Amanda Wallace Once Worked for Child Protective Services. Now She Wants to Abolish It.

The North Carolina activist who founded Operation Stop CPS says she was radicalized after witnessing the abuses of the system as an insider.

Amanda Wallace, left, and Jasmine Sankofa, executive director of Movement for Family Power (Photo courtesy of Amanda Wallace)

Protesting against injustices done to Black people often means not speaking in polite language or striving for respectability. Like those who used ”fighting words” to push for the abolition of slavery—an institution that subjugated Black people and separated families—today’s modern-day abolitionists use rhetoric and actions to galvanize people and provide moral clarity against present-day forms of oppression.

In Durham, N.C., Amanda Wallace is fighting the child welfare system, which abolitionists call the family policing system—a system that removes children from their families and places them in state custody and foster care, which disproportionately impacts Black, Indigenous and Latine children and parents. Activists such as Wallace—an insider-turned-abolitionist who hopes to end that system—call it a family policing system because they say it is racially oppressive and rooted in enslavement. She and others believe that, rather than supporting families and caring about children, the system punishes, regulates and surveils them—most often separating children not for abuse or violence but for poverty and lack of resources.

Wallace’s critics—including government officials who maintain the child welfare system and wish to preserve the status quo—object to her organizing and have criminalized her right to protest and even her freedom of speech, including her use of words such as “kidnap,” “hostage” and “genocide” to describe the work of child protective services and the legal system that undergirds child separation policies.

“They don’t want to hear that, but even when the movement to abolish slavery was happening, they didn’t want to hear that,” Wallace told ContrabandCamp, comparing her words and the rhetoric of today’s abolition movement to the language used by the Black antislavery abolitionists in the 1800s. “And slavery really wasn’t abolished. When people were selling Black bodies, it was legal. The auction block was right there in the square. Now they’ve hidden it and closed the court to the public,” she said.

Wallace, who, as the leader and founder of Operation Stop CPS, is organizing Black families in Durham affected by family policing. After a decadelong career as a child-abuse investigator in North Carolina, Wallace was radicalized after witnessing the abuses of the system as an insider. She founded Operation Stop CPS in 2021, initially to seek reform, but ultimately to abolish the family policing system.

Wallace’s successful organizing has not gone without notice. Late last year, the county of Durham took the extraordinary step of seeking and ultimately being granted a restraining order, limiting the form and function of Wallace’s protest activities. The city of Durham also attempted to ban Wallace from entering City Hall for two years before reversing the decision. Wallace has faced arrests and other repression from the local government in an effort to prevent her from speaking her truth. Wallace, via her attorney, has appealed the restraining order.

Journey From System Insider to Abolitionist

Wallace’s activism stems from 10 years of work inside the family policing system. After graduating in 2011 with a degree in social work from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Wallace began working as a child abuse investigator in a small county in North Carolina.

“I was shielded from a lot of the neglect and poverty-related stuff because I was just doing abuse cases,” Wallace said. As she moved through different and larger counties from 2013, Wallace began to see policies she did not agree with and families with no options. “They were automatically taking kids for nonsense,” she noted of her department routinely seeking petitions to remove children from their families and place them in foster care. “And I started to see the policies become more oppressive,” Wallace said.