The History
Racist, classist, and ableist Drug War narratives laid the groundwork for modern test-and-report practices. These narratives continue to fuel the expansion of the family policing system.
Test-and-report is rooted in the War on Drugs and the use of family separation as a tool of racial and class control in the United States.
In the 1960s, as Black people made strides in dismantling Jim Crow policies and gaining access to social welfare programs through the Civil Rights Movement, the government began to institute new laws, policies, and systems of law enforcement to continue the oppression and subordination of Black people. The government did so under the guise of public health and safety.
New systems of social control included the modern family policing system–created with the passage of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA)–and the War on Drugs. These efforts functioned to criminalize, police, and punish Black, Latine, and Indigenous people.
Passed in 1974, CAPTA creates the infrastructure for the modern family policing system. Despite evidence that structural conditions, like child poverty, are linked to child maltreatment, the Nixon administration refused to support anti-poverty programs. As a result, lawmakers intentionally designed CAPTA to shift the focus from addressing the root causes of harm to punishing individual parents for symptoms of poverty.
Instead of directing funds to communities to address child poverty and other structural causes of harm to children, CAPTA effectively pays states to surveil, investigate, pathologize, and criminalize parents.
To receive federal grants under CAPTA, states must enact mandated reporting laws, which require certain professionals (including social workers, doctors, teachers, and many others) to report suspected child abuse and neglect to family policing agencies.
Racist, classist, and ableist Drug War narratives fueled the expansion of family policing.
While many are familiar with how the War on Drugs ushered in mass incarceration, some are less familiar with Drug War narratives and policies that were specifically designed to target Black, Latine, and Indigenous parents and perinatal people.
The government and mainstream media combined longstanding racist tropes and junk science to construct demonizing myths about Black mothers who used drugs. This included the “crack baby” myth, which relied on imagery of Black mothers using crack cocaine during pregnancy and giving birth to “crack babies,” who would be permanently harmed by their mother’s drug use and grow up to be “neurologically damaged children who were less than fully human and who would bankrupt the schools and social service agencies.”
Central to false Drug War narratives was the notion that the biggest threat to Black, Latine, and Indigenous children was their mothers.
Relying on Drug War ideology, the family policing system deemed Black, Latine, Indigenous, and low-income mothers unfit and ripped their children away and forced them into the foster system. This years-long family separation project has resulted in stark racial disparities, the starkest of which are born by Black and Indigenous families.
While Drug War myths about perinatal people who use drugs have been debunked and scientifically disproven, the stigma they created still serves to justify family policing and family separation.
For example, as late as 2016, CAPTA was amended to include the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act (CARA), which enhances surveillance of perinatal people who use drugs.