Systemic Racism through Epistemic Ignorance: Immigrant Family Policing and Separation through Child Protection Systems in Canada

This roundtable brings together social work scholars across Canada, to explore how colonial, spatial, patriarchal, xenophobic, anti-Black, and white supremacist ideologies are mobilized to police and separate racialized and immigrant families through the child protection systems. In the wake of public outcries from Indigenous and Black communities, child protection systems across Canada are redesigning how they attend to systemic racism when working with Indigenous and racialized families. Some efforts focus on developing culturally safe approaches to identifying risk, maintaining family unity, providing supports in cases of neglect, and hiring dedicated staff to support immigrant children in their care to regularize their status. The carceral effects of immigration enforcement and marginalization of people with precarious status, nevertheless, remain underexamined, including the consequences for families whose deportability constrains their movement and access to services. Drawing upon critical race, feminist intersectionality, and critical border studies, the first presenter, will discuss how family policing of immigrants with precarious status operates through what legal scholar Lisa Washington (2022) has called the fammigration web, where the carceral logics of immigration enforcement and family policing, lead to heightened risk of permanent family separation. The second presenter will discuss how anti-Black racism underpins the interactions and drives referrals of child maltreatment for Black immigrant families. This flow of racial disparities for Black families begins with the initial child maltreatment allegation and continues to deeper and more intrusive involvement such as out-of-home care services. This presenter will discuss some of the current community and policy level efforts aimed at mitigating the over-referring of Black immigrant families to child protection system in Ontario. The third presenter, will discuss how invisibility of immigration status within the child protection system of British Columbia, operates alongside hypervisibility of cultural identity and cultural safety when constructing risk assessment and notions of good parenting in assessments of future risk for child abuse or neglect. The fourth presenter will discuss how policies that establish the threshold for child maltreatment investigation contribute to disproportionate involvement for racialized immigrant populations. Systemic neglect, exclusion, and hyper-surveillance drive disparities in resources, access to services, and policing of vulnerable families with precarious circumstances. In Ontario, the impact of both precarity and the institutional response to such vulnerability increasingly aligns with a relatively low threshold for reporting and investigating situations that present harm or risk of harm to children. The fifth presenter will facilitate a discussion to consider strategies to address systemic racism through epistemic justice: Questions that underpin this panel a) How does anti-Black racism intersect with immigration enforcement, b) How can the child protection systems move away from the fammigration web? c) In what ways could abolition of the family policing system attend to immigrant rights for undocumented and mixed status families? While this roundtable will focus specifically on child protection systems in the Canadian context, we invite cross-national dialogue of how child protection systems police immigrant families in settler colonial states across the world, towards advancing anti-carceral and abolitionist approaches to ensuring child and family well-being for all.