June 2025 marks the first year of Stolen Children’s Month. Founder, Ashley Albert, is an expert on family policing, motivational speaker, advocate and consultant. Albert’s lived experience navigating the family policing system called her to assist other families that have been torn apart. She works to illuminate the horrors of largely unaccountable public systems and their deeply entrenched racism, classism and abuse of power. The response to the first annual Stolen Children’s Month has been powerful: mothers, former foster youth and survivors of the adoption industry have come together to hold vigils online and in person across the U.S. throughout the month of June.
Real Change spoke with Albert about her inspiration to start Stolen Children’s Month, the racism and generational trauma of the family policing system, why this is such an important issue to raise awareness of and the importance of centering voices of those with lived experience.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Real Change: Why is Stolen Children’s Month being honored in June?
Ashley Albert: We decided that the month should be in June, based on Juneteenth. We chose June because we understand the history of the United States from chattel slavery to genocide of Indigenous people, boarding schools, immigration, deportation. All of those things. And right now, it’s the children who are suffering. And so, although June is National Family Unification Month — we have respect and love for Unification Month, but Unification Month is going to have to scoot over and share with Stolen Children’s Month because we want to uplift the powerful narrative of Black, Brown and Indigenous people.
How is National Family Unification Month different from Stolen Children’s Month?
The only stories that are being shared are the stories of parents [with] successful cases of being reunified. When I was thinking about Stolen Children’s Month and planning it for June, every year I grieve between June and November because in November they celebrate Adoption Month, and adoption is what harmed my family. We call adoption a family death penalty in the abolitionist space. It terminates your rights and it erases your name off the birth certificate — children have to go looking and searching for their biological families. Why should they have to do that? They don’t have rights. And it’s a form of genocide, right? So we’re going to call it what it is. Stolen. June is Stolen Children’s Month.
What do you hope Stolen Children’s Month will help illuminate and change?
We just want to honor the people who are still out there being impacted. Because those people who are being successfully re-unified are not the closest people to the problem. The closest people to the problem are the ones who are not being re-unified. Those are the ones who need to share their stories. Those are the ones who need to talk about what needs to change in the system. These folks over here got their kids back; these folks over here didn’t. Let’s look at the data and the reasons behind that. There’s a historical context that goes with that. So we chose June because it is June 19th and it stands behind Juneteenth. Slavery has not ended. People say we’re free but we’re really not free. We have to create our own spaces and holidays for us.
Has Stolen Children’s Month partnered with adoptee voices and international adoptees?
Yes, they’re on the steering committee. Adoption didn’t just start in foster care. And shout out to the people who do show up to help children and just be there for them. It’s not an attack towards the individual people — it’s the system and how they handle that, and how they do this white saviorism like ‘I can take care of your children better than you can because I have money, I have education, I have whatever.’ It’s insulting. People are doing exceptionally well with what they have, the best they can. Those stories need to be shared.
It’s a criminalization of poverty and it’s an attack on Black and Brown people. It’s to eliminate, disrupt, surveil, separate, isolate and allow them to die alone. They don’t want us to speak up. When we speak up in some parts of the country, [parents] get gag orders. They are not allowed to publicly talk about their cases. They can’t do interviews with journalists, no media people. And if they do, they will get arrested and it’s just a trickle effect. It’s a strategy to keep people silent about what’s going on.
[Last month] a child died in North Carolina while in foster care. One-year-old Kemari. His mother was left without answers, support or even comfort from the department. She was given a restraining order by the foster parent. There was no court appointed or state appointed official that accompanied that baby to the medical examiner’s office. No social worker, nobody was on the scene. Nobody went to the mother face-to-face to tell her. [The social worker] told her over the phone while she was at work.
We want answers. The community, the family, that mother. For parents, when something happens to our child, schools report, doctors offices report — they want to know who did something to this kid. If something happens to our children and they’re in the care of someone else, we’re still held accountable. In the United States of America, we are held accountable because we should have known better. But where’s that same due diligence for the department, foster parents and adoptive parents? Why do they get a slap on the wrist? Why do they get privacy?
Can you tell me how domestic violence plays a role in these cases, when children are taken from a parent who is being abused?
We get held accountable and we’re held responsible for failure to protect our children. We’re told we should have known better. But how did my child die, or if my child gets sexually abused [while in foster care]? How is my child coming back to me worse off than they come in? There’s too many survivors, especially Black and Brown women who get punished for not leaving a situation, as you can see in the whole Cassie and Diddy case that’s going on right now. If she leaves him, just all of a sudden with no plan, what does that do to her and her child? They might have issues that could be addressed. They might need to have conflict resolution, treatment or counseling.
Where did the name Stolen Children’s Month come from?
When things are stolen, do they come back? And if they do come back, do they come back the same? What is the state going to do after giving us our children back, harmed when they should have never been taken? They come back sexually abused, mentally abused, physically abused. They’re not the same people.
And they don’t give us any type of structure to have unification. It’s like a breakup. It’s like a kidnapping. Your kids have been kidnapped, held hostage. You don’t know where they’ve been. They don’t even know how to tell you what has happened. You have to read between the lines, read their body language and read their signs.
They’ve been traumatized, not fed. Imagine your kid telling you these people withheld food from your babies. What is the reparation? When are you going to stop stealing our children? And we’re not changing the language. It is stolen children. Stolen means gone, missing, dead — never coming back.
What do you want people who have never experienced the family policing system to know? What can people do to support and help amplify Stolen Children’s Month?
Just sign the proclamation on the website at StolenChildrensMonth.com and follow us on Instagram @StolenChildrensMonth. There is a storytelling project that is going to be featuring different people each week. We have a love letter writing campaign to stolen children. We have op-eds that are going to be rolling out throughout the summer. We have healing circles for families who want to be reunified. We also have a donation button on the website and are a 501(c)(3). Nationally, 25 cities across the country will host vigils at different times including two international cities — Vancouver, Canada and Bogotá, Colombia. They keep growing each week. These will be really beautiful, ceremonial, sacred spaces for families, parents and children who have not been unified, to come back and breathe and mourn with the community, and also be able to hold space with each other. There will be music, food, storytelling. It’s just a sacred space for people to resist isolation, moving into community so that they can liberated from their grief and trauma, and have the life that they deserve.
Read more of the June 18-24, 2025 issue.
