin Miles Cloud is a civil rights attorney. She is the co-founder of Movement for Family Power, co-editor of How to End Family Policing, and a former family defense public defender. She is a Black- mixed race mother of two beautiful children.
 

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