An award-winning scholar exposes the foundational racism of the child welfare system and calls for radical change Many believe the child welfare system protects children from abuse. But as Torn Apart uncovers, this system is designed to punish Black families. Drawing on decades of research, legal scholar and sociologist Dorothy Roberts reveals that the child welfare system is better understood as a “family policing system” that collaborates with law enforcement and prisons to oppress Black communities. Child protection investigations ensnare a majority of Black children, putting their families under intense state surveillance and regulation. Black children are disproportionately likely to be torn from their families and placed in foster care, driving many to juvenile detention and imprisonment. The only way to stop the destruction caused by family policing, Torn Apart argues, is to abolish the child welfare system and liberate Black communities.

This book offers a critical overview of established and emerging manifestations of domestic violence across Europe. It describes how countries within and outside the EU are responding to the problem in policy, practice and research. Eminent academics and professionals from a range of European countries share their findings from new groundbreaking victim surveys, and weigh up the legal, social and healthcare challenges. The issues addressed include: - the cultural challenges of combating abuse forms most prevalent in migrant communities such as female genital mutilation and forced marriage; - emerging problems such as child-to-parent violence, teenage relationship violence and digital intimate partner abuse; and - barriers to help-seeking faced by marginalised victims such as LGBTQ and older people. By showcasing the most effective responses formulated in Europe and exploring innovative ways to research and understand domestic violence, this book is a crucial resource for all those with responsibility for implementing social policy and good practice.

The massive uprising following the police killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020--by some estimates the largest protests in US history--thrust the argument to defund the police to the forefront of international politics. It also made The End of Policing a bestseller and Alex Vitale, its author, a leading figure in the urgent public discussion over police and racial justice. As the writer Rachel Kushner put it in an article called "Things I Can't Live Without", this book explains that "unfortunately, no increased diversity on police forces, nor body cameras, nor better training, has made any seeming difference" in reducing police killings and abuse. "We need to restructure our society and put resources into communities themselves, an argument Alex Vitale makes very persuasively." The problem, Vitale demonstrates, is policing itself-the dramatic expansion of the police role over the last forty years. Drawing on first-hand research from across the globe, The End of Policing describes how the implementation of alternatives to policing, like drug legalization, regulation, and harm reduction instead of the policing of drugs, has led to reductions in crime, spending, and injustice. This edition includes a new introduction that takes stock of the renewed movement to challenge police impunity and shows how we move forward, evaluating protest, policy, and the political situation.

Winner of the American Society of Journalists and Authors' prestigious Arlene Book Award. In "Police Wife," award-winning investigative journalist Alex Roslin takes readers inside the tightly closed police world and one of its most explosive secrets: domestic violence in up to 40% of police homes, which departments mostly ignore or let slide.

Controlling, surveilling, and punishing poor families through the child welfare system In a typical year, one in five US children have some interaction with the child welfare system. Countless other families, particularly those who struggle to care for their children due to poverty or economic insecurity, fear child welfare system involvement. Though imagined as a system that protects children from caregivers’ maltreatment, contributors to Policing Not Protecting Families argue that the child welfare system polices and punishes poor parents who are unable to meet white, middle class parenting standards due to structural inequalities. Bringing together scholars from anthropology, sociology, law, and social work, this collection is the first to critically examine the child welfare system’s role in governing poor, disproportionately Black and Native families. It shows that the child welfare system is a key site of poverty governance, or state control and management of poor families. Chapters bring together empirical research from diverse settings across the US, highlighting the system’s interactions with other state systems and its wide impact on marginalized families. Together the chapters illustrate the failure of the child welfare system to protect children and families from the structural inequalities that shape the lives of poor and other marginalized families.

The book is based on two research projects on emergency intervention, which were carried out by the author and her colleagues. The studies provide the basis for the three themes in the book: Inter-agency Working; Perceptions of Safety; and Placement and Resource Issues. The combination of quantitative and qualitative research allows a detailed picture of practice that goes beyond an account of what happens, to explore the perceptions, understandings and experiences of the practitioners who make these decisions, as social workers, police officers magistrates’ legal advisers or magistrates, and of the lawyers who advise social workers and parents. The book provides a critical account of current practice in emergency child protection, it identifies good practice and make proposals for reform.

Domestic abuse is a national emergency: one in four Australian women has experienced violence from a man she was intimate with. But too often we ask the wrong question: why didn’t she leave? We should be asking: why did he do it? Investigative journalist Jess Hill puts perpetrators – and the systems that enable them – in the spotlight. See What You Made Me Do is a deep dive into the abuse so many women and children experience – abuse that is often reinforced by the justice system they trust to protect them. Critically, it shows that we can drastically reduce domestic violence – not in generations to come, but today. Combining forensic research with riveting storytelling, See What You Made Me Do radically rethinks how to confront the national crisis of fear and abuse in our homes. ‘A shattering book: clear-headed and meticulous, driving always at the truth’—Helen Garner ‘One Australian a week is dying as a result of domestic abuse. If that was terrorism, we’d have armed guards on every corner.’ —Jimmy Barnes ‘Confronting in its honesty this book challenges you to keep reading no matter how uncomfortable it is to face the profound rawness of people’s stories. Such a well written book and so well researched. See What You Made Me Do sheds new light on this complex issue that affects so many of us.’—Rosie Batty

“A passionate, incisive critique of the many ways in which women and girls of color are systematically erased or marginalized in discussions of police violence.” —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow Invisible No More is a timely examination of how Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color experience racial profiling, police brutality, and immigration enforcement. By placing the individual stories of Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, Dajerria Becton, Monica Jones, and Mya Hall in the broader context of the twin epidemics of police violence and mass incarceration, Andrea Ritchie documents the evolution of movements centered around women’s experiences of policing. Featuring a powerful forward by activist Angela Davis, Invisible No More is an essential exposé on police violence against WOC that demands a radical rethinking of our visions of safety—and the means we devote to achieving it.

Websdale draws on extensive field research, documentary sources, and interviews to illuminate how a criminal justice system deeply rooted in racism and slavery destroys the black family, creates a form of selective breeding, and undermines the civil rights gains of the 1960s. Unlike previous studies of community policing this book focuses on the history, experiences, and perspectives of the people whose lives are most affected by today's policing strategies. Blending the voices of project residents with a rich synthesis of historical, sociological, and criminological analysis, Websdale describes the situational, cultural, and economic circumstances of Nashville's poor; examines the policing of social upheaval by detailing events in the 1997 looting and burning of the Dollar General Store; considers African American kinship systems and the special circumstances of battered women; and discusses why the vice trades--prostitution and selling drugs--thrive in public housing projects. Websdale's hard-hitting look at community policing and its negative impact on the urban poor provides a balance to prevailing optimistic views on the effectiveness of this new method of law enforcement.

Shattered Bonds is a stirring account of a worsening American social crisis--the disproportionate representation of black children in the U.S. foster care system and its effects on black communities and the country as a whole. Tying the origins and impact of this disparity to racial injustice, Dorothy Roberts contends that child-welfare policy reflects a political choice to address startling rates of black child poverty by punishing parents instead of tackling poverty's societal roots. Using conversations with mothers battling the Chicago child-welfare system for custody of their children, along with national data, Roberts levels a powerful indictment of racial disparities in foster care and tells a moving story of the women and children who earn our respect in their fight to keep their families intact.