COLUMBIA JOURNAL  

OF RACE AND LAW 

VOL. 12 JULY 2022 NO. 1 

 

 

DIVEST, INVEST, & MUTUAL AID 

Caitlyn Garcia & Cynthia Godsoe† 

“[We must develop a] freedom constitutionalism . . . seek[ing] to abolish 

historical forms of oppression beyond slavery . . . , [and] to dismantle 

systems beyond police and prisons, including foster care, regulation of 

pregnancy, and poverty.” 

– Dorothy Roberts1 

“We Keep Each Other Safe: Mutual Aid For Survival And Solidarity.” 

– Dean Spade, Mariame Kaba, & Ejeris Dixon2 

 

I. Family Policing is Harmful, Racist, and Punishes Poverty .............602 
A. Family Policing is Harmful to Children and their Families .....604 
B. Family Policing is Racist ...........................................................605 
C. Family Policing Punishes Poverty .............................................606 
D. Child Safety Requires Material Investment in  

Marginalized Families ...............................................................607 
II. Mutual Aid Provides a Model that has been Historically  

Empowering and Helpful to Marginalized Communities .................609 
A. What is Mutual Aid? ..................................................................609 
B. Historical Use of Mutual Aid by Marginalized Communities ...611 
C. Recent Resurgence of Mutual Aid Efforts .................................614 

III. Divest From Family Policing and Invest in Community-Led  

Mutual Aid ........................................................................................615 
A. Divest .........................................................................................616 
B. Avoid Reformist Reforms of Prevention & Differential  

Response ....................................................................................617 
1. Prevention ..........................................................................618 
2. Differential Response .........................................................618 
3. The Fundamental Shortcomings of Reformist Reforms ....622 

C. Invest in Community-Led Mutual Aid ......................................623 
D. The Challenges of the Mutual Aid Model ..................................626 

IV. Conclusion .........................................................................................628 

 
 Staff Attorney, Brooklyn Defender Services, Family Defense Practice 
† Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School. Thank you to the symposium organizers, 

Nancy Polikoff and Jane Spinak, for the opportunity to contribute and participate, as well 

as to our co-panelists and moderator, Kele Stewart, Bianca Shaw, Halimah Washington, 

Imani Worthy, and Tricia Stephens. We are also grateful to Vivek Sankaran and Michael 

Wald for helpful comments, Danika Gallup for excellent research assistance, and the editors 

for thoughtful edits. 
1 Dorothy E. Roberts, Abolition Constitutionalism, 133 HARV. L. REV. 1, 120 (2019). 
2 Dean Spade, Mariame Kaba, & Ejeris Dixon, We Keep Each Other Safe: Mutual 

Aid for Survival and Solidarity, BARNARD CTR. FOR RSCH. ON WOMEN (Nov. 12, 2020), 

https://bcrw.barnard.edu/event/we-keep-each-other-safe/ [https://perma.cc/R6R5-NNUW]. 



602 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 12:601 

We are honored to be part of this symposium issue envisioning the 

transformation of family support and honoring the work of Dorothy 

Roberts. The symposium is both essential and timely. It is essential 

because abolition of the family policing system is needed, and needed now; 

it is timely because the inequality exposed by the pandemic and the 

overdue reckoning with state violence, particularly against people of color, 

have mobilized communities bringing new energy and hope.3  

We look to mutual aid as a solution to the harms wrought by the 

family policing system.4 The vast majority of parents enter the system 

because of the government’s failure to support them, particularly through 

its divestment from and punishment of families in low-income communities 

of color.5 What families need is concrete material aid—housing, food, 

childcare—rather than state surveillance and punishment. As the 

abolitionist group Critical Resistance puts it: “The best way to reduce harm 

is by building safe, healthy communities where people have their basic 

needs met.”6 Moreover, listening and giving agency to these families 

constitute an essential component of true transformation of the way our 

society protects all children and supports all families.  

Mutual aid is both a practice and a theory. It consists of “people 

get[ting] together to meet each other’s basic survival needs with a shared 

understanding that the systems we live under are not going to meet our 

needs and we can do it together . . . .”7 Mutual aid couples material 

resources with empowerment and community-building of those impacted 

by the system, in order to secure real harm reduction for children and 

families and transformative change across communities.8 At the same time 

that we propose a community-based and empowering mutual aid model, we 

also advocate for divestment from punitive state interaction and for 

investment in supports for children and families, funding of communities, 

and grassroots interventions, all undergirded by a social safety net.  

This Essay proceeds in three parts. We begin by critiquing the 

family policing system as one that consolidates white supremacy, punishes 

 
3 As stated by Dorothy Roberts, “[p]olicing captures what this system does. It polices 

families with the threat of taking children away. Even when its agents don’t remove children, 

they can take children and that threat is how they impose their power and terror. It is a form 

of punishment, harm and oppression.” ‘Abolition is the Only Answer’: A Conversation with 

Dorothy Roberts, RISE (Oct. 20, 2020), https://www.risemagazine.org/2020/10/conversation-

with-dorothy-roberts/ [https://perma.cc/V3LY-BETB].  
4 See generally What is Mutual Aid?, BIG DOOR BRIGADE, https://bigdoorbrigade. 

com/what-is-mutual-aid/ [perma.cc/R6R5-NNUW] [hereinafter What is Mutual Aid?] 

(defining mutual aid).  
5 For a seminal discussion of the racist socioeconomic context underlying families’ 

involvement in the so-called “child welfare” system, see generally DOROTHY ROBERTS, 

SHATTERED BONDS: THE COLOR OF CHILD WELFARE (2002) [hereinafter ROBERTS, 

SHATTERED BONDS]; see also Cynthia Godsoe, An Abolitionist Horizon for Child Welfare, L. 

& POL. ECON. BLOG (Aug. 6, 2020) [hereinafter Godsoe, Abolitionist Horizon for Child 

Welfare], https://lpeproject.org/blog/an-abolitionist-horizon-for-child-welfare/ [https://perma. 

cc/42QW-BWJD] (laying the groundwork for a longer work-in progress situating the child 

welfare system in the punitive carceral state). 
6 CRITICAL RESISTANCE, WHAT IS ABOLITION? (June 2012), http://criticalresistance. 

org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/What-is-Abolition.pdf [https://perma.cc/BC2L-RF58].   
7 What is Mutual Aid?, supra note 4. 
8 See discussion infra Section III.  



2022] DIVEST, INVEST, & MUTUAL AID 603 

poverty, and brings significant fiscal and human costs, including family 

separation, with no benefit. In Part II, we describe mutual aid, and its long 

history of use by marginalized communities to help each other and fight 

back against the oppressive state. Mapping the recent resurgence of 

mutual aid efforts, we flag parent organizing as an essential force to abolish 

the family policing system. Part III elaborates on our argument to divest 

from the current punitive system and invest in a mutual aid model. An 

abolitionist horizon guides our thinking, both as “a practical organizing tool 

and a long-term goal.”9 We warn against the pitfalls of “reformist 

reforms”10 that grow and entrench the system, and conclude that only 

financial investment in, and power-shifting to, communities can truly keep 

all children and families safe and healthy.  

I. FAMILY POLICING IS HARMFUL, RACIST, AND 

PUNISHES POVERTY 

Like the criminal legal system, the family policing system is a state 

apparatus of racialized social control, ineffective at preventing or 

redressing harm on its own terms, while imposing very high fiscal and 

human costs.11 Players within the system—mandated reporters, police 

officers, “child protective specialists,” and judges—perpetuate an 

intergenerational cycle that punishes and separates low-income and 

marginalized families. The current system and America’s Family Courts 

are not trauma-informed but rather trauma-inducing and continually re-

traumatizing for impacted families each and every day.  

Every year, millions of families are investigated by state actors, 

surveilled through court-ordered supervision, and required to participate 

in intrusive services such as parenting classes, drug-testing, and therapy, 

all on tenuous allegations of harm or risk of harm to their children.12 Armed 

 
9 What is the PIC? What is Abolition? CRITICAL RESISTANCE, 

http://criticalresistance.org/about/not-so-common-language/ [https://perma.cc/3BBQ-

WQWU] (“An abolitionist vision means that we must build models today that can represent 

how we want to live in the future. It means developing practical strategies for taking small 

steps that move us toward making our dreams real and that lead us all to believe that 

things really could be different. It means living this vision in our daily lives.”).  
10 RUTH WILSON GILMORE, GOLDEN GULAG: PRISONS, SURPLUS, & OPPOSITION IN 

GLOBALIZING CALIFORNIA 242 (2007). We discuss reformist reforms further infra Section 

III.B.3. 
11 See ROBERTS, SHATTERED BONDS, supra note 5, at 274–76 (summarizing criticism 

of the coercive state enforcement of the child welfare system’s “punitive function”); see also 

ELISA MINOFF, ENTANGLED ROOTS: THE ROLE OF RACE IN POLICIES THAT SEPARATE 

FAMILIES 4 (2018), https://cssp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/CSSP-Entangled-Roots.pdf 

[https://perma.cc/G44R-6T7W] (connecting the family separation in the immigration, 

criminal, and family regulation systems, and arguing that “racism has always played a 

central role in the publicly funded systems that separate families”). 
12 See Michael S. Wald, Beyond CPS: Building A System to Protect the Safety and 

Basic Development of Children Experiencing Problematic Parenting, in HANDBOOK OF CHILD 

MALTREATMENT 2 (forthcoming 2022) (“[S]tudies estimate that over one-third (37.4%) of all 

children have been investigated by CPS at least once by age 18[.]”). Only a small percentage 

of these cases are for sexual (4%) or physical abuse (13%); the vast majority of children are 

taken from their homes and put in foster care for allegations of parental neglect, “caretaker 

inability to cope,” housing, “child behavioral issue,” or similarly ill-defined and poverty-based 

allegations. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. & FAMILIES, U.S. DEP’T OF HEALTH & HUM. SERVS., AFCARS 

REPORT NO. 27, PRELIMINARY FY 2019 ESTIMATES 2 (2020) [hereinafter AFCARS REPORT] 

(reporting on data from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, which 

compiles case information from state and tribal child welfare agencies). 



604 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 12:601 

police play a role in this, interrogating children at school and accompanying 

case workers to remove children from their homes, sometimes arresting 

parents in front of their children.13 Faced with the state’s loosened 

standards of proof, insufficient provisions of due process, and use of 

children as bargaining chips, parents deemed neglectful or abusive hardly 

have any legal protections against the threat of dire employment 

consequences and tremendous societal stigma.14 

A. Family Policing is Harmful to Children and their Families 

Over 430,000 children annually (a number that has risen for the 

last five years) are forcibly separated from their parents, and often their 

siblings, and put in foster care.15 This practice persists despite the fact that 

government agencies themselves have documented high rates of sexual and 

physical abuse in care and recognized effects of trauma to separated 

children.16 Experts estimate that 1 in 7 children (14%) will be subjects of 

two or more child protective reports by age twelve, and approximately 6% 

of all children in the United States (10% of African American children and 

15% of Native American children) are removed from their homes at least 

once before age eighteen.17 Annually, thousands of parents have their 

rights and all ties to their children permanently terminated.18 Tens of 

thousands of these children are never adopted and never enter into any 

kind of permanent relationship with another adult, bouncing among many 

foster homes and institutions, and entering adulthood as “legal orphans” 

 
13 The connection between law enforcement and family regulation workers is also 

demonstrated by the law enforcement training many workers receive. See, e.g., Thomas 

Tracy, Administration of Children’s Services Staffers Now Being Sent to NYPD Investigator 

Course, N.Y. DAILY NEWS (Sept. 24, 2017), https://web.archive.org/web/20200808001909/ 

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/acs-staffers-nypd-investigator-article-1.3518025. 
14 See Godsoe, Abolitionist Horizon for Child Welfare, supra note 5 (outlining the 

“lack of process [that] make[s] findings of neglect or abuse almost a foregone conclusion” 

throughout the investigation and adjudication of mistreatment reports). 
15 AFCARS REPORT, supra note 12, at 1; ADMIN. FOR CHILD. & FAMILIES, U.S. DEP’T 

OF HEALTH & HUM. SERVS., TRENDS IN FOSTER CARE AND ADOPTION: FY 2009–FY 2018, 

http://centerforchildwelfare.fmhi.usf.edu/kb/natres/trends_fostercare_adoption_09thru18.p

df [https://perma.cc/7LFH-DLSS]. 
16 See ADMIN. FOR CHILD. & FAMILIES, U.S. DEP’T OF HEALTH & HUM. SERVS., CHILD 

WELFARE OUTCOMES 2018: REPORT TO CONGRESS 16, 19–24 (2018) (reporting performance 

outcomes for reduction of “incidence of child abuse and/or neglect in foster care,” including 

incidence of maltreatment by foster parents or facility staff, and noting its association with 

increase in trauma symptoms); see also Richard Wexler, Abuse in Foster Care: Research vs. 

the Child Welfare System’s Alternative Facts, YOUTH TODAY (Sept. 20, 2017), 

https://youthtoday.org/2017/09/abuse-in-foster-care-research-vs-the-child-welfare-systems-

alternative-facts/ [https://perma.cc/W48Q-XLX5] (examining examples of child abuse by 

“parents” in foster and adoptive settings); NAT’L COAL. FOR CHILD PROT. REFORM, FOSTER 

CARE VS. FAMILY PRESERVATION: THE TRACK RECORD ON SAFETY AND WELL-BEING (2019) 

(gathering research comparing child abuse rates in foster care and in the general 

population); Laura Gypen et al., Outcomes of Children Who Grew Up in Foster Care: 

Systematic-Review, 76 CHILD. & YOUTH SERVS. REV. 74, 77–80 (2017) (reviewing over thirty 

studies and finding that children in foster care have lower rates of high school and college 

completion, lower employment rates and earnings, and higher rates of substance abuse, 

mental health issues, and involvement in the criminal system, than the rest of the 

population). 
17 See Wald, supra note 12, at 2 (regarding reports or investigations conducted by 

Child Protective Specialists).  
18 In 2019, the most recent year for which we have data, 71,335 parents had their 

rights permanently terminated. AFCARS REPORT, supra note 12, at 1. 



2022] DIVEST, INVEST, & MUTUAL AID 605 

with a catastrophically high likelihood of experiencing homelessness, 

imprisonment, and mental health trauma.19 

B. Family Policing is Racist 

The family policing system is also racist. The numbers are stark; 

“[B]lack children are twice as likely as white children to wind up in foster 

care and face its devastating effects.”20 This system is harmful, not helpful, 

as reflected in its long history of racialized social control—a history 

stemming back to the orphan trains carrying young immigrants;21 the 

forcible removal of Native American children;22 and the immigration 

policies separating Asian-American families in the nineteenth and early 

twentieth centuries.23 This historical pathway continues today, as 

evidenced by the child welfare “savior” mentality;24 the criminalization of 

health needs that is enforced through mandated reporting and the drug 

testing of Black mothers and their newborns;25 the unacknowledged 

 
19 Godsoe, Abolitionist Horizon for Child Welfare, supra note 5 (reporting 71,000 

legal orphans in 2018 alone).  
20 Sherry Lachman, Opinion, The Opioid Plague’s Youngest Victims: Children in 

Foster Care, N. Y. TIMES (Dec. 28, 2017), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/opinion/ 

opioid-crisis-children-foster-care.html [https://perma.cc/E8EG-HGGG]; see also Kathleen B. 

Simon, Note, Catalyzing the Separation of Black Families: A Critique of Foster Care 

Placements Without Prior Judicial Review, 51 COLUM. J. L. & SOC. PROBS. 347, 350 (2018) 

(recommending more stringent emergency removal laws to reduce the number of Black 

children in foster care). 
21 See generally STEPHEN O’CONNOR, ORPHAN TRAINS (2004) (presenting a history 

and legacy of supposedly welfare-enhancing orphan trains of the mid-to late nineteenth 

century, which transported children from urban parts of the nation and placed them in rural 

parts, mostly for labor). On the dynamics between immigration, class, and “juvenile 

criminal[ity]” in urban areas during the time leading up to the operation of orphan trains, 

see id. at 115–16. 
22 Christie Renick, The Nation’s First Family Separation Policy, IMPRINT (Oct. 9, 

2018), https://imprintnews.org/child-welfare-2/nations-first-family-separation-policy-indian-

child-welfare-act/32431 [https://perma.cc/G4UC-35FX]; see also Anya Zoledziowski, The 

Residential School System Didn’t End—It Just Became Foster Care, VICE (June 9, 2021), 

https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kvkb9/the-residential-school-system-didnt-endit-just-

became-foster-care [https://perma.cc/5WGX-HFQ6] (describing the same history in Canada). 
23 MINOFF, supra note 11, at 7. 
24 Child welfare or protection workers have seen themselves as “saviors” since their 

first incarnation during the Progressive Era. See, e.g., ANTHONY M. PLATT, THE CHILD 

SAVERS: THE INVENTION OF DELINQUENCY 139 (40th ed. 2009); see also MICHAEL WILLRICH, 

CITY OF COURTS: SOCIALIZING JUSTICE IN PROGRESSIVE ERA CHICAGO, at xxviii (2003) 

(asserting that juvenile court “aimed not merely to punish offenders but to assist and 

discipline entire urban populations”). The current “child-welfare industrial complex doubles 

down on the idea that it is ‘saving’ children.” Chris Gottlieb, Black Families are Outraged 

About Family Separation Within the U.S. It’s Time to Listen to Them, TIME (Mar. 17, 2021), 

/https://time.com/5946929/child-welfare-black-families/ [https://perma.cc/UMC4-HHN5] 

(further explaining the “racist imagery” and implicit bias that inform the “savior” mentality).  
25 On January 14, 2021, the Shriver Center on Poverty Law highlighted the 

concerns of criminalizing health needs and punishing mental illness, as the system used 

Black bodies for medical testing, drug tested newborns and new mothers to then remove 

babies, and created a healthcare professional’s purpose to work with the judiciary (specially 

referring to child abuse pediatricians). Webinar: Your Family or Its Health: Intersections 

Between the Healthcare and Foster Systems, SHRIVER CTR. ON POVERTY LAW (Jan. 14, 2021), 

https://www.povertylaw.org/article/webinar-your-family-or-its-health/ [https://perma.cc/FU 

V9-4QZ3]. 



606 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 12:601 

trauma of family separation;26 and the fact that the outcomes for most 

children placed in foster care are terrible on every axis.27 

C. Family Policing Punishes Poverty 

The family policing system maintains America’s caste system, a 

system that “holds everyone in a fixed place.”28 It maintains the status quo 

by holding parents of color and low-income parents within the lowest ranks 

of society’s hierarchies. To paraphrase Paul Butler’s point on policing and 

punishment, when harms are inflicted on the lowest ranks, the system is 

working like it is supposed to.29 Put another way, the harms are a feature, 

not a bug. 

Despite the rhetoric of “parental abuse” in the system, the vast 

majority of children are removed from their parents for allegations of 

“neglect.”30 This is a vague legal category that centers on a parent’s 

“failure” to provide food, medical care, housing, and child care. Or, it could 

mean that the parent failed to get proper (i.e. private-pay) treatment for 

mental health or substance abuse. The relationship between neglect and 

poverty is in the very statutory language. A typical state statute, like 

Oklahoma’s, defines neglect as “the failure . . . to provide . . . adequate 

nurturance and affection, food, clothing, shelter, sanitation, hygiene, or 

 
26 Analogous to the separation of families at the border, “highly stressful 

experiences, like family separation, can cause irreparable harm, disrupting a child’s brain 

architecture and affecting his or her short- and long-term health. This type of prolonged 

exposure to serious stress—known as toxic stress—can carry lifelong consequences for 

children.” Colleen Kraft, Am. Acad. of Pediatrics, AAP Statement Opposing Separation of 

Children from Parents at the Border (May 8, 2018), https://docs.house.gov/meetings/ 

IF/IF14/20180719/108572/HHRG-115-IF14-20180719-SD004.pdf [https://perma.cc/P9H3-

WLCZ]. This trauma is particularly unacknowledged for marginalized families, such as 

Native American families. See This Land, The Heart of It, CROOKED MEDIA (2021), 

https://crooked.com/podcast/this-land-season-2-coming-august-23rd/ (podcast season 2, 

episode 8) (conversing about the trauma from the removal of Native children from 

reservations, in the context of federal litigation on the adoption industry’s harm to tribal 

sovereignty). 
27 The Evidence is In: Foster Care vs. Keeping Families Together: The Definitive 

Studies, NAT’L COAL. FOR CHILD PROT. REFORM (Nov. 29, 2021), https://nccpr.org/the-

evidence-is-in-foster-care-vs-keeping-families-together-the-definitive-studies/ 

[https://perma.cc/X3H4-6LGN] (collecting studies comparing outcomes for children placed in 

foster care with outcomes for children remaining with their own families). 
28 ISABEL WILKERSON, CASTE, THE ORIGINS OF OUR DISCONTENTS 73 (2020); see 

also id. at 70–71 (“Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, 

privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of 

their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.”). 
29 Paul Butler, The System is Working the Way It Is Supposed To: The Limits of 

Criminal Justice Reform, 104 GEO. L. J. 1419, 1425–27 (2016) (persuasively setting up the 

argument that police violence against Black men is a systemic, structural problem that 

requires radical, abolitionist change). 
30 In 2019 (the latest available data), 61% of children reported were alleged to have 

been neglected, 10.3% were physically abused, and 7.2% were sexually abused. CHILDREN’S 

BUREAU, U.S. DEP’T OF HEALTH & HUM. SERVS., CHILD MALTREATMENT 2019, at ii (2019), 

https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cb/cm2019.pdf [https://perma.cc/42FG 

-KCHR] [hereinafter CHILD MALTREATMENT 2019]. Beyond its obvious application to 

poverty-related neglect cases, a mutual aid model that provides true community support 

would likely reduce even the number of cases of physical abuse, because without mandated 

reporting, parents will be more willing to seek out and accept help. They will have a safe way 

to address the stressors of poverty.  



2022] DIVEST, INVEST, & MUTUAL AID 607 

appropriate education.”31 The government itself recognizes the deep 

connection to poverty: virtually all of the federal Health and Human 

Services risk factors for neglect turn on a lack of resources such as 

“inadequate housing”32 and “financial problems.”33 Experts at the Centers 

for Disease Control and Prevention also recognize that virtually all of the 

protective factors turn on material resources, such as “nurturing and safe 

childcare,” “access to medical care and mental health services,” and “steady 

employment.”34 

D. Child Safety Requires Material Investment in Marginalized Families 

Instead of providing families with child care, health care, and 

housing, the nation’s policy has been to stigmatize aid and condemn 

children to poverty and inequality.35 The United States has virtually no 

social safety net, as compared to so many other nations. Massive cuts in 

(already meager) welfare over the last twenty-five years, have produced 

childhood poverty rates that are at an all-time high, particularly among 

kids of color.36 To cite just one statistic, nearly eleven million children lack 

enough food to eat—an unacceptable fact in one of the richest countries in 

the world.37 Since welfare “reform” in 1996, federal spending on cash aid to 

families has fallen 82%. The benefits are now so meager that many families 

are still left below the poverty line and usually unable to afford basic 

 
31 OKLA. STAT. tit. 10A, § 1-1-105 (2021); see also Godsoe, Abolitionist Horizon for 

Child Welfare, supra note 5 (further discussing the class and cultural biases underlying the 

definition). 
32 CHILD MALTREATMENT 2019, supra note 30, at 23 (listing risk factors including 

“Inadequate Housing: A risk factor related to substandard, overcrowded, or unsafe housing 

conditions, including homelessness; Public Assistance. . .”). One of the co-authors recently 

worked on a case that illustrates the punitive dynamic of family policing in the context of 

housing insecurity. Ms. W.’s eight children were removed from her care for allegations of 

child neglect, after she complained to the building management about the lack of repairs 

completed in her apartment. Ms. W. was only trying to ensure that her home was providing 

safe and healthy accommodations for her children. Instead of supporting her in this process, 

the state intervened to seize Ms. W.’s children and ensnare the family in costly and 

traumatizing legal proceedings. 
33 Id. at 23 (listing risk factors including “Financial Problem: A risk factor related 

to the family’s inability to provide sufficient financial resources to meet minimum needs”); 

Risk and Protective Factors, CTRS. FOR DISEASE CONTROL & PREVENTION, https:// 

www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/childabuseandneglect/riskprotectivefactors.html [https:// 

perma.cc/C5AU-VJ6C] [hereinafter Risk and Protective Factors] (listing CDC Risk Factors 

including “food insecurity,” “economic stress,” and “concentrated neighborhood 

disadvantage”).  
34 Risk and Protective Factors, supra note 33.  
35 See Maxine Eichner, What Is The “Free Market Family” And How Can We End 

It?, L. & POL. ECON. BLOG (May 24, 2021), https://lpeproject.org/blog/what-is-the-free-

market-family-and-how-can-we-end-it/ [https://perma.cc/8KY5-46AW] (noting that “the U.S. 

has long been an outlier . . . expect[ing] families to provide the conditions, cash, and services 

their members need to thrive”). See generally LINDA GORDON, PITIED BUT NOT ENTITLED: 

SINGLE MOTHERS AND THE HISTORY OF WELFARE, 1890–1935 (1994) (presenting a history of 

stigmatization of public aid for poor single mothers and their families); KHIARA M. BRIDGES, 

THE POVERTY OF PRIVACY RIGHTS (2017) (describing the state’s invasions of poor mothers’ 

privacy rights in family and reproduction). 
36 Areeba Haider, The Basic Facts About Children in Poverty, CTR. FOR AM. 

PROGRESS (Jan. 12, 2021), https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/poverty/reports/2021/ 

01/12/494506/basic-facts-children-poverty/ [https://perma.cc/492Q-J7DT].  
37 Id.  



608 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 12:601 

housing.38 Meanwhile, higher-income families are supported in numerous 

ways, such as with mortgage and college tuition tax credits, despite 

claiming not to take “handouts” from the state. Accordingly, inequality 

continues to grow.  

What most families need is material help with housing, food, and 

other basic necessities. In 2021, a New York-based parents’ advocacy 

group, Rise, published a report based on a participatory action research 

project with the legal group TakeRoot Justice.39 As part of the project, they 

held “community conversations” and collected surveys asking parents 

themselves, particularly those who had been involved with the city’s family 

policing system, what they and their families needed most. The responses 

reflected the first-order need for information about and access to resources, 

without surveillance or punishment.40  

More broadly, research shows a direct connection between 

removing families from welfare (particularly, the Temporary Assistance for 

Needy Families (TANF) program), and increased neglect cases (23%), as 

well as entries into foster care (13–16%).41 Accordingly, increased income 

supports—such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, a higher minimum wage, 

expanded Medicaid access, and supportive housing—would lead to lower 

rates of “neglect” and, in turn, lower rates of child removal.42 Yet, rather 

than supporting these families on the front end, we spend billions of dollars 

to harm them via family policing and removal.43 Despite recent legislation 

that moderately increases support for preventative measures, the system 

continues to vastly prioritize out-of-home placement over support to 

 
38 Diana Azevedo-McCaffrey & Ali Safawi, To Promote Equity, States Should Invest 

More TANF Dollars in Basic Assistance, CTR. ON BUDGET AND POL’Y PRIORITIES (Jan. 12, 

2022), https://www.cbpp.org/research/family-income-support/to-promote-equity-states-

should-invest-more-tanf-dollars-in-basic [https://perma.cc/26BX-XLYN].  
39 Naashia B. et al., Rise Participatory Action Rsch. Project & Takeroot Just., An 

Unavoidable System: The Harms of Family Policing and Parents’ Vision for Investing in 

Community Care, RISE 9 (2021) [hereinafter Rise & Takeroot Just., An Unavoidable System], 

https://www.risemagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/ 

AnUnavoidableSystem.pdf [https://perma.cc/LUZ4-PHQ2]. 
40 Id. at 12–16. Parents called for “well-resourced communities, including childcare, 

jobs, housing, community centers and supports such as therapy . . . financial investment in 

families, access to information about the rights, non-judgmental and compassionate care, 

and care from people with similar experiences and backgrounds.” Id. at 6. 
41 CHAPIN HALL, UNIV. OF CHICAGO, FAMILY AND CHILD WELL-BEING SYSTEM: 

ECONOMIC & CONCRETE SUPPORTS AS A CORE COMPONENT 24–27 (Apr. 2021), 

https://www.in.gov/dcs/files/Economic-Supports-deck.pdf [https://perma.cc/VJ4U-DHLZ]. 
42 Id.; see also Cara Baldari & Rricha Mathur, Increasing the Minimum Wage is 

Good for Child Well-Being, FIRST FOCUS ON CHILD. (Aug. 21, 2017), https://firstfocus. 

org/blog/increasing-the-minimum-wage-is-good-for-child-well-being [https://perma.cc/7ZRB-

99QS] (summarizing a new study on the minimum wage as well as prior research). 
43 Some states even divert most of the TANF money intended to support families of 

origin, to family policing and removal. Eli Hager, A Mother Needed Welfare. Instead, the State 

Used Welfare Funds to Take Her Son, PROPUBLICA (Dec. 23, 2021), https://www. 

propublica.org/article/a-mother-needed-welfare-instead-the-state-used-welfare-funds-to-

take-her-son [https://perma.cc/9DMT-KW3N]. 



2022] DIVEST, INVEST, & MUTUAL AID 609 

existing families.44 In 2018, eight out of nine billion dollars of 

Congressional funding for child welfare went to foster care.45  

Indeed, experts have documented not only the fact that federal 

funding incentives are skewed towards removal, but also that it is the 

deliberate “revenue strategy” of many states to “mine” foster children for 

federal Social Security and other funds.46 To meet their fiscal needs, states 

use children who become wards of the state.47 More specifically, the higher 

the state’s percentage of children removed from low-income families and 

eligible for IV-E funding, and the longer they stay in foster care, the more 

federal dollars can be used for the state’s administrative costs,48 agency 

training-related costs,49 disability payments (if children are deemed 

eligible for Social Security Disability benefits),50 and more. As succinctly 

explained by Daniel Hatcher, “[i]f the state receives more federal money, 

less state spending is required.”51 This skewed funding scheme is a major 

factor perpetuating family policing and separation. 

II. MUTUAL AID PROVIDES A MODEL THAT HAS BEEN 

HISTORICALLY EMPOWERING AND HELPFUL TO 

MARGINALIZED COMMUNITIES 

In this Part, we outline mutual aid as both a practical intervention 

and a political movement, and document its historical use in marginalized 

communities. We also flag state authorities’ consistent attempts to thwart 

these community-led efforts. This tension underlies our nuanced proposal 

that for families and communities truly to flourish, grassroots mutual aid 

programs should be community-run, but accompanied by a robust social 

safety net. 

A. What is Mutual Aid? 

Mutual aid has been described as “community support” that “lift[s] 

up the least equal among us.”52 In addition to providing people with 

material goods such as food and clothing, mutual aid also constitutes an 

empowering governance model, “a form of political participation in which 

people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political 

conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on their 

representatives in government, but by actually building new social 

relations that are more survivable.”53 It is different from “charity” in the 

key sense that it is not a delivery from the rich to the poor, based on the 

 
44 See Family First Prevention Services Act, Pub. L. No. 115–123, 132 Stat. 64 

(codified as amended at 42 U.S.C. § 671) (providing for increased federal funding of 

prevention of foster care placements through various services); see also infra Section III.B.3 

(critiquing the Act).  
45 EMILIE STOLTZFUS, CONG. RSCH. SERV., R45270, CHILD WELFARE FUNDING IN 

FY2018, at 1, 4–5 (July 30, 2018).  
46 DANIEL L. HATCHER, THE POVERTY INDUSTRY: THE EXPLOITATION OF AMERICA’S 

MOST VULNERABLE CITIZENS 65 (2016). 
47 Id. at 66. 
48 Id. at 71. 
49 Id. at 72. 
50 Id. at 73. 
51 Id. at 69. 
52 What is Mutual Aid?, supra note 4. 
53 Id. 



610 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 12:601 

giver’s funding priorities, with many strings attached, and creating a 

shame in dependency. In contrast, mutual aid is designed to be 

communally led through a relationship among equals. The aid is not based 

on means-testing and carries no stigma or threats.  

Mutual aid builds solidarity. As Dean Spade describes, it is a 

“radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world.”54 

It collectively ensures that marginalized and oppressed people get their 

basic needs met, while also developing group awareness and organizing 

together against the root causes of this oppression55—here, the failure of 

the state to support families. Spade notes three “key elements” of mutual 

aid programs, including (1) meeting survival needs and building awareness 

of why people do not have what they need; (2) mobilizing people and 

expanding movements for change; and (3) “solving problems through 

collective action rather than waiting for saviors.”56 

As an abolitionist movement, mutual aid is visionary. To quote 

Dorothy Roberts, abolitionism is both “destructive and . . . creative,” 

dismantling harmful and racist systems while rebuilding safer and more 

equal ones.57 Similarly, as W.E.B. Du Bois conceived of it, “abolition 

democracy” is not only a destructive project of dismantling unjust 

institutions, but also a positive one of imagining and building a more just 

society—what post-Civil War Reconstruction should have been.58 Du Bois 

noted that slavery was only ended in a narrow, hyper-legal sense, and that 

the criminal system was one of the primary tools that the state powers used 

as a method of keeping Black people at work and intimidating them.59 

Change would not come just from dismantling the criminal system or 

related unjust labor and property practices such as share-cropping; it 

would have to be accompanied by equal access to education, employment, 

and voting.60 In contemporary times, mutual aid continues to create new 

ways of relating to each other and building a more robust societal 

infrastructure.61  

 
54 Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And the Next), DEAN SPADE, 

http://www.deanspade.net/mutual-aid-building-solidarity-during-this-crisis-and-the-next/ 

[https://perma.cc/EP4D-TSA5] (book abstract); DEAN SPADE, MUTUAL AID: BUILDING 

SOLIDARITY DURING THIS CRISIS (AND THE NEXT) 12, 82 (2020) [hereinafter SPADE, MUTUAL 

AID: BUILDING SOLIDARITY]. 
55 Id. at 66. 
56 Id. at 13–34; Dean Spade, Mutual Aid is Essential to Our Survival Regardless of 

Who Is in the White House, TRUTHOUT (Oct. 27, 2020), https://www.truthout.org/ 

articles/mutual-aid-is-essential-to-our-survival-regardless-of-who-is-in-the-white-house/ 

[https://perma.cc/7BMN-5HDA].  
57 Roberts, Abolition Constitutionalism, supra note 11, at 43–44. 
58 Id.  
59 See generally W.E.B. DU BOIS, BLACK RECONSTRUCTION IN AMERICA (1935) 

(studying the “retreat” into subjugation of Black people and resistance against real abolition 

democracy in the period after Emancipation); see also Roberts, Abolition Constitutionalism, 

supra note 11, at 44 (discussing Du Boisian abolition democracy). 
60 See ANGELA Y. DAVIS, ABOLITION DEMOCRACY 95–97, 118 (2005) (noting that 

“[s]lavery could not be truly abolished until people were provided with the economic means 

for their subsistence,” as well as “access to educational institutions and . . . voting and other 

political rights”).  
61 In times of natural disasters such as the California wildfires, Puerto Rico 

earthquake, and numerous hurricanes, “people default back to mutual aid . . . people 

spontaneously come together and care for each out in times of crisis.” Miguel Petrosky, What 



2022] DIVEST, INVEST, & MUTUAL AID 611 

This model is also inherently localized and anti-authoritarian, 

building grassroots community power rather than relying on the state or 

the “non-profit industrial complex.”62 Creating spaces where oppressed 

groups can come together to both get their needs met and organize against 

the causes of their oppression helps to overcome the stigma and shame, 

which the government and society have consistently imposed on low-

income people throughout history.63 Mutual aid marks a departure not only 

from government stigma surrounding state assistance, but also from non-

profits’ sometimes skewed funding priorities, hierarchical structures, and 

the one-way direction of charity. Mutual aid eliminates stigma through a 

few deliberate aspects. Unlike government assistance and charity, it is not 

uni-directional (although, as noted earlier, government assistance to more 

affluent families goes unrecognized as such). Instead, mutual aid is, for 

lack of a better word, mutual—both the giver and the recipient benefit from 

each other’s experience, insight, and contributions; their roles may be 

reversed at any time.64 Mutual aid also seeks to be proactive, rather than 

reactive, in recognition of the structural causes of poverty and other social 

harms: “mutual aid organizations strengthen community bonds to prevent 

problems from occurring in the first place.”65 Mutual aid is also 

characterized by a lack of “strings attached.” There are no prerequisites 

(such as highly scrutinized proof of income) and no enforcement measures 

for compliance (such as “man in the house” inspections for men living with 

single mothers receiving public assistance).66 In this manner, mutual aid 

models avoid becoming the “degradation ceremonies” that so often 

accompany both government and private non-profit aid.67 

B. Historical Use of Mutual Aid by Marginalized Communities 

In the past, marginalized communities have turned to self-help in 

the form of mutual aid to serve children’s welfare in the face of a punitive 

 
Can Mutual Aid Do in a Disaster?, SOJOURNERS (Oct. 5, 2021), https://sojo.net/articles/what-

can-mutual-aid-do-disaster [https://perma.cc/NXA2-E3EW] (quoting Jimmy Dunson, an 

organizer with Mutual Aid Disaster Relief). This includes distributing supplies, food, 

clothing, money, and necessities to others. Id.  
62 The role of the state in our model is a key aspect differentiating our model from 

some abolitionist models. Many abolitionists (there is of course no monolithic definition) 

envision transforming the state, while mutual aid organizations exist largely outside of the 

state. 
63 See, e.g., GORDON, supra note 35, at 4–36 (presenting a history intersecting the 

welfare system’s structure with stigma against single-mother families); BRIDGES, supra note 

35, at 37–55 (examining various “construction[s]” of the stigma against poor Black mothers, 

including in welfare reform and in the law).  
64 Mutual aid is similar to concepts of community self-defense, as outlined further 

infra Section III.C. 
65 See Sophie Roppe, Progress Without Profit: Make Room for Mutual Aid 

Organizations, DAILY TROJAN (Apr. 5, 2021), https://dailytrojan.com/2021/04/05/progress-

without-profit-make-room-for-mutual-aid-organizations/ [https://perma.cc/YHL9-USVC].  
66 See IFE FLOYD ET AL., CTR. ON BUDGET & POL’Y PRIORITIES, TANF POLICIES 

REFLECT RACIST LEGACY OF CASH ASSISTANCE 14 (Aug. 4, 2021), https://www.cbpp.org/ 

sites/default/files/8-4-21tanf.pdf [https://perma.cc/8LYH-HPLC] (explaining “man in the 

house” laws and their enforcement). 
67 Kaarin Gustafson, Degradation Ceremonies and the Criminalization of Low-

Income Women, 3 U.C. IRVINE L. REV. 297, 301–302 (2013) (presenting finger imaging of 

public benefits recipients as an example of degradation and pointing to involvement with the 

criminal justice system as “[w]hat makes the degradation of the poor in the United States 

ceremonious,” ).  



612 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 12:601 

state that deprives those communities of material resources. Black, Asian, 

Latinx, and other excluded groups rightfully skeptical of state aid, have 

long created and led mutual aid efforts.68 These usually began out of 

necessity, as a result of exclusion from societal and legal systems of 

employment, financial support such as banking, or even definitions of 

personhood. For instance, Nyamagaga Gondwe connects the “precarious 

constitution of Black families in the slave economy” to ongoing expansive 

kinship networks and community support systems.69 Other scholars have 

demonstrated that fraternal societies in the late nineteenth century into 

the early years of the Great Depression enabled women, immigrant, and 

other marginalized groups to access social-welfare services such as medical 

care and insurance, as well as social support, otherwise unavailable to 

them.70 Indeed, Dean Spade argues that every “large, powerful” social 

movement has engaged in mutual aid.71  

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Panther Party made clear 

that overcoming white supremacy entailed not just political change and 

abolition of the policing and criminal systems, but also concrete supports 

to families such as child care, nutritious meals, and free medical clinics.72 

At the same time, they aimed to teach the children (and adults) a “rigorous 

liberation curriculum.”73 The Black Panthers created over sixty Survival 

Programs including “acts of washing pots, distributing shoes, transporting 

elders to the grocery store, testing for sickle cell, and offering culturally 

relevant schooling[.]”74 The Party’s efforts were based on the community’s 

 
68 See The Radical Past and Present of Mutual Aid, FOUND. BEYOND BELIEF (May 

7, 2020), https://foundationbeyondbelief.org/the-radical-past-and-present-of-mutual-aid/ 

[https://perma.cc/LRU3-GQKS] [hereinafter The Radical Past and Present of Mutual Aid] 

(presenting historical examples of mutual aid in order to articulate it as a “mainstay in 

communities that have often been abandoned or marginalized by government institutions”). 
69 Nyamagaga Gondwe, The Black Tax, 74 TAX L. REV. (forthcoming 2022) (on file 

with author) (also noting the presence of mutual aid and collective caregiving responsibilities 

among enslaved peoples). 
70 DAVID T. BEITO, FROM MUTUAL AID TO THE WELFARE STATE: FRATERNAL 

SOCIETIES AND SOCIAL SERVICES 1890–1967 (2000) (noting that these societies were phased 

out of existence in large part by the welfare state, which never sufficiently supported low-

income people, including children, and has always come with stigma and surveillance). 
71 SPADE, MUTUAL AID: BUILDING SOLIDARITY, supra note 54, at 1. 
72 Id. at 13; Erin Blakemore, How the Black Panthers’ Breakfast Program Both 

Inspired and Threatened the Government, HISTORY (Feb. 6, 2018), https://www.history.com/ 

news/free-school-breakfast-black-panther-party [https://perma.cc/5VF3-RYV8].  
73 SPADE, MUTUAL AID: BUILDING SOLIDARITY, supra note 54, at 13–14. 
74 Mutual Aid—Today and Tomorrow, PEOPLE’S KITCHEN COLLECTIVE, http:// 

peopleskitchencollective.com/panthers-mutual-aid [https://perma.cc/3WCY-JTGZ] (drawing 

inspiration from the Black Panther Party’s programs and gathering information on mutual 

aid efforts in California’s Bay Area); see also Survival Programs, IT’S ABOUT TIME: BLACK 

PANTHER PARTY LEGACY & ALUMNI, http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/Survival_Programs/ 

survival_programs.html [https://perma.cc/8KYV-WK2L] (listing programs that the Black 

Panther Party “instituted or envisioned starting” in order to “help African Americans and 

other oppressed peoples meet their basic necessities”); Dorothy Hastings, ‘Abandoned by 

Everyone Else,’ Neighbors Are Banding Together During the Pandemic, PBS (Apr. 5, 2021), 

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/how-mutual-aid-networks-came-together-in-a-year-

of-crisis [https://perma.cc/2K4Q-EL2S] (relating traditions of mutual aid, a “centuries-old 

practice,” to responses to recent crises such as the pandemic and natural disasters). For a 

historically rooted analysis of the survival programs, see generally Mary Potorti, “Feeding 

the Revolution”: The Black Panther Party, Hunger, and Community Survival, 21 J. AFR. AM. 

STUD. 85 (2017). 



2022] DIVEST, INVEST, & MUTUAL AID 613 

values and started within the community, addressing nutrition and 

education needs as well as economic empowerment and resource-sharing.75 

Not only did these programs meet the basic needs of the Black community, 

but they allowed Black doctors, scientists, educators, and community 

members to work within their communities.76  

The Black Panthers’ “serve the people” programs were so successful 

and powerful that J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director at the time, described 

the Breakfast for Children Program as “the best and most influential 

activity [for the Black Panther Party] and, as such . . . potentially the 

greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy 

what it stands for.”77 The night before the Chicago program was to open, 

police broke into the church housing it and urinated on all the food.78 This 

disturbing incident illustrates both the power of these programs, and the 

extent the government will go to destroy or co-opt them. The latter is 

another reason, in addition to community self-determination, why we do 

not recommend a government mutual aid program.  

Another prominent example is the transformation of the Young 

Lords from a largely Puerto Rican Chicago-based “street gang” to a mutual 

aid group that organized free breakfasts and community tuberculosis and 

lead testing, ultimately occupying New York City’s Lincoln Hospital to 

provide free health care in 1970.79 They brought people into the Puerto 

Rican liberation movement by “starting with the everyday needs of Puerto 

Ricans in impoverished communities.”80 The Young Lords specifically 

sought to help poor and working class families, often meeting at the 

Armitage Avenue Methodist Church for sit-ins.81 Further, the Young Lords 

“protested police brutality against Black and Brown men.”82 Protests 

demonstrating such solidarity continue today, surging nationwide after the 

police murder of George Floyd.83 

In the family policing context, mutual aid could be a particularly 

promising intervention but has hardly ever been used until very recently. 

Dorothy Roberts has traced elements of mutual aid to the Progressive era, 

 
75 Potorti, supra note 74, at 89–97, 107–108. 
76 See The Radical Past and Present of Mutual Aid, supra note 68 (referring to black 

mutual aid societies’ “self-sufficiency” and “employment network”); Blakemore, supra note 

72. 
77 SPADE, MUTUAL AID: BUILDING SOLIDARITY, supra note 54, at 14 (quoting 

Hoover’s memo to FBI local offices). 
78 Id. 
79 Id.; The Radical Past and Present of Mutual Aid, supra note 68. It is important 

to note that the term “gang” is often used to vilify community groups. See, e.g., Babe Howell, 

Gang Policing: The Post Stop-And-Frisk Justification for Profile-Based Policing, 5 DENVER 

CRIM. L. REV. 1, 5 (2015) (“[T]he conflation of gangs and gang membership with violent 

crimes creates the misimpression that gang membership alone is a proxy for violent 

criminality.”). 
80 SPADE, MUTUAL AID: BUILDING SOLIDARITY, supra note 54, at 14.  
81 Sarah Coffman, The Young Lords and the Black Panther Party, DIGITAL 

CHICAGO, https://digitalchicagohistory.org/exhibits/show/young-lords/young-lords-and-black 

-panthers [https://perma.cc/SCK3-LMRB]. 
82 Id. 
83 See Larry Buchanan et. al., Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in 

U.S. History, N.Y. TIMES (July 3, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/ 

07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html [https://perma.cc/4Z55-UU79].  



614 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 12:601 

when Black women who were excluded from state institutions purporting 

to help children initiated their own programs within the Black 

community.84 Akin to mutual aid, these programs focused on children’s 

wellbeing embedded within their families and communities, and provided 

tangible assistance such as child care free of state strings.85 A mutual aid 

framework, however, has not influenced state “child welfare” policy; 

instead, the government, and many children’s advocates, have preferred to 

double down on family surveillance and separation. 

C. Recent Resurgence of Mutual Aid Efforts 

More recently, many movements follow the mutual aid model. For 

one, child care collectives for parents involved in social movements are 

helping those parents more fully engage in activism while avoiding the 

punitive family policing system, by ensuring that children are not left home 

alone or unattended.86 We are also seeing a resurgence of mutual aid 

throughout the United States in the face of state failure during the COVID-

19 pandemic and natural disasters.87 With groups such as the Texas 

student mutual aid group Trinity Mutual Aid providing groceries to 

community pantries and Black Queer Groceries raising funds for 

contactless deliveries to Black, queer, and trans people, the explosion of 

mutual aid highlights the potential for such assistance in dismantling the 

family policing system.88  

In New York alone, nearly sixty mutual aid networks were 

operating during the pandemic. One group in Brooklyn’s Flatbush 

neighborhood focused on food distribution.89 East Brooklyn Mutual Aid and 

the Astoria Mutual Aid Network also provided food to families so that many 

did not have to choose between paying rent and buying groceries.90 By 

providing families with necessities and resources faster than the 

government does, mutual aid reduces the risk that the Administration for 

Children’s Services (“ACS”—Child “Protective” Services in New York—will 

be called for a lack of food or resources in the home. Similarly, in Houston, 

 
84 Dorothy E. Roberts, Black Club Women and Child Welfare: Lessons for Modern 

Reform, 32 FLA. ST. U. L. REV. 957, 957–58 (2005) (introducing the overlooked history of 

Black women’s “child service movement . . . which tied child welfare to racial advancement 

and justice” through organizing within women’s clubs and church groups). 
85 See id. at 958–71. 
86 Free Access to Movements Childcare Collective, MUTUAL AID DISASTER RELIEF, 

https://mutualaiddisasterrelief.org/co-conspirators/free-access-to-movements-childcare-

collective/ [https://perma.cc/7HSN-PWYV] (“FAM [Free Access to Movements] offers 

childcare at community events and grassroots political organizing meetings. . . .”).  
87 Mutual Aid Resources, MOVEMENT FOR BLACK LIVES, https://m4bl.org/mutual-

aid/ [https://perma.cc/B8W8-Y2ZP].  
88 See Elizabeth Merritt, Mutual Aid in Time of Crisis, AM. ALLIANCE OF MUSEUMS: 

CTR. FOR THE FUTURE OF MUSEUMS BLOG (Aug. 12, 2020), https://www.aam-

us.org/2020/08/12/mutual-aid-in-a-time-of-crisis/ [https://perma.cc/Z7C6-DLS8]; Madison 

Semro, Through the Storms and Beyond, TRINITY UNIV.: TRINITY MAG. (Apr. 12, 2021), 

https://www.trinity.edu/trinity-magazine/spring-2021/through-storms-and-beyond 

[https://perma.cc/A2B3-4JXM] (describing Trinity Mutual Aid’s efforts for the San Antonio 

community during winter storm shutdowns).  
89 Anna Arons, An Unintended Abolition: Family Regulation During the COVID-19 

Crisis, 12 COLUM. J. RACE & L. F. (2022).  
90 Keyna Franklin, ‘Our First Priority is Making Sure People are OK’, RISE (May 20, 

2021), https://www.risemagazine.org/2021/05/east-brooklyn-mutual-aid/ [https://perma.cc/ 

TQ7B-SCD7].  



2022] DIVEST, INVEST, & MUTUAL AID 615 

Texas, the Black women-led mutual aid organization, BLMHTX, stepped 

up to check in on neighbors during the pandemic.91 It is this peer-to-peer 

assistance that gives mutual aid groups power—the power of spreading 

justice and supporting the collective wellbeing.  

This equal power dynamic from community member to community 

member moves away from the hierarchical structure of charities and 

nonprofits.92 Similarly, parent movements like the one at Rise have 

brought parents to the front and center of change while “working to build 

a peer and community care network to support families and give them 

information about resources, so that when families have challenging 

situations they can address them early on . . . without system 

involvement.”93 

III. DIVEST FROM FAMILY POLICING AND INVEST IN 

COMMUNITY-LED MUTUAL AID 

Delivering services or treatment through a punitive framework 

does not work.94 Instead, keeping children and families safe and healthy 

requires divesting from the family policing system and investing in care. 

Public funding currently spent on surveillance and removal/foster care 

should go to societal supports such as housing, mental health, substance 

abuse treatment, and child care. Moreover, divesting and investing, taken 

together as a model, does not just entail better allocation of societal 

resources, but also a shift in power from state “experts” to the community—

both components of mutual aid.95 This transformation requires questioning 

existing perceptions of child and societal protection. The divest/invest 

model that this Part will outline changes the sticky narrative that 

children’s well-being comes from state surveillance and family separation, 

offering the alternative one that “basic necessities such as food, shelter, 

and freedom are what really make our communities secure.”96 This 

recognition compels a shift from a fear-based to a care-based framework for 

true community safety, and challenges the false binary between child 

 
91 See Hastings, supra note 74. 
92 Id. (citing proponents of mutual aid). 
93 Keyna Franklin, How Rise is Working to Support Faster Family Reunification – 

And Shrink the Foster System, RISE (June 16, 2021), https://www.risemagazine.org 

/2021/06/how-rise-supports-faster-reunification/ [https://perma.cc/A25R-78P5]. Through 

interviews with parents themselves, Rise has found that ACS is virtually unavoidable in 

Black and Brown communities, ACS fails to help parents, ACS intervention inflicts trauma, 

ACS involvement damages relationships, and parents suffer long-lasting consequences from 

ACS involvement. See Rise & Takeroot Just., An Unavoidable System, supra note 39, at 6. 
94 Wald, supra note 12, at 21. 
95 One co-author has looked to the participatory defense movement in criminal 

defense to illustrate this power-shifting. Cynthia Godsoe, Participatory Defense: Humanizing 

the Accused and Ceding Control to the Client, 69 MERCER L. REV. 715, 716 (2018) [hereinafter 

Godsoe, Participatory Defense] (examining the participatory defense movement, which seeks 

to “transform the landscape of power in the court system”). Parent-led movements in the 

family policing space are adopting similar models to “humanize the defendant . . . and 

increase visible family presence” in individual cases, as well as to address the system as a 

whole. See, e.g., Family Reunification, Equity & Empowerment (Free) Project, STARTING 

OVER, INC. https://www.startingoverinc.org/free [https://perma.cc/953D-RZAA].  
96 About, CRITICAL RESISTANCE, https://web.archive.org/web/20220310180902/ 

http://criticalresistance.org/about/. 



616 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 12:601 

protection and family health and integrity.97 On a broad scale, greater 

racial and class equality and more funding for families hold the potential 

to reduce harm and help better serve all children. 

A. Divest 

A truly pro-family system entails both the divestment of state 

funding from family separation and punitive expertise and the concomitant 

investment in state support for families of origin, as well as a shift in power 

to community and parent expertise. As Part I has shown, foster care has 

terrible outcomes for children, whereas material support for families (not 

what we currently call “prevention”) has proven to achieve successful 

outcomes for children and families.98 Despite this substantial evidence, 

state funding is still very skewed to out-of-home care and to preventive 

“services” like drug testing and parenting classes, which harm rather than 

help families. Indeed, every dollar spent on family separation and foster 

care takes away from potential spending on things families need.99 To cite 

just one recent example, experts estimate that the government will spend 

nine hundred and seventy-two million dollars ($972,000,000) on foster care, 

a cost of eighteen-thousand dollars ($18,000) per child, this year just for 

children who are removed due to their family’s lack of secure housing.100 

Helping their families of origin with rent and in-home services would cost 

only one fourth as much, two hundred and seventy-six million dollars 

($276,000,000).101  

The government should reallocate those dollars away from family 

policing, and begin giving families the material support they need to thrive. 

Currently, most families can only access services via punishment.102 In 

many cases, only once Family Courts order services do parents actually 

receive assistance (still often not tailored to their needs), and even then, 

 
97 See ZACH NORRIS, DEFUND FEAR: SAFETY WITHOUT POLICING, PRISONS, AND 

PUNISHMENT (2020) (proposing a continuum of societal supports in place of criminalization 

and punishment, and citing successful community programs).  
98 For foster care, see supra notes 15, 25 and accompanying text; for efficacy of 

material support, see supra notes 37–39, 81–85, 142–147 and accompanying text. 
99 Analogously, see DAVID SCOTT, AGAINST IMPRISONMENT: AN ANTHOLOGY OF 

ABOLITIONIST ESSAYS 195 (2018) (“Building a new prison is not just about putting money 

into the pain infliction industry- it is also about shifting focus away from welfare support.”). 
100 Letter from Ruth White, Exec. Dir., Nat’l Ctr. for Hous. and Child Welfare, to 

JooYeun Chang, Principal Deputy Assistant Sec’y and Acting Assistant Sec’y, Admin. of 

Child. and Fams., U.S. Dep’t of Health & Hum. Servs. 2 (Mar. 2 2021), 

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a7dcc2a0100277e36127414/t/6044f78ec81e850732f6

44d5/1615132558695/Stafford+Act+Request+to+ACF+for+Families+2021+revised.pdf 

[https://perma.cc/7HQH-PKF6] (referencing a 2021 cost analysis by the National Center for 

Housing and Child Welfare, comparing funding for the cost of foster care with funding for 

housing subsidization and related services). 
101 Id.; cf. NAT’L CTR. FOR HOUS. AND CHILD WELFARE, NCHCW HOUSING–CHILD 

WELFARE COST STUDY 2015, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a7dcc2a0100277e36127 

414/t/5c1286abc2241b1194b3569e/1544717995727/NCHCW+Housing+Cost+Savings+Study

+2015.pdf [https://perma.cc/9TL8-Q3AM] (concluding that the study “shows considerable 

savings to states when Title IV-E [child welfare] funding is used to subsidize housing and 

supportive services”).  
102 See Rise & Takeroot Just., An Unavoidable System, supra note 39, at 7 (“[M]ost 

parents are mandated to preventive services after being reported and experiencing an 

investigation.”); Wendy A. Bach, Flourishing Rights, 113 MICH. L. REV. 1061, 1064–65, 

1067–70 (2015) (reviewing CLARE HUNTINGTON, FAILURE TO FLOURISH: HOW LAW 

UNDERMINES FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS (2014)). 



2022] DIVEST, INVEST, & MUTUAL AID 617 

under punitive terms; if parents do not comply with service plans, judges 

can punish parents for not complying with their orders.103 Conversely, 

many existing public services, such as educational and healthcare systems, 

function as the point of entry for state surveillance into intimate spaces 

and family relations.104 This lack of community-based supports—

particularly disproportionate in communities of color—also underlies many 

mandatory reports on families. 105 For instance, many parents become 

ensnared in the family regulation system because they are forced to call 

the police and other state actors for help with intimate partner violence 

and housing, due to the scarcity of resources in their communities.106 True 

community support entails funding for services that free individuals from 

the broad net of punitive surveillance and control, in exchange for services 

that provide true “dignity, care, and justice.”107 It also requires divestment 

from social work, legal, and other professionals tasked with family 

surveillance and separation.108 Instead, we must learn from parents and 

community organizers—they know best how to care for their children.109 

B. Avoid Reformist Reforms of Prevention & Differential Response 

Here we consider two options within the system other than the 

current investigate/prosecute model: (1) preventive services, and (2) 

differential response. Although these options are both better than the 

current prosecutorial model, they also risk net-widening. Most 

importantly, they are never going to be implemented in a way that fully 

supports families, due to the stigmatizing politics and social worker 

surveillance that are endemic to the entire family regulation system. In 

other words, the current system cannot be repaired. It is doing what it was 

designed to do: surveil and control marginalized families. As a result, any 

reforms to the existing system risk becoming “reformist reforms,” which 

are sometimes worse than no reform at all.110 

 
103 Bach, supra note 102, at 1073. 
104 Kelley Fong, Getting Eyes in the Home: Child Protective Services Investigations 

and State Surveillance of Family Life, 85 AM. SOC. REV. 610, 610–38 (2020).  
105 See id. at 1795–97 (discussing the connection between mothers’ material 

hardship and mandatory reporting). About two-thirds of reports to the State Central 

Registry in New York are made by mandated reporters, who are required to report suspected 

abuse and neglect. Mandatory reporters are usually state employees tasked with helping 

families, such as teachers, doctors, and shelter workers.  Rise & Takeroot Just., An 

Unavoidable System, supra note 39, at 22. 
106 See generally Kelley Fong, Concealment and Constraint: Child Protective 

Services Fears and Poor Mothers’ Institutional Engagement, 97 SOC. FORCES 1785 (2019) 

(examining ways that communities “strategize to evade” state contact, such as concealment 

of domestic violence, particularly in relation to child welfare entanglement). 
107 THE PEOPLE’S PLAN NYC, https://peoplesplan.nyc/ [https://perma.cc/QJ9S-

AVD4] (presenting the “collective vision” of the Plan, developed by hundreds of organizers 

across New York City). 
108 See, e.g., Leah A. Jacobs et al., Defund the Police: Moving Towards An Anti-

Carceral Social Work, 32 J. PROGRESSIVE HUM. SERV. 37, 54 (2021); see also Cynthia Godsoe, 

The Place of the Prosecutor in Abolitionist Praxis, 69 UCLA L. REV. (forthcoming 2022) 

[hereinafter Godsoe, Place of the Prosecutor] (describing the need for lawyers to examine 

their role in supporting the carceral state). 
109 See discussion infra Section III.C (on community defense). 
110 See GILMORE, supra note 10, at 242 (cautioning against reforms that “get caught 

in the logic of the system itself” to solve the system’s own problems); see also discussion infra 



618 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 12:601 

1. Prevention 

Investing in prevention is better than investing in foster care, but it is 

still very problematic. Again, useless services, surveillance, and, worst of 

all, net-widening, enmesh families further in the punitive system.  

First, efforts to invest in prevention provide very limited direct 

support. One effort in particular, the Family First Prevention Services Act 

of 2018 (“FFPSA”), was enacted to use federal funding to provide mental 

health services, substance misuse treatment, and in-home parenting skill-

based programs to families at risk of entering the family policing system.111 

Yet, this funding allocation is limited in scope and reach. When the 

numbers were broken down on a national level between 2018 and 2022, the 

FFPSA would only provide approximately four hundred and eighty dollars 

($480) per child or family.112 Substance misuse treatment lasts only twelve 

months, failing to account for relapses and the high recidivism rates among 

those who misuse opioids and other drugs.113 In-home services also failed 

to meet the needs of families experiencing homelessness and housing 

insecurity.114  

Second, prevention efforts like the FFPSA lead to more surveillance 

of Black and Brown families and their children. With mental health 

counselors providing updates and reports to Family Court, substance 

misuse treatment programs continually drug testing mothers, and 

parenting skills training actually taking place within the home, families 

become more entrenched in the family policing system without being 

provided a way out. Analogous to efforts to decarcerate without an 

abolitionist horizon, these preventive efforts have the harmful effect of net-

widening, thus expanding the surveillance, control, and punishment of 

marginalized communities.115 

2. Differential Response 

Differential response (“DR”) is the most promising model in the 

existing family policing system, but the “pathological politics” of the system 

 
Section III.B.3. For instance, preventive services can net-widen and increase funding for the 

family policing system. See discussion infra Section III.B.1.  
111 The Family First Prevention Services Act enacted in 2018 allocates federal child 

welfare funding streams, Title IV-B and Title IV-E of the Social Security Act, to be used to 

assist families at risk of entering the child welfare system, specifically by reimbursing states 

for families’ mental health services, substance abuse treatment, and in-home parenting 

skills training. Family First Prevention Services Act, Pub. L. No. 115–123, 132 Stat. 64 

(codified as amended at 42 U.S.C. § 671). For in-depth explanations of the Act, see Family 

First Prevention Services Act, NAT‘L CONF. OF STATE LEG. (Apr. 1, 2020), http://www.ncsl.org/ 

research/human-services/family-first-prevention-services-act-ffpsa.aspx 

[https://perma.cc/H72R-U5JR]; Family First Prevention Services Act Section by Section, 

FIRST FOCUS CAMPAIGN FOR CHILD. (Mar. 2018), https://campaignforchildren.org/wp-

content/uploads/sites/2/2016/06/FFCC-Section-by-Section-FFPSA.pdf 

[https://perma.cc/ZR5E-VSLQ]. 
112 Caitlyn Garcia, Replacing Foster Care with Family Care: The Family First 

Prevention Services Act of 2018, 52 FAM. L. Q. 27, 35–36 (2019). 
113 Id. at 37–39. 
114 Id. at 39–41; cf. Charlotte Baughman. Tehra Coles, Jennifer Feinberg, & Hope 

Newton, The Surveillance Tentacles of the Child Welfare System, 11 COLUM. J. RACE & L. 

501, 530 (2021) (critiquing the Act’s focus on funding for formal services rather than material 

resources).  
115 Godsoe, Place of the Prosecutor, supra note 108. 



2022] DIVEST, INVEST, & MUTUAL AID 619 

nonetheless mean that differential response programs are under-utilized 

and set up for failure.116 Differential response posits multiple pathways as 

a response to reports of child maltreatment, including alternative 

pathways from the “regular track” of CPS investigation, prosecution, and 

foster care placement.117 Under a DR model, families are subject to 

different response pathways based on factors reflecting risk of 

maltreatment.118 Over half the states have implemented DR to some 

degree in the last fifteen to twenty years.119 These states’ rationales 

include: reducing the very high number of families that are in the system 

for poverty-related reasons; increasing services available to at-risk 

families; reducing the stigma of child protective services (“CPS”) 

involvement; improving caseworker satisfaction; and addressing racial 

disproportionality.120 States’ DR programs are also considerably more cost-

effective than the regular track.121  

Towards these myriad ends, differential response departs 

significantly from traditional family policing. Two key components of DR 

are: (1) a focus on meeting the material needs of struggling families, such 

as diapers and groceries; and (2) a service approach for caseworkers, rather 

than an “investigate and prosecute” model.122 Guidance urges caseworkers 

to prepare to be “respectful and cooperative from the very first contact with 

the family,” noting that “[f]amily engagement and respect are core 

values.”123 Accordingly, workers make appointments with families rather 

than the midnight knocks on the door typical of many family policing 

agencies.124 The contrast to the regular family policing system is stark, as 

 
116 Bill Stuntz famously summarized the legislative one-way ratchet to increased 

criminalization and punitiveness. William J. Stuntz, The Pathological Politics of Criminal 

Law, 100 MICH. L. REV. 505, 509 (2001). We argue that the family policing system is very 

similar to, and closely intertwined with, the criminal system, and that many of the criminal 

system’s “pathological politics”––such as recognition of only one-sided risks and skewed 

media coverage—apply here. 
117 CHILDREN’S BUREAU, U.S. DEP’T OF HEALTH & HUM. SERVS., DIFFERENTIAL 

RESPONSE: A PRIMER FOR CHILD WELFARE PROFESSIONALS 1–2 (Oct. 2020), https://www. 

childwelfare.gov/pubPDFs/differential_response.pdf [https://perma.cc/QE8A-MEER]. 
118 Differential Response in Child Protective Services: Analysis of State Legislative 

Provisions, NAT‘L CONF. OF STATE LEG. (Dec. 15, 2019), https://www.ncsl.org/research/ 

human-services/state-legislation-differential-response.aspx [https://perma.cc/PP9G-Z6UD]. 
119 Id.  
120 See Cynthia Godsoe, Symposium, Just Intervention: Differential Response in 

Child Protection, 21 J. L. & POL’Y 73, 75–77 (2012) [hereinafter Godsoe, Just Intervention]. 
121 Id. at 82. 
122 Most reports on families lead to no assistance. For instance, in California, 

ninety-two percent of reports of maltreatment were closed after initial contact by CPS staff, 

with no services provided to the families, yet many of these families were re-reported shortly 

afterwards. Sofya Bagdasaryan et al., Implementation of California’s Differential Response 

Model in Small Counties, 23 PROTECTING CHILD., 40, 41 (2008). 
123 N.Y. STATE CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES MANUAL ch. 5, § D-1 (N.Y. OFF. OF 

CHILD. & FAM. SERVS. 2022) [hereinafter NYS CPS MANUAL] (providing guidance on the 

conduct of family assessments). 
124 Id. The recent case of Ms. M., whose newborn was removed by numerous police 

officers and child protective specialists at 3:00am, highlights the use of police to weaponize 

the family policing system. Although the Administration for Children’s Services’ own 

guidelines state, “Defensive and angry behaviors towards child welfare workers or others 

can be a normal reaction to a stressful situation,” Ms. M.’s reaction to the removal of her 

infant in the middle of the night unfairly became characterized as “imminent risk of harm.” 



620 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 12:601 

reflected in parents’ reactions. As one put it: “My caseworker was awesome. 

She saw that I wasn’t a bad mother. I just needed a little help to get back 

on the right track. And I love her for that.”125 Workers recognize the change 

too: “Families don’t believe you are actually going to help them. And when 

you do, they are flabbergasted.”126  

In theory, DR programs focus on the family’s strengths and on 

“solutions to the family’s needs” rather than on whether there was 

maltreatment and who is responsible.127 Instead of an approach where the 

caseworker mandates services—or goes to court to have them ordered—the 

agency and parents develop solutions together. States vary widely in their 

criteria, although none include physical or sexual abuse cases in their 

differential responses. The most common types of cases on DR’s alternative 

track are educational neglect, lack of supervision, and other more minor 

neglect cases.128 Even where the law allows for a wide range of cases to go 

through DR, localities or individual workers usually underutilize it.129  

Virtually all the research on existing programs shows that DR 

systems are very effective, both in increasing family satisfaction and in 

improving safety rates for children; there are also far fewer traumatic 

interventions such as child removals and family separation.130 Researchers 

noted two key points: more material resources provided to families, and 

greater respect accorded to parents.131 Studies have overwhelmingly found 

that families in the DR track felt more listened to, helped, and generally 

positive about their experience with the agency.132 The research on the key 

issue of re-report rates also favors DR, although one or two local studies 

 
N.Y.C. ADMIN. FOR CHILD. SERVS., PRINCIPLES TO INFORM CHILD WELFARE DECISION-

MAKING REGARDING MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES 1–2 (2013). 
125 Godsoe, Just Intervention, supra note 120, at 85 (quoting an Ohio parent). 
126 Id. at 86 (quoting a caseworker who was interviewed in a Nevada study, GARY 

L. SIEGEL ET AL., INST. OF APPLIED RSCH., DIFFERENTIAL RESPONSE IN NEVADA: FINAL 

EVALUATION REPORT (2010)). 
127 See, e.g., NYS CPS MANUAL ch. 5, supra note 123, at A-2. Guidance also specifies 

that “solutions are different than services and more than referrals.” Id. at D-6. 
128 Godsoe, Just Intervention, supra note 120, at 79. 
129 For instance, New York state allows this track for all neglect cases, other than 

severe neglect, but most localities use it only for a narrow category of the least serious cases, 

such as educational neglect. See NYS CPS MANUAL ch. 5, supra note 123, at B-1–B-3 (setting 

forth restrictions on the eligibility for differential response). 
130 The most comprehensive study found DR to be successful on all fronts. JOHN D. 

FLUKE ET AL., OFF. OF THE ASSISTANT SEC’Y FOR PLAN. & EVALUATION, U.S. DEP’T OF 

HEALTH & HUM. SERVS., DIFFERENTIAL RESPONSE AND THE SAFETY OF CHILDREN REPORTED 

TO CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES: A TALE OF SIX STATES (2016), https://aspe. 

hhs.gov/system/files/pdf/204981/DifferentialResponse.pdf [https://perma.cc/L28E-SWQS] 

[hereinafter DIFFERENTIAL RESPONSE REPORT] (using data from the National Child Abuse 

and Neglect Data System (NCANDS) for six states using DR from 2004 to 2013). See also 

Godsoe, Just Intervention, supra note 120, at 82 (also reporting increased caseworker 

satisfaction in DR programs). 
131 See, e.g., L. Anthony Loman & Gary L. Siegel, Effects of Approach and Services 

Under Differential Response on Long Term Child Safety and Welfare, 39 CHILD ABUSE & 

NEGLECT 86, 91–96 (2015) (discussing empirical findings on the “shift[ ] toward material 

services to more families” and “changes in approach” in services, from a study on the 

implementation of DR program reforms in ten Ohio counties). 
132 See Godsoe, Just Intervention, supra note 120, at 82, 85–87 (findings from 

numerous state-level studies). 



2022] DIVEST, INVEST, & MUTUAL AID 621 

indicate slightly higher re-referral rates for DR families.133 Like the use of 

arrests to measure recidivism rates, the metric of re-reporting itself is 

flawed in measuring risk of maltreatment.134  

More significantly, opposition to DR is usually driven not by data 

but by political opposition to change. Given their empirical success and 

cost-effectiveness, one would think that DR programs would be expanding. 

This is unfortunately not the case. The pathological politics of the family 

policing system have instead led to doubling-down on the ineffective and 

harmful status quo. Indeed, states are using DR less frequently than they 

were even a few years ago. To cite just two examples, Minnesota, the state 

that had most widely and effectively used DR, rolled back its program 

considerably, and a New York county discontinued its program 

altogether.135 As in other locations, these programs were shrunk or stopped 

altogether after high-profile and very unusual child fatalities, with tenuous 

if any connection to DR, as well as political pressure to reserve all the 

funding for the traditional family policing system.136  

In criminal law, this focus on extreme outlier examples is termed 

the “Willie Horton” effect, because an entire successful furlough program 

was upended (and likely a Presidential election lost) because one of the 

thousands of participants committed a violent crime post-release. 

Government officials used that tragic event to overlook the evidence that 

the hundreds of other participants in the program were very successful.137 

Family policing agencies are likely even more publicity-shy and skewed 

towards the risk of wrongful separation.138 Revealing their vested interest 

in keeping the machine of family policing running, some researchers and 

agencies switched the baseline to argue that differential response had to 

be proven much more effective than the current system in order to justify 

 
133 See DIFFERENTIAL RESPONSE REPORT, supra note 130, at 5–8 (presenting data 

on re-report rates across DR utilization in six states, and finding no association with 

increased risk of re-reporting). 
134 See id. at 5 (explaining that child safety is “difficult to capture” and cautioning 

that “interpretation of re-reporting is confounded by many systemic factors”); cf. Anna 

Roberts, Arrests as Guilt, 70 ALA. L. REV. 987, 1000–07 (2019) (problematizing the use of 

“rearrest as a proxy for recidivism” and the underlying use of arrest as “equivalent to guilt”). 
135 Mark Hudson, Minnesota’s Experience with Differential Response, 28 APSAC 

ADVISOR 15, 15–16 (2016); David Thompson, Putting Differential Response Into Perspective, 

THE IMPRINT (Nov. 2, 2014, 7:43 PM), https://imprintnews.org/child-welfare-2/putting-

differential-response-into-perspective/8453 [https://perma.cc/3MFJ-UPQ9]; Monroe County 

Ends Use of Alternative Child Protective Services Program, WHAM (June 21, 2018), 

https://13wham.com/news/local/monroe-county-ends-use-of-child-protective-services-

program [https://perma.cc/52E7-VMSZ]. 
136 Monroe County Ends Use of Alternative Child Protective Services Program, supra 

note 135; see also Elizabeth Bartholet, Differential Response: A Dangerous Experiment in 

Child Welfare, 42 FLA. STATE U. L. REV. 573, 598 (2015) (critiquing DR for taking funding 

from regular track and listing nine states that recently limited or eliminated DR on the basis 

of funding tradeoffs or in response to a high-profile child fatality only tangentially linked to 

DR). 
137 John Pfaff, The Never-Ending ‘Willie Horton Effect’ Is Keeping Prisons Too Full 

for America’s Good, L.A. TIMES (May 14, 2017), https://web.archive.org/web/20220601 

173015/https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-pfaff-why-prison-reform-isnt-working-

20170514-story.html (discussing the “Willie Horton” effect). 

https://web.archive.org/web/20220601173015/https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-

pfaff-why-prison-reform-isnt-working-20170514-story.html 
138 Godsoe, Abolitionist Horizon for Child Welfare, supra note 5. 



622 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 12:601 

using it even for some small number of cases.139 This argument, however 

ignores the elephant in the room: there is no evidence that the current 

system keeps kids safe. In fact, the trauma of family investigation and 

separation, and the terrible outcomes from foster care, show that the 

system is harming children, families, and entire communities.140  

When DR is used, it is inevitably set up for failure, since it is 

severely underfunded and implemented as an arm of the punitive family 

regulation system, rather than an independent path for families. First, the 

entry point is almost always a report of maltreatment.141 Second, 

participation is usually not fully voluntary, but rather court-mandated 

and/or overseen by family policing system personnel.142 This can be net-

widening, particularly in states where families who do not qualify for 

general system involvement are included in DR. Third, many states 

provide no services, only referrals, or limit services to a very short-term 

period of two to three months, although the challenges and poverty facing 

these families are not solvable in sixty days.143 Finally, the history and 

culture of family policing agencies do not seem to allow for a truly 

alternative track. The dual-mission agency problem is well-documented in 

administrative law literature.144 Differential response can only succeed if 

it is administered through community-based organizations, separate from 

the family policing system. No state has done this.145 

3. The Fundamental Shortcomings of Reformist Reforms 

In abolitionist theory, all reforms must be assessed against the 

horizon of dismantling the carceral state (transformative or abolitionist 

reforms), rather than inadvertently empowering it (reformist reforms). As 

Mariame Kaba explains in the context of policing, “[T]he only way that we 

will address oppressive policing is to abolish the police. Therefore, all of the 

‘reforms’ that focus on strengthening the police or ‘morphing’ policing into 

 
139 See, e.g., Bartholet, supra note 136, at 628 (comparing re-report rates to 

denounce alternative response); Thompson, supra note 135, at 22 (comparing re-report rates 

to conclude that DR implementation “did not result in better child safety outcomes”); Ronald 

C. Hughes et al., Issues in Differential Response, 23 RSCH. ON SOC. WORK PRAC. 493, 502 

(2013) (critiquing multiple studies on DR, and arguing that even “lower observed recurrence 

rates in [alternative response] families may not be a meaningful measure of the effectiveness 

of the AR program in ensuring children’s safety”). 
140 Critics also pointed out methodological characteristics of the DR research that 

are essentially true of all social work research. See Alberta J. Ellett, Timely and Needed 

Perspectives on Differential Response in Child Protective Services, 23 RSCH. ON SOC. WORK 

PRAC. 521, 522 (2013) (making this point against DR critics). 
141 Godsoe, Just Intervention, supra note 120, at 88.  
142 See, e.g., Hudson, supra note 135, at 16 (noting that both tracks—alternative 

and traditional—are involuntary child protection responses); NYS CPS MANUAL ch. 5, supra 

note 123, at G-1 (advising caseworkers faced with “uncooperative” families after just one 

week, with no full assessment, to make a new report of maltreatment on the traditional 

track). 
143 See, e.g., NYS CPS MANUAL ch. 5, supra note 123, at D-7 (advising workers who 

believe the family has ongoing needs at the end of the case to give the family “information 

regarding available services in their community”); see also Bartholet, supra note 136 

(describing the financial stipends provided by DR programs as “pathetically limited”); 

Hudson, supra note 135, at 16 (noting that most children and families in the Minnesota DR 

track were offered no services). 
144 Godsoe, Just Intervention, supra note 120, at 88–92. 
145 Id.  



2022] DIVEST, INVEST, & MUTUAL AID 623 

something more invisible but still as deadly should be opposed.”146 These 

include measures to increase police budgets to monitor police malfeasance 

and develop diversion programs that are ultimately controlled by law 

enforcement. In contrast, abolitionist steps reduce the funding and scope 

of policing by, for instance, capping overtime pay, refusing to re-hire police 

involved in excessive force, and, most of all, using police funding for other 

social goods such as housing and education.147  

Reformist reforms, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore famously termed them, 

can be worse than no change because they entrench and further legitimate 

the existing system under new cover.148 By obscuring the true nature of 

fundamentally unjust and flawed institutions—be it the police, the family 

policing system, or the neo-liberal capitalist state—reformist reforms help 

to reinvent and perpetuate these institutions and the concomitant 

hierarchies of race and class.149 In contrast to reformist reforms, truly 

transformative changes modify power relations and yield greater self-

determination for marginalized communities.150 Thus, they are developed 

bottom-up, rather than formulated by elites, and they directly involve 

struggle—just like mutual aid.  

Both preventive services and differential response, in their current 

iterations, are reformist reforms that further entrench the system as the 

primary state intervention to “protect” children. They likely net-widen to 

include more families. More broadly, they legitimate the system by dividing 

families into “worthy” and “unworthy” ones, obscuring the structural 

causes of family poverty and other struggles, and further perpetuating the 

false narrative of individual wrongdoing. Drawing on concerns about police 

reforms, we conclude that slight improvements to the family policing 

system may similarly “smooth out the wheels of injustice” and render less 

visible the inherent brute force of the institution, thus prolonging its 

existence.151  

C. Invest in Community-Led Mutual Aid 

A mutual aid model has great potential to successfully support 

families. Although research on the model in a family policing system is 

limited, the research there is supports this view. One study, out of Canada, 

found that the parents in a mutual aid group “showed positive gains over 

 
146 Mariame Kaba, Police “Reforms” You Should Always Oppose, TRUTHOUT (Dec. 7, 

2014), https://truthout.org/articles/police-reforms-you-should-always-oppose/ [https://perma. 

cc/JN2B-HPRL].  
147 Reformist Reforms vs. Abolitionist Steps in Policing, CRITICAL RESISTANCE, 

https://criticalresistance.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/CR_NoCops_abolitionistreforms. 

pdf [https://perma.cc/Q8YP-CEVH]. 
148 GILMORE, supra note 10, at 23, 242. 
149 Rachel Herzing, Let’s Reduce, Not Reform, Policing in America, OPEN SOC’Y 

FOUND. (Oct. 6, 2016), https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/let-s-reduce-not-

reform-policing-america [https://perma.cc/SRM8-U9T8] (describing the hierarchical 

relations enforced through policing).  
150 See Amna A. Akbar, Demands for A Democratic Political Economy, 134 HARV. L. 

REV. F. 90, 97–98 (2020) (introducing “non-reformist reform” as a heuristic for grassroots 

social movements’ “bottom-up project” of democratic transformation and self-determination).  
151 Raj Jayadev & Pilar Weiss, Organizing Towards A New Vision of Community 

Justice, L. & POL. ECON. BLOG (May 9, 2019), https://lpeproject.org/blog/organizing-towards-

a-new-vision-of-community-justice/ [https://perma.cc/63VV-J3RX]. 



624 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 12:601 

the evaluation time period that were not apparent for the comparison 

group members receiving regular child welfare services.”152 The evidence 

from DR, as well as research on violence prevention and community health 

more broadly, further support the conclusion that unstigmatized universal 

support, particularly economic support, for communities would increase 

child wellbeing and family stability far more than the current system 

does.153 On this point, sociologist Patrick Sharkey’s research demonstrates 

that building up community resources and social infrastructure, such as 

local non-profits, can address even violent crime “at least as effective[ly] as 

the police” and with far fewer costs.154 Accordingly, he calls for 

“investments in a different set of institutions [than law enforcement and 

the criminal system] driven by residents and local organizations that can 

play a central role in creating safe streets and strong communities.”155 

Relatedly, Vivek Sankaran, who represents parents in Michigan, describes 

the false narrative “that CPS has the tools to support families in crisis” and 

calls for agencies to “reimagine” how they serve families by providing, for 

instance, rental aid and food.156 Given the strong correlation between 

family struggles and a lack of resources, a mutual aid model that increases 

community infrastructure without stigma or surveillance would likely 

bring very beneficial results. 

Beyond the research, we know from families themselves that 

material aid and resources are what they most need, and that they and 

their communities know best how to safely care for their children.157 It not 

only provides essential material services, but also brings about 

destigmatized, bottom-up change that gives agency to the families most 

impacted by the system. Mutual aid does this by “practic[ing] non-

hierarchy, positioning recipients as members of the project––with a goal of 

 
152 Gary Cameron & Shelly Birnie-Lefcovitch, Parent Mutual Aid Organizations in 

Child Welfare Demonstration Project: A Report of Outcomes, 22 CHILD. & YOUTH SERVS. REV. 

421, 421–22 (2000).  
153 See, e.g., Godsoe, Place of the Prosecutor, supra note 108 (summarizing research 

on violence prevention). 
154 See Roge Karma, How Cities Can Tackle Violent Crime Without Relying on 

Police, VOX (Aug. 7, 2020), https://www.vox.com/21351442/patrick-sharkey-uneasy-peace-

abolish-defund-the-police-violence-cities [https://perma.cc/6LF7-Y8JV] (in conversation with 

Sharkey, who references violence reduction outcomes gleaned from his own study on the 

expansion of the nonprofit sector, and from other studies on programs focused on transitional 

employment and public space).  
155 Id.  
156 Vivek Sankaran, Redesigning Child Welfare Agencies to Address the Concrete 

Needs of Families, RETHINKING FOSTER CARE (Sept. 23, 2020), http://rethinkingfostercare. 

blogspot.com/2020/09/redesigning-child-welfare-agencies-to.html [https://perma.cc/FKY9-

3KCR]. Sankaran has also observed, for example, that a Michigan state program that 

provided civil legal services to families to prevent CPS involvement was very successful until 

defunded. E-mail from Vivek S. Sankaran, Clinical Professor of Law, Univ. of Mich. Law 

Sch., to co-author (Feb. 12, 2021) (on file with authors). 
157 See supra notes 39–40, 93, 102, 105 and accompanying text; Rise & Takeroot 

Just., An Unavoidable System, supra note 39, at 6. See also Ashley Albert et al., Ending the 

Family Death Penalty and Building A World We Deserve, 11 COLUM. J. RACE & L. 861, 869 

(2021) (“We demand a world where the integrity of all families is valued and family ancestry 

is held sacred. In this world, families are supported and given the resources they need to 

thrive, and the family death penalty, or termination of parental rights, no longer exists.”); 

Wald, supra note 12, at 16 (noting that agencies do not provide the treatment programs, 

housing, or economic aid “needed by most families”). 



2022] DIVEST, INVEST, & MUTUAL AID 625 

self-determination.”158 In the context of abolishing the family policing 

system, mutual aid reduces forced reliance on punitive state institutions 

by providing families and communities with autonomy. As the upEND and 

parent-led movements tell us, “safety and protection of children [rest] with 

families and communities first.”159 Instead of stigma, surveillance, and 

removal, parents should be lifted up; we should recognize their expertise 

and engage together in work as “community guardians.”160 The egalitarian 

and grassroots mutual aid framework decenters professionals, such as 

social workers and lawyers. Rather, it builds on the collective expertise and 

reciprocal aid of people in our communities.161  

One local program illustrates the promising potential of building on 

community expertise and local harm prevention infrastructure. The Bay 

Area Transformative Justice Collective addresses more serious physical 

and sexual abuse, rather than the much more widespread and poverty-

related neglect.162 The organizing model centers on families’ chosen “pods” 

of support, correctly positing that many survivors, particularly in 

marginalized communities, “turn to their intimate networks before . . . 

state or social services.”163 Empowering these pods to build prevention 

infrastructures aids both in individual cases and systemic change. 

 
158 Tammy Gan, Mutual Aid: Non-Hierarchy in Practice, BAD ACTIVIST 

COLLECTIVE, https://www.badactivistcollective.com/the-bad-book/mutual-aid-non-hierarchy 

[https://perma.cc/M6X2-TLNF]. 
159 The upEND movement seeks to end the “child welfare system” and reimagine a 

new, anti-racist means of helping children, families, and communities thrive by redirecting 

resources to the communities themselves. Alan J. Dettlaff et. al., It is Not a Broken System, 

It is a System that Needs to be Broken: The UPEND Movement to Abolish the Child Welfare 

System, 14 J. PUB. CHILD WELFARE 500, 508–11 (2020). 
160 See NORRIS, supra note 97, at 95 (positing community involvement in public 

safety as a remedy to the current “too narrow view of how community members can engage 

. . . and too broad a view of the role [state punitive authorities] should play”). 
161 The participatory defense movement provides an analogous example of 

recognizing on-the-ground community expertise instead of relying on professionals. See 

Godsoe, Participatory Defense, supra note 95, at 719–20 (introducing participatory defense 

as a “grass-roots movement”); Jocelyn Simonson, Essay, The Place of “The People” in 

Criminal Procedure, 119 COLUM. L. REV. 249, 266–70 (2019) (explicating participatory 

defense, whereby “community groups join together with families, friends, neighbors, and 

allies of defendants” to build a defendant’s criminal case, as an example of “bottom-up 

agonistic participation” that decenters legal expertise). Broader community self-defense 

movements do so as well, by embodying the concept that “we keep us safe,” i.e. that true 

public safety comes from support systems for families and communities, who can also work 

together against violence and other harms through restorative justice and investments in 

resources like healthcare and housing, education and living-wage jobs, rather than top-down 

carceral interventions. Mariame Kaba, Free Us All: Participatory Defense Campaigns as 

Abolitionist Organizing, NEW INQUIRY (May 8, 2017), https://thenewinquiry.com/free-us-all/ 

[https://perma.cc/263A-S63W] (describing local and mass self-defense campaigns in relation 

to abolition). 
162 See Jacobs et al., supra note 108, at 48–49 (detailing the Bay Area 

Transformative Justice Collective’s commitment to “restorative justice interventions to child 

sexual abuse and other related forms of interpersonal violence”). 
163 Id. at 48. Pods, or localized support groups, are a key mutual aid component. See 

MUTUAL AID DISASTER RELIEF, MUTUAL AID 101: #WEGOTOURBLOCK, https:// 

mutualaiddisasterrelief.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NO-LOGOS-Mutual-Aid-101_-

Toolkit.pdf [https://perma.cc/H4MF-MDBU] [hereinafter MUTUAL AID TOOLKIT] (presenting 

a toolkit that includes steps for building a neighborhood pod). 



626 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 12:601 

D. The Challenges of the Mutual Aid Model 

There are several challenges to implementing a mutual aid 

framework in the family regulation context, both practical and political. 

One challenge lies in scaling up existing mutual aid models and, in 

particular, working in (arms-length?) collaboration with state programs. 

The mutual aid model is inherently local, but community-based mutual aid 

needs funding to expand.164 To remain local and to not be overwhelmed, it 

should be accompanied by a government social safety net that is truly 

“child protective.” Both an adequately-funded social safety net and a robust 

community-led mutual aid network are key components of family health 

and safety. In the United States, however, the social safety net has always 

been underfunded.  

The extent to which to collaborate with governments at any stage 

is a difficult question for all abolitionist organizing. This is especially so for 

a mutual aid model of organizing which has been theorized as outside or 

even anti-government. Tellingly, even those politicians advocating for 

mutual aid, such as progressive U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-

Cortez, discuss a fully volunteer program, necessitated by ongoing 

government failure.165 There have, however, been some initiatives that 

could be broadly conceptualized as mutual aid with government support, 

both in the further and more recent past. For instance, working-class Black 

women in the South collaborated with the federal government agency Child 

Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) to found the child care and 

parental support program that became Head Start in the 1960s.166 Rather 

than letting it be stigmatized as a state “handout,” the women were actively 

engaged in mobilizing their community around this new program.167 Some 

were also employed as child care workers and teachers, harnessing their 

community expertise and increasing their financial stability.168 

However, these programs are rare, in part because they are at 

constant risk of being defunded or co-opted. Head Start was defunded due 

to backlash by state and local segregationists.169 Co-optation is perhaps a 

 
164 SPADE, MUTUAL AID: BUILDING SOLIDARITY, supra note 54, at 32–34 (discussing 

the meaning of “scaling up” mutual aid). Analogously, as Michael Wald points out, scaling 

up successful family-support programs is always a challenge due to their contextual and 

intensive character. Wald, supra note 12, at 23. 
165 MUTUAL AID TOOLKIT, supra note 163, at 1 (referring to a public discussion 

between Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and organizer Mariame Kaba, calling for 

“community building and resource sharing” in a mutual aid response to the COVID 

pandemic); see also Jia Tolentino, What Mutual Aid Can Do During a Pandemic, NEW 

YORKER (May 11, 2020), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/what-mutual-

aid-can-do-during-a-pandemic [https://perma.cc/RL59-6XBQ] (quoting Representative 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in stating that mutual aid would not wait for “Congress to pass a 

bill, or the President to do something”). 
166 See CRYSTAL R. SANDERS, A CHANCE FOR CHANGE: HEAD START AND 

MISSISSIPPI’S BLACK FREEDOM STRUGGLE 3–10 (Waldo E. Martin Jr. & Patricia Sullivan, 

eds., 2016) (introducing the dynamics of local working class Black Mississippian women ’s 

involvement in “the CDGM ‘communigarten’ program”).  
167 Id. 
168 Id. 
169 Id. at 152–62 (delineating the segregationist opposition, defunding, and 

replacement of Head Start); Remembering Head Start History: Mississippi, 1966, NAT’L 

HEAD START ASS’N (Feb. 8, 2021), https://natlheadstart.medium.com/remembering-head-

start-history-mississippi-1966-e71dc62b552e [https://perma.cc/SFX2-83EY] (noting that 



2022] DIVEST, INVEST, & MUTUAL AID 627 

more significant risk. This is what happened to the Black Panther’s 

breakfast clubs. They were co-opted by the Department of Agriculture 

through its School Breakfast program, which continues today.170 This is not 

a wholly negative development, as more children are fed,171 but the 

government program comes with significant strings attached. It is usually 

administered in schools, includes the participation of mandated reporters, 

and carries stigma as a handout.172 Moreover, it does not come with the 

organizing and solidarity that are key to a mutual aid framework.173 The 

government has made sure to thwart any efforts at community building 

and mobilization from the inception of the government-run version of the 

program.174  

The big question is: will there ever be government-provided 

material support for families without punitive surveillance and stigma? 

Political history says no. Nevertheless, we are now at an extraordinary 

inflection moment. The pandemic has brought unprecedented recognitions 

of racist state violence and social inequality. This has increased public 

backing of state support for families, including—for the first time ever in 

American history—a universal child allowance.175 

Although mutual aid has helped those whom the state leaves out or 

punishes, it should not be on communities alone to support their children. 

Accordingly, we propose divesting state funds from the family regulation-

to-foster care apparatus, and investing instead in marginalized 

communities’ infrastructure and health. As the #DefundPolice movement 

puts it: “Fully invest in care, not cops [including] allocat[ing] city funding 

toward healthcare . . . neighborhood-based trauma centers, non-coercive 

 
Head Start “challenged the status quo, disrupted the white power structures that were in 

place, and the political pressure to defund it mounted”). 
170 Blakemore, supra note 72; Potorti, supra note 74, at 90, 108. 
171 Blakemore, supra note 72; see also SPADE, MUTUAL AID: BUILDING SOLIDARITY, 

supra note 54, at 13–14, 29–31 (suggesting that the Department of Agriculture’s free 

breakfast program, as a co-optation and expansion of the Black Panther Party program, 

could also be seen as a “concession [that] might also provide support to many more people 

than mutual aid groups can reach”).  
172 See, e.g., Bettina Elias Siegel, Shaming Children so Parents Will Pay the School 

Lunch Bill, N.Y. Times (Apr. 30, 2017), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/30/well/family/ 

lunch-shaming-children-parents-school-bills.html [https://perma.cc/8BD5-K92X] (citing the 

Department of Agriculture’s finding that almost half of all school districts withheld food from 

children, shaming them and their families over “unpaid bill[s]”); Potorti, supra note 74, at 

90–91 (detailing problems with the various federal food aid programs administered by the 

government in the 1960s). 
173 SPADE, MUTUAL AID: BUILDING SOLIDARITY, supra note 54, at 31–34 (contrasting 

locally run mutual aid frameworks with governmental initiatives that “centraliz[e] and 

standardiz[e]”).  
174 See, e.g., Potorti, supra note 74, at 90–91, 98–99 (examining the federal 

government’s endeavors to suppress the Black Panthers’ breakfast program, at the same 

time that the Department of Agriculture was piloting its own limited food programs). 
175 Steve Dean & Cynthia Godsoe, It’s Time for an Antiracist Welfare Policy, 

IMPRINT (Mar. 15, 2021), https://imprintnews.org/child-welfare-2/time-for-an-antiracist-

welfare-policy-america/52691 [https://perma.cc/XT2F-FCZG]. At the same time, it was not 

renewed for a second year, in the one-step forward, two-steps back, or two-steps forward, 

one-step back, path to change that is so central to the American approach to societal 

problems. Deepa Shivaram, Families Are in Distress After the First Month Without the 

Expanded Child Tax Credit’t, NPR (Jan. 21, 2022), https://www.npr.org/2022/01/21/10744 

13273/end-expanded-child-tax-credit-families-effects [https://perma.cc/7LMX-6RMG]. 



628 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 12:601 

drug and alcohol treatment . . . teachers and counselors, universal 

childcare[.]”176 Similarly, diverting billions of dollars from foster care and 

family court into food, housing, and cash grants would do far more to keep 

children safe and healthy, while saving families from the trauma of the 

current system. Investments should be made in a social safety net and, 

most importantly, grassroots community-based organizations. The 

structural investment that states can provide is as important as the mutual 

aid that people build, in enhancing community dignity and self-governance. 

This combination is essential so that “those most impacted [can] control . . 

. the laws, the institutions, and policies that are meant to serve [the 

people].”177 

IV. CONCLUSION 

We strive to use this time, of both heightened awareness of and 

creative struggle against the over-policing of families of color, to propose a 

mutual aid model that truly empowers and supports families within a 

reimagined system of state interaction. As abolitionist leader Mariame 

Kaba points out, such a “change in society won’t happen immediately, but 

the protests show that many people are ready to embrace a different vision 

of safety and justice.”178 America must radically reimagine child welfare 

under this vision of safety and justice for families. Working towards 

abolition, the proposed mutual aid model moves away from the current 

system’s appetite for stigmatization and extreme social control of families 

of color. This model divests from family policing and foster care and invests 

in community-led mutual aid. It calls for providing public funds directly to 

families for basic necessities and asking families what they truly need, 

rather than surveilling families through costly and harmful means.  

The history of mutual aid and the recent resurgence of mutual aid 

efforts in times of crisis, including the global health pandemic, demonstrate 

the power of providing such support to families without the stigma. 

Collaborating with the government for funding and assistance presents 

challenges and concerns for abolitionists, but this paper seeks to show the 

promise of such efforts until abolition. While we strive to eventually abolish 

the system, it is crucial to remember that it is a process. Some work with 

state agencies may be a short-term step, but we accept that work while 

always keeping an abolitionist horizon in view. Most importantly, 

“abolition is not about simply ending the family policing system, nor is it 

about ignoring child safety; it is about creating the conditions in society 

 
176 8 TO ABOLITION, ABOLITIONIST POLICY CHANGES TO DEMAND FROM YOUR CITY 

OFFICIALS 4 (2021), https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5edbf321b6026b073fef97d4/t/5ee0 

817c955eaa484011b8fe/1591771519433/8toAbolition_V2.pdf [https://perma.cc/6EWH-

XWP5].  
177 Community Control, MOVEMENT FOR BLACK LIVES (Feb. 21, 2021), 

https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/community-control/ [https://perma.cc/AW89-5QXY]. 
178 Mariame Kaba, Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police: Because Reform Won’t 

Happen, N.Y. TIMES (June 12, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/ 

floyd-abolish-defund-police.html [https://perma.cc/ZF6A-WTQS].  



2022] DIVEST, INVEST, & MUTUAL AID 629 

where the need for family policing is obsolete.”179 It is this radical cultural 

shift that government-supported mutual aid efforts will help encourage.180 

 

 
179 ALAN DETTLAFF ET AL., HOW WE ENDUP A FUTURE WITHOUT FAMILY POLICING 

5 (2021), http://upendmovement.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/How-We-endUP-6.18.21. 

pdf [https://perma.cc/E4NQ-HCPZ]. 
180 Id. 


	I.  Family Policing is Harmful, Racist, and Punishes Poverty
	A. Family Policing is Harmful to Children and their Families
	B. Family Policing is Racist
	C. Family Policing Punishes Poverty
	D. Child Safety Requires Material Investment in Marginalized Families

	II.  Mutual Aid Provides a Model that has been Historically Empowering and Helpful to Marginalized Communities
	A. What is Mutual Aid?
	B. Historical Use of Mutual Aid by Marginalized Communities
	C. Recent Resurgence of Mutual Aid Efforts

	III.  Divest From Family Policing and Invest in Community-Led Mutual Aid
	A. Divest
	B. Avoid Reformist Reforms of Prevention & Differential Response
	1. Prevention
	2. Differential Response
	3. The Fundamental Shortcomings of Reformist Reforms

	C. Invest in Community-Led Mutual Aid
	D. The Challenges of the Mutual Aid Model

	IV.  Conclusion