1. Mass incarceration, foster care, and the scope of harm

Most readers are likely familiar with enormous scale of American mass incarceration; in the context of this vast and racialized system of subjection, specific and grave harms emerge that are difficult to conceptualize in a framework of atomic individualism. Dorothy Roberts argues that the “crime-prison nexus,” which views incarceration as an individualized response to an individual infraction, fails to comprehend the large-scale harms to Black families and communities caused by the scale and geographical concentration of mass incarceration. These harms are not merely individual harms, scaled up to a community, but harms that target relationships and networks of kin and community: “[m]easuring harms at the community level is more complex than aggregating prison’s collateral consequences for individual inmates. Community harms affect more than the total number of residents who have been incarcerated.” (Roberts Reference Roberts2012, 1281). These harms include the damage to social networks, including kin groups, that characteristically offer support and guidance, and the undermining of social norms, including norms of kinship, which guide individuals and shape communities.Footnote ¹ By removing Black mothers, Roberts points out that mass incarceration forces many Black children into foster care, which disrupts family bonds. In other work, Roberts points out that the regime of hypersurveillance and punitive measures created by the intersection of mass incarceration and the child welfare system serves specifically to degrade and persecute Black mothers and to endanger Black kinships (Roberts Reference Roberts2012, Reference Roberts2022). While the child welfare system has not been critiqued as widely as the justice system, Roberts documents that it is characterized by the same stark racial and class disparities, and by seemingly arbitrary decision-making with devastating consequences for families. Like Black parents and children, Indigenous and mixed-race families have also been disproportionately targeted.

The harms implicit in the child welfare and justice systems escape mainstream notice not only because of the racial and class marginalization of those targeted, but because they are not easily conceived of in a purely individualistic moral or political framework. Utilitarian assessments of incarceration tend to focus on the effects on the incarcerated individual and their potential future victims; retributive theories, again, focus on the moral desert of the individual offender and not on their community and family. Roberts’s work shows that a purely individualized framework elides systematic harms that are endemic to our political and judicial system and that target the racially marginalized and economically disadvantaged.

Similarly, in their work on reproductive justice, Ross and Solinger focus on the history of harms to women of color and their families that result not only from lack of access to contraception and abortion, but from policies that have tried to destroy marginalized people’s fertility, denied them access to social supports, and disproportionately removed their children from their custody (Ross and Solinger Reference Ross and Solinger2017). They document the long history of anti-natalist policies that have hindered people of color, people with disabilities, poor people, and others from forming and maintaining family relations, thematizing programs like compulsory sterilization and the defunding of welfare as a means to cut targeted populations off from their generativity and kinships. Ross and Solinger argue that we should assert a right to parent against these depredations; later in this text, I’ll further explore how we can conceive of this right. Ross and Solinger connect their work to Roberts’s, pointing out that systems such as welfare reform, which deny social support to families, and “population control” paradigms, which argue that allegedly less desirable yet hyperfertile/hypersexual communities must be prevented from reproducing, enable and justify child removals. Together, these practices reflect a radical devaluation of Black mothers and their children, as well as others who are marginalized on the basis of race, class, ethnicity, and more. Ross and Solinger explicitly root their analysis in the material, emphasizing how the lack of—or targeted denial of—social supports makes individuals and families vulnerable to state interventions.

It is my contention that the patterns observed by Ross, Solinger, and Roberts not only coalesce with one another, but that this pattern of what I call kinship violence (Hom Reference Hom, Sares and Mary2023)—the suite of practices that destroy existing relationships and harm people at the point of their generativity or connection with others—recurs throughout the history of the colonial and racially stratified state. To enumerate just a few examples, the US, Canada, and Australia all forcibly removed generations of Indigenous children from their families and placed them in abusive residential schools or arranged for them to be fostered or adopted by white families. Jacobs details the overlap between US and Australian child removals (Reference Jacobs2009), both of which were justified through the demonization of Indigenous parents. The Australian and Israeli governments kidnapped light-skinned babies from, respectively, Aboriginal and Yemeni families and gave them to white and Ashkenazi families to raise (Madmoni-Gerber Reference Madmoni-Gerber2009; Moses Reference Moses2004). Dutch authorities in colonial Indonesia schemed to separate or sideline Indigenous women from their mixed-race children (Stoler Reference Stoler2023). In India, British colonists attacked communities of hijras, third-gender women who disrupted colonial gender and sexual norms, by outlawing their kin groups as so-called “Criminal Tribes” and attacking the practices of inheritance and domesticity that organized hijra “houses” (Khan Reference Khan2017). In the US the Trump administration separated thousands of child migrants and asylum seekers at the southern border from their family members; due to shoddy record-keeping and the practice of deporting some parents without their children, the ACLU predicts that some of these children will never be reunited with their kin, and instead will have been “permanently orphaned” by the US government’s actions (Sacchetti and Perry Reference Sacchetti and Perry2019). The concept of obstetric violence, first articulated by South American feminists to describe the abuse and disrespect of poor and racialized mothers and babies during the birth process, has been adopted to describe similar patterns worldwide, including the United States (Sadler et al. Reference Sadler, Santos, Ruiz-Berdún, Rojas, Skoko, Gillen and Clausen2016; Diaz-Tello Reference Diaz-Tello2016; see also Menzel Reference Menzel2024), where the abuse of pregnant and birthing prisoners is characteristic of US mass incarceration (Ocen and Oparah Reference Ocen and Oparah2015). This list is not exhaustive, but is intended to demonstrate the geographical and temporal breadth of kinship violence.

It is notable that kinship violence is justified through strongly raced, classed, and gendered devaluations. Roberts points out that “[a] popular mythology promoted over centuries portrays black women as unfit to bear and raise children. The sexually licentious Jezebel, the family-demolishing Matriarch, the devious Welfare Queen, the depraved pregnant crack addict accompanied by her equally monstrous crack baby—all paint a picture of a dangerous motherhood that must be regulated and punished.” (Roberts Reference Roberts2012, 1492). The “Welfare queen” and the “anchor baby” are discourses that target on the basis of class and nationality, distinguishing idealized native-born, middle-class family relations from those which are demonized. The removal of Indigenous children was similarly justified by a racist discourse that described Native mothers as savage heathens who, in their childlike mentality, were incapable of raising children properly (Jacobs Reference Jacobs2009, 148). This “maternal colonialism” (Jacobs Reference Jacobs2005; Zink Reference Zink2018, 32; Kaplan Reference Kaplan1998) emphasizes both the gendered degradation of Native women and the idealization of white womanhood grounding settler colonialism. If pathologizing discourses have often blamed the mother in general—blaming middle-class mothers, for instance, for the supposed disorder of their sons’ homosexuality—this pathologization is dangerously intensified for women of color and for single mothers, who currently face increasing levels of societal disapproval (Hurst Reference Hurst2022), not least due to the association of single mothers with unrestrained sexuality and dependency on welfare benefits. The Moynihan Report, a notorious instance of this pathologization, argued that the ills facings African Americans in the Jim Crow era originated not in racial oppression but rather in the failings of black mothers (Moynihan Reference Moynihan2018). The demonization of Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, single and poor motherhood is not conceptually distinct from other forms of denigration—for example, racist discourses of animality and hypersexuality are used to degrade African Americans in multiple ways; instead, race, gender, class, and sexuality intersect uniquely in issues related to kinship, and have a disproportionate effect on Black and Indigenous mothers. Thinking through kinship violence requires recognizing and opposing the unique and intersectional forms of demonization that are used to justify it.

An extreme and total form of kinship violence characterized the institution of American slavery. Enslaved persons were kidnapped from their families and communities and held under conditions where no familial bonds were respected or recognized. Legal marriage was impossible, and they lived under the ever-present threat of being separated from loved ones, including young children, who could be sold to a different owner or simply sent to work elsewhere. In his work on the history of the African slave trade, Meillassoux describes:

Patterson describes this “legal alienation from all formal, legally enforceable ties of ‘blood’” as “natal alienation” (Reference Patterson1982, 5), one of the central characteristics of chattel slavery. Unkinning was a means to dehumanize, to control, and to render human beings into fungible products and property. This kinlessness is emphasized both in the legal denial of any kin relations to the enslaved person—who can be separated from parent or child, lover or sibling, at the owner’s whim–and the systematic denial of paternity by white men who fathered children with enslaved women while enjoying ownership of these offspring (Spillers Reference Spillers1987, 74).

Perhaps the nearest thing to an extant discourse of kinship violence is found in genocide studies, which recognizes the purposeful destruction of kinship, along with acts that prevent biological reproduction, as genocidal.Footnote ² The framework of genocide, however, offers only a limited and incomplete view of kinship violence. While the United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (United Nations 1948) recognizes “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” and “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” as a form of genocide, this definition (part of a short list which is “enumerated exhaustively”—in other words, there is no room to stretch or elaborateFootnote ³ ), a number of practices described here are not included, or are included only under a cloud of ambiguity, suggesting, for example, that the mass removal of Black children from their natal families is only harmful if their foster families are non-Black. Because this definition of genocide also requires an explicit intent to eradicate the targeted group, it raises a series of difficult questions about the intent of the actors, as well as the question of what constitutes a relevant group (it is unlikely that the class-based anti-natalist policies described by Ross and Solinger, for example, would qualify). The standard of intent would likely exclude examples like those given by Roberts, where family separations are justified through appeals to criminal justice and child protection, and those given by Ross, where the denial of social support and the imposition of anti-natalist measures are often justified through reference to austerity and a moral commitment to self-sufficiency.

The discourse of genocide is, by design, narrow and exclusionary, intended to capture only the most extreme and reprehensible acts; as a result, it relies on narrow definitions which, as I discuss below, tend to reproduce colonially imposed, sharply limited conceptions of kinship. Perhaps most importantly, because discussion of harms to families, kinships, and fertility are primarily discussed in the narrow terms of genocide, other pressing discussions are foreclosed, such as: in what various forms does kinship violence appear, and how does it target non-reproductive kinships? How does it differ from other forms of violence, what impacts does it have on the survivors, and what ends does it serve for the perpetrators? (I will argue here that the harms of kinship violence do not reduce to the genocidal but rather play into systems of oppression and control in various ways.) How can philosophers develop a robust vocabulary to recognize and oppose varying forms of kinships and kinship violence? I do not mean to disconnect the concept of kinship violence from genocide, since it is undoubtedly a genocidal strategy in many instances, but rather to encourage thinking about kinship violence more broadly and deeply.

2. Defining kinship

I use the word “kinship” to describe the enduring, embodied relations that constitute and sustain selfhood and provide care in situations of dependency and vulnerability. This usage reflects contemporary practice in anthropology and in the study of colonialism, as well as in Indigenous and queer theory, all of which increasingly thematize kinship while making use of anti-essentialist definitions (see Whyte Reference Whyte2021; Bradway and Freeman Reference Bradway and Freeman2022; Clarke and Haraway Reference Clarke and Haraway2018; Faubion Reference Faubion2001; Strathern Reference Strathern1992). These definitions are pragmatic, defining kinship as relations that work to construct and sustain subjectivity. Emphasizing the relation of kinship to subject formation, the anthropologist James Faubion—a key figure in the move away from essentialisms in kinship studies--describes kinship as Foucauldian asujettissement: “it refers to all those processes through which individuals are labelled or made into subjects of one or another kind; … it refers to all those processes through which individuals might make themselves into subjects of one or another kind” (Faubion Reference Faubion2001, 12). For Faubion, “kinship” describes a set of subjectivizing processes that can discipline us to the norms and practices of our society, and can also represent choices in self-formation (one can, at times, choose one’s kin, and exert agency in the formative aspects of one’s relationships). While the term “kinship” can suggest a fixed quantity, Faubion’s definition emphasizes that kinship is a dynamic process which creates and maintains connections—a process that can be disrupted and that can, perhaps, also be recovered. I utilize kinship as the term for the maintenance and production of those non-fungible, enduring relationships that provide care and sustain subjectivity, not least because (unlike “family”) this term has developed a strongly anti-essentialist implication in its scholarly use.

Contemporary kinship studies in anthropology recognizes a wide variety of kinship formations, ranging from biological, heteronormative ones to so-called “fictive kinships,” established absent genetic bonds or legal recognition. Kath Weston’s work on “chosen families” describes the ways in which queer people build kin networks of friends, neighbors, current and former lovers as strategies for mutual care and sustenance in the face of the AIDS epidemic and alienation from their natal kin (Weston Reference Weston1997). Informal kin networks have been key to sustaining African-American communities, in the form of “othermothers” and “community mothers” who step up to help support children (Collins Reference Collins2002, 179 ff.) and the practice of “childkeeping” (Stack Reference Stack2008) or informal, temporary fostering. Historians increasingly engage with the ways in which kinship practices are unmade and remade in the context of colonialism (see Hyde Reference Hyde2011; Pérez Reference Pérez2018; Elbourne Reference Elbourne2022). Kinship is often emphasized in Indigenous thought, in ways that resist narrow, colonial conceptions. TallBear, for example, emphasizes the ways in which settler colonialism has attempted to erase Indigenous kinship practices, and the ways in which matrilineal kinships and polyamorous relations survive and continue to shape Indigenous ways of being (TallBear Reference TallBear2018; see also Nickel and Fehr Reference Nickel and Fehr2020; Rifkin, Reference Rifkin2024). Keaney’s recent work on queer uses of reproductive technology draws out the ways in which practices like gamete donation can be used to articulate nonnormative “racialized intimacies”—for example, a “transnational sense of pan-indigeneity” between a donor and recipient on different continents (Reference Keaney2023, 105). Queer, Indigenous, and African-American kinning practices demonstrate the significance of kinship as a strategy for survival, and the capacity of kinships to develop outside of legal, socially recognized, heteronormative or domestic spaces.

Since the main focus of this project is on the systems of mass incarceration and foster care which are designed primarily to separate humans from their families and communities, the kinships I will use in my examples are kinships between human beings. I do not mean to imply, however, that kinships cannot exist between humans and nonhumans, between humans and the land or environment, and so on. It seems to me that to do so would be to already foreclose a serious consideration of some Indigenous ways of being in the world. Among the forms of kinning that are erased and marginalized by colonial practices in North America are Indigenous accounts of kinship with nonhuman beings, places, and objects, and the Earth itself (Harrod Reference Harrod2000), and the loss of these ecological kinships is also a grievous form of violence (Brave Heart and Debruyn Reference Brave Heart and Debruyn1998, 62). In this text, however, only human kinships will be theorized.

3. Why is kinship violence different from individual violence?

Feminist analysis helps to explain the workings of kinship violence by emphasizing the ways in which relationality grounds autonomy and resistance to oppression. These accounts decenter the autonomous and atomic individual at the heart of modern Western philosophy and philosophical liberalism, demonstrating that fostering relationships is not merely a right of the individual, but a precondition of rights-bearing individuality itself. Reversing the usual order of individualistic Western philosophy, many feminists highlight that relationships are the precondition of individuality and autonomy: in Nedelsky’s words, “[a]utonomy is a capacity made possible by constructive relationship” (Reference Nedelsky2011). Feminist work emphasizes that relationality is constitutive, and therefore the harms that come from wounds to and denials of subjectivity cannot be understood merely through the framework of autonomous individuality; instead they work to undermine the very conditions of subjectivity.

Feminist accounts of relationality emphasize both that it is constitutive to autonomy and selfhood and that it attaches at points of constitutive vulnerability. This vulnerability is the intrinsic condition of humans; Cavarero writes that “the uniqueness that characterizes the ontological status of humans is also in fact a constitutive vulnerability, especially when understood in corporeal terms” (Cavarero Reference Cavarero2009, 20). Kinships attach precisely at these points of vulnerability, and as such are not only sites where we care for one another, but where we shape and are shaped by others in profound ways. While kinship and family are often idealized, these relations are not necessarily benevolent but can also be sites of profound harm. Fundamental to the concept of vulnerability is the capacity to be affected by others: Erinn Gilson writes that “[w]e are dependent and rely upon others, requiring their assistance and support, because we are vulnerable, open to being affected by our environment and by others. The ability to be affected, however, leads not only to possible harm and loss but is also the basis of positive forms of connection and transformation” (Gilson Reference Gilson2013, 23). Similarly, Cavarero describes the vulnerable being as characterized by “two essential dimensions: openness to both wounding and to care” (Reference Jacobs2009, 24). The double face of vulnerability extends to the kin relations that grow around points of vulnerability: kin relations hold the power to care and to wound, to sustain selfhood and to undermine it. This makes kinships a potential site for deeply destructive abuse and domination. As Faubion’s language of “asujetissement” emphasizes, kinship may simultaneously create the possibility of subjectivity and also act as a mechanism of subjection, by transmitting oppressive social norms or individualized domination. Kinship violence, like the closely related sexual violence, targets a specific and culturally laden point of vulnerability.

There is no simple dichotomy between the harmful and sustaining effects of kinship, and they are often at work simultaneously. As the constitutive relations that attach to sites of vulnerability, kinship should be theorized as a site of intersubjective transmission—not least for the transmission of the aforementioned caring and wounding, sometimes within the same relationship. Jaarsma (Reference Jaarsma, O’Byrne and Shuster2020) and Geronimus (Reference Geronimus1992) have argued for epigenetics as one way to understand the embodied flows of trauma—what Geronimus calls “weathering”—through the life course of multiple generations (see also Halfon et al. Reference Halfon, Larson, Tullis and Russ2014). Willett, following Kristeva and Irigaray, describes maternal relations—a significant if not fully representative form of kinship—as transmitting rhythms and ways of being that exceed and precede language while grounding human selfhood and sociality (Reference Willett2013, 17ff.). Harms that target lines of kinship may be transmitted through kinships to many others, across communities and generations. This transmission of intergenerational trauma is a central concern for Indigenous thinkers, as well as those thinking through the aftermath of slavery and racism. It is at this point of intensified vulnerability—a raw point that can challenge not only the physical or legal integrity of a subject but the very condition of her subjectivity and that of her kin—that the state exerts violence against racialized subjects. One important reason to highlight violence against kinships, and not only against individuals, is to draw out the ways that these harms are never centered on one person, but necessarily flow outward through families and communities—a central part of Roberts’s critique of both mass incarceration and the foster care system.

Violence against kinship doesn’t just hurt people as individuals but short-circuits the processes that develop and sustain autonomy itself. This makes kinship violence into a powerful form of subjection, and one which produces cascading and expansive harms. It also contributes to a double invisibility of kinship violence in the individualized Western schema. Because the framework of individualism considers harm and desert on an individualized basis, it justifies, for example, the incarceration of an individual mother solely as her punishment in response to her ostensible crimes, with no consideration to the harms that may flow to her family and community as a result of her removal. And because the Western schema does not sufficiently recognize the importance of kinship and relationality in sustaining autonomy, the harms that result from cutting off relations or obviating the possibility of relations are downplayed—they are seen as unfortunate contingencies rather than as attacks on the very foundation of community and selfhood. When these commonplaces are challenged, they are often redoubled by the targeted devaluation of marginalized kinships; it might be terrible for “our” children to be denied access to their mother, but “those” children will be better off without the influence of their criminalized parent. Significantly, the harms of kinship violence flow outward through networks of connection and across generations, making them difficult or impossible to track using a purely individualistic framework. In the sort of institutionalized and deliberate ignorance which Charles W. Mills describes as central to the “racial contract” underlying colonization (Mills Reference Mills2014), this violence has been rendered nameless and untheorized by philosophical and legal approaches concerned with the rights and status of atomic individuals. Drawing attention to this pattern of violence—which I call kinship violence—is a primary goal of this paper.

4. How does kinship violence work?

In looking at the aforementioned examples of kinship violence, we can reconstruct some of the purposes it serves for the colonial state. First, as Patterson and Spillers point out, unkinning in the context of slavery was a profound form of degradation and dehumanization, the means by which a person was reduced to the status of a slave. Spillers uses the multiple senses of “belonging” to map the way that kinlessness marks out enslaved people as property, noting that, if kinship were possible under slavery, “property relations would be undermined, since the offspring would ‘belong’ to a mother and a father” (Spillers Reference Spillers1987, 75); here “belonging” to and amongst one’s kin is opposed to “belonging” to a master as property. To erase kin relations was to erase personhood or to enact a radical loss of self; to be kinless is to become property. Practically speaking, the continued refusal to recognize or respect the kin relations of enslaved persons was a condition of economic exchange, rendering the enslaved person a fungible commodity who could be deployed or exchanged without regard to bonds of blood, marriage, or affinity. In light of the historical connections between slavery and mass incarceration (see Alexander Reference Alexander2012; Davis Reference Davis2011), the unkinning of prisoners can be understood as a similar erasure, reducing the prisoner to a fungible quantity who can be put to work for a wage that allows for no familial support, housed in remote areas, and moved at will to manage the economic and logistic needs of the carceral system.

The title of Saidiya Hartman’s Lose your mother refers to stories, evoked in the context of the Middle Passage, of rituals or magical passages that could cause the captive to literally forget her mother. These rituals are represented as rendering the captive mindlessly compliant, erasing autonomy and resistance (Hartman Reference Hartman2008, 157). These stories reflect that kinship violence, or the threat thereof, is a powerful vector of control, acting on subjects precisely at their most vulnerable points. In some cases, the profound and dehumanizing trauma of kinship violence may itself obviate hope and resistance; in other cases, the threat of family separation was used to coerce enslaved people’s compliance. Authoritarian regimes know well that the threat of harm to kin is often a more potent means of control than threats to the individual herself. Memoranda released from the Trump administration make clear that the policy of family separation was conceived of specifically as a form of state-sponsored terrorism, intended to frighten prospective asylum seekers to the extent that they would no longer attempt to enter the US (Ferriss Reference Ferriss2019; Kopan Reference Kopan2018). So threats of kinship violence are a significant form of control, coercion, and terror.

Shifting from the example of American slavery to that of residential schools, more uses and motivations of kinship violence come into focus. Residential schools were originally conceived as a means to assimilate Indigenous children into white settler culture. Many of the practices of these schools—prohibiting children from speaking their native (and in many cases only) language; forcibly separating children from their natal families, including siblings interned at the same school; coercive indoctrination into Christianity, and so on (Barman et al. Reference Barman, Hébert and McCaskill1986)—function together as an overt form of cultural genocide. As Lloyd Robertson, a former Residential School employee and psychiatrist, puts it, residential schools “were attempting to eliminate the influence of Aboriginal families and communities on the minds of their children” (Robertson Reference Robertson2006, 7). Kin relations are a crucial site of cultural and social reproduction, and by attempting to turn Indigenous children into strangers to their families, languages, and cultural practices, the residential school system worked toward the eradication of Indigenous cultures (Lafrance and Collins Reference Lafrance and Collins2003), Among the cultural practices combatted by the residential school system were practices related to kinship and sex, including polygamy (Rifkin Reference Rifkin2006, 41–42) and practices surrounding third-sex identities (Robertson Reference Robertson2006, 3), in order to assimilate Native Americans to European, Christian norms. Another goal of residential-school assimilation was to extirpate the collective land ownership that grounded Indigenous kin relations by introducing European norms of private property (Rifkin Reference Rifkin2006, 40–41) and to train Indigenous children as menial laborers; kinship violence against Native Americans aimed to disrupt the transmission of property and sustenance practices, easing the way for economic exploitation and dispossession. Similarly, prior to the Indian Child Welfare Act, with its limitations on the placement of Native American children with non-Native families, Indigenous children were being placed in foster care with non-Native families at an unsustainable rate which echoed earlier generations of child removal and threatened the survival of Native communities (George Reference George1997).

The strategic breaching of kinships is also a central means by which colonial and white supremacist states establish their founding narrative. Breaching and denying interracial kinships—which, I have argued in other work, are a constitutive presence at the beginnings of the white settler state (Hom Reference Hom2013, Reference Hom2025)—is necessary to establishing the myth of white purity which founds the white settler state. Similarly, pathologizing or erasing kinships like those of the hijras was a means for imperial powers to institute specifically modern and colonial conceptions of gender and sexuality (conceptions that are intrinsically racialized) and to stigmatize Indigenous kinships as uncivilized and sexually immoral. Colonists pathologized Indigenous kinships as negligent, abusive, or unnatural (Jacobs Reference Jacobs2005, 463–65), or simply erased them; Mbembe describes the colonial imaginary that renders Africa and African subjectivities unspeakable as a phantasmagoria that includes “children who seem to belong to nobody”: a sort of terra nullius for human exploitation (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2001, 142). The stigmatization of Black women and Black families in the US turns on the pathologization of single-mother families, an incidence that is, as Spillers points out, not unrelated to the erasure of paternity under the unkinning regime of slavery. (Of course, the term “single-parent family” is itself frequently an erasure of non-normative kin networks, especially those native to working-class and African-American communities; see Stack Reference Stack2008). These erasures and breaches of kinship all serve to feed a narrative of colonial and racial power as benevolent and justified.

Ongoing legacies of transgenerational trauma from kinship violence continue to harm and weaken people of color communities. The term “Residential School Syndrome” (RSS) is sometimes used to describe the post-traumatic stress disorder that emerges in many survivors of residential schools, marked by a heightened incidence of substance abuse, relationship difficulties, and lack of parenting skills (Brasfield Reference Brasfield2001); Robertson argues that it should be understood in the context of “historical trauma” that plays out across generations (2006). Brave Heart argues that there is a framework of “historical trauma” (HT) stemming from a more general set of Native experiences (Reference Brave Heart1999). Similarly, some have suggested that the descendants of slaves are affected by “Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome” (Degruy-Leary Reference Degruy-Leary2017). Both proponents of RSS and HT agree that this trauma is transmitted across generations and between family members, increasing vulnerability to addiction and weakening parenting skills. The same characteristics, of course, are cited by child welfare professionals as justification to initiate another generation of family separations. In this sense, kinship violence is self-perpetuating, and the stigmatized signs of resultant, intergenerational trauma are cynically used to justify further harm and pathologization.Footnote ⁴

Thinking through the workings of kinship violence draws attention to salient features of the current American child welfare and criminal justice systems. Some, like Guenther (Reference Guenther2020), argue that mass incarceration is in itself genocidal, functioning to dehumanize and to destroy the cultures of targeted populations, and point out that its origins are continuous with explicitly genocidal practices like slavery (Davis 2011). Certainly, the contemporary child welfare system is also continuous with practices of Indigenous child removal which explicitly aimed to eradicate Indigenous ways of life (Jacobs Reference Jacobs2005, Reference Jacobs2009; Stevenson Reference Stevenson2020). But the framework of genocide does not exhaust the functions of kinship violence, which can be used not only as a means of destruction but as an ongoing means of control and subjugation. State power that is backed by the implicit threat of child removal or family destruction functions as a form of intimate terrorism, coercing its targets in private and often invisible ways. And kinship violence takes on a life of its own which quickly escapes the intents and purposes of its perpetrators, flowing indefinitely through communities and generations. Kinship violence continues to shape the postcolonial landscape, not least as a trauma that has never been worked through; it haunts contemporary kin relations among racialized and colonized people, and these effects are often pathologized, criminalized, and stigmatized. In this sense kinship violence acts as a self-justifying and self-propagating force for the control and marginalization of racialized communities.

If unkinning is at the heart of slavery as a system of degradation and domination, kinships appear as sites of resistance. Angela Davis points out that the central site of community and resistance for enslaved people in the US must have been the domestic space in which enslaved women cared for the basic needs of others, including those who were not biological relatives. This care didn’t just allow for the survival of enslaved people, including the sick and disabled, very young and very old: “the community gathering around the domestic quarters might possibly permit a retrieval of the man and the woman in their basic humanity” (James Reference James1998, 115) and thus nurtured the human desire for freedom and grounded further acts of resistance. While slavery attempted to efface humanity and resistance, not least through systematic unkinning, enslaved people—especially, as Davis points out, women—fought back precisely by laboring to recreate kinships, sometimes in creative forms. Such resistance appears in the work of many Black women to maintain kinships and to remedy obstetric and kinship violence (Stack Reference Stack2008; Muigai Reference Muigai2019; Mullings et al. Reference Mullings, Wali, McLean, Mitchell, Prince, Thomas and Tovar2001). If the concept of kinship violence draws together many types of colonial and racial harm, it also emphasizes the ways in which the undervalued and seemingly mundane care work of oppressed people, especially women, serves as an explicit form of resistance. While it is beyond the scope of this paper, an understanding of kinship violence also calls for this resistance to be centered in future work.

5. Thinking kinship rights

Ross and Solinger argue that achieving reproductive justice and full sexual citizenship requires three elements: the right not to become a parent; the right to become a parent; and the right to parent under stable and dignified circumstances. They shorthand the latter two into a “right to parent” which includes both a negative right (the right to be free of interference and particularly of anti-natalist coercion) and a positive right to support in one’s parenting.Footnote ⁵ Ross and Solinger invite further thought on this right, pointing out that, while it is clear that full reproductive autonomy is central to citizenship, it is not clear how far the right extends at the edges (they highlight access to expensive fertility treatments and surrogacy as points for further exploration: Reference Ross and Solinger2017, 210 ff.). Ross and Solinger’s idea of a right to parent emerges from a crucial need to push back against kinship violence and anti-natalist policy, and deliberately echoes the language of the “parental rights” that are relinquished or terminated in the child welfare system. At the same time, the language of rights, and a right to parent in particular, carries risks and limitations. It closely resembles other “parental rights” discourses that have focused on preserving patriarchal and white control in families and communities; it draws on a universalist tradition that is not well-suited to addressing the specific contexts of kinship violence; and, incautiously stated, it threatens to protect abusive kinships. In response, I argue that a feminist “right to parent” should prioritize connection over control; should be contextualized as a means to resist racially and colonially based kinship violence; that it should be embedded in a nuanced ethical framework that emphasizes good care; and that it must center a positive right to a decent standard of living.

While the “right to parent” is presented in the specific context of coercive, state-based anti-natalism, its language dovetails closely with other movements focused on parental rights and fathers’ rights. These movements similarly situate themselves as asserting a legally actionable right to maintain a specific relationship or role with their (almost always biological) kin. Fathers’ rights and right-wing parental rights movements also present themselves as resisting state-based interventions into their “natural” rights. The intent and result of these claims, however, is very different from Ross and Solinger’s, in that they focus on a parental right to control over their children rather than the right to exist in connection with their children. In this, fathers’ rights and parental rights discourse reflect the roots of legal doctrines of parental rights, which have roots in English common law and natural law theory, and emphasize the rights of parents to “care, custody, and control” of their children (Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57 (2000), my emphasis). I will argue that feminists ought to redefine a conception of rights to parent or to kinship that deemphasizes patriarchal language of control.

Under the banner of parents’ rights, conservative groups have organized to demand governmental support for alternative, including religious, schools and to prevent the teaching of material related to LGBTQ perspectives, gender, sexual education, or race. Groups have targeted school and public libraries, aiming to remove books with LGBTQ themes from circulation and to criminalize membership in the librarians’ professional association. (Notably, these organizations have either sat silent or actively participated in moves to deny parents the right to seek gender-affirming care for their children; see Goldberg et al. Reference Goldberg, Abreu and Flores2024). Parentalrights.org is a lobbying organization devoted to protecting parental rights in state legislation and, they hope, getting an amendment to the US Constitution; while the organization’s website makes a show of condemning the disproportionate impact of child welfare interventions on poor and people of color families, their only legislative initiatives have been to pass bills guaranteeing the right of parents to “direct the education of their children” by opting to homeschool or to weigh in on the curriculum of their children’s public schools.

Despite the lip service given to the challenges faced by poor and people of color parents in the child welfare system, then, the mainstream parental rights movement is overwhelmingly focused on defending parents’ presumed “right” to control the material to which their children are exposed in schools and to prevent any children from accessing materials that are out of step with their ideological commitment. (Education is a primary, but not exclusive, focus: Parentalrights.org also organizes against child abuser registries.) Indeed, by appropriating arguments related to BIPOC struggles with the child welfare system while pursuing unrelated interests, the parents rights movement threatens to elide the concerns of poor and people of color parents whose fundamental parental rights are at risk of termination. Clark (Reference Clark2022) points out that this movement is fundamentally raced as white not only because it consists largely of middle- and upper-class white people, but because the so-called rights it articulates—primarily, the right to control children’s education—are inherently racialized. White parents have long organized under the sign of controlling the conditions of their children’s public education—not least, in opposition to desegregation—and to bend educational policy in their children’s interest. The framework of “white parents protecting whiteness” (Clark Reference Clark2022) is especially manifest in white parents’ complaint that teaching about the history of race—long acknowledged as a way to let students of color see elements of their experience in the curriculum—harms white children by making them feel badly about whiteness.

Similarly, while Ross and Solinger’s conception of the “right to parent” is situated in the context of reproductive rights and therefore primarily focused on the rights of mothers and pregnant persons, their framing resembles that of the fathers’ rights movement. Just as the right-wing parents’ rights movement decries what they consider to be undue state interference (in this case, in their children’s publicly funded education), fathers’ rights advocates argue that the family court system favors mothers while denying fathers access to their children (a claim that is contradicted by family court data; see New England Law Review 1990). Academic studies have emphasized that the claims of fathers’ rights groups tend to erase the gestational labor of mothers and the frequently disproportionate gendered distribution of labor in heterosexual families to push a decontextualized and vacuous version of de jure equality (Khader Reference Khader2008; Flood Reference Flood2012). Khader has explored the ways that the fathers’ rights paradigm is used to undermine the rights of pregnant persons to seek abortion (Khader Reference Khader2008) while Dragiewicz has pointed to fathers’ rights activists’ opposition to the Violence Against Women Act, and particularly to provisions that strip domestic abusers of custody (Dragiewicz Reference Dragiewicz2008). By opposing the reproductive rights of pregnant persons and the interests of domestic violence survivors, fathers’ rights advocates argue for control over their partners rather than connection with their children. A central contention of the fathers’ rights movement relates not to custody, but to what advocates consider the unfair requirement to pay alimony to the women who had compromised their careers to care for the couple’s children; financial control, of course, is a central aspect of broader patriarchal power (see Boyd Reference Boyd and Hunter2008, 65). Highlighting the theme of raced and gendered control, Flood points out that father’s rights groups that sometimes “seem more concerned with re-establishing paternal authority and fathers’ decision-making related to their children’s and ex-partners’ lives than with actual involvements with children” (Flood Reference Flood2012, 1).

There are multiple elisions in the shift from Ross and Solinger’s “right to parent” to the parental rights and fathers’ rights paradigm. Marginalized and disproportionately scrutinized families fight to maintain the most basic and literal meaning of “parental rights”—precisely those “parental rights” that are often terminated through contact with the child welfare system. These “parental rights” refer to a legal relationship with their children, implying either an ongoing connection with them—often in the form of custody—or the hope of regaining that connection in the future. These interests in parental rights simpliciter are appropriated to an interest in parental and, especially, patriarchal control which, as Clark argues, is an entitlement of racially, gender-, and class-privileged parents and out of reach for others. While autonomy and control is not entirely separate from a “right to parent,” Ross and Solinger’s paradigm emphasizes a parent’s right to involvement and connection, which contrasts strongly with the right-wing parental rights movement, with its emphasis on control, and the fathers’ right movement, which engages with issues of connection but also emphasizes both control and economic interests. Similarly, Indigenous responses to kinship violence emphasize the importance of connection, knowledge, and cultural transmission as much or more than control and custody per se. For example, Robert Doucette, who was removed from his Indigenous family as an infant against their will, asks “What’s wrong with telling me that ‘Robert, you’re the eighth generation of the MacKay clan from Buffalo Narrows. Here’s who your relations are.’” (Stevenson Reference Stevenson2020, 136). The first principle I propose in order to elucidate a feminist “right to parent,” then, is that this should be conceived of as a right to ongoing connection and knowledge and be actively opposed to white and patriarchal paradigms that frame parental rights as a matter of control.

Furthermore, the racing and gendering of parental rights emphasizes the need for a rights paradigm that is contextual and alert to asymmetries of power. Clark (Reference Clark2022) emphasizes the way in which a position of colorblindness facilitates the colonization of parents’ rights in the interest of whiteness by allowing white parents to present their interests in continued racialized control in a historically decontextualized and ostensibly innocent manner. Similarly, Boyd (Reference Boyd and Hunter2008, 76) argues that the abstract framework of equality favored by the fathers’ rights movement obscures the economic and social asymmetries within heterosexual parenting couples, which generally compel women to provide disproportionate, unpaid care labor at the expense of their economic pursuits. As is emphasized in Ross and Solinger’s lengthy and thoughtful consideration of the various challenges to a “right to parent” (Ross and Solinger Reference Ross and Solinger2017), a movement to protect families against state kinship violence must necessarily be contextualized in the history of the specific dispossessions of marginalized parents—not only mothers and people of color but also trans people, people with disabilities, poor families, and so on. In this project, it is strategically necessary for activists to press state actors to afford marginalized parents the same rights to kinship as other citizens, but also necessary to avoid falling into a discourse of abstract equality that erases the historical context of raced, classed, and gendered inequality in what Mills calls “white liberalism” (2008). It is important to note that the language of rights, with its appeal to universality and abstract equality, is always in tension with the kind of nuanced and historicized approach that could address and compensate for this pattern.

The individualized nature of rights discourse also carries significant risks in discussions of kinship violence. Rights are traditionally asserted against others who would deny them. But there are many legitimate reasons why individuals might wish to distance or estrange themselves from their kin, or why others—if not the state, then other family or community members—might justifiably intervene in the kin relations of minors and other dependents. Although kinship and family are often idealized, they are also, as I have argued, sites of profound vulnerability, and are potentially sites of abuse, neglect, and domination. While Dorothy Roberts stresses that increased levels of scrutiny by child welfare authorities do not make children safer (Reference Roberts2022, 287), she is careful to acknowledge the reality of child abuse, and emphasizes the importance of kinship care, or the practice of formally or informally placing children with relatives or family friends when their parents are unable to care for them. A right to parent or to kin would be deeply harmful if deployed in defense of abusive, neglectful, or simply unwanted kinships.

Fortunately, feminist philosophy has already fostered a rich dialogue about how to distinguish laudable from harmful forms of care. Feminist care ethics has emphasized the importance of moral relations that are asymmetrical and non-reciprocal, highlighting the ways in which caring for those who cannot care for themselves is both central to our political and moral life and, potentially, a site of injustice (Held Reference Held2005). The site of care includes the threat of abuse and exploitation of both the dependent charge and the caregiver, who experiences “secondary dependency” (Kittay Reference Kittay1999) and is often disprivileged by race, class, and nationality (Erevelles Reference Erevelles2011). The asymmetry of power and ability in the caregiving relationship creates an opportunity not only for abuse and neglect, but for domination—the imposition of the caregiver’s will on the charge in ways that reflect the desires, interests, and values of the caregiver rather than those of the charge (Held Reference Held2005, 83). In response, feminist care ethics has developed frameworks to distinguish ethical care from dominating care, emphasizing that, in instances where autonomy is possible for the charge, care should be aimed at fostering growth and autonomy (Ruddick Reference Ruddick1989, 13); that caregiving should be both situated in and critical of social norms which could hinder the charge’s thriving (Kittay Reference Kittay1999); and that it is necessarily not just a matter of affects, but of the concrete material resources needed to care (Engster Reference Engster2015). Care ethics points to the need for a robust, socially situated normative framework for caregiving and kinship which can distinguish abusive and dominating relationships from those that foster autonomy or well-being. Of course, there is no guarantee that such rubrics would not be applied in ways that reflected implicit racial and class biases, or that deploy ableist and culturally specific conceptions of flourishing; I do not mean to argue that applying normative frameworks to kinship is without risk. Feminist care ethics, however, attests to both the ways that care is crucial to fostering subjectivity, and the ways that it can be a site of deep harm; as such, any defense of care and kinship requires both a recognition that these are frequent sites of abuse and a means to distinguish between relationships that are conducive to flourishing and those that are harmful.

If a right to parent or a right to kin must be conceived in such a way as to allow for interventions in abusive relationships, it should also refuse to neatly compartmentalize parenting into the good and bad, the parenting worthy of respect and the parenting worthy of termination. Following a number of Indigenous thinkers, I have argued that kinship violence flows through the generations, harming people precisely at the point of their relationality and generativity—that is to say, in their capacity to parent, to build healthy relationships with others, and to provide care. While some forms of familial abuse are severe enough to obviate further contact between the victim and abuser, many flawed parents are capable of doing better, particularly given access to health care, addiction treatment, and material resources. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart describes culturally embedded care to help Lakota parents cope with the traumatic aftermath of residential schools and improve their parenting (Brave Heart Reference Brave Heart1999). Others emphasize the importance of culturally appropriate, trauma-informed care for parents and children suffering from traumas related to racial and ethnic identities (see Lee et al. Reference Lee, Chin, Nambiar and Hill Haskins2023; Smith et al. Reference Smith, Yzaguirre, Dwanyen and Wieling2022). I do not mean to suggest that an abusive parent’s history of trauma decenters the harm to the child, or that it is in any way exculpatory. Instead, I want to point out that abusive and neglectful behaviors are, in some cases, remediable, and that in instances of racial and colonial trauma, these remedies are a form of decolonial justice. To varying degrees, it is already the case that child welfare authorities attempt to reunite separated families once dangerous or abusive conditions are addressed; similarly, while a “right to parent” ought not be deployed to protect abusive families from intervention, it does imply a duty to remedy rather than terminate kinships when possible. The framework of kinship violence suggests that a focus on family reunification would be preferable to existing policy guidelines which seek to quickly “free” American foster children of their natal families for adoption, as would a greater emphasis on adoptions by existing kin and community members (see Testa Reference Testa, Lindsey and Shlonsky2008; Hegar and Scannapieco Reference Hegar and Scannapieco2016; ASPE 2021).

Thus far I have focused on the “right to parent” as a negative right—that is, as the right of parents (and others) to engage in kinning without undue interference from the state. Importantly, for Ross and Solinger, it is also necessarily a positive right—a right to decent and safe material conditions under which to parent. Ross, Solinger, and Roberts all emphasize that food security, adequate housing, and concrete access to education and medical, mental health, and addiction treatment are among the basic material conditions for successful parenting, and that the lack thereof is a major risk factor leading to child welfare interventions and loss of custody. Brave Heart’s argument in the previous paragraph, that culturally appropriate support and treatment for generational trauma can help parents in crisis to become better and safer caregivers, highlights that access to such mental health and community support is key both for keeping children out of foster care and for reuniting families that have been separated by child protective services. Given that poverty and deprivation are a significant risk factor for child abuse (Eckenrode et al. Reference Eckenrode, Smith, McCarthy and Dineen2014), as well as for involvement in systems of child welfare and mass incarceration, access to these material supports contributes to what Mariame Kaba calls “non-reformist reform” (Reference Kaba2021), which redirects resources from harmful institutions to alternatives that can address underlying social problems. While such positive rights are not usually centered in rights-based theories, expanding access to material resources for caregiving is a crucial issue for a “right to parent” and should be a key focus in resisting and repairing kinship violence.

Against a standard conception of parental rights as comprising a negative right allowing parents “care, custody, and control” of their children free of state intervention, we can sketch a feminist conception of parental rights rooted in ongoing connection and knowledge (not control) and in a robust conception of care rooted both in an ethic of good care and an acknowledgment of the material conditions of care. At the same time, I acknowledge that, by rejecting the individualization and abstract universality of rights theory, Ross and Solinger’s “right to parent” pushes rights discourse near its breaking point and does not fully address the range of political and ethical concerns around kinship and kinship violence.

6. Kinship justice: beyond a right to parent

If it is useful to articulate a “right to parent”—particularly, a right to ongoing connection posited against racist and colonial interventions—this right does not fully address the scope of injustices and harms against kinships. Extrapolating from Ross and Solinger’s work on reproductive justice—a broadened framework that incorporates both a right to abortion and a wider set of material supports and political protections rooted in lived histories of reproductive abuse and injustice—I argue that we can articulate a moral and political imperative of kinship justice.

While the framework of a “right to parent” is apt to issues in which kinship violence targets the relationship between a parent and a minor child, it does not accurately capture the full extent of the harms that flow from such violence and the range of agents who might reasonably claim protection against them. In the case of the removal of Native children in the United States, for example, the harm attaches not only to the parents (whose rights qua parents were overridden) and to the children (who were often subject to terrible abuse) but the extended families who were separated, the cultures that were not passed on to the next generation due to removal, and the future generations that experience the aftermath of this trauma and erasure. Similarly, the American foster care system not only separates children from their parents, but frequently also from their extended families, their communities, and their siblings. As Roberts points out in her account of the harms of mass incarceration and the foster care system, siblings, extended family members, communities, cultures, and future generations all suffer from kinship violence and have an interest in kinship justice; rights or protections asserted against kinship violence, then, ought also to have a broader scope than the parent–child relationship alone. In response to intensive targeting by child welfare authorities, Native American groups successfully fought for the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978), which gives federally recognized Native tribes the right to maintain Native children’s connection to their culture and community where possible. One of the most significant legal interventions against racialized abuses of the foster care system, then, relies not on a sharply limited “right to parent” but on a larger, community-based vision of kinship justice.

With its focus on the relationship between parents and children, a “right to parent” does not speak to sustaining relationships between adults. Given its dual roots in the reproductive justice movement and in heteronormative natural law discourse, it is also largely focused on reproductive and biological relationships. However, kinship practices within Black, Indigenous, and poor communities often exceed the limits of biological kinships (see Stack Reference Stack2008; Rifkin Reference Rifkin2010; Young and Wilmott Reference Young and Wilmott2013; TallBear Reference TallBear2021), attesting to the incompleteness of a biological framework. LGBTQ work has further emphasized the importance of “chosen families” and trans “care networks” (Malatino Reference Malatino2020) which provide much-needed care, often to subjects who have been cut off by their natal families. Indigenous accounts of kinship not only highlight non-heteronormative models but push more decisively beyond the boundaries of Western discourse by emphasizing kinships between human individuals and other sorts of entities; in related work, Haraway (Reference Haraway2016) argues for the practice of making “oddkin” with all manner of living things as a form of solidarity. Harms related to the mass incarceration and foster care systems should not be understood separately from these more expansive networks of kinship and relation: for example, the general neglect of broader networks of “kin and fictive kin” (where “fictive kin” refers to non-biological relationships) has an adverse effect on foster children, whereas stronger extended communities foster resilience (Leon and Dickson Reference Leon and Dickson2019) and create the possibility of placing children in care within their communities and extended families.

While it may be possible to stretch the borders of Western discourses on rights and moral considerability to include cultures, communities, and ecosystems, Indigenous thought emphasizes that the ethics and politics of interconnection do not reduce neatly to these Western concepts. Whyte (Reference Whyte2021), for example, describes kinships that bind together not only human families, but interspecies dependencies, ecological webs, and the fraught relations of settlers and natives. For him, kinship is defined not only by relationality and interdependence (however diminished and denied in the settler perspective), but by accountability. Indigenous conceptions of kinship are in and of themselves moral and political frameworks that may both comprehend and resist kinship violence more thoroughly than those based in Western perspectives. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to further explore Indigenous kinship ethics, I want to emphasize that such an approach—one that not only values kinship, but takes kinship as its ethical-political grounding—is distinct from and irreducible to a Western standpoint which centers solely the rights-bearing individual. Where this project has largely focused on both Western political theory and a Western conception of kinships between humans only (sidestepping Indigenous conceptions of kinships and of political obligation), exploring Indigenous contributions is a logical next step in thinking kinship violence and kinship justice.