Facilitating the Carceral Pipeline: Social Work’s Role in Funneling Newcomer Children From the Child Protection System to Jail and Deportation

Abstract

This article examines the intersections of the child protection, immigration and criminal systems, and the carceral logics that undergird all three systems. Taking seriously Patricia Hill Collins’ (2017) call to analyze “intensified points of convergence” (p. 1464), we analyze the role of social work in perpetuating carceral systems and the tools that feminist social work provides for disrupting them. Using a case analysis of a foster child in Halifax, Canada, who in 2018 was faced with deportation after social workers failed to secure his citizenship status, we argue that a pipeline exists between child protection and a growing “crimmigration” system. The carceral logics of this pipeline not only draw from anti-Black, Islamophobic, and settler colonial histories of oppression, but they also position certain noncitizen families as unassimilable and requiring of state intervention rather than social supports. With this carceral pipeline in mind, we then draw from feminist anticarceral and intersectional approaches to consider a range of resistance strategies. Ultimately, we argue for a transformative justice approach that goes beyond reforming the pipeline and instead takes seriously the insights of abolitionist movements as an alternative to purely reformist approaches.

Keywords

abolition carceral state child protection immigration intersectionality

In 2018, Abdoul Abdi made national headlines when his sister confronted the prime minister at a town hall meeting about his possible deportation. Despite spending most of his childhood as a crown ward, Abdoul never obtained Canadian citizenship, due in part to the failure of his social workers to inform Abdoul of his right to apply or to support his application process. When Abdoul subsequently served a sentence for a criminal offence, he became deportable under a new immigration policy introduced in 2013. Some media outlets framed Abdoul’s case as that of a bureaucratic error gone awry, choosing to focus on the failure of Abdoul’s social worker to support Abdoul in applying for citizenship in the first place. However, in this research, we advance a feminist anticarceral and intersectional analysis of the systemic oppression(s) that noncitizen children like Abdoul experience as wards of the Canadian state. In doing so, we draw from ample social work literature on the criminalization of racialized youths, who are more likely to be funneled from foster care into the prison system (Boyd, Fast, & Small, 2016; Lee & Villagrana, 2015). However, the particular experiences of noncitizen children like Abdoul—who may also face deportation as an effect of criminalization—continue to be largely overlooked in this literature (Fung & Shone, 2016; although see Hare, 2007). Likewise, migration scholars have examined the increased criminalization of noncitizens in the 9/11 period—or what Stumpf (2006) has termed a “crimmigration system”—but have stopped short of considering the links between crimmigration and child protection systems.¹

To address the virtual absence of scholarship examining cases like Abdoul’s among both social work and migration literatures, we offer a conceptual framework for analyzing the lived experiences of noncitizen children in foster care and the ways in which social work/ers in particular might be implicated in broader processes of criminalization. We use a feminist anticarceral and intersectional approach to argue that child protection in Canada functions as a carceral system—a departure from approaches that situate child protection systems (CPS) as primarily welfare systems or part of the social services arm of the state (Chapman & Withers, 2019). Drawing from Abdoul’s case as an illustration of this carceral system, we use the metaphor of a pipeline² to show the constitutive relationship that exists between child protection, prisons, and the immigration system, all of which adopt carceral logics to normalize separation of largely racialized, poor, and/or immigrant families, as well as the incarceration and expulsion of youth who have grown up in state “care”. By carceral logics, we refer to presuppositions that frame marginalized communities as threats to the social order rather than adopting a systemic analysis of the structural barriers experienced by such communities. The purpose of such criminalizing frames is to then position punitive state responses as the solution to such threats: “solutions” that amount to increased policing, mass incarceration, and mass deportation in the prison industrial complex (Golash-Boza, 2016; Maynard, 2017; Whalley & Hackett, 2017; Willison & O’Brien, 2017). In the context of neoliberalization of social services such as child protection services, carceral logics are used to obscure the structural violence of state retrenchment of social supports, in effect scapegoating marginalized groups as the cause of social problems in ways that reinforce ongoing histories of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and heteronormative patriarchal oppressions. Importantly, feminist social work(ers) have been implicated in the development of the carceral state, where efforts in the 1980s and 1990s to hold the state accountable for addressing and preventing violence against women dovetailed with carceral state responses to social problems and the growth of mass incarceration and mass deportation among countries in the global north (Abji, Korteweg, & Williams, 2019; Abji, 2016; Bergen, 2020a; Bhuyan, 2012; Kim, 2018; Mehrotra, Kimball, & Wahab, 2016; Whittier, 2016). Our analysis of the pipeline between child protection, prisons, and deportation/detention thus highlights a key dimension of how the carceral state functions and the role of social work(ers) in facilitating the carceral pipeline for noncitizen youths.

Given the problematic ways social workers become implicated in the functioning of carceral systems, we include in our analysis of Abdoul’s case a range of resistance strategies. Here, we argue for a transformative justice approach (Bergen, 2020a; Chandler, 2018; Kim, 2018) that goes beyond reforming the pipeline and instead takes seriously the insights of feminist anticarceral and abolitionist approaches as an alternative to purely reformist strategies. Our research overall thus addresses a critical gap in scholarship on child protection, criminalization of marginalized communities, and the crimmigration system, which will only become more salient as the number of youth like Abdoul moving through the system increases.

We begin the article by situating our approach within a significant body of scholarship on anticarceral feminism. We then apply our approach to consider key gaps in literatures on child welfare and crimmigration. To illustrate our analytical framework, we share Abdoul’s story in order to argue that child protection functions as a carceral system and then trace the carceral logics that shape the pipeline between foster care, prisons, and punitive immigration controls that underline the structural violence that Abdoul and his family experienced.

Extending Anticarceral Feminisms: The Connection Between Child Protection and the Crimmigration System

Anticarceral feminisms represent a range of feminist responses to the reality that the mainstream domestic violence movement has chosen to pursue increased criminalization as the primary response to gender-based violence (Bernstein, 2012; Heiner & Tyson, 2017; Kim, 2018; Panichelli, 2018; Whalley & Hackett, 2017; Whittier, 2016). Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color have provided important leadership to activism and scholarship in response to this harmful strategy (Incite! Women of Color against violence, 2006; Chen, Dulani, & Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2011; Maynard, 2017; Simpson, 2017; Walia, 2013). Anticarceral feminisms utilize a radical analysis that exposes the carceral logics of colonialism, anti-Blackness, and racism that make specific people and communities expendable. This analysis necessitates shifting the focus from reforming carceral systems such as the prison and immigration detention to alternative theories and strategies for addressing harm such as transformative justice and abolition (Alexander, 2012; Bassichis, Lee, & Spade, 2015; Chandler, 2018). We align ourselves within this tradition and invite social workers to examine the ways in which the child protection system functions as a pipeline or conduit that criminalizes, rather than protects, young people. Indeed, the child protection system is a creation of social work, and thus, we have a unique responsibility to consider the impacts of the system and how to decrease harm.

While we align ourselves with anticarceral feminisms, we extend this literature to consider the particular implications for noncitizen children. Migration scholars have drawn attention to key shifts in the regulation of immigration in countries like Canada since the turn of the century (De Genova, 2007; Nyers, 2009; Anderson, Gibney, & Paoletti, 2011; Mountz, Coddington, Tina Catania, & Loyd, 2012; Bosworth & Turnbull, 2014). While immigration policies have always been implicated in the production of inequality—particularly in white settler colonial contexts like Canada—what has shifted is the securitized response of states to border enforcement and regulation of “irregular” or nonstatus populations (Arbel & Brenner, 2013; Glenn, 2015; Goldring & Landolt, 2013; Golash-Boza, 2016). Coined the “crimmigration” system by Stumpf in 2006, this shift has been characterized by new convergences between criminal law and immigration law (where, e.g., “unauthorized” migration is increasingly treated as a crime rather than an administrative violation), as well as more police-style tactics of immigration enforcement (Armenta, 2017; Menjívar, Gómez Cervantes, & Alvord, 2018). In the Canadian case, irregular migration is still considered an administrative offence; however, this has not prevented criminalization of migrant populations through the enforcement arm of the state as well as in political discourse that frames noncitizens as security threats (Razack, 2010; Walia, 2013; Bosworth & Turnbull, 2014). In 2013, for example, the Canadian government introduced Bill C-43, the Faster Removal of Foreign Criminals Act into law, which rendered deportable any noncitizen who is sentenced in Canada to prison for 6 months or more.³ This includes permanent residents as well as families who have settled in Canada as refugees. Scholars have critiqued such laws, noting how they effectively constitute a double punishment for individuals who serve their time but then are subject to deportation (Atak, Hudson, & Nakache, 2017; Burt et al, 2016; Silverman & Molnar, 2016). Other scholars have illuminated how border enforcement is often combined with racial profiling to police marginalized communities, demonstrating how the effects of crimmigration are particularly egregious for minority populations (Abji, 2018; Armenta, 2017; Romero, 2008; Villegas, 2015). While scholarship on crimmigration has made important contributions to addressing the carceral logics underlying immigration policies, very little attention is paid to the links between crimmigration and the child protection system.

In what follows, we offer a case analysis of a noncitizen ward of the state, Abdoul Abdi, whose immigration status intersected with his positionality as a Black, Muslim refugee from a nonheteronormative family, to shape his experiences of child protection and the crimmigration system. Our analysis is illustrative rather than representative: We offer a feminist reading of Abdoul’s case based on media interviews and newspaper accounts as well as activist responses to the case covered in opinion pieces, press releases, and social media (Ferree & Merrill, 2004; Wahab, Anderson-Nathe, & Gringeri, 2015). Our media sample (N = 25) covers the 1-year period between January 2018 when the news story first made headlines and January 2019 when the Children’s Aid Society of Nova Scotia issued a new policy on noncitizen children which was attributed as a response to Abdoul’s case. In what follows, we analyze the carceral logics underlying Abdoul and his sister’s removal from their legal guardians in 1996 when Abdoul was 7 years old, tracing what we see as a pipeline that shaped Abdoul’s subsequent experiences in prison and with border enforcement. At the time of writing, Abdoul remains in Canada as a permanent resident—an outcome of successful advocacy by his lawyer and activist groups—although the precarity of his status is far from resolved (Luck, 2018). With Abdoul’s story in mind, we then conclude our analysis by considering strategies for resisting the carceral pipeline using a transformative justice approach.

Child Protection and Carceral Logics: Analyzing the Effects of Family Separation for Noncitizen Children

Abdoul Abdi arrived in Halifax in 1995 as a refugee from Somalia with his sister and two aunts at the age of 6 (Whitman, Ungar, & Lachance, 2018). His mother died when he was 4. Within a year of living in Halifax, Aboul and his sister were removed from their family, separated from each other, and taken into “care”. In 2018, Abdoul’s story made national headlines when his sister, Fatouma, asked the prime minister about her brother’s pending deportation at a televised town hall meeting in Halifax (Williams, 2018). As a noncitizen ward of the state, social workers had failed to inform Abdoul of his right to apply for citizenship status, nor had they initiated an application for citizenship on Abdoul’s behalf. In the weeks of media coverage that followed, it was revealed that CPS in Nova Scotia had no formal policy addressing the particular needs of noncitizen children, and according to several immigration lawyers, the government ministry responsible for processing such applications was routinely dismissing them at the time (Tremonti, 2018). When in 2014 Abdoul was convicted of a crime and served a sentence of 4.5 years, he was immediately rearrested and served with a deportation order by the Canadian Border Services Agency (Patil, 2018). Under new regulations introduced in 2013, the state’s capacity to deport permanent residents like Abdoul was expanded: After serving his sentence, Abdoul was deportable without any right of appeal or ability to apply for immigration status through a Humanitarian and Compassionate application (Atak et al., 2017).

While it might be tempting to frame Abdoul’s story as an exceptional case—and indeed, this was often the framing used in mainstream media accounts—we argue that Abdoul’s experience was far from exceptional, but rather evidence of the often routine ways in which CPS functions as part of the carceral arm of the state. Here, we draw from feminist anticarceral and critical social work studies, which examine the historical and contemporary complicities of social work practice in reproducing state power in the service of settler colonial and white supremacist legacies in Canada (Blackstock, 2009; Chapman & Withers, 2019; Sinclair, 2017). More recently, critical social work has unpacked the role of neoliberalism in intensifying oppression of racialized, Indigenous, and/or low-income families (Mehrotra et al., 2016). Carceral logics are foundational to such processes: that is, where gendered and racialized understandings of marginalized groups as threats to the social order are used to justify punitive interventions, while simultaneously obscuring the neoliberal retrenchment of the welfare state through the scaling back and/or privatization of social services. As the neoliberal state divests from social programming that supports families such as income supports, affordable childcare, housing, and supports for those leaving situations of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV), within the child protection system carceral logics are used to demonize and discard mothers for their inability to “protect” their children from what is in essence an effect of state divestment (Bergen, 2020b; Roberts, 2014b). Such processes can be seen in Abdoul’s case. As a Black, Muslim newcomer living in a nonheteronormative family headed by unmarried women (his aunts), he was much more likely to come into contact with CPS (Burgos, Al-adeimi, & Brown, 2017; Horn, Piescher, Shannon, Hong, & Benton, 2017; Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies [OACAS], 2016, Stanley, Guru, & Coppock, 2017).

While the stated objective of CPS is protecting children from abuse which places it within the welfare arm of the state, scholarship on its historical and current functioning reveals that CPS intervenes primarily in poor, racialized, and Indigenous women-led families precisely because of these identities rather than because of harmful parenting practices (Edwards, 2019; Fong, 2018; Phillips & Pon, 2018). In Ontario, 48% of families’ “verified child maltreatment” is due to the possible impact of children witnessing violence between parents (Fallon et al., 2015). This is the definition of blaming the victim as children are removed primarily from mothers for the “crime” of being abused. The next largest category of verified child maltreatment is neglect at 23% (Fallon et al., 2015). Neglect can be a serious form of abuse in which caregivers actively withhold necessities. However, for the families involved with CPS, it is often due to a contracting social safety net that forces families to make impossible choices on how to spend insufficient money (Fong, 2017; Roberts, 2014b). This means that approximately three of four CPS interventions are because mothers experience IPV and/or because they are poor (Fallon et al., 2015). These are situations that would benefit from support from social workers but not via a punitive “investigation” process where the threat of potentially removing children from their families looms large. Indeed, there is a sense that it is easier and perhaps better to discard parents who are struggling and to place their children in the “care” of the state. This can be seen in statistics from Ontario where the number of “chronic” cases for factors like witnessing IPV, neglect, or caregiver mental health concerns has quadrupled, whereas “acute” cases, such as physical and sexual abuse, have decreased in CPS caseloads in the last 20 years (Fallon, Trocmé, Filippelli, Black, & Joh-Carnella, 2017). Importantly while acute cases have decreased on CPS caseloads, there is no evidence to suggest that there is an actual decrease in this type of violence, simply that CPS is involved with fewer families for these types of concerns than in the past (Fallon et al., 2017). More alarmingly, in 2013, half of the investigations were based on future risk of maltreatment rather than any maltreatment having taken place (Fallon et al., 2017). This shows increasing state surveillance and intervention in families deemed as “risky” which is often constructed based on racism, colonialism, xenophobia, classism, and sexism. Roberts (2014a) points out that “both the prison and foster care systems are marked by glaring race, gender and class disparities: the populations in both are disproportionately poor and African American, and both systems are particularly burdensome to poor black mothers” (p. 1778).

What we add to this literature is the role of precarious immigration status within a context of restricted access to citizenship and increased deportation, which dovetails with the neoliberalization of social work in a carceral state. The positionality of Abdoul’s family as refugees played a role in the forms of anti-Black racism and Islamophobia that they encountered as newcomers to Canada, where the family’s settlement needs were framed as evidence of neglect (Maiter, Stalker, & Alaggia, 2009). When Abdoul and his sister experienced racist bullying at school, their aunts chose to withdraw them due to concerns that the school was not addressing the issue, not understanding that schooling is mandatory in Canada (Zimonjic & Barton, 2018). A CPS worker investigating a case like this could have used advocacy or educational skills to help the family address the racist bullying and help reenroll or transfer schools rather than removing the children from the family for neglect. We argue that this is a case of “chronic” care intervention, where racialized/minority families like Abdoul’s are punished for what is in essence a failure of the state to recognize and address settlement needs of newcomer families. As indicated in media reports, the siblings had two aunts who cared for their well-being, but instead of providing supports and tools to help them advocate with the school system, the caregivers were framed as being neglectful and the removal of the children was rationalized as the appropriate solution.

From Victim to Threat: Analyzing the Carceral Pipeline for Foster Children in a Crimmigration System

CPS’ carceral nature can also be seen through its convergences with other carceral systems. The pipeline of youth from CPS to prisons is well-documented. While racialized, particularly Black and Indigenous young people, are more likely to come into contact with police, this risk is exponentially increased for children being raised by the state (Boyd, Fast, Hobbins, McNeil, & Small, 2017; Shaw, 2014). Conflicts between young people that would rarely escalate to police involvement if they occurred between siblings in a family are automatically called if this conflict happens in a group home or foster home. Even more troublingly, social workers may call the police as a way of scaring young people into completing chores, being late for curfew, or other minor issues (Doucet & Harrison, 2018; Shaw, 2014). Social workers have a duty to reflect on their role in transforming vulnerable young people from victims of violence into threats requiring police intervention.

In Abdoul’s case, both he and his sister experienced abuse while in foster care. According to a CBC interview with his sister Fatouma, social workers removed Fatouma from a foster home where both siblings were experiencing abuse, but her younger brother Abdoul was left behind (Tremonti, 2018). When Abdoul was finally removed from the abusive situation nearly 2 years later, he subsequently was moved 31 more times before coming into contact with the law (Tremonti, 2018). Children in the foster care system are not only at risk of abuse and instability but such experiences only intensify the likelihood of police involvement (Lee & Villagrana, 2015; Moore, McArthur, Death, Tilbury, & Roche, 2018; Wojciak, McWey, & Waid, 2018). This alongside anti-Black racism makes children like Abdoul much more likely to come into contact with the criminal justice system and for those interactions to lead to serious charges that could put children’s immigration status in jeopardy (Boyd et al., 2016; Nordberg, Crawford, Praetorius, & Hatcher, 2016).

Indeed, the decision to remove the children from their aunts had multiple ripple effects: ranging from abuse, to instability, to precarious immigration status. In Abdoul’s case, his precarity as a noncitizen was compounded through forced removal as his guardians could no longer apply for citizenship on the children’s behalf. According to media reports, the aunts did try to include Abdoul and Fatouma on their own application for citizenship status, but because the children were wards of the state, they were unable to do so (Jones, 2018). Thus, the separation of noncitizen children from their caregivers can expose them to precarity based on immigration status in addition to other forms of precarity. In contrast, the state’s own neglect in addressing the diverse needs of children in its care is left unaddressed. One article in a journal put out by the OACAS did a survey of the child protection agencies in Ontario and found that “most CASs [Children’s Aid Societies] appear to have limited awareness or experience of immigration issues, basic concepts, key players or agents responsible for steps in the process of obtaining refugees status, to permanent residency and to citizenship” (Fung & Shone, 2016, p. 11). This is a real problem: the data are not being collected or acted on in the way that a “reasonable” parent would. Abdoul’s sister Fatouma recognized this failure on the part of the state in her own articulation of the issue:

We were placed in permanent care, meaning the government was our parents, basically…It was their responsibility to figure out our paperwork, to do our paperwork as children…Now my brother is facing the consequence of getting deported, which I think is really unfair (Tremonti, 2018).

In this context, the failure to secure Abdoul’s citizenship is much more than a bureaucratic error. Indeed, it is part of a larger issue of neglect by the state, where social workers are rendered complicit. This complicity is then obscured through the framing of Abdoul not only in carceral terms but also as a noncitizen outsider who is not worthy of inclusion in the nation-state altogether. As Harsha Walia, an activist with No One Is Illegal argued in response to the case on social media, such routine “paperwork errors” are anything but benign:

Those who experience state violence daily understand brutal deliberate banality of bureaucracy…it’s enraging how both immigration and child services ministries easily admit it’s a ‘paperwork error’ than admit no deportation would be happening if it weren’t for their negligence (2018).

To be deported to a country where Abdoul has no family or community, where his family fled as refugees, and where Canada has a travel warning in place for Canadians is to expose him to a violent situation.

As newcomer children like Abdoul move through the carceral pipeline, then, a shift happens where the child in “care” is reframed from victim to a threat to the Canadian population due to criminality and noncitizen otherness. The threat of criminality is imposed without any understanding of the systemic processes that led him there and how the Canadian state is complicit on multiple levels. Likewise, the threat of the stranger/noncitizen other is imposed without any understanding of the state’s own responsibility or failure to protect or integrate its “own” child. While much has been written about the pipeline between child protection and prisons, what may be less visible to social workers is the process through which young people exit the prison system only to be detained, deported, or forced underground due to their deportability. Abdoul suffered such a fate when he was detained by the Canadian Border Services Agency and during his detention was also placed in solitary confinement—a punitive measure that has been widely critiqued by migration and human rights scholars and activists (Silverman & Molnar, 2016). What we show is how social work and workers are directly implicated in the process by which the carceral state “adopts,” jails, and then deports young people. While social workers are complicit in mass incarceration and mass deportation, we as social workers have created and control CPS and thus have a unique responsibility to consider our roles in facilitating—and disrupting—the carceral pipeline.

Advancing Anticarceral Feminisms: Strategies for Reforming and Transforming Child Protection in a Carceral System

In this section, we provide suggestions for social work and workers. We suggest that some change work should be undertaken by all social workers committed to social justice, while other strategies may depend on where and how social workers are positioned. In aligning ourselves with feminist anticarceral and abolitionist approaches, we advance the viewpoint that all social workers, especially those working from a feminist perspective, should take leadership in actively supporting the communities most impacted by these systems. This necessitates taking seriously abolition as a longer term strategy for transformative justice (Bergen, 2020a; Davis, 2012; Kim, 2018). In what follows, we begin with more reformist strategies for advancing short-term change, while continuously moving toward a transformative justice approach.

In light of the fact that social workers are positioned throughout these systems, we use the situation of Abdoul to provide some context-dependent suggestions for system reform. For those working in policy and government, there should be lobbying so that if children become permanent wards of the state that they have an expedited path to citizenship. How can Canada be one’s parent without one being a citizen? Expedited is a key word here—applications for permanent residence and citizenship require a significant amount of money and bureaucratic requirements—such as listing everywhere a child has lived in the last 5 years. This may be difficult for a child bouncing around the system to remember, and unfortunately, CPS files are often incomplete as children like Abdoul move often. Social work should advocate for the “parent” of children in state care to pay or waive the fee, and bureaucratic barriers should be eliminated or sharply reduced.

Social workers can also evaluate what policies and practices their agencies have that facilitate the pipeline, such as involving the police for minor rule infringements of rules and mental health crises. We know from the literature that this happens within group homes and foster care but also in drop-in centers and other social work spaces that youth access (Joseph, 2015; Kovarikova, 2017). Formal policies as well as informal practices should be reviewed and updated to ensure that seeking support from social services will not lead to criminalization. Social work plays an important role in feeding increasing numbers of marginalized children into the carceral pipeline, but thoughtful, strategic change work can reduce or eliminate this process.

We also invite social work/ers to consider what an ethical engagement with the carceral state should look like. One controversial issue worth discussing here is the “duty to report” the risk of child maltreatment, as this is a key avenue through which children enter the pipeline. This might involve difficult conversations within the profession and with law and policy makers, examining the primary reason stated by CPS for their involvement and whether mandatory involvement with CPS is the best way to support children. While the potential harm caused by children witnessing IPV was not reported as a concern in Abdoul’s case, it is nevertheless a major factor for families, including families without permanent immigration status, becoming involved with CPS (Bergen, 2020a, 2016). For example in Ontario, 48% of families were reported for the potential harm caused to children who witness violence between their parents (Fallon et al., 2015). As we know from previous feminist work on this issue, the quest to have IPV and the negative impacts on children taken seriously has led to reforms that have ended up punishing marginalized mothers experiencing IPV rather than perpetrators of IPV (Carlton, Krane, Lapierre, Richardson, & Strega, 2013; Kim, 2018). Violence in the lives of children is widespread with one in three adults reporting having experienced or witnessed violence in their childhood homes but only 7.6% having any interaction with CPS (Affifi et al, 2015). These statistics encapsulate both the scale of the issue and the lack of involvement of CPS in the lives of these children, despite extremely broad legislation regarding the duty to report. This raises serious concerns when juxtaposed against the reality that the majority of cases reported to CPS are for future risk rather than past violence, are based on chronic rather than acute concerns, and disproportionately involve Indigenous, Black, poor, mother-led families (Bergen, 2020a). We must therefore interrogate whether increasingly broad requirements to report families to CPS effectively decreases violence in children’s lives.

To be clear, the work of ending interpersonal violence in the lives of children should be a key goal for anticarceral feminists. However, just as the solution to interpersonal violence in lives of adults is not increased involvement of the carceral state, we argue that the carceral state, through CPS, is not the solution for violence in the lives of children either and social work must seriously engage with how to decrease violence in the lives of children without turning to the carceral state.

An important place for critical social workers to start considering alternative ways to address violence in the lives of children is through listening to, and supporting, the work already being done in the communities most impacted by the intersections of CPS, prisons, and immigration detention. Fortier and Wong (2018) highlight the need for social work/ers working toward decolonizing futures to stop occupying the role of the “expert” and to listen and take leadership from Indigenous communities. Likewise, Roberts (2014a) argues that centering the insights of feminists of color and building interdisciplinary and cross-movement approaches are integral to addressing the roots of CPS. Revisiting the situation of Abdoul Abdi, we see the tireless, innovative, and ultimately successful advocacy work done by his sister, Fatouma Abdi, by speaking with the press and confronting the prime minister to bring national attention to his plight. Additionally, activist groups Black Lives Matter, No One Is Illegal, and others worked together to raise the intersections of anti-Blackness and xenophobia that put Abdoul at increased risk. This type of successful cross-movement community organizing work serves as an important reminder of the need to connect struggles—a key issue in social work, which is often siloed by funding and bureaucratic regulations. Social workers can play an important role by considering how they can listen and support the work already being done by communities to address and resist the convergences of these unjust systems.

Finally, we recommend that anticarceral feminists incorporate attention to the pipeline between child protection and a growing crimmigration system in our broader project of realizing a world without carceral systems. Roberts (2014a) reminds us of the importance of exploring, “collective efforts within communities to combat family violence–efforts that rely on the strengths and accountability of community members rather than on punitive state intervention” (p. 1780). This fits in with other calls to examine abolition and alternatives rather than reforms to these systems. Groundbreaking work by Alexander (2012), Walia (2013), Ritchie (2017), Maynard (2017), and other feminists of color call on us to imagine abolition and alternatives to the prison industrial complex. Generation FIVE explains that transformative justice approaches prioritize safety, healing, and agency for survivors, accountability and transformation for those who abuse, community response and accountability for abuse, and seek the “transformation of the community and social conditions that create and perpetuate violence” (2017, p. 45). We augment this call and ask critical social workers to consider what could be gained through the abolition, rather than reform, of CPS. The current system fails to protect many of the children in its care, leading us to question whether meaningful reform is possible or desirable. Currently, CPS focuses on policing marginalized mothers for “chronic” issues such as poverty and experiencing IPV, while a large number of Canadian children experience violence without any involvement with CPS. We argue that a focus on abolition and transformative justice rather than reforms would simultaneously decrease overpolicing of marginalized communities and create more productive strategies for addressing the epidemic of violence in children’s lives. Abolition of CPS as it currently exists would form a key part of the broader strategy to abolish prisons, immigration detention, and borders (Abji, 2018; Maynard, 2017; Walia, 2013).

Imagining a world without prisons, immigration detention, and the child protection system stretches the limits of our collective imagination. Yet, the skills of facilitating and holding space for groups to heal, learn, and grow together are one that social work can offer (Beck, Ohmar, & Warner, 2012). Abdoul’s trajectory through the pipeline as well as the ongoing resistance by his communities, family, and himself provides important lessons for social workers committed to creating a world free from interpersonal and structural violence.

Discussion and Conclusion

By drawing attention to the experiences of noncitizen children in “care”—as illustrated through the case of Abdoul Abdi—we offered an alternative reading of child protection services as a carceral system rather than as a welfare system. To illustrate the carceral logics that shape the experiences of nonstatus families, we drew connections between the anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, and setter colonial logics that shape the separation of marginalized families. In doing so, we highlighted how the effects of neoliberalization on access to social supports not only undermine the capacity of families to address chronic issues but also are used to criminalize or justify punitive responses in the absence of sufficient state support. Building on existing scholarship, we showed how an increasingly precarious immigration system intersects with the carceral logics of child protection by reframing the settlement needs of newcomers and refugees as evidence of neglect. The state’s neglect of settlement needs is then reframed as an individual failing that justifies the removal of children from the family. The decision to remove Abdoul and Fatouma from their caregivers subsequently exposed them to multiple forms of structural violence—from experiences of abuse in “care”, to the increased likelihood of imprisonment, to the exposure to deportation and detention. We theorized this process as a pipeline that first normalizes the separation of largely racialized, poor, and/or immigrant families and then reframes foster children as threats to the social order requiring their incarceration and expulsion. Our analysis thus extends anticarceral feminist scholarship on state violence by bringing attention to the connection between CPS and the crimmigration system. Our study also engages with a growing body of scholarship on crimmigration and migrant justice, by highlighting the role of CPS in facilitating the movement of racialized and nonstatus youth into the crimmigration system.

Given the problematic ways social workers become implicated in the functioning of carceral and crimmigration systems, we considered a range of resistance strategies: from addressing policies that facilitate the pipeline to having difficult conversations about how attempts to address violence in children’s lives might be co-opted by a carceral state. Ultimately, we argued for a transformative justice approach that goes beyond reforming the pipeline and instead takes seriously the insights of feminist anticarceral and abolitionist approaches as an alternative to purely reformist strategies. Our discussion of potential strategies thus contributes to feminist social work and social work more broadly, by taking seriously the importance of the leadership of communities most impacted by these three systems, and by considering abolitionist and transformative justice strategies in addition to short-term reforms.

Given the connections between CPS, jail, and crimmigration, we argue that there is important future research for feminist scholars to undertake. First and foremost, future research should address the lack of substantive data on the numbers of noncitizen children in “care”, as such data is not currently collected. We know anecdotally that Abdoul’s case is certainly not the exception. In fact, in 2018, former crown ward Kiwayne Jones launched a CAD$200 million class action lawsuit against the Ontario government by individuals who as noncitizen children were taken into the care of CPS. The lawsuit alleges that the government “failed in its duties to take all reasonable steps” to pursue and obtain Canadian citizenship for noncitizen in its “care” (Gallant 2018). Understanding the true scope of the problem will enable social workers and the communities they support to develop better strategies for “regularizing” children without citizenship status in “care”. Importantly, data on the scope of the problem should also include research on former wards of the state who have since been deported, as well as the expansion of feminist analysis of the transnational dimensions of carceral power, colonialism, and global capitalism that are shaping these families’ lives across borders.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research has been funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) received by Salina Abji.

ORCID iD

Heather Bergen

Notes

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