For the official version of record, see here:
Seigel, M. (2025). Anti-Violence Work: RISE Magazine’s Resistance to Family Policing. Media Theory, 9(1), 255–272. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v9i1.1173
Anti-Violence Work: RISE Magazine’s Resistance to Family Policing
MICOL SEIGEL
Indiana University Bloomington, U.S.A.
Abstract
From selling away the children of the enslaved to Native American “boarding schools” to separating migrant families at the border, family policing has been a tool in the arsenal of US colonial practice. This commentary examines the role of a particular media cluster in resisting a contemporary iteration of that tradition, the removal of Black, brown and working families’ children through “child welfare” or foster care systems. The cluster begins with an inspiring venue for resistance and solidarity, the online magazine RISE, published by and for parents who have lost children to the system. Articulating a powerful vision of intersectional political analysis including an explicit recognition of the effects of colonialism on people of color in the US, RISE is the backbone of an increasingly aware, abolitionist opposition to family policing. RISE emerged from a prior publication, Represent, a forum for teens in foster care. Both magazines also have community organizations underlying them. They have a relationship to the magazine The Imprint, a non-profit daily news outlet focused on child welfare and youth justice. This article explores the ways these and related projects work together to produce structural analysis, foster collectivity and solidarity, and create possibilities for mutual aid against the violence work of family policing.
Keywords
Anti-violence, violence work, RISE Magazine, Family Policing
In New York City in 2005, a group of parents with children in foster care began to publish a magazine they called Rise [figure 1]. Its mastheadproclaimed: “Rise is a magazine by and for parents who have been involved with New York City’s child welfare system (ACS). Its mission is to help parents advocate for themselves and their children.”[1]
Figure 1: Rise no. 1 (Summer 2005): 1. Public Domain.
Rise is a noteworthy media player in the broad-based resistance to family policing, a phenomenon some people call child welfare but which critical prison studies understands as policing. Family policing is a brutal method of disciplining poor, Black, and other vulnerable women and men in the US today. Like street policing, family policing is fully a part of the carceral system that has grown up around the profound alienations and immiserations of racial capitalism. Scholars of state violence must include family policing in their sense of the whole rather than allow it to be relegated to the hidden abode of the domestic sphere or worse, a realm of “care” that seems benevolent in any way.
Most critical prison studies colleagues today are fully aware of the call from such scholars as Dorothy Roberts to be suspicious of state calls for “care,” despite our hopes in other moments that, as Saidiya Hartman has suggested, “the antidote to violence is care” (Roberts, 2002; Roberts, 2022; Hartman, 2017). We recognize that the notion of care, like so many widely compelling concepts, is also captured. With the need to care for abused and neglected children as alibi, the behemoth of family policing justifies itself.
Rise is animated by parents who protest the injustice of family policing collectively. Part of a notable media universe both online and in print, Rise is the visible index of an advocacy group led by Black and brown women—“Black and Latin women,” in the terms favored in Rise’s New York City context (Vega, 2025a)—offering powerful critiques of structural racism and poverty. The community conversation hosted by Rise produced insights about care, family policing, structural violence, intersecting forms of discrimination, culpability and blame that are foundational to scholarly discourse in critical prison studies and related fields. Critical prison studies owes its building block concepts to grounded struggles such as those carried out and featured in Rise.
Rise grew out of initiatives organized to help children subject to family policing. In an ideological landscape in which children personify innocence (some more than others; Tilton, 2010), it is no surprise to find programs for parents harbored under umbrellas for kids. The Child Welfare Fund, a foundation established in 1992 in New York City, supported Youth Communication, “dedicated to publishing stories by those whose voices are rarely heard in the media,” which featured teen perspectives in Foster Care Youth United (FCYU), later renamed Represent (Child Welfare Fund, n.d.; Youth Communication, n.d.). In 1999, the Child Welfare Fund gave Youth Communication a challenge grant to develop a monthly column of “Parents’ Perspectives” (Arsham, 2025a). The parents who contributed were involved with the Child Welfare Organizing Project (CWOP), also supported by the Child Welfare Fund; the CWOP Parent Leadership Curriculum began to offer writing workshops. In its first issue, Rise credited its early content to the CWOP writing group and Represent, which Rise called a magazine “written by and for youth in foster care nationwide” (8).CWOP’s large network of collaborations were visible in the list of contributors to its publication, The Survival Guide to the NYC Child Welfare System: A Workbook for Parents by Parents, which it credited to “attorneys, parents, social workers, and student interns” from ten legal and advocacy organizations (CWOP, n.d.).
Rise, the Child Welfare Fund, the Child Welfare Organizing Project, Youth Communication, Represent, and all the organizations behind the Survival Guide constitute a collective arena of organizational and print culture defending and supporting parents and children harmed by family policing, comprising a media field organized to resist state violence.
These outfits are centered in New York City. There is a west coast corollary with similarly rich pieces, though focused more on fostering than is true in New York. Under the auspices of the non-profit organization Fostering Media Connections, three magazines flourish. The oldest, Fostering Families Today, created in 2001, aimed to reach “resource families and kin caregivers across the country” (Fostering Media Connections, n.d.). The Imprint, founded in 2013, is “an independent daily news outlet focused on the nation’s child welfare and youth justice systems” (The Imprint, n.d.). Finally, Youth Voices Rising wasbegun in 2016 “as a journalism training program for young people with lived experience in the foster care or juvenile justice systems” (Fostering Media Connections, n.d.). East and West coasts touched, as when Washington state parents organizing and organized by this media body reached across the continent to write for and be interviewed in Rise celebrating their collaboration (Mays et al., 2014).
Offering more than practical or moral support, this field of cultural production is itself a radical force. It is a constellation that rejects the implications of individual fault projected by family policing onto parents whose children are removed. Within the harbor it provides, people labor to counter the violence work of the carceral apparatus (Seigel, 2018). Against the violence of state and corporate media justifying family (and other) policing, Rise and its sister entities counterpose competing analysis at multiple levels of scale. At the individual level, articles admit to parental mistakes with compassion, recognizing loving moms and dads. At a slightly higher level of scale, that of the agency or organization, the magazines feature “know your rights” and other practical advice pieces which present entities such as ACS as navigable, permeable, and mutable. At the highest level of abstraction, content spotlights and critiques the racism and poverty that make working-class people of color in New York City more vulnerable to family policing, encouraging the structural analysis that fuels dissent and organizing by the people this branch of the carceral state most intensely affects. Together, this collection of expressive organs mitigates powerfully against the individualization of disorder imposed on parents by family policing. Its visionary agents have created a subcultural counterpublic sphere of solidarity and resistance, a venue for an accessible critique of the state violence of family policing.
RISE Magazine
Rise offers neither polemic nor exhortation but starts and stays with the people being affected everyday by the family policing system. Its radicalism emerges between the lines in the ways it allows the truth of the system to become evident in its authors’ firsthand experiences.
Parents’ struggles are highlighted without an iota of blame. Parental drug use, for example, is a frequently-treated topic. In a piece in the very first issue, it is framed with compassion for the user, who lost her son’s father and then her own mother three years later. “All the feelings I’d held back for so long came rushing back,” explains the author. “I didn’t want to feel those feelings so I started snorting cocaine and smoking crack, too” (Miller, 2005). A second mention of parental drug use in issue #1 is rendered with complete lack of judgment [figure 2]. “I told my sons, ‘I had a drug problem, which not only took over my life but my mind as well. Even though I thought about you and love you, the drugs were more important to me at the time. That was what the drugs were telling me’” (Sanchez, 2005). Issue #2 focused entirely on parental drug or alcohol addiction, introducing itself with this straightforward header:
Many children enter foster care because their parents are struggling with an addiction to drugs and alcohol. It’s very hard to stop using drugs or drinking, and rehab can be sad, painful and shameful. But parents can get help, reconnect with their children and reunite their families.
Figure 2: Milagros Sanchez, “Tough Questions Brought Us Closer,” Rise no. 1 (Summer 2005): 8. Public Domain.
In discussions of parental addiction, the harm done to children is fully recognized and the parent is recognized as an agent, not a passive victim, but the forthright directness of the text allows for neither shame nor blame. Occasionally authors even more explicitly recognize and reject the blame visited on parents, as in Kevin Edwards’s sympathetic account of the dilemma faced by his son’s mother. “Until she completes [parenting classes and other requirements], she’s just another bad parent in the system’s eyes” (Edwards, 2005). Here “the system” is rendered a faceless monolith, unfriendly and perhaps antagonistic. As another parent put it, when she educated herself, “I began to say, ‘The system cannot screw me’” (Henriquez, 2006). A clear “them” emerges in relation to which Rise’s “us” is nourished and embraced.
Writers for Rise amply understood the weight of the demand to perform penitence for the surveillant lens of the family policing system and actively resisted the call to blame. One exemplary acknowledgement of the ways Rise allowed parents to resist their own demonization was a report back from a national conference for parent advocates by Violet Rittenhour. The author pointedly critiqued the overemphasis on parental responsibility alongside the blindness to systemic failures. “At the conference, I saw parent after parent get up and describe themselves in negative terms,” she lamented:
Most had been in recovery and worked mainly with other parents in recovery. Their stories were often about being neglectful, irresponsible parents who had changed their ways thanks to the child welfare agency. They spoke about helping other parents cooperate with the system. … That was disappointing. Substance abuse is not the only thing that brings families into contact with the system, and public child welfare workers are not always helpful or respectful to families (Rittenhour, 2006).
Rittenhour’s comments reveal the extraordinary power of Rise and its organizing body, the Child Welfare Organizing Project, in empowering parents in New York:
By seeing how parent advocates are treated—and how they work—in some other states, I saw that in New York City we are light years ahead. By no means are we where we need to be as a system, but at least CWOP is an independent voice for parents. At least our foster care system engages families in policy making in a meaningful way (Rittenhour, 2006).
Rittenhour’s sharp critique contains a noteworthy hopefulness about the New York City child welfare authorities, a congratulations to “our foster care system” at a moment when there was reason for such optimism. Rise founding editor Nora McCarthy recalled this as a moment when ACS leadership was receptive to critique and to parents’ concerns. ACS Commissioner John Mattingly, she remembered, “made it feel like ‘we’ were together in realigning this behemoth to reality. He created a culture of standing together apart from the system, and taking responsibility together for being truthful and making the effort to fix it” (McCarthy, 2025b). Rise staked its claim on the hope that listening to parents could be a part of genuine movement in the child welfare system.
By many indicators, Mattingly did justify McCarthy’s confidence. Mattingly moved to close group homes, focused on prevention, and gave community members greater voice through measures such as ACS’s Community Partnership initiative, launched in 2008. Mattingly was not the only ACS Commissioner to be receptive to Rise’s proposals (Arsham, 2025b), and his administration did oversee cuts to preventive services. Still, over the years of his leadership from 2004 to 2011, the number of children in foster care dropped from 24,000 to 15,000 (Administration of Children’s Services, n.d.; “Guest Writer” [no name], 2018). It would continue to drop after that (McCarthy, 2025a; Newman, 2023).
In relation to other cities, furthermore, New York in the 2000s was receptive to efforts to allow parents a say in processes that concerned them. It had come a long way from the Reagan 1980s, when the City foster system had swelled as supply-side economics and punitive policy exacerbated poverty amidst the AIDS and crack epidemics. An underlying thread of relative progressiveness survived, visible during the mayoralty of David Dinkins, whose Child Welfare System Commissioner was Robert Little, a younger brother of Malcolm X (Arsham, n.d.; Lee, 1990). Yet the early 1990s still saw close to 50,000 City children in foster care, and attempts to emphasize preventive services and support rather than punish foundered on the shoals of the massive federal Adoption and Safe Families Act (Arsham, n.d.). Signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1997, AFSA limited support for families in crisis in favor of adoption, tragically accelerating removals (Center for the Study of Social Policy and the Urban Institute, 2009).
It was in this complex context that CWOP’s parent advocacy programs gained ground. The organization grew out of research from Hunter College showing that “parents had insufficient voice in NYC’s public child welfare system,” as Mike Arsham remembered. Supported, as noted above, by the Child Welfare Fund, CWOP was born with an activist director who drew parents into organizing, peer-led support groups, street demonstrations, the parent leadership curriculum, and writing for publication, leading to the creation of Rise (Arsham, n.d.; see also Tobis, 2013).
Undergirded by CWOP, Rise tackled the issues afflicting families in New York’s tough neighborhoods with sensitivity and sharp analysis. Much of that analysis has come to be standard in critical prison studies scholarship, but it was tangible in the pages of Rise well before academics came to embrace it. As Rise authors well understood, for example, to refuse blame is to refuse to individualize the disorder indexed by chaotic drug use or other parental challenges. That is, it is to refuse a carceral framing. Rise tended not to name the issues underlying drug abuse, namely the saturation of certain communities with dangerously addictive chemicals, the prevalence in those same communities of premature death, the stresses of racialized urban poverty, and the lack of high-quality, accessible health care. As Nora McCarthy recalled, these issues seemed to many writers so obvious as not to need to be named (McCarthy, 2025b).
Structural critique emerged nonetheless, as in Kevin Edwards’s invocation of “the system” above. This was a fairly regularly-sounded note. Robin Wiley characterized “the system” starkly:
Often I thought about trying to get rehab, but I thought that if I told someone, “I’m using crack,” they’d put my kids into foster care. Once you let the system into your life they can do whatever they want to your family. Since I didn’t want to lose my children, I just kept trying to stop using crack on my own (Wiley, 2005).
An article on New Jersey voiced a critique by ventriloquizing a group of parents about to be in conversation with the Department of Children and Families. The co-executive director of a body called the Statewide Parent Advocacy Network predicted that families would speak quite frankly. They will explain, she expected, that:
Too often, workers are not respectful to parents, they talk down, they focus on a family’s problems exclusively and don’t build on the family’s strengths. They’ll probably say there are not enough services for kids who are at the greatest risk to prevent them from entering care. …. Finally, the parents will probably say there’s discrimination. Whether your child goes into foster care often depends on your access to money and on where you live (Rise, 2006).
Note the subtle critique of racism, here rendered via notice of class and geography. Stopping short of endorsing such opinions themselves, this writer and Rise broadly nonetheless set them into motion in public conversation.
Critique of the damage inflicted on children by removal was published as well. An early issue devoted to reunification noted the devastating emotions children experience when removed and even when they return. In essays such as “Baby Steps: I had to get to know my daughter again when she came home,” and “Paying for the Past: After years in foster care, my son came home angry,” authors convey the trauma of removal provokes (Perez, 2006; Caban, 2006; see also Miller, 2006). “Even though she seems strong,” wrote Bertha Marquez in this issue, “I know that Barbie is affected by all that she’s gone through with me. I think if she came home and had to live with the fear of being removed again, that would be a tragedy. I don’t want my daughter to feel like life’s so hard that she could drown in a glass of water” (Marquez, 2006).
Although the mother writing here takes responsibility for her daughter’s experience (“all she’s gone through with me”), her essay clearly conveys how shattering family policing is for a child. Other issues contained similar lamentations. A mother who lost her children for only forty-five days—and saw them every day at school—explained that still, “the episode had a lasting effect. My whole family went to counseling for years, and I still go. It was traumatic for all of us” (Sanchez-Cochran, 2006). Another urged caseworkers “to understand how important it is for them to think about the families they affect, and how hard it is for parents and kids to build a relationship after the kids have been removed” (Timmons, 2006).
Another subject that allowed for critique to emerge was agency personnel. Foster system workers are a mixed bag in the pages of Rise. Occasionally they are understanding and helpful, as they were for Sandra Jimenez:
The people at the foster care agency, St. Christopher’s Inc., helped me immensely. The first day I went there, my casework supervisor, Sid, said to me as I sat there scared to death and ashamed, “Forget about what you did in the past. It’s what you do from today on that counts.” That started a trust, because he didn’t judge me (Jimenez, 2005).
Rosita Pagan writes that she “was blessed with Ms. Angela Torres, my substance abuse counselor” (Pagan, 2005). Robin Wiley found that she “could talk about what I was going through because the staff were ex-addicts” (Wiley, 2005). Shared stigma may explain other parents’ experiences of comfort and support as well.
Agency staff were also painted in less rosy frames. When ACS took away Lynne Miller’s son, she “never thought I’d get him back. My ACS worker told me that she would make sure the foster parents he was with would adopt him right out of my life. She said there wasn’t a thing I could do about it—and I believed her!” (Miller, 2005). The straightforward storytelling does not mask the social worker’s cruelty while the admission of belief clearly identifies her lie. Directly following this first-person account is a “Know Your Rights” feature on visiting and staying in touch with children in foster care reprinted from The Parents’ Survival Guide to the NYC Child Welfare System. In it, parents are advised that agencies “may not deny you visits” and “should not interfere with your contact with your child,” clearly responding to experiences of precisely such denials and interference (Rise,2005).
Figure 3: “Getting the Visits You Need: Your rights to visiting and staying in touch with your children,” Rise no. 1 (Summer 2005): 3. Public Domain.
The artwork accompanying this piece is particularly revealing [figure 3]. Although the prose is a straightforward series of legal bullet points, it is illustrated with an impressionistic drawing. In it, a group of three people, two adults and a child, embrace in a smiling circle. Behind them a single man in a collared shirt and tie holds a stopwatch, his thumb at the ready on the knob. The critique of industrial time, inhuman and inflexible, is tangible and apt. The perspective in the sketch places the man literally above the family group, his thumb the largest body part in the image. The man’s eyes are slits, conveying boredom or uncaring. Interestingly, he is rendered with black lines on white, while the family cluster whose time together he is about to terminate is sketched in reverse, white lines outlining black. The illumination of the racial relations of New York City social workers and clients is unmistakable in the facial features of all the characters conveyed. Rise may not have put its critique into actual words, but a picture is worth the proverbial thousand.
Figure 4: CWOP, The Survival Guide to the NYC Child Welfare System: A Workbook for Parents by Parents, publisher unclear, n.d. [but 2005 or earlier], available: https://cfrny.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/ACS-Survival-Guide.pdf (Accessed 10/26/24), p. 5, and https://cssp.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/survivalguide-english.pdf (Accessed 10/26/24), among other websites. Public Domain.
The handbook Rise reprinted the “Know Your Rights” piece from, The Survival Guide to the NYC Child Welfare System, is a similarly powerful offer of solidarity and practical support. It offers an explicit and notably spatial critique of family policing. In its opening pages, it asks and answers the question, “Which children go into foster care?” The answer is a refusal of the alibi institutions within the system (and the general public) would offer: abused and neglected children [figure 4]. Instead, it presents a direct and profound analysis of class and race in the City:
Most children in foster care are from families without a lot of money. Most children in foster care are African-American and Latino. If you are a person of color and do not have a lot of money, it is a good idea to think about how to prevent ACS from becoming involved with your family and/or putting your children in foster care. There are certain neighborhoods in New York City where there is a higher risk that your children will be put into foster care. In the recent past those neighborhoods have been in Upper Manhattan, the South Bronx, and Central Brooklyn (CWOP, n.d.).
These high-poverty neighborhoods include Harlem, New York’s renowned historic Black neighborhood; multiple districts in the South Bronx, all at the time richly Black and Puerto Rican; and the neighborhoods in Brooklyn that boast New York City’s greatest density of immigrants as well as the Chasidic Jewish community in Crown Heights, classified among New York’s high-poverty Jewish communities by the UJA Federation (The Furman Center, 2006).
The specification of the particular neighborhoods in which ACS concentrates its policing capacity is an astute geographic analysis of the social landscape in New York City, a global city both in its migrant communities and in the ways its race and class patterns reflect historical inequities and reproduce them in the twenty-first century. These historical inequities index formal US colonialism such as the colonization of Puerto Rico and internal colonialism in the form of antiblackness. Recognizing geographic inequity and mapping it onto race and class, The Survival Guide circulates a deft critique of colonialism at home.
The Survival Guide encourages its readers to identify and critique the race, gender, class and geographic unevenness of New York’s family policing. Just after the analysis above, a first-person account narrates:
“I know that I would have been treated differently if I weren’t a black woman living in Harlem. You could tell just by the way the caseworker was treating my father and I. It was with such disrespect. I hadn’t really even given it much thought because my focus was keeping my child but now, when I look back, I can see how disrespected I really was” (CWOP, n.d.).
The precise spatialization of the racialized, gendered subject reflects a keen understanding of the relational qualities of social categories and the intersectional nature of the structural disadvantages this mother faced. Here as elsewhere, academics have followed rather than led.
The Survival Guide offers 168 pages of helpful information, translations of bureaucratic jargon, scripts for phone calls, templates for letters to judges or ACS social workers, and instructions for legal procedures, all aimed to recognize, critique and mitigate those disadvantages. No wonder Jeanette Vega, longtime parent activist and current executive director of Rise, characterized it in a conversation with me as“our bible” (Vega, 2025b). In reading it a person is invited into an imagined community of subjects struggling at the intersections of race, gender, class and neighborhood, and resisting policing by a violent state. That community was midwifed by its print culture field, Rise strong at the helm, a universe of media activism engaging deftly and strategically with state-sanctioned violence.
Rise has continued to evolve, still vibrant and ever more essential. Twenty years old and digital, on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/readrisemag) and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/readrisemag/) as well as its own website (https://www.risemagazine.org/), Rise has adapted impressively. Its magazine form ceased in 2021 or 2022, ending its presence as a media entity, but it has expanded its other arenas of activity. Rise and Shine is the leadership training program, an entry point into Rise; the Parent Advocates program trains parents to work in foster and preventive agencies, or “in the system,” as Jeanette Vega, now the organization’s executive director, puts it; the Peer and Community Care Network trains parents to be peer support and to advocate for each other; and the Parents’ Platform focuses on organizing and legislation (Vega, 2025b). These programs are led by parents with experience in the system. Keith Hefner, founder of Youth Communication, and Mike Arsham, longtime leader of CWOP, have retired; Nora McCarthy, founding editor of Rise, moved to found the NYC Family Policy Project in 2021 (McCarthy, 2025c). All remain in close communication or active collaboration with Rise, while parents impacted by the system, including Vega, are now the leaders in nearly all capacities, and the staff has swelled notably to fifteen paid positions.
While the organization is no longer a print culture medium, Rise rose to its current robust condition through its work to publish parents’ stories. Vega and her powerful (and large!) crew will continue to bring the original vision to bear in all the sites they have occupied and to seek to expand their areas of influence. The victories against family policing, particularly the dramatic decrease in children removed from families over the twenty years of the organization’s existence, amply demonstrate the value of this notable anti-violence media work.
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Notes
[1] The author wishes to thank Mike Arsham, Nora McCarthy and Jeanette Vega for their generous comments and interviews.
Micol Seigel is Professor of American Studies and History at Indiana University, Bloomington, and the author of Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police (Duke University Press, 2018) and Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (Duke, 2009).
Email: mseigel@iu.edu
Conflicts of interest
None declared
Funding
None declared
Article history
Article submitted: 13/8/2024
Date of original decision: 30/9/2024
Revised article submitted: 7/5/2025
Article accepted: 7/5/2025
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