Torn Apart

How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World
by Dorothy Roberts, Janina Edwards
$27.99

Buy from Other Retailers:

An award-winning scholar exposes the foundational racism of the child welfare system and calls for radical change 
 
Many believe the child welfare system protects children from abuse. But as Torn Apart uncovers, this system is designed to punish Black families. Drawing on decades of research, legal scholar and sociologist Dorothy Roberts reveals that the child welfare system is better understood as...
Read More

Published By Basic Books

Format Audiobook

Category

Number Of Pages N/A

Publication Date 04/05/2022

ISBN 9781549193170


"Roberts buttresses her impassioned call for dismantling the child welfare system by skillfully situating it within a larger web of institutions intended to surveil, control, and punish Black Americans. This illuminating and alarming study shatters the “facade of benevolence” surrounding foster care."—Publishers Weekly

Torn Apart is a brilliant and impassioned call for abolition of our racist and disastrous systems of family policing. Better than anyone else could, Dorothy Roberts shows convincingly why we must reimagine child welfare and develop new systems for meeting human needs, preventing violence, and caring for children, families, and communities."—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

"Dorothy Roberts has brilliantly illuminated the Black experience in America for decades. Her new book on America's punitive child welfare system is a bold and critically important reimagining of how to better protect children. Her thesis on how the legacy of slavery and carceral systems have impacted Black families is rooted in decades of rigorous examination, research, and reflection. This is a compelling, thoughtful, and urgent work."—Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy

“Once again Dorothy Roberts offers us a bold, visionary critique of the contemporary institutional consequences of colonialism and slavery. Her penetrating analysis of the family policing system and its masquerade as child protective services not only persuades us that reforms alone will forever reinforce the system’s racist and repressive foundations, it also compels us to imagine new modes of care and frameworks for abolitionist futures.”
 —Angela Y. Davis, author of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

 
Shipping calculated at checkout.