Ayami Ono-Hatanaka

The child welfare system is becoming increasingly known as the “family policing system,” in acknowledgement of the surveillance and punishment it carries out. This dissertation interrogates the seemingly incompatible notions of welfare and policing by asking how a system claiming to help families creates more harm through family separation. Most cases hinge on accusations of “neglect,” a catch-all term which many advocates and attorneys say is shorthand for poverty. Through an ethnography of New York City Family Court and archival research, I argue that the system is comprised of paradoxical logic, resting on the foundational contradiction that family separation is the best tool to protect children. Such contradictions build a logic that not only becomes the lingua franca of child protection but also permeates societal political imagination regarding children and state protection. I contend that the paradoxical logics of the system would not be possible without the spectral presence of the figure of the child, simultaneously the center of and not at all part of the proceedings. By asking what happens to children and parents in these legal settings, I argue that paradoxical logics are fundamental to understanding the role of women, children, and family in the American political imaginary.