Text Box: Brown Bag Lunch Series Center for Puerto Rican Studies Fall 2006 November 29th Eloisa Gordon-Mora Vice President, Government Affairs Safe Horizon Hunter College, Solarium Hunter East 1413 12-2:00pm The Prison of the Body: The Intersections of Child Maltreatment and State Controls in the Lives Poor Children of Color The soul is the prison of the body. Foucault Introduction This paper is part of a larger research project that seeks to problematize the way the child welfare system in New York City, which is notorious for its overrepresentation of poor children of color, is typically interpreted. Characteristically, discussions on the child welfare system—and particularly, as they refer to poor, black and Puerto Rican/Latino families—are of a bifurcated, high moral ground nature. These discussions typically follow one of two lines of thinking: either the condemnation of not only the individuals committing the crimes but by association, the racial/ethnic communities in which they reside, or the blaming of the child welfare state structures for their racist practices. The limitations of either stand have to do with the fact that in one, racist and classist interpretations of poor communities of color are reified and in the other, agency and response are disallowed to the communities affected by the violence and abuse. Rather than privileging either concern, I analyze the interconnections, the interstitial, if you will, at which both meet. From this point of departure, I want to break down and re-examine the relationships between child maltreatment, class, and race/ethnicity. I do this by incorporating some of Foucault’s ideas on state controls, violence and morality. With this approach, the paper hopes to begin a new and more honest dialogue that can answer such questions as: what is the appropriate role that the state ought to assume in taking control of the lives of children; how can the state effectively avoid the exclusive targeting of certain communities; how is one to interpret the correlations existing between class, race/ethnicity and family violence; and related to this, how is one to interpret the acute increases in child maltreatment among Puerto Rican families—both, in New York City and the Island—in recent years?

 

 

 

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