This kind of rhetoric, on display throughout Torn Apart, makes it tough to take Ms. Roberts’s analysis seriously. And indeed, she says that, contrary to the idea that foster care rescues children from threatening family members, children ‘are much more likely to be maltreated in foster care than in their homes.’ In fact, the median rate of reported maltreatment of children in foster care is well below the rate for the general population. The cherry-picked studies Ms. Roberts cites to support her case are often decades senior, with diminutive sample sizes. Her own research involves interviews with mothers who answer her flyers asking for their thoughts on child protective services … When one sees Angela Davis, the feminist-Marxist activist, giving Torn Apart a gushing blurb, it’s uncomplicated to dismiss the book as a marginal work of analysis. But last month the Biden administration official in charge of child welfare compared the workers in the field to ‘overseers on plantations’ and advised the public not to call child protective services: ‘Save Black children from that knock on the door and that tunnel of child welfare, out of which they may never see their way.’ Such views will only keep black families—all families—from getting the facilitate they need.
Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families–And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World
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