Torn Apart

Dec 04 2023 9

Torn Apart Podcast artwork

Welcome to 'Torn Apart: Abolishing Family Policing and Reimagining Child Welfare' with Professor Dorothy Roberts. Journey with her as she brings listeners front and center with the broken child welfare system that destroys families and what we need to do to fix it. Hear from families at the center of this travesty as she welcomes guests and narrates this gripping series based on her award-winning book. In this podcast she and guests examine how abolishing the current child welfare system can build a safer world.

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Torn Apart: Abolition

Dec 04 2023 37 mins

In the final episode of the Torn Apart podcast, Dorothy Roberts makes the case for the abolition of the child welfare system and lays out a vision for the more just and equitable society that could replace it. Roberts discusses why abolition, and not reform, is the necessary path forward. In conversation with Professor Anna Arons of St. John’s University, Roberts uses how New Yor

Torn Apart: The Carceral Web

Nov 27 2023 38 mins

In this episode, Torn Apart reveals the child welfare system’s deep entanglements with the criminal legal system. It exposes how state child protection caseworkers collaborate with police and use a carceral logic to surveil families. It investigates how the system treats Black children like criminals, resulting in Black children being more vulnerable to arrest, incarceration, and

Torn Apart: Design

Nov 20 2023 44 mins

In this episode, Torn Apart shows that the child welfare system was designed from its beginning to oppress marginalized communities. The episode explores how the child welfare system's roots in slavery, settler colonialism, and white supremacy, taking listeners on a journey to the separation of enslaved children from their mothers on plantations and the return of freed Black childr

Torn Apart: Terror

Nov 13 2023 40 mins

In this episode, Professor Dorothy Roberts opens Torn Apart with a first-hand account from a young Black mother, Vanessa Peoples, who became the subject of a government child welfare investigation when a stranger accused Peoples of neglecting her young son who had wandered away from her briefly in a park. Professor Roberts brings the listeners through the horrors that the child wel

Torn Apart: The Trailer

Nov 06 2023 2 mins

Welcome to Torn Apart, a podcast hosted by Professor Dorothy Roberts. Journey with her as she brings listeners front and center with the oppressive child protection system and what we need to do to reimagine child welfare. Hear from families at the center of this travesty as she welcomes guests and narrates this gripping series. Launching November 13th at Ms. Magazine.