The state has two principal ways to forcibly separate a person from their home. The first is to send police to remove them. The second is to send a social worker to remove their child. In both cases, the state arrives at the door, asserts an authority predicated on suspicion, and leaves with someone in custody. In neither case is the person who answered the door free to refuse. The first is widely understood as carceral. The second, in much of Canadian public discourse, is understood as care.
The argument here is the one made over the past two decades by Dorothy Roberts, by abolitionist organizers, and — in the Canadian context — by Cindy Blackstock and the institutional findings she compelled: that the child welfare apparatus, whatever the intentions of the people who staff it, performs a carceral function1. It enters, surveils, separates, files, and disposes. The fact that the figure at the door wears a lanyard rather than a badge does not change the analysis. The fact that the action is named apprehension rather than arrest does not change the outcome.
The powers actually held
A useful exercise is to list what a child welfare worker in Canada can do, under the authority of provincial child protection legislation, that an ordinary citizen cannot2. The list is not metaphorical.
The functional comparison to policing is not rhetorical. It is descriptive. A child welfare worker can do things to a family — enter the home, interview children, separate parent from child, generate a permanent record — that ordinary state agents cannot do without a warrant or an arrest. The threshold is lower precisely because the action is framed as protective rather than punitive. That framing is what allows the apparatus to operate at scale.
The hammer fact
The simplest test of whether the system functions carcerally is the one the people inside it have already named.
The residential school system removed Indigenous children to assimilate them; the child welfare system removes Indigenous children to protect them. The first framing is now universally condemned in Canadian public life. The second is the operating premise of a system that, three decades after the last residential school closed, holds more Indigenous children in state custody than the schools ever did at any one time3.
The two systems are usually discussed separately because they are administered separately. Roberts' argument, and Blackstock's, is that they should not be: they are two faces of the same project. Adults are held in the prison system; their children are held in the welfare system. The communities being processed by both are the same communities.
The case Canada fought for fourteen years
The strongest Canadian institutional admission of this argument is not in any academic monograph. It is in a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruling from January 2016 — a ruling Canada spent the preceding nine years, and the following six, trying to evade.
In 2007, Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, and the Assembly of First Nations filed a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission alleging that the federal government discriminated against First Nations children by underfunding on-reserve child welfare and by narrowly defining Jordan's Principle5. The allegation was specific: federal funding for on-reserve services was substantially lower than provincial funding for off-reserve services, with measurable consequences for children.
The detail that most cleanly illustrates the carceral framing is the surveillance of Cindy Blackstock herself5. The federal department responsible for First Nations services placed under surveillance the woman leading the legal effort to make it spend more money on First Nations children. Not a militant. Not a protester. A social worker — herself a member of the Gitksan First Nation — running a non-profit organization, who had filed a complaint under Canadian human rights law. The state's response was to watch her.
A system that surveils its critics is doing one of the things carceral systems do. It is part of what people mean when they call the apparatus carceral.
The 2016 CHRT decision found that Canada's funding model and management of on-reserve child welfare "resulted in denials of services and created various adverse impacts for many First Nations children and families." The decision found Canada's conduct caused, in the Tribunal's framing, trauma and harm of the highest degree. The Tribunal explicitly placed the modern system in direct lineage with residential schools5.
Family policing: the term and the argument
The phrase family policing is not metaphorical. It is the term used by the abolitionist scholarship that emerged in the United States in the 2010s and has been increasingly taken up in Canada6. The argument has three parts.
First, the function is policing. The child welfare apparatus surveils, investigates, and forcibly separates — the same set of functions performed by the criminal legal system. The difference is the threshold of evidence, the category of people targeted, and the framing of the harm being prevented. It is otherwise the same set of operations.
Second, the target population is the same. The communities subject to disproportionate police contact, disproportionate incarceration, and disproportionate child apprehension are not three different populations. They are one population processed by three institutional pathways. In Canada this is Indigenous communities; in the United States it is Black and Indigenous communities; the structural logic is the same.
Third, the reformist response treats each of these systems as separate problems and proposes fixes — better training, more cultural competency, equity audits — that address none of the structural drivers and leave the apparatus intact. Decades of reform inside the residential school system did not change its function. The argument is that reform inside child welfare does not, either6.
What's claimed, and what actually happens
The system describes itself one way. The data describes it another.
The counterargument, in its strongest form
The case against the family policing framing is not without weight. It deserves to be stated at its strongest.
Children are, in fact, harmed in homes — including in Indigenous homes. The cases are real. Some apprehensions prevent real, ongoing abuse. A categorical framing of child welfare as carceral risks obscuring this and, in its most ambitious form, proposes the dismantling of the only institutional response Canadian law currently offers to children in danger.
Many social workers, including many Indigenous social workers, see themselves as advocates inside a flawed system — pushing for family preservation, kinship placements, and culturally appropriate services. Many actively resist apprehension and pursue least-disruptive alternatives. The structural critique, on this view, flattens an internal landscape that includes meaningful resistance.
And the alternative — community-led, well-resourced, prevention-oriented family support — does not yet exist at the scale that would be required to replace the apprehension apparatus. Calling for abolition without that infrastructure in place risks leaving children unprotected.
These are real objections. The structural response is also real.
The first objection treats the existence of harm in some homes as a justification for an apparatus calibrated to the population scale. It does not address why that apparatus operates against Indigenous families at fourteen times the non-Indigenous rate when the underlying rates of harm — once poverty and housing are controlled for — are not fourteen times different7. A system that responded to risk would distribute its action by risk. This system distributes its action by race.
The second objection — the good worker defense — is the most common and the most important to engage carefully. It is true that many workers are conscientious. It is also true that many prison guards are conscientious, that many police officers de-escalate, and that the conscientiousness of individual actors inside a system does not change the system's function. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission found cultural genocide; many of the priests, nuns, teachers, and Indian agents inside the residential school system were not personally cruel. The system did what it did regardless of the dispositions of the individual actors. The structural argument is not about disposition. It is about role.
The third objection — that no alternative infrastructure exists at scale — is partly correct. It is also partly an artifact of choices the state has made. The state could choose to fund family preservation, prevention, kinship care, and community-led services at the scale at which it currently funds apprehension and foster placement. It chooses, year over year, not to. The fact that the alternative is underfunded is a consequence of policy, not a fact of nature.
What abolition would mean
Abolition in this context does not mean abandoning children. The abolitionist literature on family policing is clear and specific on what it does mean6.
None of this is theoretical. Indigenous communities have been running prevention, healing, and kinship-based programs — under-resourced, under-recognized — for decades. The Mothering Project in Manitoba; community-led child and family services across the country under Bill C-92; the long advocacy of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society. The infrastructure exists. It is starved.
The role performs the function. The role does not change because the people inside it are good. The role changes when the role changes.
Sources
- Dorothy Roberts — Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (Basic Books, 2022). Foundational text on family policing as a carceral framework. Earlier: Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2002).
- Government of Canada / Department of Justice — Provincial and Territorial Child Protection Legislation and Policy, 2023 cross-jurisdictional review. canada.ca
- Trocmé, N., Knoke, D., & Blackstock, C. (2004) — "Pathways to overrepresentation of Aboriginal children in Canada's child welfare system." Comparison of contemporary Indigenous child welfare numbers to residential school enrolment peaks. Reaffirmed in subsequent research and in the 2016 CHRT decision.
- Statistics Canada — Hahmann, T., Lee, H., & Godin, S. (2024). Indigenous foster children living in private households. 2021 Census analysis. www150.statcan.gc.ca · For adult incarceration figures: Office of the Correctional Investigator, Annual Reports.
- Canadian Human Rights Tribunal — First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada et al. v. Attorney General of Canada (2016 CHRT 2), January 26, 2016. Also: Blackstock, C. (2016). "The Complainant: The Canadian Human Rights Case on First Nations Child Welfare." McGill Law Journal, 62(2). On surveillance: confirmed by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada following her complaint.
- Roberts, D. — "Abolish Family Policing, Too." Dissent, Summer 2020. Also: "The Carceral Logic of Child Welfare," Dissent 2022; "A Veneer of Benevolence," Inquest 2022. · upEND Movement — Alan Dettlaff, Maya Pendleton, et al. — abolitionist organizing in U.S. family policing context.
- Public Health Agency of Canada — First Nations / Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect. Neglect — predominantly correlated with poverty and housing inadequacy — is the most common substantiated category in Indigenous child welfare contact, not physical or sexual abuse.
- Cedar Project (PMC8191959) — Pearce, M. et al., on the relationship between child apprehension and attempted suicide among young Indigenous mothers in two Canadian cities. Child welfare contact as continuing intergenerational trauma.
- Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada — Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report, 2015. Calls to Action 1–5 specifically address child welfare.
- Supreme Court of Canada — Reference re An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families, 2024 SCC 5 — affirming the constitutional validity of Bill C-92 and the inherent right of Indigenous self-government over child and family services.