The Long Shadow of Family Separation: a Structural and Historical Introduction to Mandated Reporting in the Domestic Violence Context

When intimate partner violence survivors seek help from public institutions, including domestic violence programs, they necessarily submit to the scrutiny of staff who are required to report suspicions of child abuse or neglect to the state child protective system. This prospect would frighten anyone but has particular weight for survivor-parents who – during a period of enormous stress, chaos, and trauma - are often held responsible for the conditions of abuse they are trying to end or escape. So, what happens when they enter such systems? How do survivors think about and manage the experience of being evaluated, and more acutely, the looming possibility of a mandated report? And how do advocates, trained to restore power to survivors navigate their roles as mandated reporters? Each of the articles in this special section describes a piece of this puzzle. But the profound implications of their findings cannot be understood clearly without an understanding of the historical and structural contexts of oppression in which they play out – contexts that many survivors know only too well. This article aims to review briefly the broader social, historical, and structural contexts of mandated reporting and the linked phenomena of parenting surveillance and the forced separation of families of color. Centering these broader legacies of violence and other harms expands our capacity to ask the right research questions and support survivors more effectively as they seek help from systems they need for safety and healing, but that they also rightly fear.