What do abortion bans and family policing have in common? They both give the state control over our personal, reproductive decisions.

Today, upEND is launching a new digital ad campaign in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, inviting communities to connect the fight for reproductive freedom with the fight to keep families together.

Our message connects reproductive freedom and family autonomy. We want audiences to make a connection that is too often left out of mainstream reproductive rights conversations: The same systems that control whether people can end a pregnancy also police whether and how they are allowed to parent.

Instead of cruel intrusions into our lives, families need resources and support. Everyone should have the freedom to decide when and how we build our families, without government interference. And we should have all the resources to raise our kids with dignity.

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You can help boost our reach! Share our posts about reproductive justice to your friends, family, and colleagues. We can work together to spread the message that we have the right to make choices about our pregnancies and to raise our kids without fear of the government taking them away.

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Ads will also run across media platforms including Capital B, Blavity, Essence, Mississippi Today, The Current, and Verite News.

Letter to the Editor: We Say “Abolition”–In Solidarity With Those Who Are Harmed by the Child Welfare System

New Journal Article by Maya Pendleton, Alan Dettlaff, Sydnie Mares, Josie Pickens, connease warren, and Angela Burton

Here’s what happened. Some people were uncomfortable with us using the word “abolition,” and they wrote a letter about it. They said we were misguided and disrespectful to slavery abolitionists to use this term in relation to the family policing system.

We wrote a response:

In other words, attempts to police the language originated by Black scholars and organizers is just another way to sustain the very systems of oppression we’re trying to dismantle.

Abolition is an ONGOING project, to dismantle systems of racialized domination. This tradition is tied to the efforts to end slavery, but it didn’t end there. Like Angela Davis said, “Freedom is a constant struggle.”

We use the term abolition because communities most impacted by the family policing system describe it as a modern iteration of slavery. Family separations were weaponized, reproductive control was exerted over Black women, and dehumanizing narratives about Black families emerged. If those parallels between slavery and today’s so-called “child welfare system” are uncomfortable, imagine what it must be like to experience such violence. Imagine the radical shifts we need to make to truly be free.

Of course, abolition is about the tearing down of carceral systems like prisons, ICE, and family policing. But it also invites us to radically shift how we think about harm, accountability, and care. We believe in practicing collective responsibility for children— without surveillance, coercion, or separation.

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In the Studio…

Our summer project is almost ready to be revealed! Follow @upendmovement on Instagram.

Upcoming Events

This September, the Socialism 2026 Conference will bring together activists, organizers, and communities from across the country and around the world.

Follow Socialism Conference on Instagram and BlueSky to learn more.

Pre-Conference Summit

“Organizing Social Workers for Abolition”
September 4, 10-2pm, Chicago

A pre-conference summit for social workers organized by the Social Work Activist Collective, the Network to Advance Abolition in Social Work, upEND, the Abolitionist Social Change Collective, and Social Work for Palestine.

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Socialism Conference 2026

September 4-7, Chicago
A four-day conference featuring over a hundred participatory discussions, lectures, and workshops, Socialism is the place for both seasoned radicals and new activists to sharpen analysis, hone strategy, and build community.

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Registration is open for Socialism 2026!

This September, the Socialism 2026 Conference will bring together activists, organizers, and communities from across the country and around the world.

upEND is proud to be an endorsing organization because we believe in the collective liberation that is possible when we work together. If you see us at the conference, say hi! We’d love to connect.

Follow Socialism Conference on Instagram and BlueSky to learn more.

Pre-Conference Summit

“Organizing Social Workers for Abolition”
September 4, 10-2pm, Chicago

A pre-conference summit for social workers organized by the Social Work Activist Collective, the Network to Advance Abolition in Social Work, upEND, the Abolitionist Social Change Collective, and Social Work for Palestine.

Register →

Socialism Conference 2026

September 4-7, Chicago
A four-day conference featuring over a hundred participatory discussions, lectures, and workshops, Socialism is the place for both seasoned radicals and new activists to sharpen analysis, hone strategy, and build community.

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What We’re Reading

Moms of Black Babies More Likely to Be Flagged to Police Over Alleged Pregnancy Drug Use

Child welfare referred Black parents to law enforcement 14,000 times in 7 years, despite no findings of abuse or neglect.

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A Predatory State

A new report by the Palestinian Feminist Collective, supported by the Progressive International, documents Israel’s systematic use of sexualized and gendered violence against Palestinians, across detention centres, homes, military operations, and systems of surveillance, from the Nakba of 1948 to the present.

Download the report →

Upcoming Events

SisterSong 2026 Conference

August 6-9, Chicago
Mother’s Outreach Network founder Melody Webb to present “Poverty Is Not Neglect: What the First Child Welfare Guaranteed Income Pilot Reveals About the Criminalization of Black Motherhood” at the SisterSong Let’s Talk About Sex Conference 2026. The convening expands SisterSong’s mission of strengthening and amplifying the voices of Indigenous women and women of color to achieve reproductive justice.

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In Case You Missed It

Catch Up on the Latest Episodes of The upEND Podcast

Ashley Albert, founder of Stolen Children’s Month, discusses Reclaiming Safety for survivors of domestic violence. Her honesty and radical compassion make this episode an essential listen.

Listen Now →

Stolen Children’s Month calls for the abolition of all systems that steal children and separate families.

We envision a world where children remain rooted in the love, care, and cultures of their families and communities; and where families harmed by state violence have access to the material and relational resources needed to heal and repair.

Communities in these cities & regions will host vigils to honor stolen children on or around June 25, 2026.

Altadena, California
Bay Area, California
Bogotá, Colombia
Boston, Massachusetts
Bozeman, Montana
Cali, Colombia
Charleston, SC
Chicago, Illinois
Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas
Detroit, Michigan
Durham, North Carolina
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Graniteville, South Carolina
Kansas City, Missouri
Knoxville, Tennessee
London, United Kingdom
Los Angeles, California
Missoula, Montana
Moorhead, Minnesota
New York City, New York
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Portland, Oregon
Quetzaltenango, Guatemala
Richmond, Virginia
Sandstone, Minnesota
St. Louis, Missouri
Seattle, Washington
Vancouver, BC, Canada
Washington, D.C.

Learn More →

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Stolen Children’s Month Founder Ashley Albert Speaks Out on The upEND Podcast

We talk about how survivors of domestic violence are punished instead of supported, how the family policing system connects to other forms of systemic violence, and what it means to imagine a future where survivors are met with care instead of surveillance and separation.

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Read the Transcript →

This podcast episode is an accompaniment to the essay Reclaiming Safety for Survivors of Domestic Violence and Their Kids by Ashley Albert, Josie Pickens, and Sydnie Dan’el Mares.

Read the Essay →

Roxanna Asgarian and Alan Dettlaff Featured on “Nobody Should Believe Me” Podcast

Novelist Andrea Dunlop is looking for answers. When her older sister was investigated for Munchausen by Proxy abuse more than a decade ago, it tore her family apart. This catastrophic series of events sent Dunlop on a journey to understand this most taboo form of abuse.

As the media weaves a narrative about evil doctors kidnapping children, the real harms caused by the child welfare system go unnoticed. This episode talks about strengthening children’s rights and the case for family policing abolition.

Listen Now →

How can we support survivors of domestic violence and their children without the child welfare system?

State intervention often forces survivors into impossible choices: remain in a harmful situation to keep their children or engage with a legal system that might use their trauma as evidence of an unstable home.

In this episode, we sit down with Ashley De Anna Albert, an abolitionist, writer, and survivor of intimate partner violence whose children were taken by CPS. Ashley has transformed her own pain into powerful advocacy through Stolen Children’s Month and her work leading healing justice circles that remind us no family is disposable.

Together, we talk about how survivors are punished instead of supported, how the family policing system connects to other forms of systemic violence, and what it means to imagine a future where survivors are met with care, resilience, and community, instead of surveillance and separation.

Listen on Spotify →

Listen on Apple Podcasts →

Read the Transcript →

About Our Guest:

Ashley De Anna Albert is an abolitionist working to dismantle the family policing system and its ties to mass incarceration. Through her advocacy, writing, and healing justice circles, she uplifts the voices of parents impacted by child removal and challenges the racialized harms of foster care, adoption, and termination of parental rights. Her work centers on building community-based alternatives rooted in care, resilience, and the belief that no family is disposable.

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Reclaiming Safety is upEND’s exploration of frequently asked questions about family policing abolition. This discussion is an accompaniment to the essay Reclaiming Safety for Survivors of Domestic Violence and Their Kids by Ashley Albert, Josie Pickens, and Sydnie Dan’el Mares.

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Introduction

by Angela Olivia Burton

The way we address domestic violence when children are involved doesn’t help survivors or protect their kids.

Right now, the prevailing child protective services (CPS) system approach is to accuse survivors of harming their children, citing “failure to protect” laws, even when the children haven’t been harmed directly. Many have their kids stolen by the foster system, and many may never be reunited.

What’s called “child protection” or “child welfare” is really a system of family policing - surveillance, prosecution, and punishment that especially targets Black, Brown, Indigenous, immigrant, poor, and disabled families. This state violence has become so normalized that most people assume it has to be this way. It doesn’t.

This essay in the Reclaiming Safety series was informed by Ashley Albert, based on conversations between her and the upEND Team. Ashley’s lived experience as a survivor of the family policing system, a survivor of domestic violence, and a mother whose children were stolen by the family policing system deeply informed the strategies for prevention, intervention, and healing listed at the end of this essay. We are grateful for Ashley’s leadership in the family policing abolition movement, her radical compassion, and, above all, her friendship.

Abolition invites us to interrogate prevailing premises about the meaning of safety, and to imagine new paths forward. In the dismantling of the carceral web that polices families, there is hope for new approaches that prevent and respond to harm and create safety for both parents and their kids.

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Reclaiming Safety for Domestic Violence Survivors and Their Kids

by Ashley Albert, Josie Pickens, and Sydnie Dan’el Mares

Sharwline Nicholson made a decision that many survivors of intimate partner violence eventually face. She ended her relationship with the father of her infant daughter, a man who traveled from South Carolina to New York each month to visit her and their child. When Nicholson told him the relationship was over, he responded with violence. She did what survivors are told to do in moments like this. She called 911. She went to the hospital to seek treatment. She arranged for a friend to take care of her two children overnight so she could stay safe.

The next day, instead of the support she desperately needed, she got a call from New York’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) informing her that both of her children had been removed from her care. Their reasoning was not that she had harmed her children, but that they had witnessed harm done to her. The agency said she had “failed to protect” them.¹ Although some survivors of IPV who face family separation may never see their children return home, Nicholson was eventually able to regain custody. She even helped establish a major court ruling declaring that witnessing abuse cannot, by itself, justify removing a child.² But the damage, for her and for so many other parents like her, was already done. Her story shows how quickly the state can turn a survivor’s attempt to seek safety into yet another experience of harm.

To explain how this happens, we have to understand the different kinds of violence families navigate. Intimate partner violence (IPV)—also called domestic violence—is commonly defined as “a pattern of behaviors used by one partner to maintain power and control over another partner in an intimate relationship.”³ It is one form of intrafamilial violence, sitting within a broader category that includes both harm between partners and harm that occurs between parents and children, siblings, or other relatives.⁴ These experiences are particularly overlapping and complex, shaped by relationships, resources, culture, and structural inequities.

But survivors are not only navigating interpersonal violence. They are also navigating the violence of state systems. The network of agencies often called the “child welfare system” is more accurately described as the family policing system (FPS).⁵ The term reflects what families actually experience: surveillance, investigations, monitoring, and punishment rather than care or safety. Black, Brown, Indigenous, immigrant, poor, and disabled survivors are disproportionately targeted, creating a landscape where calling for help can put entire families at risk.⁶

This essay, part of upEND’s Reclaiming Safety series, takes up an essential question: How do we support survivors of intrafamilial violence—including children—without relying on the harmful family policing system?

Gender-Based Violence as a Bigger Structural Issue

Gender-based violence is often described as something that happens between two people, tucked away in private spaces. But survivors know that this violence is shaped long before any single incident occurs. It festers in a society where patriarchy, racism, and economic inequality decide who is valued and who is dismissed.

Patriarchy is not a matter of individual men behaving badly. It is a system, a web of beliefs and arrangements lodged inside our politics, our economy, our homes, one that prizes what we’ve learned to call masculine and discards what we’ve learned to call feminine. Feminist scholars name this plainly: race, class, and gender are not separate burdens stacked on top of each other but are interlocking systems, a single matrix of domination that operates through our institutions, our governing bureaucracies, our ruling ideas, and our most ordinary daily exchanges.⁷

Gender-based violence is not just an interpersonal problem. It is a cultural and structural one that lives in our laws, our institutions, and our assumptions about whose lives matter. This violence also does not fall on everyone in the same way. Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, immigrant, poor, and disabled survivors face higher rates of harm because they live at the intersections of multiple inequities.⁸ Their access to safety is shaped by barriers that have nothing to do with personal choices and everything to do with systems built to limit their freedom. When these survivors seek help, they often encounter suspicion instead of support.⁹ They encounter service systems that monitor rather than care, systems that question their credibility, punish them for lacking resources, or treat their families as inherently deficient. The result is a landscape where the people most vulnerable to violence are the least protected by the institutions that claim to keep families safe.¹⁰

These barriers prevent survivors from seeking help. When a survivor hesitates to dial 911, it is not because of confusion or weakness. A recent systematic review of women’s own accounts puts it plainly: fear and mistrust are not personal deficits but rational responses to the institutional and structural barriers, the police culture, and the racism that shape what happens to women who report.¹¹ And calling does not always make a survivor safer. A review out of Columbia’s Mailman School found that policing intimate partner violence can carry adverse consequences for survivors themselves, from reduced help-seeking to survivor arrest to child protective services involvement, enough to call into question whether this policing benefits survivors at all.¹²

Hospitals carry their own failures. Even when a survivor reaches care, that care often arrives in a fast-paced setting that is short on trauma-informed, survivor-centered practice, and the person who came in during a crisis frequently slips away before any real support reaches her.¹³

Capitalism holds this violence in place. A woman with no savings, no credit, nowhere of her own to go is bound more tightly to a dangerous partner than a woman with means, and the research says so without flinching: economic dependence is one of the most common barriers keeping survivors from leaving for good, and many who do leave lose their housing in the leaving.¹⁴

These systemic forces become especially visible when intimate partner violence meets the family policing system. Survivors often report that abusive partners use the threat of Child Protective Services (CPS) involvement as a tool of control. This is a known tactic, not an aberration. Advocates have long documented that abusers threaten to take the children if a survivor tries to leave or tells anyone, and weaponize the legal system to keep harassing and stalking her long after she is gone.¹⁵ A single hotline call can trigger an intrusive investigation, home searches, interrogations, and sometimes removal.¹⁶ For many families, the state becomes another source of danger. The dynamic is painfully familiar: a person seeking safety is met with punishment, blame, or disbelief. In this way, the family policing system mirrors the same patterns of control at the heart of intimate partner violence, turning children into leverage and survival into evidence of “neglect.”

The family policing system recreates the very dynamics that survivors of gender-based harm are trying to escape. Asking for help can lead to losing your children. Staying silent can feel like the only way to keep them. The family policing system becomes another source of fear, another barrier to safety, and another reminder that survival is never treated as enough.

When we understand gender-based violence as a structural and cultural issue, it becomes clear that ending it will require transforming the systems that continue to reproduce it.

When Violence Against Women Becomes State Violence

The prevailing, mainstream solution for domestic violence has been ever-increasing criminalization and punishment. White feminists of the late 1800s organized to end the right to “wife abuse,” and physical punishment was put forth as the solution to patriarchal violence. Unsurprisingly, new state laws that created punishments such as whippings for violence against women targeted Black families. One sample from Charleston, South Carolina between 1889 and 1894 illustrates this disproportionality: fifty-eight of sixty men prosecuted for physical violence against their wives were Black.¹⁷

The modern iteration of this pattern is just as gruesome and ineffective, wielding the prison industrial complex as a weapon. The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) of 1994 solidified prosecution and incarceration as the primary response to domestic violence. The law’s intention is clear in its funding priorities: in 2013, approximately 85% of the VAWA’s funding went to the criminal legal system. ¹⁸

Of course, demands for increased criminalization go hand in hand with increased surveillance, particularly for Black families. In 1974, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) required states to create mandatory reporting hotlines and established minimum definitions of abuse. Since then, racial disproportionalities in the family policing system have grown, with Black families and caregivers more likely to be reported for alleged maltreatment than white families.¹⁹

Mandatory reporting laws require professionals to report information that survivors share to the police or child protective services (CPS).

• People seeking help from a domestic violence hotline said that being reported made their situation worse. (50% much worse, 12% a little worse, 20% no different , 15% a little better, 3% much better)

• Some people seeking help were warned that the person they were reaching out to would legally have to report them. They said this changed their reactions.

• One participant simply said, “I didn’t want my kids taken away, so I didn’t talk.”

National LGBTQ Domestic Violence Capacity Building Learning Center²⁰

The System’s Failure to Protect

“Failure to protect” laws and practices are some of the most damning evidence that the family policing system is not created for the protection of children or their caregivers.

The first “failure to protect” laws arose in the 1960’s, prosecuting a caregiver as a child abuser if they knew a child was being abused by someone else and did not report it. Then, a landmark decision in 1998 broadened the scope of what could be considered child abuse. In re Lonnell J., the court decided that because exposing children to domestic violence was itself harmful, a mother that stayed with their partner had “failed to exercise a minimum degree of care.”²¹

When victims of IPV are considered complicit in abusing their children, states can terminate their parental rights (severing all legal ties between parent and child) and even pursue criminal charges. Punishments can lead to life sentences for victims, such as in Texas where the maximum penalty for a “failure to protect” charge is 99 years.²³

Of course, witnessing violence can negatively impact a child and should be addressed, but the solutions should not beget more harm to the whole family. Children and parents who are forcibly separated by the family policing system or the criminal legal system experience life-long psychological trauma.²⁴ As long as the state’s default response to IPV is to blame victims for their own abuse, children will bear the brunt of its failure to protect.

Intimate Partner and Domestic Violence

The patterns of intimate partner violence (IPV) extend far beyond physical bruises. This violence thrives on coercion—a slow, calculated erosion of a person’s autonomy through the control of their movements, finances, and social interactions.²⁵ Abusers build this environment through isolation, systematically severing a survivor’s ties to family, friends, and support systems to create total dependency.²⁶ Shame acts as a silent anchor, convincing the person being harmed that the violence is their fault or a secret they must protect. These tools of power mirror broader societal hierarchies and rely on the survivor’s fear that no one will believe them, or that the cost of leaving—including poverty or state intervention—is higher than the cost of staying.²⁷

Family policing system involvement is also isolating and shame-inducing by design, mirroring what abusers attempt to do. Ashley Albert, an organizer and survivor who lost her parental rights, describes the stigma she experienced: “People would say, ‘CPS doesn’t just take your kids. You must have done something.’” Survivors feel that they cannot tell their neighbors about abuse in their relationships or about investigations by the family policing system, which compounds the two overlapping harms.

A profound gap exists between how communities understand IPV and how the state defines it. To a community, domestic violence is a rupture of safety and trust that requires long-term care, economic support, and deep accountability.²⁸ Many communities recognize that survival requires a “both/and” approach, where a survivor may need to leave their partner while still needing their community’s financial or emotional resources to endure. The state, however, defines domestic violence through a narrow, criminal legal lens, looking for a specific incident, a visible injury, or a broken law to justify intervention.²⁹ This rigid definition fails to account for the daily reality of coercion. It demands a “perfect victim” who is willing to cooperate with police and move into a shelter system that can feel as restrictive as the home they left.​​³⁰

State responses are almost always punitive rather than restorative. While a community might see a mother struggling to manage an abuser’s outbursts as someone in need of a village, the state often views her through a lens of individual responsibility. This mismatch in understanding can turn “help” into a trap. For many, calling the police or reaching out to a formal agency brings a new set of monitors rather than safety.³¹ State intervention often forces survivors into impossible choices: remain in a harmful situation to keep their children or engage with a legal system that might use their trauma as evidence of an unstable home.³² Reclaiming safety means bridging this gap, moving away from state definitions that focus on punishment and toward community responses that center the survivor’s intuition and material needs.

Alternative, community-centered approaches can make room for the messy reality of domestic violence without relying on coercion and punishment. Sometimes victims love their partners and aren’t ready to leave, sometimes they don’t want to see their partners criminalized, and sometimes they fight back and are at risk of criminalization themselves. One-size-fits-all solutions won’t meet every family’s needs. Survived & Punished, a national coalition founded by formerly incarcerated survivors, offers a nuanced and compassionate framework for community members addressing gender-based violence. They write, “What usually makes a greater impact than proposing immediate solutions is the slow, delicate work of growing trust through kindness, patience, and non-judgmental listening.”³³

“They Can Just Call the Police” and Other Myths About Domestic Violence

Jackie contacted the child welfare system in Los Angeles to escape an abusive partner, hoping for a safe path for herself and her four sons. Instead, a caseworker told Jackie she had thirty days to leave her partner’s house or the state would remove her children.³⁴ Sadly, many survivors like Jackie are misled to believe that the family policing system is a helping system and then end up entangled in it. Real safety for families begins with naming these kinds of myths for what they are.

One common myth that much of the public believes is that the “family policing” system is a helpful resource for protection. Survivors frequently find that this system acts as a second source of harm.³⁵ In facilitating conversations with parents who lost their kids to CPS, Ashley Albert heard it all. “They would start to talk about how their caseworkers targeted them sexually, what was said to them, and how they felt silenced.” In her own case, Ashley describes the system’s lack of accountability for the lifelong trauma it perpetrated. “When the system makes errors, there are no reparations. There is no repair or reconciliation. We are left to put our families back together. Nobody is apologizing for the error in their ways.”³⁶

Another myth is that survivors can leave abusive relationships whenever they choose. This idea ignores how dangerous separation actually is. Research shows that 75% of domestic violence homicides happen during or right after a person tries to leave.³⁷ Survivors stay because they are performing a daily analysis of how to keep their children alive. Abusers also use financial abuse to control bank accounts and ruin credit scores. A ruined credit score makes it nearly impossible to secure housing because many landlords will not approve a rental application with a poor credit history.³⁸Capitalism also presents a systemic barrier. Survivors navigating poverty must calculate how to provide for themselves and their children with little resources and high expenses.

Public narratives routinely suggest that courts and police are the best ways to handle violence. However, police and courts only intervene after there is documented evidence of harm which is too late and misunderstands the complexities of intimate partner violence. For example, emotional abuse doesn’t leave a paper trail, nor do threats and other coercive behavior. Some survivors also don’t want to see their abuser punished or imprisoned, even though they want the abuse to stop.

Many police officers are abusers themselves,³⁹ with intimate knowledge of the mechanisms for reporting abuse and systems of support like domestic violence shelters. And, horrifyingly, police officers have access to weapons which means that violence can escalate quickly.⁴⁰ When a woman was murdered by her police officer spouse, a loved one told reporters, “Who was she supposed to call for help? When things go sideways, you call 911. He was 911.”⁴¹

Furthermore, the police frequently facilitate violence against survivors even when they are not in the relationship in question.⁴² After the enactment of the VAWA, twenty-three states enacted mandatory arrest laws requiring an officer to arrest a person involved in domestic violence if it meets certain criteria.⁴³ Mandatory arrests and “dual arrests” can lead to the arrest of the survivor along with the person who harmed them.⁴⁴ An example of this can be found in the case of Cat Brooks, who was arrested at 19 after her husband beat her. Because she was Black and visibly traumatized, and her white husband remained calm, the police took her to jail while he stayed in their home.⁴⁵

Strategies for Addressing Domestic Violence Without Policing Families

Prevention

Family policing, like traditional policing, cannot prevent harm, it can only react after harm occurs. True prevention strategies require ending the systemic violence that creates an environment for interpersonal harm to occur.

• Create financial stability to give parents autonomy and alleviate power imbalances in relationships. Implement universal basic income, guaranteed housing, healthcare, and childcare.

• Repeal CAPTA and mandatory reporting that turns supportive services into surveillance mechanisms that threaten to steal victims’ children.

• Eliminate the threats of deportation, incarceration, and family separation that prevent victims from leaving their partners.

Intervention

When violence occurs, communities should be equipped to respond quickly for both the children and adults involved. That can look like a community member willing to intervene by creating safety plans, facilitating accountability, and upholding everyone’s worth.

• Promote solutions for survivors outside of carceral systems. The Survived & Punished safety planning toolkitoffers a compassionate, realistic framework and reminds us that, “Safety planning is for everyone, not just the professionals.”⁴⁶

• Implement holistic responses that involve the survivors, the person doing harm, their children, and community allies. The Creative Interventions toolkit outlines harm reduction practices, goal setting, survivor support, and accountability for those who caused harm.⁴⁷

• Stay flexible and creative to meet survivors’ unique needs. For example, the “It Takes a Village, People!” Toolkit focuses on LGTBQ survivors of abuse and reminds supporters that there are no “one size fits all” answers.⁴⁸

Healing

Healing and reparations for survivors and their families after experiencing the overlapping harms of IPV and family policing can disrupt generational and systemic cycles of violence. Ashley underscores the hope in these frameworks: “There’s a possibility for redemption.”

• Help parents rebuild trust in themselves and in their community. As a healing circle practitioner, Ashley Albert explains, “Through storytelling and framing the family policing involvement as a systemic issue rather than an individual failing, parents were able to be heard and feel a sense of community with others who were also right there in the muck.”

• Listen to survivors’ stories. The guidebook “Owning Your Story, Claiming Your Power: Talking About Domestic Violence and Child Protective Services,” outlines how survivors can safely talk about their experience with loved ones and practice advocacy in their community.⁴⁹

• Implement reparations for the harm that the family policing system has caused children at the center of intimate partner violence.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, intimate partner violence needs to be addressed. It harms everyone: the survivor, the harmdoer, and the children witnessing the abuse. But what we are doing now—threatening families with separation and incarceration— isn’t creating safety for anyone.

Safety is a material reality that depends on access to housing, financial resources, and community care. True safety comes from creating communities where no one is considered disposable. This path focuses on supporting families and repairing harm so every child can grow up in peace.

We look to One Million Experiments, an abolitionist project documenting the ways organizers are bringing this vision to life. As the project’s originator Mariame Kaba says, there won’t be one new thing to replace carceral systems, there may be one million experiments.⁵⁰ We need to be dynamic, willing to fail and try again. And we must be resolute, refusing to simply replace an abusive partner with a violent state institution.

Of course, not every community member will be up to the task of addressing domestic violence. The systemic and cultural misogyny, racism, and homophobia that underlies such gender-based violence is deeply rooted indeed. Still, this is a project worth working toward. And through the abolition of the family policing system, there is hope for the children at the center of these crises.

Just as children are impacted by witnessing violence, they can be benefited by participating in the transformative justice process. Abolition offers us a radical vision. Imagine a world where children see their neighbors provide safe harbor, warm meals, and a listening ear. They see their loved ones protected from harm and held accountable for harmdoing, without the looming threat of child welfare investigations and incarceration that can sever their familial bonds.

Survivors have been clear about what they need to build safety for themselves and their kids: housing, childcare, mental health care, financial stability, community support, and people who will listen without judgment. Real safety comes from care, not coercion. From connection, not punishment. And from the belief that no family is disposable.

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Authors

Ashley De Anna Albert is a national advocate, writer, and peer support specialist dedicated to transforming the child welfare system. A mother, survivor of foster care, and formerly incarcerated woman, Ashley draws from her lived experience to fight against family policing and the “civil family death penalty.” She is the founder of Intuned Consulting and the creator of healing circles for parents impacted by child removal, blending restorative justice with community care. Her work includes developing toolkits such as The Black Mama’s Guide to Surviving Family Policing and leading initiatives like Stolen Children’s Month, a national effort to honor families torn apart by the system. Ashley’s testimony, writing, and trainings uplift the voices of parents while challenging systemic racism and injustice.

Josie Pickens is a Houston-based writer, narrative strategist, culturalist, and community organizer whose work bridges storytelling, public engagement, and social change. A longtime journalist and commentator, her writing has appeared in outlets including Essence, Ebony, The Root, Mic, NewsOne, and The Guardian. She specializes in narrative strategy and public storytelling, helping organizations, institutions, and movements communicate their impact, values, and vision. Josie serves as an Advisor to the upEND Movement and has led advocacy, research, and community engagement initiatives focused on social justice, public health, and systemic change.

Sydnie Dan’el Mares is an artist and communicator committed to supporting and uplifting marginalized communities. Sydnie is the director of the short documentary “A Vision of Grace” and serves as upEND Movement’s Communications Manager. She uses her creative work to build a future free of carceral systems where Black, LGBTQ, and immigrant communities can thrive.

Citation

Albert, A., Pickens, J., Mares, S. (2026). Reclaiming Safety for Domestic Violence Survivors and Their Kids. upEND Movement. upendmovement.org/safety

Endnotes

1. Elizabeth Brico, “State Laws Can Punish Parents Living in Abusive Households,” Talk Poverty, 2019; NYCLU, Nicholson v. Williams case summary.

2. NYCLU. “Nicholson v. Williams (Defending Parental Rights of Mothers Who Are Domestic Violence Victims),” July 12, 2007. https://www.nyclu.org/court-cases/nicholson-v-williams-defending-parental-rights-mothers-who-are-domestic-violence-victims

3. National Domestic Violence Hotline, “Understand Relationship Abuse.”

4. Renner, Linda M., and Stuart D. Whitney. “Family Violence: An Overview.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 12, no. 5 (1997): 293–295.

5. ACLU of Northern California (quoting upEND), “Fighting to End the Family Policing System.”

6. Ibid.

7. Hill Collins, Patricia. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 18, 227–29.

8. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–1299.

9. Sokoloff, Natalie, and Ida Dupont. “Domestic Violence at the Intersections of Race, Class, and Gender.” Violence Against Women 11, no. 1 (2005): 38–64.

10. Ramirez, Rachel, et al. “Service Accessibility: Service Providers’ Perspectives on Barriers Faced by Immigrant Women of Color Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence.” Journal of Family Violence, 2025, 1–17.

11. Rocío Vicente-García, Daniel La Parra-Casado, and Carmen Vives-Cases, “Personal and Structural Barriers to Reporting Intimate Partner Violence to the Police: A Systematic Review of Women’s Experiences and Societal Influences,” Trauma, Violence, & Abuse (2026), https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380251409827

12. “Research Points to Downside of How Police Respond to Intimate Partner Violence,” Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, August 7, 2024, https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/news/research-points-downside-how-police-respond-intimate-partner-violence

13. Dabney P. Evans et al., “’And Then the Person Sort of Just Drops Off the Radar…’: Barriers in the Transition from Hospital to Community-Based Care among Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence in Metropolitan Atlanta,” Frontiers in Public Health 12 (2024), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2024.1332779

14. Jill Theresa Messing et al., “Coordinated Community Response Components for Victims of Intimate Partner Violence: A Review of the Literature,” Violence and Victims 30, no. 4 (2015): 564–83, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4113829/

15. Raz, Mical. Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost Its Way. UNC Press, 2020.

16. BMJ Public Health. “Intersectional Inequalities in Gender-Based Violence Exposure.” (2025).

17. Washington, S. Lisa. “Survived & Coerced: Epistemic Injustice In the Family Regulation System.” Columbia Law Review, vol. 122, no. 4, 2022, pp. 1097–164. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27136467

18. Goodmark, Leigh. “Reimagining VAWA: Why Criminalization Is a Failed Policy and What a Non-Carceral VAWA Could Look Like.” Violence Against Women, vol. 27, no. 1. 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801220949686

19. Inguanta, Gemma, and Catharine Sciolla. “Time Doesn’t Heal All Wounds: A Call to End Mandated Reporting Laws.” Columbia Social Work Review, vol. 19, no. 1, 4 May 2021, pp. 116–137, https://doi.org/10.52214/cswr.v19i1.7403

20. Lippy, C., Burk, C., & Hobart, M. (2016). “There’s no one I can trust: The impact of mandatory reporting on the help-seeking and well-being of domestic violence survivors.” National LGBTQ DV Capacity Building Learning Center.

21. “Charging Battered Mothers With “Failure To Protect”: Still Blaming The Victim,” 27 Fordham Urb. L.J. 849 (2000). Available at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/ulj/vol27/iss3/3

22. Mae Trozzo, Amaris . “Victim Blaming: Failure to Protect Laws as a Legislative Attack on Mothers.” The Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law Volume XXIII, no. 1 (2021). https://www.law.georgetown.edu/gender-journal/in-print/volume-xxiii-issue-1-fall-2021/victim-blaming-failure-to-protect-laws-as-a-legislative-attack-on-mothers/

23. Brico, Elizabeth. “State Laws Can Punish Parents Living in Abusive Households.” Talk Poverty, 25 Oct. 2019, talkpoverty.org/2019/10/25/failure-protect-child-welfare/index.html

24. Trivedi, Shanta. “The Harm of Child Removal (2019).” SSRN Electronic Journal 43 (2019). https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.3341033

25. Stark, Evan. Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. Oxford University Press, 2007.

26. Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books, 2015.

27. Kim, Mimi. “The Emergence of Community Accountability as a Response to Intimate Partner Violence.” Social Justice 37, no. 4 (2011).

28. Goodmark, Leigh. “Decriminalizing Domestic Violence: A Balanced Policy Approach to Intimate Partner Violence.” University of California Press, 2018.

29. Richie, Beth E. Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and the America’s Prison Nation. NYU Press, 2012.

30. Salami, Minna. Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone. Amistad, 2020.

31. Roberts, Dorothy. Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare. Basic Books, 2002.

32. Bhattacharyya, Gargi. Rethinking Micro-Aggressions and Structural Violence. Routledge, 2024.

33. “Safety Planning and Intimate Partner Violence Toolkit.” Survived + Punished, 21 Apr. 2022, survivedandpunished.org/safety-planning-and-intimate-partner-violence/

34. CalMatters, “Jackie: California’s ‘failure to protect’ law” (2023).

35. Movement for Family Power, “Family Policing: The Modern-Day Auction Block”.

36. Josie Pickens and Sydnie Mares, “Interview with Ashley Albert,” upEND Movement.

37. Center for Relationship Abuse Awareness & Action. “Barriers to Leaving an Abusive Relationship.” Accessed 2025.

38. Center for Relationship Abuse Awareness, “Financial Sabotage and Barriers to Housing”.

39. Goodmark, Leigh S. “Hands up at Home: Militarized Masculinity and Police Officers Who Commit Intimate Partner Abuse.” University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law , 2015. https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/fac_pubs/1515

40. Brian Stanley. “Understanding Police Officer-Perpetrated Domestic Violence.” Public Health Post, May 9, 2024. https://publichealthpost.org/health-equity/understanding-police-officer-perpetrated-domestic-violence/

41. Stanley, Brian. “Police Officer Domestic Violence Is a Crisis. It’s Time for States to Take Action.” Ms. Magazine, December 11, 2025. https://msmagazine.com/2025/12/11/police-officer-domestic-violence-women/

42. USPrisonCulture.com, “Transformative Justice and Community Accountability”.

43. Inouye, Elise. “Mandatory Arrests - a Double-Edged Sword .” University of Hawai‘i at Hilo, 2017. https://hilo.hawaii.edu/campuscenter/hohonu/volumes/documents/MandatoryArrestsADouble-EdgedSword.pdf

44. Sadusky, Jane. “The Criminal Legal System Response to Domestic Violence: Questions and Debate.” National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women. 2020.

45. California Health Report, “Alternatives to Calling the Police for Domestic Violence Survivors”.

46. “Safety Planning and Intimate Partner Violence Toolkit.” Survived + Punished, 21 Apr. 2022, survivedandpunished.org/safety-planning-and-intimate-partner-violence/

47. “Creative Interventions Toolkit: A Practical Guide to Stop Interpersonal Violence.” Creative Interventions, 2012. https://www.creative-interventions.org/toolkit/

48. Burk, Connie, et al. “It Takes a Village, People! Advocacy, Friends and Family, & LGBT Survivors of Abuse.” NW Network of Bisexual, Trans, Lesbian & Gay Survivors of Abuse. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6848c1e12967ee370601d516/t/6849bdac640a951f79e02743/1749663162558/It-Takes-A-Village-People-Web-Version.pdf

49. Albert, Ashley, and Margaret Hobart. “Owning Your Story & Claiming Your Power: Talking about Domestic Violence and Child Protective Services.” Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence, 2023. https://wscadv.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/WSCADV_Guide_compress.pdf

50. Millionexperiments.com. “Listen to the Podcast: One Million Experiments,” 2021. https://millionexperiments.com/podcast/season-1/podcast-episode-1

Reclaiming Safety is an anthology from upEND Movement answering critical questions about family policing abolition. Learn more at upendmovement.org/safety

Stolen Children’s Month 2026

Get involved and help us honor children stolen by the family policing system, the ICE machine, youth incarceration, private adoption, forced treatment facilities, and every other system that tears families apart.

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🗓️ Virtual Rally & Community Vigil

June 1 | 11AM PT + 2PM ET

Join us for a kickoff virtual rally & community vigil to begin healing together and organizing to abolish ALL systems that steal children and separate families.

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Catch Up on The upEND Podcast

We explore what real safety looks like for families when a parent uses substances. Stigma, shame, and anti-Blackness shape the way families are treated by the family policing system, but community centered care can save lives and families.

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New Documentary In Production

Here For The Kids follows director Josh Sabey and his family’s harrowing interactions with Child Protective Services, and explores the history and current state of Child Welfare and Foster Care in the United States. This film ignites a conversation that includes everyone – and urges the audience to imagine something better together.

The film is currently in production and features voices from upEND Movement and JMAC for Families.

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What We’re Reading

A boost for embattled families

Student-run Harvard Legal Aid Bureau partners with local, parent-led group to ensure rights

94A6325: Coming of Age in the Era of Mass Incarceration

Toward Liberation’s May/June book club pick shows how the violence of mass incarceration is not accidental. It is rooted in the same logics that have shaped this country from the beginning—slavery, racial control, and the ongoing criminalization of Black and brown communities.

The Algorithmic School-to-Prison Pipeline

With little transparency or oversight, technology is being used to flag youth as risks to public safety and deciding who is surveilled, arrested, and confined.

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Dear friends,

I’m sharing today that I’ll be stepping down from my role as Program Director at upEND. This transition comes with a deep sense of gratitude for the time I’ve spent here.

My work at upEND has meant a great deal to me. I’m proud of what the team and I have built together to deepen public and political understanding of family policing abolition and to shift the narrative toward dignity, accountability, and community. During my time here, I’ve had the opportunity to help lead and shape work I believe in deeply—co-creating the upEND Podcast, supporting the Youth Voices Empowered (YVE) collective at Montrose Grace Place, producing the documentary A Vision of Grace, developing national convenings, and contributing to creative and strategic projects like Dream, Create, Liberate. Each of these efforts has been grounded in a shared commitment to truth-telling and collective well-being.

I’m also very grateful for the relationships I’ve built along the way with fellow organizers, partners, and community members who continue to show me what it means to do this work with integrity and intention. I’m especially thankful to Joyce McMillan and Angela Burton, who first welcomed me into this movement with open arms and have continued to encourage me over the years as I’ve developed my voice and vision as an abolitionist thinker and dreamer.

While I’m transitioning out of my staff role, I’m not stepping away from upEND or this movement. I will continue as part of the advisory team, alongside Maya, connease, and Alan, and remain deeply committed to advancing social justice initiatives in all the ways my work calls me to.

I’m also leaving with a strong sense of trust in what’s ahead. upEND’s staff is in good hands with Sydnie Mares guiding the many upcoming projects the organization is bringing forward.

Thank you to everyone who has been a part of this journey with me. I’m looking forward to what comes next—for all of us.

— Josie Pickens

“Parents who use drugs, we’re at the bottom of the totem pole.”

We explore what real safety looks like for families when a parent uses substances. Stigma, shame, and anti-Blackness shape the way families are treated by the family policing system, but community centered care can save lives and families.

Together, we imagine a world where families impacted by substance use are met with compassion, resources, and community support rather than punishment and surveillance.

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Read the Transcript →

About Our Guest:

Dinah Ortiz has been working on behalf of people who use drugs and pregnant and parenting people for over two decades. She has spent much of that time at a Well renowned holistic public defense organization as a parent advocate, supervisor, trainer for incoming Attorneys pre bar, Social workers and as an internal thought leader on harm reduction. She serves as a board member for the North Carolina Survivors Union (NCSU) and is a current member of the leadership team for the National Survivors’ Union (NSU). She has sat on advisory boards for work supporting federal rural overdose response grantees, and currently for the Albert Einstein College of Medicine IMPOWR-me project as a board member. Coming out of direct parent representation for over a decade Dinah slowly came to understand there was something missing in the representation of marginalized parents who use drugs (our voice.) She has appeared on hundreds of panels globally sharing the challenges created by the child regulation system and its disproportionate targeting of marginalized communities and communities of color. She helped adapt and develop a storytelling model for people who use drugs—helping people work through their own experiences so there is space for reflection where stigma has been internalized, as well as equipping people to share their stories to disrupt larger narratives.

Reclaiming Safety is upEND’s exploration of frequently asked questions about family policing abolition. This discussion is an accompaniment to the essay Reclaiming Safety for Children Whose Parents Use Substances by Kassandra Frederique, Dinah Ortiz, and Mark Z.

Let’s talk about substance use.

The authors of our recent Reclaiming Safety essay have asked us to support families with nonjudgemental care and to disrupt stigma and shame around substance use. For some, this is an uncomfortable ask.

The family policing system approaches families as broken, in need of intervention, and requiring separation, but we believe there’s a better way to prevent harm and create safety. We invite you to read these works for yourself, discuss them with a friend, and start building transformative and reparative justice practices in your community.

Essays Out Now:

• Confronting the “What about…” Questions

• Reclaiming Safety for Children of Parents with Disabilities

• Reclaiming Safety for Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse

• NEW: Reclaiming Safety for Children Whose Parents Use Substances

What’s Next:

This spring, we’ll be publishing two more essays in the series that discuss abolitionist responses to intimate partner violence in the home and how we can create safety in community when harm does occur to children.

Catch Up On Recent Podcast Episodes

In Season 3 of The upEND Podcast, we’re diving deeper into the Reclaiming Safety papers with some of the authors and organizers doing the work. Three episodes are out now, and we have four more that will be releasing monthly!

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Upcoming Events

Systems, Surveillance, and Health: Examining Family Policing Through MCH and Public Health

April 9, 2026, 6:00 PM, Los Angeles CA

The Black Maternal Health Center of Excellence and Movement for Family Power will confront family policing as a driver of the maternal and infant health crisis, and to ground in abolition as a public health imperative.

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Taking Action Together (TAT)

April 22-23, Houston, TX

Hosted by the Collective for Community Action, this two-day summit for HIV service providers, advocates, and People Living with HIV invites you to create justice-oriented solutions and actions for your organizations

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KNOW BEFORE THEY KNOCK: The State of Family Miranda Rights Across the U.S.

Apr 24, 2026 10:30 AM CT, Zoom

Hosted by Repeal CAPTA, this national webinar brings together advocates from multiple states who are working to secure “Family Miranda” protections, clear notice of rights provided both verbally and in writing before questioning, searches, or coerced agreements during child abuse investigations.

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Introduction

by Angela Burton

In this essay of upEND’s Reclaiming Safety series, Kassandra Frederique, Dinah Ortiz, and Mark challenge the family policing system’s assumptions that parental drug use automatically equals harm to a child—an assumption that collapses complexity into crisis and justifies surveillance and separation. Centering the lived realities of Dinah, a single mother parenting under the constant threat of child removal, and Mark, who navigated his father’s substance use amid financial instability and incarceration but was sustained by family and community care, the authors expose the gap between dominant narratives and families’ realities.

Through these stories, the authors call for new norms that center children’s and families’ actual conditions rather than fictional ideals of “good parenting” or “unexamined beliefs that all parental drug use causes harm.” They note that the most persistent threats to families with a substance-using parent stem from housing insecurity, economic precarity, strained relationships, and the absence of reliable material and social support. Yet “when drugs are in the mix, everything else about a family—their strengths, needs, and circumstances—disappears from view.”

The authors remind us that “real life is complex and that effective responses must be equally nuanced,” proposing concrete steps toward networks of care that hold families together, meet material needs, and prevent harm without surveillance or separation. Ultimately, they offer a simple but transformative precept: when intervening in the lives of children whose parents use drugs, state actors must “treat a family as a family.”

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Reclaiming Safety for Children Whose Parents Use Substances

by Kassandra Frederique, Dinah Ortiz, and Mark Z.

In the United States, most believe that people who use substances, including those in chaotic use,1 should get help and not punishment.2 Fearless organizing and advocacy have shifted perceptions of many drugs, including cannabis, psychedelics, and some opioids and stimulants (though many in these classes of drugs, including the people who use them, remain highly stigmatized). Yet public support for treating substance use as a health issue does not necessarily translate into support for non-punitive responses. Many people endorse treatment only when it is mandatory, abstinence-based, or tied to surveillance and sanctions for relapse. In this sense, carceral logics remain deeply embedded even within so-called “health” approaches. Treatment is too often structured as coercion rather than care, and relapse is framed as moral failure rather than a predictable part of recovery. As such, when efforts are made to decriminalize substances or to discuss the abolition of punishment systems in the context of parental drug use, these efforts are met with skepticism. This skepticism blocks radical imagining, permits draconian drug war policies to continue decimating families, and most importantly, dehumanizes everyone involved.

Punishment Centered Approaches Create Stigma and Policing for Parents Who Use Drugs

Our culture has rigid norms around what it means to be a “good parent”—particularly when it involves mothers, and even more so for Black, Indigenous, and Latine families. These norms are rooted in notions of worthiness and deservedness and are influenced by racism and classism. Over centuries, our local, state, and federal governments — and the institutions and agencies [that partner with them] — have determined who has the right to form families through policies such as forced sterilization, family separation, and child removal. Parental drug use, particularly for women of color, falls outside of the norms of “good parenting.” Admitting to recreational or occasional drug use carries the risk of ostracization and punishment. With this admission can come deep shame, even when the drug use has not caused any harm.

Put simply, when drugs are in the mix, everything else about a family—their strengths, needs, and circumstances—disappears from view.

These enforced norms have created a landscape of risk, stigma, and fear of state involvement and family separation, making it challenging to even have conversations about safety and wellbeing. Imagine how hard it is to maintain an affirmative view of yourself as a mother — even if you know yourself to be a good mother — when every agency, policy, and cultural message is telling you otherwise. This powerful messaging is reproductive violence3 and a particularly potent form of oppression.

It is important to note that the messaging not only targets parents but also family and community members, incentivizing them to participate in the stigmatization and isolation of parents who use drugs. Families are, understandably, concerned, but in the name of protection of the affected children and accountability for the parent, people sometimes engage in actions or responses that multiply harm for everyone involved.

By every measure, the “family policing system” (commonly referred to as the “child welfare system”) invests more in funneling children into prisons than into schools. Policies related to parental substance use are largely driven by myth instead of fact, and extensive racism (specifically anti-Blackness) undergirds these policies. Despite evidence of children and families experiencing immediate and long-term harm and poorer outcomes after family separation and state intervention, we continue to legitimize and fund the family policing system. Through punishing parents who use substances (as well as their families), the family policing system has become a collaborative arm of the war on drugs. In short, the family policing system is a series of policy choices that need undoing.

Family policing policies start with the assumption that the child of a parent who uses drugs requires forcible intervention, rather than the notion that children and families need support and nonjudgmental care. This ethos does not reflect the truth of many real people who assert that family policing intervention invites more damage than care. This essay attempts to reconstruct the narratives of families with a substance-using parent and center these lived experiences of family and state intervention. It attempts to construct new norms and values that center the wellbeing of children and whole families in their realities instead of our fictional beliefs of “good parenting” and unexamined beliefs that all parental drug use causes harm. This process requires evaluating these policies and asking if they are truly moving us towards the goals of wholeness, wellbeing, and safety — and, if not, aggressively changing the practices that are setting us farther from this vision.

The stories in this essay highlight the harms that the family policing system failed to address and dispel the myth of the system as savior. These stories are not fantasies; these are the realities of family resilience. Between the two families featured, the most consistent truth is that everyone had a deep love and desire to care for children as best as possible. How that happened was often impacted and constrained by systemic factors of state involvement, stigma and judgment, poverty, and the lack of support for people who use drugs. Often, stories about substance use, parenting, and the family policing system are positioned as acute moments of harm, attributed primarily to drug use. We aim to disrupt that, and instead offer a layered view of their experiences before, during, and long after intervention from the family policing system.

Throughout this essay, we aim to center families’ own stories of harm, survival, and healing. We hear from two people who share their stories of substance use and parenting:

• Dinah, who raised three children as a single parent, describes the compounding challenges of poverty and financial instability against a backdrop of familial shame and the looming threat of child removal.

• Mark, who navigated his father’s substance use, financial instability, and incarceration as a child outside of family policing involvement.

In sharing these stories, several realities associated with family policing system involvement emerged:

• Addressing substance use may not be a family’s primary need. State actors misunderstood the experiences of harm and need in each family situation. Families were seen by the family policing system in acute moments of chaos catalyzed by a parent’s substance use that translated into beliefs that the harm was extreme. In reality, families were managing the everyday challenges of substance use, lack of resources and support, and challenging relationships.

• The family policing system is poorly equipped to provide the support families actually need and creates additional harm. State involvement was assumed to bring stability, when instead it created unnecessary chaos and instability with long-term negative impacts.

• Shame and stigma prevent people from getting the support they need. Shame was an overarching experience, one compounded by state intervention.

True support for children and parents begins with a fundamental shift in understanding drug use and parenting.

Policies often require or encourage service providers to use the presence of illicit substances as a proxy for the presence of actual abuse or neglect and acute experiences of harm against children. As a Movement for Family Power report describes, “much of the literature claiming associations between drug use and child maltreatment suffers from circular logic: the literature determines child maltreatment has occurred if a CPS caseworker says it has occurred, and a CPS caseworker determines child maltreatment has occurred if they find evidence of substance use.”⁴ This narrative around parental drug use assumes harm to a child, that the harm experienced is acute, that it is the result of a parent’s substance use or chaotic patterns of use, and that the acute harm comes from a child’s interactions with a parent who is using illicit substances.

This false narrative, where parents can never control their use and therefore cannot control their actions around children, invites family policing staff to intervene in what they presume to be a dangerous, tumultuous situation. In describing her first experience with family policing, Dinah described agents immediately replicating experiences with law enforcement, saying how the “conversation went from zero to 100 really, really fast… they’re introducing themselves one minute, and the next minute they’re threatening to remove my children.”

Dinah described this experience as one where CPS workers came with their own biases about her situation and immediately enforced a power differential over her. In her view, the family policing system was “empowering one side of human beings to then have power over the other side, that they perceive [to be] wrong or bad or evil.” In this dynamic, CPS workers see families as places of harm and intervene accordingly. The first shift must be to approach families, not with answers and interventions, but with curiosity and a desire to understand the family’s needs.

Reducing the Reach of the System

When a 17-month-old boy was taken from his father following a positive drug test, social workers and organizers filed an amicus brief and the California Supreme Court ruled that substance use alone is insufficient to warrant family separation.

Before this groundbreaking decision in 2023, California operated under a “tender years doctrine” that suggested when a child is under the age of 6, any evidence of substance use is evidence of an inability to care for a child.⁵

Addressing substance use may not be a family’s primary need.

For many families, substance use is not the primary source of instability. Rather, the most pressing and persistent harms stem from poverty—housing insecurity, economic precarity, strained relationships, and the absence of reliable material and social support. For both families featured in this essay, those looking from the outside pointed to substance use as the main source of harm and an issue to “fix.” But they failed to address the day-to-day well-being of the children in the family, which was compromised by issues other than substance use. Even in situations where illicit substances were present, the problems described were never completely encapsulated by substance use. In short, the drugs were not the primary drivers of harm.

For Dinah’s family, chaos came from a lack of financial stability, not her use of substances. As Dinah described, “Chaotic is when you are struggling, trying to find housing, trying to find employment, trying to find, you know, some type of way to censor yourself while raising children.” As a single parent to three small children, Dinah lacked structural or familial support to maintain employment, creating a cycle of instability. “It was like this catch-22,” she said, “I could work. But then I didn’t have no way to watch my kids, and if I stayed home, then I had no money for my kids to keep a roof over their heads.”

Despite clear resource needs, both the family policing system and her extended family were insistent that substance use was the main issue and responded in ways that centered on shame and punishment instead of the economic support she needed. In those moments of need, Dinah articulated several interventions that could have been meaningful, including community-based resources for familial support, a living-wage job that offered options for childcare, and resources for her family to better understand how shame and punishment are ineffective, harmful approaches to substance use. Providing these resources shouldn’t require state intervention, but too often for parents who use substances, receiving support is predicated on policing and surveillance.

Unlike Dinah’s experience, Mark’s relationship with his family was not characterized by forced intervention from the family policing system. Rather, a network of relatives found different ways to support his father and their relationship, including through periods of his father’s instability and substance use. They provided stability for Mark and opportunities for his father to engage with them when it was possible.

Mark’s father engaged in substance use throughout the majority of his life, contributing to economic and housing instability, incarceration, and, later in life, unstable and unpredictable behavior. Eventually, Mark’s mother separated from his father and took Mark to live with a family member, creating a necessary separation to avoid being affected by his father’s instability. But this did not erase the familial bonds, and his mother and other relatives provided opportunities to maintain the relationship.

As Mark described, “In addition to my mother, my paternal grandparents and father’s siblings offered various levels of support. They provided meeting places, picked me up for family outings, and at times, supported my father financially.” Times of stability for Mark were not encapsulated by the times where his father was sober, but instead by periods where his father was resourced with a job and housing, which corresponded with periods of sobriety or managed substance use.

The family policing system is poorly equipped to provide the support families actually need and creates additional harm.

Despite the instability of his father’s life, familial and community support offered a safety net for Mark to have the necessary space from his father but enough connection to where the relationship could be preserved. Whereas Dinah felt isolation and judgment from her family and punishment from the family policing system, Mark found support that centered on his well-being, including maintaining the relationship with his father.

The family policing system is not equipped to address the underlying needs of families or provide the kind of support that Mark experienced. As Movement for Family Power insightfully summarizes, “Studies show that increases in income and the minimum wage, access to childcare, expanding Medicaid, and providing housing all correlate with decreases in what the foster system defines as ‘child maltreatment.’”⁶ However, the structure of child welfare funding continues to prioritize out-of-home placement over meeting families’ basic needs. The majority of federal and state dollars are tied to foster care and system administration, while states have limited mechanisms to provide families with direct material support such as cash assistance, housing, or childcare. This imbalance persists despite clear evidence that concrete economic supports—not surveillance or separation—are what most effectively reduce harm. Families in need are left with few resources to address their concerns, while facing a system intent on punitive responses.

For Dinah and many other parents, the threat or realization of family separation is a primary source of trauma. Mark similarly named his father’s inconsistent presence overall as a source of pain. While Mark mentions that there were negative impacts of his father’s substance use, he also describes that he “felt a lot of stress when we were separated. I didn’t know where he was. I didn’t know if he was okay.” Mark’s mother and extended family supported their relationship through logistical and emotional care, including during moments of his father’s instability or incarceration. Even with these efforts, the relationship remained challenging, but the pain described was not one of acute harm but the disappointment of an unstable parental presence.

In both of these families, parents and children shared the same goals and desires: to maintain a healthier relationship. The family policing system, on the other hand, approaches families as broken, in need of intervention, and in many cases, requiring separation. Dinah and Mark expressed desire for the state to identify and support the aligned goals of parents and children. Essentially, they want the state to treat a family as a family.

Shame and stigma prevent people from getting the support they need.

Shame, whether external or internalized, shaped Dinah and Mark’s experiences. Dinah expressed shame as a defining experience of her interactions with family members: “It was family members putting me down…talking about me in front of [my kids].” In addition to wanting more familial support, Dinah also noted the importance of those family members receiving education around substance use and how they could better support her and her children.

Systemic-level stigma also had a significant impact on the ability to seek care and treatment. As Mark observed, his father’s substance use was treated as a failure, not as a medical issue requiring treatment and support. Mark advocated for narrative change on substance use, especially parental substance use and supporting loved ones who use drugs. In addition to contributing to Mark’s father’s absence, criminalization compounded the shame for both Mark and his father when visiting during periods of incarceration. Had there been a way for his father to find support for both his substance use and his parenting, he may have been able to stay more present for Mark.

Mark and Dinah also discussed the impact of internalizing shame, noting how this altered their perceptions of their experiences and their ability to seek help. Mark described that, even as a young person, shame isolated him, even from friends who were going through similar situations: “A huge proportion of people I dealt with and knew had similar situations with [their] parents. So, looking back, I definitely had people I could have talked to, but I felt like I couldn’t talk about things, and I kept a lot to myself.”

Dinah described a similar isolation, noting that when she looked back at a family shelter they had stayed in, all but ten families had an open family policing case — but no one was sharing their experiences. Mark also identified how shame contributed to his father’s absence: “I definitely understand, as a father, not wanting your children to see you incarcerated or talking to your father behind glass…There can be some shame and a want to preserve the memory [that] your child has of you in the good times.”

Shame around substance use and system involvement leads to emotional and psychological isolation for both children and parents, which cuts off the ability to find support and understanding, compounding the trauma already being experienced. To help address the feelings of shame and isolation, Dinah recommended a parent-advocate model, where individuals who have previously received services are trained to provide support to parents navigating similar experiences. She noted that parent-advocates were most successful when they came from community-care models instead of through state systems. Mark also desired community support, where he could have talked about his experiences with peers in a supportive, safe environment to escape his emotional isolation.

JUSTICE FOR SYSTEM-INVOLVED FAMILIES:

MOVING FROM SURVEILLANCE TO SUPPORT

1. Support the Needs of Parents and Advocate for the Whole Family

• Engage in transformative and reparative justice practices. Prioritize healing, accountability, and repair for families who have experienced harm related to substance use rather than punishment or separation.

• Ensure access to harm reduction and voluntary treatment without penalty. Parents who use substances should be able to obtain support and treatment without mandates, reporting, or the threat of family separation.

• Create safe, confidential spaces for honest conversation. Pregnant and parenting people who use substances must be able to speak openly and seek help without fear of repercussions.

• Design supports that stabilize daily family life. Assistance should strengthen—not disrupt—existing routines, relationships, housing, and caregiving arrangements.

• Amplify children’s voices and experiences. Provide children with meaningful opportunities and support to share their perspectives and inform decisions that affect them.

• Include peer oversight and advising. Parents with lived experience of substance use should guide program design, support staff, and shape service delivery.

• Offer scaled and flexible levels of support. Provide a range of responses matched to families’ varying needs rather than one-size-fits-all interventions.

2. Address the Material, Everyday Circumstances of Families to Create Meaningful, Sustained Support and Change

• Provide families with direct material resources. Ensure access to cash assistance, housing, food, childcare, transportation, and other concrete supports that address the root causes of instability.

• Expand and strengthen the social safety net. Guarantee universal healthcare and other public benefits, and remove these programs from surveillance, eligibility policing, and punitive conditions.

• Offer flexible, family-directed funding. Allow families to determine how resources are used to meet their own needs, rather than restricting assistance through narrow program requirements.

3. Create Community and Kin-Based Care Networks

• Expand community-based supports and alternative care options. Invest in peer support, respite care, and safe community spaces where parents and children can access help and connection.

• Provide education and resources to family and community members. Equip relatives, friends, and neighbors with tools to support parents and caregivers who use substances.

• Develop collaborative safety and harm reduction plans. Support parents and children in identifying trusted people, safe places, and clear logistics for navigating challenges, with both individual and shared planning.

• Strengthen non-punitive, community-based crisis response. Expand responses that prioritize de-escalation, stabilization, and support rather than surveillance or enforcement.

Authors

Kassandra Frederique is the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a national nonprofit that works to end the war on drugs—which has disproportionately harmed Black, Latinx, Indigenous, immigrant, and LGBTQ communities—and build alternatives grounded in science, compassion, health, and human rights. During her time at DPA, Frederique has built and led innovative campaigns around policing, the overdose crisis, and marijuana legalization—each with a consistent racial justice focus. Her advocacy, and all of the Drug Policy Alliance’s work, lies at the intersection of health, equity, autonomy, and justice.

Throughout her work, Frederique has been a powerful advocate for working closely with people who have been directly impacted by the war on drugs, and she has built strong alliances with partners in New York and beyond. She has been instrumental in grounding the national drug policy conversation around reparative justice and restitution for communities harmed by the war on drugs. Additionally, Frederique is actively working with the In Our Names Network and other efforts across the country to resist drug war-fueled state violence.

A New Yorker, Frederique holds a M.S. in Social Work from Columbia University and a B.S. in Industrial Labor Relations at Cornell University.

Dinah Ortiz is a parent advocate and harm reductionist with more than two decades of experience supporting people who use drugs, including pregnant and parenting people. She has worked with a leading holistic public defense organization, serves on the boards of the North Carolina Survivors Union and the National Survivors’ Union, and advises national projects focused on overdose response and family care. Dinah is dedicated to transforming how systems support parents who use drugs through advocacy, education, and community care.

Mark Z. navigated his father’s substance use, financial instability, and incarceration as a child. Now he advocates for narrative change and support for loved ones who use drugs.

Citation

Frederique, K., Ortix, D., Z., M. (2026). Reclaiming Safety for Children Whose Parents Use Substances. upEND Movement. upendmovement.org/safety

Endnotes

1. Chaotic use is a term sometimes used in the fields of health, harm reduction, and drug policy, though it may not resonate with everyone. One way to define chaotic use is that negative impacts of drug use on a person’s life outweigh the benefits of use.

2. Green, H. H. (2024, December 6). Most in US view substance use as health issue, but many states treat it as a crime. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/06/substance-use-drug-possession-felony-health-issue-poll

3. Reproductive violence includes any form of abuse, coercion, discrimination, exploitation or violence that compromises a person’s reproductive autonomy. This form of gender-based violence can be committed by individuals such as partners, relatives and health care providers, or by entire communities, as social norms influence societies’ ideas of who should or should not be a parent. Meanwhile governments often exert this form of violence through laws and institutions, by preventing access to contraceptives or even conducting forced sterilization campaigns, for instance.

4. Sangoi, S. (2020). “Whatever they do, I’m her comfort, I’m her protector.” How the foster system has become ground zero for the U.S. drug war (p. 22). Movement for Family Power. https://www.movementforfamilypower.org/library/how-the-foster-system-became-ground-zero-for-drug-war

5. upEND Movement. (2024, January 23). “California Supreme Court Strikes ‘Tender Years Doctrine’” https://upendmovement.org/2024/01/23/california-supreme-court-strikes-tender-years-doctrine/

6. Sangoi, S. (2020). “Whatever they do, I’m her comfort, I’m her protector.” How the foster system has become ground zero for the U.S. drug war (p. 22). Movement for Family Power. https://www.movementforfamilypower.org/library/how-the-foster-system-became-ground-zero-for-drug-war

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Reclaiming Safety is an anthology from upEND Movement answering critical questions about family policing abolition. Learn more at upendmovement.org/safety

If we abolish the family policing system, how do we respond to child sexual abuse? Abolition helps us create a world where all children are safe and supported by their communities. We’re addressing the problem, not just sweeping it under the rug.

We speak with award-winning journalist and author Roxanna Asgarian about her essay “Reclaiming Safety for Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse.” Roxanna explores how the current carceral response to child sexual harm—rooted in punishment, separation, and shame—fails survivors and perpetuates cycles of trauma.

Together, we discuss what safety and accountability can look like outside of prisons, foster care, and family policing. Drawing from her reporting and lived experience, Roxanna invites us to imagine community-based pathways to healing that honor survivors, hold those who harm accountable, and build the conditions where safety is possible for everyone.

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Reclaiming Safety is upEND’s exploration of frequently asked questions about family policing abolition. This discussion about child sexual abuse is an accompaniment to the essay Reclaiming Safety for Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse by Roxanna Asgarian.

About Our Guest:

Roxanna Asgarian is a Texas-based journalist and the author of We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America, which won the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and the L.A. Times Book Prize. Her reporting has appeared in The Washington Post, Texas Monthly, and New York Magazine. A survivor of child sexual harm, Roxanna has spent years covering stories at the intersections of child welfare, justice, and community care—centering the voices of those most impacted by family separation and systemic neglect.

I Was Born In Houston, Gave Birth There, And Almost Died There

by Josie Pickens

I was born and raised in Houston, Texas. It’s the city that shaped me, the place where my family built a life, and the place where I believed I would be safest bringing a child into the world. Houston is home to the world’s largest medical center and is often held up as a symbol of medical excellence and innovation. It’s also where I nearly died giving birth.

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Upcoming Events

Before the Crisis: The Future for Black Birth in Houston is in Our Past

Join Avow Texas to confront a brutal truth: Houston is the deadliest major U.S. city for Black people to give birth. This crisis is the direct outcome of a century-long project to dismantle Black community power. Featuring local organizers, birth workers, and advocates, this event will ground us in history, analyze the present, and build toward a future where every person has the right to have children, not have children, and parent the children they have in sustainable communities. We will center the expertise and resistance of Black communities, and explore what a reproductive justice future—where Black families can thrive in safety and autonomy—looks like in Houston and beyond.

February 26 @ The Reading Room
1111 Providence St, Houston, TX 77002
Doors at 5:30pm. Panel conversation begins at 6:00pm.

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Catch up on The upEND Podcast

The family policing system considers parents with mental health issues and other disabilities to be an inherent threat to their children. We reject that premise. Listen to our latest episode with Dr. Robyn Powell.

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Further Reading

Reclaiming Safety is upEND’s exploration of frequently asked questions about family policing abolition. This discussion about disability justice is an accompaniment to the essay Reclaiming Safety for Children of Parents with Disabilities by Charisa Smith.

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The family policing system considers parents with mental health issues and other disabilities to be an inherent threat to their children. We reject that premise.

Because of ableism, the legacy of eugenics, and the violence of poverty, disabled parents face a high risk of separation by the family policing system.

In this episode, Dr. Robyn Powell discusses how the child welfare system weaponizes the idea of “predictive neglect” to discriminate against parents with disabilities and further enshrine stigma around mental health.

How can we build a future where disabled families are supported through care, community, and trust—not surveillance and punishment?

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About Our Guest:

Dr. Robyn Powell is an Assistant Professor of Law at Stetson University College of Law and a Senior Research Associate at the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy at Brandeis University. Her work focuses on disability law, reproductive justice, family regulation, and constitutional law, with a special emphasis on the rights of disabled parents and the abolition of the family policing system.

She is the principal author of the National Council on Disability’s landmark report Rocking the Cradle, Ensuring the Rights of Parents with Disabilities and Their Children, and her scholarship—featured in leading law reviews and interdisciplinary journals—examines how law and policy continue to reinforce ableism and the legacy of eugenics.

Welcome to Season 3 of The upEND Podcast where we’ll be answering all of your burning questions about family policing abolition.

If we get rid of the child welfare system, what will happen when children are harmed? Are abolitionists saying that child abuse is okay?

Reclaiming Safety is upEND’s new anthology series answering important, frequently asked questions and proposing effective, humane responses to crises that occur in our communities. To introduce the series, we talk to the editor of Reclaiming Safety, Angela Burton.

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About Our Guest:

Angela Burton is a renowned community lawyer, scholar, and public servant with over thirty years of experience advocating for the rights of parents and children in the family policing system, commonly known as the child welfare system. Her commitment to social justice is driven by a deep understanding of the systemic inequities faced by vulnerable families. Angela has consistently fought to protect the human, constitutional, and civil rights of marginalized individuals, ensuring their voices are heard, their experiences valued, and their expertise centered in catalyzing and implementing change.

Communities across the country are experiencing deep terror at the hands of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Created under the 2002 Homeland Security Act, ICE’s stated mission is to preserve national security by enforcing immigration law. In practice, this enforcement has meant surveillance, detention, deportation, and the violent separation of families and communities.

Since its inception in 2003, federal investments in ICE and the broader immigration enforcement apparatus have surpassed $400 billion. Administrations on both sides of the political aisle have fueled this expansion. In 2013, former President Obama spent $18 billion on immigration enforcement, in March 2024, former President Biden signed a spending bill which provided a spike in funding to immigration enforcement, and most recently, the current administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act provided a dramatic new infusion of funds to ICE. ICE is now the most funded law enforcement agency within the United States, with $85 billion in funding.

These continued investments in ICE inevitably lead to continued surveillance, separation, and trauma for communities. Migrants and migrant justice organizers have long called for the abolition of ICE, recognizing how the agency’s existence all but ensures that communities will experience state violence. What many are witnessing now–in plain view–is the fallout of repeatedly refusing to meet that demand.

Recently, all eyes have been on Minneapolis, Minnesota where, since December, thousands of federal immigration agents have been deployed in what the federal government is calling the largest immigration operation ever. Fear and tension has soared in Minnesota as federal agents terrorize, arrest, and detain both migrants and U.S. citizens. Tensions continued to rise when Renee Good was murdered by a federal agent on video. On January 24th, federal agents murdered another community member, Alex Pretti, also recorded on video. These murders and violent arrests have occurred as images of children, parents, and other community members being separated and detained continue to circulate.

As public scrutiny has intensified, the federal government has moved to suppress documentation of this violence, with the arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort. And, while all eyes have been on Minneapolis, the terror unleashed by ICE is being felt across the country. Reports of increased ICE activities have surfaced in Memphis; in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve Keith Porter Jr. was murdered by an off duty ICE agent; and the death of a Cuban migrant in an ICE facility in Texas has now been ruled a homicide.

ICE must be abolished, and its abolition is possible. The agency is younger than many of us; most of us have lived during a time when ICE has not existed. The demand for abolition rests on the understanding that institutions of state terror are also death-making institutions.

They facilitate social death by severing families and communities, increase precarity and fear, and, at their most extreme, kill our neighbors, our loved ones, and our friends. Calls for abolition are often quelled by propositions for reform. Already, elected officials have said that rather than abolishing ICE we can ensure that agents have better training, wear body cameras, and be prohibited from wearing masks. These arguments are familiar to anyone who has followed the long history of police reform in this country. Procedural reforms have never stopped state violence against poor Black communities, and they will not stop violence against communities now. Reform stabilizes harmful systems, it does not transform them.

We must continue to demand the abolition of all state agencies and the functionalities that wreak havoc on poor communities of color. The criminalization of immigration must end. We fight for abolition and the end of family separation because we know that state violence is not inevitable. A world governed by borders and policing is not natural; these are man made systems designed to uphold colonialism and racial capitalism. Because they were created, they can be dismantled. It has been deeply encouraging to see people in Minneapolis, and across the country, refuse to back down from their demands or abandon their community members. These acts of resistance remind us that another world is possible and many of us long for something better.

At upEND, we have been in conversation with organizers about the intersections between ending the family policing system and dismantling borders. We recently spoke with Silky Shah, Executive Director of Detention Watch Network, about what it will take to end immigrant detention. Listen to that conversation to learn more. For those looking to deepen their understanding of borders and immigrant justice, Haymarket Books is offering free ebooks of some of our favorite books like Border and Rule and Unbuild Walls. And for those who want to provide direct support to communities in Minnesota, consider checking out this list of local organizations you can support.

Read Our New Zine

Check out our new, handmade booklet, “Abolish the Family Policing System.” A printable version is available on our website for sharing with friends and neighbors.

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Breaking Down Family Policing Copaganda with SkipIntro

It's probably not news to you that Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is copaganda, but chances are that you haven't even noticed one of its most egregious and damaging portrayals of our legal system. Jackson Mayer presents a video essay about family policing portrayals in television, featuring upEND’s Communications Manager Sydnie Mares.

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What We’re Reading

​Foster Care and Child Maltreatment Mortality Rates in the US​

by Frank Edwards, Kelley Fong, and Robert Apel

In this cross-sectional study, child maltreatment mortality rates did not appear to decrease with higher foster care entry rates or increase with decreasing foster care entry rates. This evidence suggests that there is not a negative association between child maltreatment mortality rates and foster care entry rates.

“Nobody Blames the Landlord. They Just Take Away the Kids.”

by Bryce Covert

All too often, when parents can’t afford safe housing, the only solution the family policing system offer is taking away their children.

Abolish ICE? How about DHS altogether.

by David M. Perry

“None of this is ancient history, inevitable or unchangeable.”

upEND Movement, MJCF Coalition, and Mothers Outreach Network signed onto an amicus brief to appeal the decisions in the State v. Nieves and State v. Cifelli, and the appeal was upheld by the New Jersey Supreme Court. Their decision means that symptoms commonly associated with “shaken baby syndrome” cannot be used as evidence of abuse on a theory of shaking alone without some other impact to a child’s head.

In the State v. Nieves and State v. Cifelli, the young children exhibited symptoms of subdural hematoma, retinal hemorrhages, and encephalopathy. In both cases, the same doctor determined that the children were victims of child abuse, specifically Shaken Baby Syndrome/Abusive Head Trauma (SBS/AHT).

Because the children were in the care of their fathers when they began to exhibit the symptoms, both men were charged with criminal offenses.

These cases highlight the intersections of family policing, the criminal legal system, and the inherent violence of mandated reporting. Because doctors are encouraged and required to report families for suspected abuse, it creates distrust between communities and medical professionals and may dissuade parents from seeking critical emergency care for their children.

And of course, this surveillance is racialized, disproportionally targeting Black and Indigenous families. Research shows that injuries in Black children are nine times more likely than those in white children to be reported as abuse despite evidence that child abuse and neglect occur at equal rates across races.

We are encouraged by the court’s decision to omit the doctor’s assumptions of abuse based on symptoms alone, but so much work is still needed to untangle our healthcare from the carceral web that makes situations like this possible. Additionally, true reparations are needed for communities to heal from state violence that separates, surveils, and punishes them.

We look to organizers like Joyce McMillan, founder of JMAC for Families, who coined the term “mandated supporting”, a framework centering families through “equitable, harm reductionist, and anti-racist practices, while divesting from systems of surveillance and punishment.” Similarly, at upEND Movement, we are exploring non-carceral community responses when kids experience harm and families need support.

It will take varied responses across local, state, and national levels to reduce the reach of the family policing system and build a safer future for families. We’re thankful for all of the organizers in this movement for chipping away at the system, one case, one march, one project at a time.

The post Amicus Brief Successful in New Jersey Supreme Court appeared first on upEND Movement.

The Mother Up pilot is a guaranteed income pilot for mothers involved in the family policing system in Washington DC led by Mother’s Outreach Network.

By ensuring families have direct, unconditional financial support, this initiative helps prevent unnecessary state intervention, reducing the likelihood of child welfare investigations and removals. We are excited about the growing demand for guaranteed income programs as a way to reduce the reach of the family policing system by addressing poverty—one of the primary reasons families are surveilled and separated.

The Mother Up research group published the results of their Phase 2 Pre-pilot.

• The study of 19 participants featured a Direct Cash group, which received unconditional payments of $500 per month for twelve months as well as up to $240 for participation in surveys and interviews, and a Compensated Research group, which received up to $240 for participation in surveys and interviews but no cash.

• Eligible participants were Black mothers living in D.C. who had experienced an investigation of the District of Columbia’s Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA) for an allegation of child neglect within twelve months of enrollment.

• Of the 11 participants who received the guaranteed income, seven described using the money to spend more quality time with their children, six described using it to resolve issues which contributed to their initial CFSA case, and five described using it to pay off bills and debts. In addition, several discussed how the income gave them more independence from past abusive relationships, allowing them to feel more secure and safe.

“The money has really helped me a lot. Like it helps me to the point where I can still pay my bills and still have some money left over. I can put money away for my kids. And like I said, get them, you know, like, a new pair of shoes if they can’t fit their old ones. I don’t have to worry about, oh, my goodness, am I going to have money after I get their shoes? I was actually able to get myself a pair ofshoes last weekend and I have not bought myself anything in like two years since I got pregnant. So, it was like, you know, it felt great. I wanted to cry. It felt really great to do that for myself.” – Participant 6

• The interviews suggest that the guaranteed income payments brought stability to participants’ lives with no observable effect on labor force participation, and in some cases eliminated financial barriers to employment like lack of childcare.

• Although the next step is to replicate the study on a larger scale, these early interviews showed that finances played a role in CFSA involvement, and that sufficient financial support could both facilitate an earlier end to CFSA oversight and monitoring as well as avoid future involvement.

• The next phase of Mother Up will explore a three-year provision of guaranteed income for a population of up to thirty mothers with more extensive CFSA involvement. Follow Mothers Outreach Network for more updates.

To learn more about abolitionist steps to end the family policing system that affirm child, family, and community autonomy and promote healing, explore our Framework Tool for evaluating policies and programs.

The post Mothers Outreach Network Reaches Next Phase in Guaranteed Income Pilot appeared first on upEND Movement.

This week in Washington, DC, the current administration announced plans to “takeover” the city.

This includes federalizing DC’s police force and deploying 800 National Guard troops, who arrived on Tuesday. Trump’s takeover of DC expands an authoritarian state using anti-Black logic under the guise of public safety. The stated justification for this takeover rests on inflammatory claims that DC “has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs, and homeless people.” But this is not about safety. 

This language is vile, racist, and it dehumanizes residents of the District, but the move to police and punish the city’s most vulnerable is not new. All summer, public discourse – online, from residents, and government officials – has been filled with alarmist “concern” about Black teenagers “taking over” the city. Local media and officials have painted these young people as inherently violent and dangerous, circulating reports of teenagers “overrunning” DC neighborhoods. The result has been heightened surveillance of teens in targeted neighborhoods and the imposition of curfews for DC teens in certain areas. 

Graffiti seen in Union Market in Washington DC reads “Kids Need Care – Not Curfew…”

And the punitive approach doesn’t stop with youth. For years, the city has treated its homeless residents as problems to be removed, rather than people in need of care and support. The mayor’s responses have included “evicting” residents from encampments, ramping up criminalization of homelessness, and creating barricades to make it harder for unhoused people to find shelter.

In May 2025, the Democratic mayor even urged the city to overturn its sanctuary city law, which prohibits local law enforcement from assisting ICE. In short, DC’s leadership has spent years paving the way for this moment by laying the groundwork for Trump’s takeover and enabling the wholesale criminalization of the city’s residents by federal agents.

What’s happening in DC (now and before Trump’s actions) can be understood through Stuart Hall’s analysis in Policing the Crisis (1978). Hall and his co-authors show how the ruling class manufactures “moral panics” by amplifying sensationalized reports of crime to produce public fear. That fear is then used as a tool of social control to legitimize expanded policing, harsher punishment, and the surveillance of poor, racialized communities. In DC, the rhetoric about “violent gangs,” “roving mobs of youth,” and “drugged-out maniacs” follows this exact playbook. But, the crisis is not the alleged wave of crime, it’s the political project of disciplining and controlling marginalized communities under the guise of “public safety.” Already, the current “takeover” of DC has led to federal agents terrorizing DC’s majority Black neighborhoods. 

Those of us working toward the abolition of family policing are familiar with these tactics.

The very existence of the family policing system rests on moral panics: narratives that poor Black families will harm their children if they are not surveilled or separated. Rather than offering care and support, the system weaponizes false stories about communities to justify violence against them.

In times like these, it’s essential to return to our abolitionist vision and the world we must work to build – our lives depend on it. Abolition teaches us that policing and prisons are not solutions; they are tools to manage the very crises that capitalism creates. Unhoused people are not a “problem” to be removed, they are living through one of capitalism’s most devastating consequences, and it is our collective responsibility to end a society that allows homelessness to exist at all. Black teenagers are not a threat. Children and youth deserve spaces where they can be free, safe, and able to thrive. The most common crimes DC’s youth are involved in are carjackings and robberies, actions that mostly damage property but, more importantly, reveal how capitalism creates the conditions for desperation. Harsh immigration policies do not keep anyone safe. Instead, we must address how the United States devastates other countries, fueling the social and economic conditions that force people to leave their homes in the first place.

Abolition offers us an analysis that goes far beyond Trump. While the current administration poses a grave threat, we must recognize that Trump is only able to wield these forces because they already exist. The infrastructure of policing, prisons, and surveillance is always a danger to our collective safety and well-being, no matter who is in power. Communities, especially poor, Black, immigrant, and unhoused communities, have lived under the threat of policing, violence, and criminalization long before this moment.

Right now, we must refuse the trap of moral panic. Capitalism wants us to fear one another, to accept policing and cages as “solutions,” and to disappear social problems rather than confront and end them. We can choose differently. We can choose to protect our neighbors, especially those most targeted. We can fight against policies and policing that harm our communities. We can choose not to police each other. Collectively, we can support mutual aid networks and resource those doing care work. We can commit to studying to deepen our political analysis and understanding of the world around us. Together, we can take meaningful steps, every day, to resist the violence of policing and to build the safety that comes from solidarity, not surveillance.

Maya Pendleton has been a part of the upEND movement since its inception. She currently works as researcher and writer for the upEND movement, focusing on how we abolish the family policing system, the harms of the current system to children, families and communities, and the world we will build post family policing.

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“A Vision of Grace” is a short documentary following queer, Black youth in Houston who are building chosen family and mutual aid networks in the face of housing insecurity.

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The post DC’s Militarization Shows How Policing Targets Black Youth appeared first on upEND Movement.