In one of my first jobs after law school, I worked in a legal services office, representing parents who had been accused of abuse and neglect. Throughout my time, I witnessed their struggle to navigate the complexities of legal proceedings, the inability of the public welfare system to provide the requisite support to the entire family, the pain that my clients experienced in losing their children, and the overall trauma inflicted on parents by a system that claimed to protect their children.
When I read Shanta Trivedi’s The Hidden Pain of Family Policing, I found it to be a powerful intervention in ongoing conversations about, and critiques of, family regulation, justice, and systemic reform 1 precisely because of the article’s focus on parents. Others have argued that, as currently structured, the child welfare system (or what is now frequently labelled the “family policing system”) functions less as a protector of children and more as a carceral technique for surveillance and separation of marginalized families. Trivedi observes that the system relies on an overly simplistic demonization of parents. She calls for a radical rethinking of this system to change attitudes towards parents, emphasizing community-based support, the importance of meeting basic material needs for families, and the adoption of alternative perspectives, including transformative justice and abolition. (P. 51.) Trivedi achieves the article’s goal to “comprehensively examine the wide-ranging effects that family policing intervention can have” by examining “the behavioral, emotional, mental, physical, and social health of parents.” (P. 7.)
At the heart of the article is a critical and often overlooked insight: the family policing system, while purportedly designed to protect children, inflicts profound and lasting harm not just on the very families it targets but specifically on parents. Trivedi uses the term “hidden pain” to describe the psychological, emotional, physical, and social consequences experienced by parents whose lives are disrupted, and often devastated, by state intervention that is justified as protecting their children. These consequences—ranging from mental health deterioration and emotional trauma to stigma, housing instability, and loss of employment—are rarely acknowledged in public discourse or legal proceedings.
The article is nicely organized around this central theme. Part I documents this otherwise-hidden pain, showing the impact on parents from state surveillance of their families. Part II explores the potential explanations for the comparative lack of scholarly focus on parents, suggesting that one reason is “because of who society perceives them to be,” while another is because the child welfare system is focused on protecting children, not their parents. (P. 32.) It discusses – and then undermines – the stereotypes about such parents. And it shows the ironic nature of the conflict between “the idea that children need to be saved from their parents” and the jurisprudential deference typically given to parental decisionmaking. (P. 47)2 That savior mentality, however, means that children are removed not necessarily because they are unsafe but because state officials fear harm to the children, even though that means “parents are left to suffer as a result.” (P. 49.)
In this Part, Trivedi is particularly effective in demonstrating how this binary conception of “good” versus “bad” parents serves to rationalize the system. Drawing from both case law and anecdotal accounts, she argues that this reductive framing allows the law to ignore or dismiss the suffering of parents, especially those who are low-income, Black, Indigenous, or otherwise marginalized. These parents are often presumed unfit not because of specific harm they have caused, but because they are burdened by “additional stereotypes in a world obsessed with white, upper, middle-class notions of parenting.” (P. 32.)
What sets this article apart is not just its critical review of the harms to parents, but also the humanity which Trivedi brings to the topic. Trivedi forefronts the voices of impacted parents, using stories collected from a variety of sources to highlight the structural violence of the system. For example, she quotes one mother who wonders, “‘Am I still a parent. . . . People who don’t know the situation are like, ‘Have you got any children? Sometimes I choose to say no . . . .’” (P. 18.) Another ponders how to move forward when “‘[her] whole life has been about raising these kids and being there for my kids.’” (Id.) These narratives are not presented as isolated incidents, but as representative of a broader, patterned injustice perpetuated by a system that surveils and punishes rather than supports and nurtures. The inclusion of these personal accounts bridges the gap between academic discourse and lived experience.
In the final part of the article, Trivedi explains that to reduce the overall harm of the family policing system requires not just policy changes that recognize the injuries that the system inflicts on parents (as well as children) but also that rewrite the dominant legal and cultural narratives around parenting, state surveillance, and the meaning of child welfare. Her proposals include limiting unnecessary investigations by replacing mandated reporting with mandatory supportive measures for parents and children (P. 55), recognizing the relationship between poverty and neglect, reducing family separations, enhancing procedural protections for parents, and investing in community-based support systems that address poverty and structural inequality rather than punishing it. She argues convincingly that these reforms are not only legally and ethically necessary, but also essential to restoring trust and justice in communities that have long been over-surveilled. In centering parents’ voices, the article provides an alternative perspective on family protection and emphasizes the real-world impact that policy decisions seemingly focused on children also have on parents.
Ultimately, The Hidden Pain of Family Policing challenges legal professionals, policymakers, and scholars to rethink how we protect children and support families by putting the parent back into the family protection system. To accomplish this goal, Trivedi emphasizes the need for a paradigm shift away from a carceral mindset and towards a narrative that does not rely on dismissive stereotypes about parents but instead respects their autonomy and dignity. Trivedi argues that a narrative change could affect the approaches of workers within the system, lawyers, and judges. Appreciation of context could help judges deciding whether a parent has fulfilled the elements of a reunification plan to contextualize “the effects of separation on a parent that may have hindered their ability to comply.” (P. 65.)
To be sure, the article might have offered even more specificity about the pragmatic and political difficulties of changing the narratives and advocating for consideration of parental interests. But by showing how foregrounding the interests and vulnerabilities of parents can redirect child protection, Trivedi provides a critically important perspective on fundamental flaws in the existing system and opens up space for a more holistic and just approach to family well-being.
- For other discussions of this conversation in Jotwell, see, for example, Anibal Rosario-Lebron’s review of Lisa Washington’s work and Shani King’s review of Dorothy Roberts’s work.
- Maxine Eichner, Mary Ziegler, and I explore the strength of this concept in a forthcoming article, “For Their Benefit”: The Lost History of Parental Consent and Minors’ Rights.
