S. Lisa Washington, Survived & Coerced: Epistemic Injustice in the Family Regulation
System, 122 Colum. L. Rev. 1097 (2022).
Abstract
Recent calls to defund the police were quickly followed by calls to fund social service agencies, including the family regulation apparatus. These demands fail to consider the shared carceral logic of the criminal legal and family regulation system. This Essay utilizes the term family regulation system" to more accurately describe the surveillance apparatus commonly known as the "child welfare system." The general premise of this system is that it is non adversarial and rehabilitative, geared toward child safety. In practice, involved parents, including survivors of domestic violence, encounter an intrusive, disempowering surveillance system. The removal of children and extensive supervision mechanisms operate as powerful coercion tools, especially for survivors, who may find the state actively engaging in unwanted family separation. Family regulation cases, which already disproportionately affect Black and Brown families, further perpetuate the subjugation of marginalized experiences. Survivor narratives that do not align with the expectations of the system are discredited and instrumentalized to justify family separation and the termination of parental rights.
The family regulation system depends on compelling Black and Brown families to participate in the reproduction of existing knowledge to legitimize its purported goal of child safety. This system, ostensibly there to protect children, facilitates harmful knowledge production by coercing false narratives and excluding alternate knowledge. This Essay analyzes knowledge production within the family regulation system through the framework of epistemic injustice theory, examining how hegemonic power structures discredit and subjugate marginalized knowledge. This Essay makes the novel argument that the concept of a survivor's "lack of insight" into their own abuse is a form of epistemic injustice. The cycle of subjugating marginalized knowledge is embedded in a carceral power structure that labels poor mothers "weak" and "dependent. "In response to the current reckoning with carceral systems, a growing social movement led by directly impacted parents demands an end to their silencing and the crediting of their knowledge.
