Torn Apart: Terror

Torn Apart

In this episode, Professor Dorothy Roberts opens Torn Apart with a first-hand account from a young Black mother, Vanessa Peoples, who became the subject of a government child welfare investigation when a stranger accused Peoples of neglecting her young son who had wandered away from her briefly in a park. Professor Roberts brings the listeners through the horrors that the child welfare system inflicts on families by invading homes, targeting low-income families, and threatening to separate parents and children. With the help of guest experts, Professor Roberts argues that the family policing system is designed to terrorize low-income, majority Black families.
Check out this episode’s landing page at MsMagazine.com for a full transcript, links to articles referenced in this episode, further reading and ways to take action.
Meet Dorothy Roberts
Dorothy Roberts is a distinguished professor of Africana Studies, Law, and Sociology at
University of Pennsylvania. An elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, American Philosophical Society, and National Academy of Medicine, she is author of the best selling book on reproductive justice, Killing the Black Body. Her latest book, Torn Apart, won the 2023 American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Book Award Honorable Mention, was a finalist for an LA Times Book Prize and C. Wright Mills Award, and was shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice.
With Guests:

• Vanessa Peoples is a young Black mother from Aurora, Colorado, who was targeted in 2017 by child protective services and forced to plead guilty to endangering her child, despite no evidence that she endangered her child.
• Kathleen Creamer is the Managing Attorney of the Family Advocacy Unit at Community Legal Services, which uses a holistic family defense model to help parents involved with the child welfare system maintain custody of or reunite with their children in Philadelphia. In addition to individual representation of parents in dependency court, Ms. Creamer has focused much of her advocacy on supporting incarcerated parents and their families. From 2011-2013, she served as a Stoneleigh Foundation Fellow dedicated to Improving Reunification Outcomes for Children of Incarcerated Parents. Ms. Creamer also led the coalition that developed and lobbied for the successful passage of the 2010 Healthy Birth for Incarcerated Women Act, which curtailed the practice of shackling incarcerated women during childbirth in Pennsylvania’s jails and prisons.
• Kelley Fong is an assistant professor of sociology at UC Irvine whose work focuses on state intervention into motherhood and families. Her first book, Investigating Families: Motherhood in the Shadow of Child Protective Services, was published with Princeton University Press in 2023.
  Background Reading
  - Fostering tragedy: Experts say system designed to protect children can break up families
  - One in Ten Black Children in America Are Separated From Their Parents by the Child-Welfare System. A New Book Argues That’s No Accident
  - Benevolent Terror: Dorothy E. Roberts on Reimagining the Child Welfare System