Digging Deeper
Colonial carceral logic as the foundation for Child Welfare Failure to Protect
I Was Seven.
When I was seven years old, I was taken into foster care and placed in a home where I was kept in solitary confinement at all times, except for school. I wasn’t included. I wasn’t cared for. I was force-fed the family’s leftover scraps. No one believed me. No one followed up. No one came.
In the years that followed, I was moved into several private group homes where control came through violence and a so-called “privilege score.” They used locked doors, threats, isolation, and violence to keep us in line. I’ll never forget the daily, blood-curdling screams of other children, restrained, beaten, punished for things like “non-compliance.” Crying too long. Moving too slowly. Speaking up.
When I was old enough, I started running away, not to rebel, but to find silence away from the desperate screams. To feel safe. The world outside was terrifying, but it still felt safer than the world inside that hell.
But even then, the system wouldn’t let go. Police would find me, rough me up, and drag me back to the group home like I was a criminal. Those officers judged me. Threatened me. Insulted me. Pinned me to the ground. Back at the group home, despite my voluntary compliance, grown men sometimes dug their knees into my back and neck, twisted my limbs into pain-compliance positions, because I didn’t comply fast enough or in exactly the manner they wanted. Because I was a means to access funding, an object they didn’t care about or want to understand.
Today, I’m in a wheelchair. I have cervical spine myelopathy and complex PTSD that impact every part of my life. And sometimes, I still hear that voice in my head whispering: Maybe if I had listened faster… maybe if I had been a better kid… maybe today I’d be okay. Maybe I’d even be worthy of love and dignity.
But the truth is, I was just a child. I was a good, if somewhat nerdy, kid. The system was not good or just, and still isn’t.
Reforming child welfare institutions, courts, and prisons is meaningless so long as the foundation of colonial and carceral logic upon which they are built remains. Show me a judge, I’ll show you a monster. The law and those who use it to justify their violence and dominance are the problem.
I read so many stories today about people everywhere justifiably upset about the atrocities of war and genocide, many failing to recognize it’s the same evil supremacist ideology doing its thing in a different time and place to a different set of people. Settler colonialism, supremacist hate and a deep-seated ideological belief in superiority are the problems. Evil can’t be reformed, it must be vanquished.
This is not just a political issue. It’s a moral one. And silence is complicity.