Lived Experience and Disability Justice in the Family Regulation System

Abstract

The public family regulation system fails to live up to its underlying laws and policies that purport to value family reunification as their primary goal. Despite the premise of equitable treatment of parents and families involved in the system, parents are often mislabeled, maltreated, and untrusted by actors within the system. This Article explores how ableism operates in the family regulation system to create an ongoing pathology of parents with disabilities and of parents who have been labeled as disabled by the system.