By: Emma Ketteringham, Managing Director of The Bronx Defenders’ Family Defense Practice

When I first met Ruth, she was a young mother of two boys. Both were born after difficult pregnancies and with developmental challenges; her two-year-old in particular struggled to gain weight. His pediatrician instructed Ruth to put him on a strict feeding regimen, which required special food, constant attention, and regular visits to the hospital. Ruth lived in an apartment without reliable access to hot water or a working stove, which made preparing the special meals almost impossible. It was a challenge just to keep fresh food in the home.

When her son continued to struggle and Ruth missed a medical appointment, the pediatrician called the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) and reported Ruth as a child abuser. That call — and the calls that commence every family policing investigation — is where the terror began.

Each state has mandatory reporting laws  that require professionals like physicians, social workers, teachers, nurses, therapists, drug counselors, and shelter workers to call ACS if they suspect a child is being mistreated. This means the family police are everywhere, dressed up as helpers.

Ruth’s children were placed with a foster caretaker who was paid thousands of dollars each month to meet their needs. While money and material support were gifted to this stranger, Ruth was not offered a habitable home or assistance in negotiating with her landlord to fix her dangerously inhospitable apartment. No one assisted Ruth in applying for the health benefits or home nursing support for which she and her son qualified.

Like Ruth, the vast majority of parents ensnared in the family policing system have not abused, abandoned, or committed an inhumane act against a child. They are charged with “neglect under the law,” not abuse. The definition of neglect as “a failure to provide a minimum degree of care” in terms of food, clothing, and housing means that neglect is synonymous with poverty.

Indeed, poverty is the single biggest predictor of a child’s placement in the foster system. Families who live below the poverty line are 22 times more likely to be involved in the family policing system than the ones with incomes slightly above it. And housing instability is a major cause of family separation; a quarter of all families in shelters in New York City have open ACS cases.

But it’s not just low-income families who are overrepresented in this system of family separation. New York City’s family policing system is one of the most racially segregated systems in America. For decades, nonwhite children have made up the majority of children in the United States’ family policing system, despite making up a relatively small portion of the nation’s population. The latest data shows that Black families are seven times more likely than white ones to be investigated, and Black kids thirteen times more likely to be removed from their homes than white ones.

Once in the foster system, Black children are more likely to never be reunited with their families and are the least likely to be adopted. And foster care is not a safe place for a child to be: Children are nearly twice as likely to die in foster care than in the general population. Children who age out of the system at 18 experience a higher risk of negative life outcomes, including lower career earnings, homelessness, incarceration, and a lack of mental health care and support.

It’s undeniable that the family policing system  punishes poverty while pouring endless resources into policing that fails to address the actual needs of the children it purports to protect. Instead of family policing, our focus should be on building a society that provides all families with the support they need to raise healthy and safe children. If a family doesn’t have childcare, they don’t need supervised visits, they need a babysitter. If a father lives in dangerous conditions, he doesn’t need a foster placement; he needs his landlord to fix his apartment. If a mother is unhoused, she needs a home; not a parenting class. And if a parent is upset because ACS takes her child away unfairly, she doesn’t require an anger management course, she needs the government to stop causing harm in the name of help.