#carceral child welfare

[boof-chamber]

pineapple says if ya got a few bones and you’ll be ok without ‘em, she’d be ever so glad if you’d kick ‘em over to our friend, Dolly.

CA: babymamashark

VMO: f0rbidden_pets

(the 0 in f0rbidden is a zero)

they are a disabled parent, recently displaced from their home. they and their kid have day to day requirements like food and medication, while also needing to come up with enough to move into safe & stable housing

they also have educational requirements that they need fulfilled before the carceral child “protection” system involves itself

[mswyrr]

things that would help reduce the impact of domestic violence in the US:

-affordable housing

-higher minimum wage

-Medicare for All

-no cost and low cost quality child care

-affordable access to quality mental health/addiction services

-a solid UBI and/or quality social welfare programs*

-comprehensive, age appropriate sex ed throughout school that includes info about recognizing issues in relationships, raising problems with friends and family in productive ways, getting help from available resources, and supporting someone who is being abused

-reforming/transforming the "justice system," with an emphasis on non-punitive support vs carceral solutions

things that don't even make the top 20:

-harassing women and other folks on the internet for their taste in love stories and erotica

-demanding all love stories, because they're overwhelmingly written and enjoyed by women, be didactic instruction manuals* about how to have perfectly healthy relationships

things that abusers actually use to cover their tracks and silence victims:

-pretending that gay couples don't have similar rates of domestic violence as m/f couples

*advocates warned bill clinton when he "ended welfare as we know it" that it would financially trap people in abusive relationships. he didn't care.

**even perfectly normal, psychologically "healthy" relationships with accurate levels of conflict and issues are being treated like they're "harmful" and "toxic" especially if they're f/f

[atthebell]

(in reference to an ask you sent etoilesbienne just for clarification lmao)

actually I love to see you point out how some people were talking about karma during happy pills arc cause it makes me so relieved to know that I'm not the only one who was bothered by it and that it possibly wasn't just because I'm a forever main 💀

LIKE- Hot takes guys, but maybe NO ONE DESERVES TO BE FORCED ON DRUGS nor HAVE THEIR KID DISAPPEAR just because they come off as mean when they talked about a mom who was grieving? like sure disagree with forevers actions towards Jaiden all you want (cause I too think forever was in the wrong when it came about her house, although I do understand his justification and the place he was coming from) but like. let's not say someone deserved to be forced on drugs and have their kid disappear over it???? specially cause richas wasn't the only egg who disappeared????

yeah i talked about it at the time because it was actually so fucking rancid that people were saying that but it bears repeating. and also the thing that got me is that forever literally said that what jaiden did with bobby fields freaked him out because he thought he'd react the same way!! he said he was scared of what he would do if he lost richas and that fear made him nervous about jaiden and nervous for himself. like, i don't think he was as kind about it as he could have been, but that doesn't make the loss of richas like. a divine retribution. it makes it a tragedy, one that NO ONE FUCKING DESERVES. again, like i said, keep your freak christian morality out of my minecraft roleplay. there is no world in which someone's just punishment is being forcibly drugged and having their child taken away.

and yeah richas was not the only egg taken, which was ALSO PART OF WHY FOREVER LOST HIS SHIT! like he felt responsible for ALL the eggs, because of NINHO and because of the presidency. that's not really related to the karma thing i think people just neglect to realize how much forever has on his shoulders and how much he actually cares about everyones welfare and especially that of the eggs. everyone is so hung up on 4halo having pissing contests over voting systems that they forget that forever works his ass off for the presidency and he does it because he gives a shit about everyone on the island and wants to make people happy. like, he didn't run because of a power trip or whatever. he ran because he genuinely had a lot of ideas for what to do with the server and thought he would make a good leader. sorry lost the point of this post i just get annoyed when people completely mischaracterize forever because they think he's like power hungry or whatever, and it happens a lot on here even though i acknowledge twitter is a slightly different beast.

anyway yeah i genuinely cannot fathom looking at that kind of grief and deciding that actually that's morally fair. like, okay, i hope you understand what kind of carceral bullshit that sounds like. and yeah the just punishment for saying some unkind things is being FUCKING DRUGGED AGAINST YOUR WILL AFTER YOUR CHILD WAS KIDNAPPED. like ffs people

[reasoningdaily]

A new paper by Yale researchers finds racial disparities in the use of physical restraints on children who are admitted to the emergency department. Black children are more likely than White children to be subdued with restraints during ED visits, the study finds. Published September 13 in JAMA Pediatrics, the study looked at data from 11 EDs across New England between 2013 and 2020. Their sample included over 551,000 visits of patients ages 0 to 16, in which physical restraints were used 532 times. According to their analysis, Black pediatric patients were 1.8 times more likely to receive a physical restraint than a White patient. Boys were more likely than girls to be restrained. The results mirror those in another Yale-led study that looked at the use of restraints on adults in the ED, and found that Black males who lacked insurance were more likely than patients of other racial demographics to be physically restrained.

Destiny Tolliver, MD

Study co-author Destiny Tolliver, MD, is a second-year postdoctoral fellow and scholar in the National Clinician Scholars Program (NCSP) at Yale School of Medicine.

When pediatric patients are restrained in the ED, they are typically tied to the bed, the researchers said. It is done “in concern for their safety or others’,” said Destiny G. Tolliver, MD, a second-year postdoctoral fellow and scholar in the National Clinician Scholars Program (NCSP) at Yale, and co-author of the current study. She added, “It can be very traumatic and scary for a child, looking up at all these people who are stopping them from moving.”

According to standard ED protocol, the researchers said, hospital staff are supposed to use de-escalation techniques and only implement physical restraints as a last resort. But the researchers said that systemic bias and racism, including the “adultification” of Black youth, and particularly Black boys, could change the way these children are perceived by nurses, doctors, and other specialists.

Tolliver has devoted her research to the overlap between the healthcare and carceral system.

“When Black children are perceived as adults, they lose the benefit of the doubt that is granted to children, and it increases the perception of threat,” she said.

Co-author Katherine A. Nash, MD, a pediatrics specialist at Yale and former NCSP scholar said adultification bias does not just occur in the ED, but can happen at any stage in the child’s journey to the ED — including at the school and in the ambulance. “And there are other forms of bias for Black boys,” Nash said. “In addition to adultification, we want to understand what else might contributes to bias and racism against Black children in the medical system — for example, the presence of the child welfare system or being brought in by police.”

Similar to the findings in the adult ED study he led, co-author Ambrose Wong, MD, MSEd, MHS, research director and associate fellow director at the Yale Center for Medical Simulation, said these findings “reflect systemic bias of these patients. These kids are labelled as ‘problematic’ and the hospital and health care system reinforces that in the intersection with police.”

When Black children are perceived as adults, they lose the benefit of the doubt that is granted to children, and it increases the perception of threat.

The researchers said that future studies will attempt to uncover the root causes of these bias inequities — where decisions were made in the chain of events leading to a patient’s ED visit that led to the use of restraint, as well as the impact of structural racism — for example disparities in access to outpatient mental health care. “We will be partnering with emergency medical services and with schools to understand where we can intervene and collaborate,” said Nash, adding that she hopes these findings will encourage other institutions to launch their own investigations.

[homonationalist]

This past summer, protests erupted around the nation and the world in response to continued police violence against Black people. The call to defund police and abolish prisons began to make sense to more and more people. The family policing system is part of the same carceral regime. Like the police and prison systems, family policing is designed to maintain racial injustice by punishing families in place of meeting human needs; it targets Black, Brown, and Indigenous families in particular and relies on racist beliefs about family disfunction to justify its terror; and it’s entangled with police, criminal courts, and prisons, forming a coherent carceral machine. As I was drawn to prison abolition, it became clear to me that the movement to abolish police, prisons, and surveillance was profoundly connected to a less visible movement to end family policing.

[...] Prison abolitionists have shown that the pillars of the U.S. criminal punishment system—policing, prisons, and capital punishment—all have roots in racialized chattel slavery. [...] Today, police serve to control Black and other marginalized communities through everyday physical intimidation and by funneling those they arrest into jails, prisons, and detention centers.

[...] We can apply a similar analysis to family policing. The origins of the U.S. child welfare system lie in the forcible separation of enslaved families, the control of emancipated Black children as apprentices to former white enslavers, and removal of Indigenous children as an instrument of tribal genocide. The whole point of the child welfare system has always been to regulate economically- and racially-marginalized communities. These families are targeted precisely because they are marginalized. Their status makes them vulnerable to state intervention because of the way child maltreatment is defined to blame them for the harms to children caused by societal inequities. Family policing helps to keep them in their subordinated status by disrupting their relationships and communities. And, more broadly, family policing implements an approach to child welfare that buttresses an unequal social structure.

Dorothy Roberts from “Strengthened Bonds: Abolishing the Child Welfare System and Re-Envisioning Child Well-Being” (2021)

[salcristina]

So will "social workers"

[womenanddisability]

“Ain’t Nobody About to Trap me”: The Violence of Multi-System Collusion and Entrapment for Incarcerated Disabled Girls of Color

Incarcerated disabled Girls of Color reside and exist within a nexus of systems that continually entrap them through the ongoing use of carceral logics. Utilizing interviews from a larger qualitative study, this article centers the lived experiences of disabled Girls of Color by interrogating the collusive partnerships between schools, child “welfare,” and other related systems in entrapping and criminalizing them. The narratives shared by the incarcerated disabled Girls of Color highlight the role of schools in perpetuating state induced entrapment, how multi-system collusion makes carceral and state-sanctioned protection systems indistinguishable, and showcase the creative ways that Girls of Color resist and subvert confinement and entrapment within carceral apparatuses. Ultimately, this article recognizes how multiple systems are set up to trap incarcerated disabled Girls of Color through collusive relations. However, through forged connections, economies, and the girls’ savvy and ingenuity, their experiences remind us that ‘nobody about to trap’ them fully.

KEYWORDS: 

Education

child welfare

carceral studies

youth prison

disability critical race theory

[thelonguepuree]

Since the police killings this year of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black people, more people have begun to confront the harms of policing, and many are imagining for the first time how police might be abolished altogether. One palatable alternative has emerged: Social workers should collaborate with—or replace—police officers. But many social workers across the country, including Jon, a member of Social Service Workers Uprising Now-NYC, disagree. Networks of radical social workers in New York, Michigan, Illinois, Massachusetts, and elsewhere are organizing in opposition to increased cooperation between their field and police. Social work, they say, already involves law enforcement and can embrace punitive practices that disproportionately harm communities of color. Some in the field wonder what society might look like if, like police, social work in its current form is also dismantled. “You have to understand all of the systems that fail people,” Jon said. “The conversations about how to divest [from the current system] are very complicated because there are those of us who understand what needs to be done and there are those of us who clamp down tighter.” … some in the profession are demanding that NASW [National Association of Social Workers] embrace abolitionist goals instead. In July, Social Service Workers United-Chicago created a petition that was signed by more than 1,700 social workers, students, and clients, and endorsed by groups across the country and internationally. The petition called on NASW to adopt eight demands, including aligning with the 8 to Abolition movement and changing the social work code of ethics to allow for free dissent and criticism of the field. … In an open letter accompanying the petition, SSWU-Chicago wrote that it is time for “a reckoning on how [social work] has created, upheld, and strengthened oppressive systems.” The letter mentions past backlash to dissent within the field, highlighting the case of a Binghamton University student who faced disciplinary action after he put up posters that were critical of the social work department. The SSWU-Chicago criticized social workers’ collaboration with police—an institution it described as racist and violent—and with prisons, jails, court-ordered drug treatment programs, and other systems that they say are in conflict with social work itself.   “If all we do is replace police with social workers without eliminating these carceral aspects of social work, we will simply subject vulnerable people to cops by a different name,” the letter reads. … Social workers already work closely with law enforcement. They regularly treat clients who are being held in prisons and jails, at inpatient psychiatric facilities, and in detention centers. They are also often required by law to collect and report clients’ personal health information, which, in some cases, winds up harming their clients. Reporting in Vox has detailed how migrant children may be encouraged to open up to doctors or social workers, only for those medical and psychological records to be used as evidence in immigration court. … Social workers also point to the child welfare system, a significant employer of social workers, as deeply problematic. For years, Native children were taken from their families and enrolled in boarding schools, where they were forced to give up their languages, clothing, and cultures in an “assimilation” effort. The system also plays an outsize role in Black communities: Black children are overrepresented in foster care and Black parents’ parental rights are terminated at higher rates than their white counterparts. Social work as a field is also predominantly white, and researchers have pointed to an “empathy gap” between providers and their clients who are people of color. Research by Terence Fitzgerald, a clinical associate professor at the University of Southern California, found that white social workers are often not as empathetic toward people of color as they think they are. Also missing from the conversation, radical social workers say, is discussion of how the collective organizing power of practitioners is interconnected with serving their clients—that abolition work goes hand-in-hand with labor organizing. Supporting union representation, fair wages, and manageable caseloads is a way to stand with the clients social workers seek to serve, they say. Many social workers are themselves clients of social services and struggle financially or with mental health issues, or are victims of violence.

Mia Sato, “Social Workers Are Rejecting Calls for Them to Replace Police,” The Appeal, 8/20/2020 (x)

[hexalt]

The Indian Child Welfare Act is under attack, which threatens Native families, Native sovereignty and much more. @NativeChildren helps to protect Native children and keep them connected to their families, community and culture.

On OP’s reservation, Woodland Women is an elder-led group that creates space for mutual support and healing. They hold community talking circles, practice mutual aid, offer free beading classes and share Menominee cultural knowledge. I love these women.

IWRising's initiatives include financial and practical support for Indigenous abortion seekers in the US & Canada, midwifery support & advocacy surrounding repro justice related issues. To donate to their abortion fund

4directionsvote throws down hard to register Native people to vote, to get Native people to the polls, and to fight voter suppression. They’re on the ground in GA right now. These folks have a massive impact. To help keep Native organizers on the ground

@Chi_Nations is a diverse group of Native youth activists who steward the First Nations Garden, which is an important radical Indigenous space here in Chicago

OP’s collective is sponsoring survival stipends for individual Indigenous organizers. Indigenous activists on their list include a traditional birth worker who serves rural communities, a longtime healer and land defender & a Native mother about to be evicted.

Indigenous Justice does a lot of beautiful work supporting the families of MMIW & MMIR, using mutual aid, protest and traditional lifeways as modes of healing. They also work to expose and address disparities in California's carceral system.

[coquelicoq]

"There's the question of soft policing, which I don't think is actually soft. It's really rough and hard. People who are coming out of prison are going through reentry, and one of the things they have to do is pee in a cup the social worker gets. They come up dirty with that particular test, and then they're revoked back into the carceral state. This is policing in the form of probation and parole. We understand other forms of 'soft policing' that involve the 'child welfare protection' system, which is just a law enforcement agency. People think about it as services, but folks from the Movement for Family Power, for example, just put out a new report that helps us to really understand that actually pulling your child away from you is one of the most horrific forms of violence that can be done to a human being. We don't see that as deep policing. [...]

I'm thinking a lot about Liat Ben-Moshe who is also in Chicago, and her book called Decarcerating Disability. And it's all about the way that everybody is now saying, 'Mental health--what we need is a different force that's going to handle mental health.' But what are we really saying there? And what are we trying to handle? And what does that look like for the people who are going to be the targets of this? We have to be thinking about the root of all of these kinds of systems and all of these kinds of ideologies and all these visions in order to be able to get to the world we want."

Mariame Kaba, "'Community Matters. Collectivity Matters.': Interview by Damon Williams and Daniel Kisslinger" in We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice

Original talk was on episode 253 of the AirGo podcast, July 2020

[alivesoul]

What will I remember about foster care??

How everybody gave a fuck about the welfare of my mother’s child but nobody gave a fuck about the welfare of my mother. Then they expected me to grow up and disavow her because they declared her unfit.

I did not.

End all carceral systems.

[pirepoumon]

also, the difference between someone who is incarcerated because they were convicted of committing a crime and someone who is not incarcerated but committed the same action is quite often only what the state has done to them (incarceration); similarly, the difference between a child who experienced abuse and was removed from their family and put into the care & custody of the state and a child who was not removed but also experienced abuse is the removal from their family of origin by the state, and all unique traumas that differentiate youth in the welfare system who experienced abuse & those not in the system are derived from that removal, not the abuse.

it is not the personal qualities of the participants' experiences but the particular context forced upon them by mechanisms of the state that make arts-based interventions particularly powerful. effective prison arts programs provide those protective factors which are necessary to nourish the human spirit which those outside have access to and which we intentionally deprive the incarcerated and youth in welfare of in the name of the public's safety, their safety, or both.

trauma drama utilizes improv workshops to indirectly invite youths to take their newly-built improv skills to better navigate potential conflicts - and so provides mentorship/connection to other humans, and encourages re-imagining situations which is a prerequisite for having hope and transforming the world. even in more prescriptive programs such as shakespeare behind bars in which the material is not written or necessarily determined by participants, the resonances between shakespeare's work and the participants' experience allow for imagining alternatives and provide safe, non-personal contexts through which potential trauma or one's own narrative of life can be interrogated and re-imagined without directly recounting in one's own voice, avoiding the common problem of retraumatization when clinicians try to approach trauma through a quantitative and "empirical" lens with screeners and diagnostic processes.

these sorts of programs necessarily must be community-driven for the underlying principle of pro-social support to work, since the goal (should be) is re-integration into the wider non-carceral/institutional community. if they are non-clinical, this improves the ROI drastically, as training artists with existing specialty to adhere to best practices and basic principles is cheaper than paying for the licensing of or employing a clinician and then getting them specific training in e.g. some high-fidelity model of care. frequently programs like these (& similarly effective non-arts interventions) will allow participants to "graduate" into becoming leaders or facilitators as well, providing another model for re-imagining the participants' future outside of the narrative ascribed to them by their context and helping establish a sustainable, self-perpetuating program.

it's often asserted that the arts are a humanizing force, and while I don't believe that is a guarantee, arts in the context of incarceration and institutionalization proves the conditions under which art does have the capacity to humanize. when art achieves a true dialogue among participants and facilitators and audiences, recognizing the human dignity of those who are structurally and systematically denied it, all parties move toward realizing "our vocation to become more fully human," as described by Freire. if we mutually find solidarity across contexts, then it's the humanizing force that achieves stable, long-term community integration.

these programs are not truly preventative, nor are they - as currently implemented in any known real-world context - capable of systems-level transformation. these programs work precisely because the context they are performed in are antithetical to the business of being fully human, and are perpetuated by complex, hostile systems which must be submitted to in order to produce them at all.

still, there is so much opportunity to build conceptual frameworks about why arts programs are so effective at reducing recidivism rates while also building solidarity in other institutional contexts. I haven't even touched on I/DD which provides useful language around "least restrictive environments" and "meaningful days" that are still often aspirational in I/DD contexts but nearly absent from state conceptualizations of even the most "rehabilitative" carceral contexts foster care and psychiatric institutionalization can provide the language of trauma, ACEs, and resiliency.

if i can't make & refine this argument to get certain big-name orgs to fund small CBOs to increase capacity or create new arts intervention programs, it's my hope to at least better-equip those who are already doing the work or have an interest in doing it to build effective programs. but i'm also just some guy with a blog. so who knows

page and a half into the outline for a paper on the financial and theoretical case for nonclinical community driven arts based interventions in restrictive residential settings, which has been a long time coming but I think I gotta commit.

essentially I see the two biggest gaps in prison arts scholarship is recognition of arts interventions in other kinds of residential contexts (especially involuntary ones) such as PRTFs and group homes for foster youth, etc. the specific context of prison is deserving of specific attention but the efficacy of arts based interventions are not particular to art or to prisons but have incredible impact due to the characteristics of art and of prisons, which can then be applied to other similar contexts and intervention types. and what we know about non-art based interventions can inform a theory of not only why but how they are effective, since I think feature breakdown is the other missing component of scholarship.

mostly, though. I want to have a convincing argument to get my job to fund these kinds of programs and start walking the talk of trauma informed care and community supports and least restrictive environments &c&c.

[homonationalist]

The child welfare system—the assemblage of public and private child protection agencies, foster care, and preventive services—is a crucial part of the carceral machinery in Black communities. Many Americans view the child welfare system as a benign social service provider that safeguards children from abuse and neglect in their homes. Though it may bungle its responsibilities, they tell themselves, it is an essential safety net for children whose parents are unable to care for them. The left should be contesting, not buying into, this misguided perspective.

[...] In cities across the nation, CPS surveillance is concentrated in impoverished Black neighborhoods, where all parents are ruled by the agencies’ threatening presence. Fifty-three percent of Black children in America will experience a CPS investigation at some point before their eighteenth birthday. During CPS investigations, caseworkers may inspect every corner of the home, interrogate family members about intimate details of their lives, strip-search children to look for evidence, and collect confidential information from schools, healthcare providers, and social service programs. If caseworkers detect a problem, like drug use, inadequate medical care, or insecure housing, they will coerce families into an onerous regimen of supervision that rarely addresses their needs.

More disruptive still is the forcible family separation that often follows CPS investigations. Every year child welfare agencies take over 250,000 children from their parents and put them in the formal foster care system. At the same time, these agencies informally separate an estimated 250,000 more children from their parents each year based on so-called “safety plans”—arrangements parents are pressured to agree to in lieu of a formal court proceeding. [...] Black children have long been grossly overrepresented in the national foster care population: although they were only 14 percent of children in the United States in 2019, they made up 23 percent of children in foster care. Most of the money spent on child welfare services goes to keeping children away from their families. In 2019, the federal government alone devoted $8.6 billion to maintaining children in foster care—more than ten times the amount allocated to services aimed at keeping families together.

Dorothy Roberts from “Abolish Family Policing, Too” (2021)

[solarpunkprincess]

Social workers have been promoted as an all-purpose substitute for police officers. These recommendations reflect a more general failure to understand CPS as an integral part of the U.S. carceral regime. Regulating and destroying black, brown and indigenous families in the name of child protection has been essential to the “ongoing white supremacist nation building project” as much as prisons and police. Like the prison industrial complex, the foster industrial complex is a multi-billion-dollar government apparatus that regulates millions of marginalized people through intrusive investigations, monitoring and forcible removal of children from their homes to be placed in foster care, group homes and “therapeutic” detention facilities.

[cps-oteric]

Good things I’m experiencing with the stay-at-home orders (because I am focusing on the positive to combat PANIC and DREAD):

1. Home is my happy place and my comfort zone. I don’t ever get FOMO, but I do get FOOPTILFSAHATT (fear of other people thinking I’m lame for staying at home all the time). The mental shift where it’s now admirable to stay home is just a bonus and relieves the pressure on lil ole homebody me.

2. I advocated HARD to get work-from-home “privileges” (even when they were literally governmental orders in black and white — it was still a bit of a struggle to get it all going and fully approved). I fought every people-pleasing, be-seen-and-not-heard bone in my body and decided to speak up on a 500-bazillion-person phone call (with everyone from management to direct staff) when the employer was still making a chunk of us come to the physical office full-time — I jumped in outlining areas where we were putting ourselves and our clients at risk, plus three examples of ways we could pretty much immediately do the same jobs from home and maybe avoid, I don’t know, some number of DEATHS or severe illnesses?? It felt really good to speak up, even knowing I was potentially putting my paycheck (and reputation at my still-new workplace) at risk. And hey, here I am reporting live and well after my cozy, productive, at-home workweek. Worth it.

3. Relatedly, it’s so nice to see the shifts in the field (intertwined fields — social work, health, mental health, criminal justice/CPS systems) that are allowing and even embracing ways a lot of the work CAN be done remotely and much more flexibly. There are challenges and kinks and questions of ethics and privacy and of COURSE the in-person work is important, but really, I hope some amount of this continues to become more of a norm. I worked for years and years at a place that would never entertain the notion of approving any work from home, and then BAM, this crisis hit and I have heard from work friends that they immediately authorized it across the board! So, at the very least, employers will have to be clear that it’s not about remote work being impossible but about them simply not wanting to allow it (which, in some workplaces, is an issue of control and lack of trust — and telling employees they have to “earn” it, while ensuring it remains completely unattainable, which of course only makes staff feel like they’re never good enough for this alleged reward). Now instead of waiting on a bureaucratic policy change next decade or some fairy dust from a magic wand, we are all SHOWING that it’s possible.

4. Same as above but on a societal level. I wish there weren’t a global disaster making us move mountains, but the positive result is that we (societies, governments, communities) can’t pretend certain things are impossible or get hung up forever in the debates about how to do them — we have to just DO them. Jails are de-carcerating, smog is lifting, and I saw a map of one city that turned 75 miles into car-free streets because so many people are walking and biking in places drivers aren’t used to spotting them (driving is way down right now anyway). Suddenly seems like ancient history when it was a struggle to get one bike lane approved on one street or get a handful of people to agree to leave their SUVs at home a bit more often. Still, maybe these are all temporary pandemic measures giving the appearance of social justice and widespread cultural change, but I know it will make a strong argument for the toughest change-makers out there. Again, now that we’ve seen it, they can’t simply say it’s not possible.

5. For my personality, working from home is soooooooo preferable — I’m still doing my job, but what I’m NOT doing is worrying about fixing my resting bitch face at my computer screen to give a cheery smile every time someone walks by, or wasting time in the morning making sure my top matches my skirt and goes with my shoes, or sitting under fluorescent lights in a windowless box for eight hours a day. I...feel...better about where I’m putting my time and energy during the workday.

6. I have shed a bunch of stress I didn’t realize I had about racing from place to place. Maybe this is a holdover of my stress from child welfare, but even with the change to a slower-paced job, I still had to do all these mental calculations all the time about getting from Point A to Point B to Point C, not wanting to arrive TOO early and wanting to squeeze every last drop out of my purpose at each place before moving on to the next...but then inevitably ending up stressing in transit, about traffic or parking or lines or unexpected delays or whatever. Now I can go straight from work to to yoga to therapy ...without even having to plan an outfit change.

7. I’ve been connecting with far-flung family and friends in a much more focused, thoughtful, intentional way then I normally do. Yes, a fair amount of it is pandemic-related and fear-specific (my therapist last week: “If your loved ones have...something...happen to them...have you said everything you want to say?” me: “Oh fuck NO oh shit”) (cue scrambling to get in every meaningful conversation with everyone EVER)... but there has really been a solid amount of meaningful, peaceful, grounded, sweet, fun, light-hearted, genuine reconnecting with people. Right now I have daily and weekly contact with people I’ve often gone months without seeing. Last night, back to back, I had a couple really simple but meaningful bonding sessions that I hope will carry over to becoming something of a norm — are you sensing a theme in this list? — in whatever our “normal” life becomes from here.

[rapeculturerealities]

“From forced sterilization to family separation, the carceral state itself is an act of reproductive violence,” writes long-time prison abolitionist and organizer Mariame Kaba. Kaba is just one of many Black feminists who have been arguing for decades that a framework of reproductive justice, rather than reproductive rights, must take into account the role of prisons and policing in the fight for true reproductive and bodily autonomy.

Echoing the ways in which white, cisgender, upper class women ignored and/or actively opposed the inclusion of Black and other women of color into the framework of voting rights, white women of the Roe v. Wade era largely framed their arguments for reproductive rights around notions of individual choice, conveniently ignoring that, for the majority of Black, Brown, and otherwise dispossessed people, the legalization of abortion was and remains largely irrelevant to their material ability to access such a procedure.

Even before Roe v. Wade, however, white women were “fighting for the right for some of us to be considered human, and then leaving some people behind,” as Alicia Garza succinctly states. She reminds us that, when the birth control pill was being developed in the 1930s, some of the advocates for it also advocated for Black women and Puerto Rican women to be forcibly sterilized.

By framing their demands around rights rather than access, white women have long failed to take into account the extent to which reproduction is a material form of labor whose conditions, like all forms of labor, are rendered uneven within a capitalist system. As Yamani Hernandez, executive director of the National Network of Abortion Funds states:“We know in this country there are racial and economic injustices intertwined with reproductive health, and so it’s hard to pull apart the two because Black women are hit hardest by health disparities.”

Hernandez backs this claim up with statistics: “For our national hotline, 50% of the folks that call are Black, so we know who our core constituency is.” Simply arguing for a person’s legal “right” to have an abortion, then, overlooks a whole host of other barriers that those who are Black, Brown, poor, trans, undocumented, disabled and otherwise dispossessed need to overcome in order to access bodily and reproductive autonomy.

At the center of these barriers, the prison industrial complex looms large as one of the single biggest institutions which perpetuate and exacerbate unequal access to reproductive care. The Child Welfare League of American states that: “Today, there are nearly 2 million children under age 18 with a parent in prison or jail. The majority of those children are under age 10. Nationwide, 4% of women in state prisons and 3% of those in federal prisons are pregnant at sentencing. This leaves their families, and the professionals and policymakers involved, in a quandary: What should happen when infants are born in prison?”

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