Dorothy Roberts

About Dorothy's Work

Dorothy Roberts is a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems. Roberts’s work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She sheds light on systemic inequities, amplifies the voices of those directly affected, and boldly calls for wholesale transformation of existing systems.

Roberts’s early work focused on Black women’s reproductive rights and their fight for reproductive justice. In Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997), she analyzes historical and contemporary policies and practices that denied agency to Black women and sought to control their childbearing—from forced procreation during slavery, to coercive sterilization and welfare reform—and advocates for an expanded understanding of reproductive freedom. This work prompted Roberts to examine the treatment of children of color in the U.S. child welfare system. After nearly two decades of research and advocacy work alongside parents, social workers, family defense lawyers, and organizations, Roberts has concluded that the current child welfare system is in fact a system of family policing with alarmingly unequal practices and outcomes. Her 2001 book, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, details the outsized role that race and class play in determining who is subject to state intervention and the results of those interventions. Through interviews with Chicago mothers who had interacted with child protective services (CPS), Roberts shows that institutions regularly punish the effects of poverty as neglect. CPS disproportionately investigates Black and Indigenous families, especially if they are low-income, and children from these families are much more likely than White children to be removed from their families after CPS referral. In Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022), Roberts traces the historical, cultural, and political forces driving the racial and class imbalance in child welfare interventions. These include stereotypes about Black parents as negligent, devaluation of Black family bonds, and stigmatization of parenting practices that fall outside a narrow set of norms. She also shows that blaming marginalized individuals for structural problems, while ignoring the historical roots of economic and social inequality, fails families and communities. 

Roberts argues that the engrained oppressive features of the current system render it beyond repair. She calls for creating an entirely new approach focused on supporting families rather than punishing them. Her support for dismantling the current system of child welfare is unsettling to some, but her provocation inspires many to think more critically about its poor track record and harmful design. By uncovering the complex forces underlying social systems and institutions, and uplifting the experiences of people caught up in them, Roberts creates opportunities to imagine and build more equitable and responsive ways to ensure child and family safety.