Legal marijuana possession = child abuse?

Today's New York Times contains an article about state child welfare investigations of parents who legally possess marijuana: The police found about 10 grams of marijuana, or about a third of an ounce, when they searched Penelope Harris’s apartment in the Bronx last year. The amount was below the legal threshold for even a misdemeanor, and prosecutors declined to charge her. But Ms. Harris, a mother whose son and niece were home when she was briefly in custody, could hardly rest easy. The police had reported her arrest to the state’s child welfare hot line, and city caseworkers quickly arrived and took the children away. Her son, then ...

Brazilian Bass Fishing Offers More Than A Good Catch

Brazilian bass fishing is more than big business, it's also apparently a vehicle for child sex tourism. For the past 20 years, U.S. fishing aficionados have been spending up to $10,000 for trips to remote lodges in the interior reaches of Brazil or Venezuela. American sport tour ads are filled with promises of "uncompromising luxury" in plush jungle lodges, complete with resort-like amenities, fine dining and satellite phones to keep in hailing distance of the office. Now a federal investigation and two related actions — a parallel criminal inquiry in Brazil and an unusual lawsuit filed in federal court in Georgia — could provide a rare ...

Foster Children Speak to Congress – is anyone listening?

This summer, fifteen former foster children worked as Capitol Hill interns and developed a set of policy recommendations outlined in a recently released report entitled "The Future of Foster Care - a revolution for change." Among the recommendations created by these former foster youth: Congress should require that an education advocate be trained and assigned to every foster child in special education; Congress should require that surrogate parents be trained on the unique needs of foster youth in special education; Documented and undocumented immigrant children within the foster care system deserve the same basic rights and freedoms that are ...

Handling Lost/Destroyed Records in Child Welfare Tort Litigation

A recently published article in the American Bar Association's Child Law Practice examines the potential effects of failing to preserve or produce evidence in the child welfare context. Best practices are offered from three perspectives—the plaintiff, the defending agency, and the court. Litigation involving public and private social services agencies should make administrators and attorneys keenly aware of the obligation to preserve evidence. Across the country, torts regarding individual children in the child welfare system are common. Professor Daniel Pollack and his co-author Associate Professor Dale Margolin explain that while lost records ...

Chinese Babies Kidnapped and Sold for Adoption

From today's New York Times: The abduction of children is a continuing problem in China, where a lingering preference for boys coupled with strict controls on the number of births have helped create a lucrative black market in children. Just last week, the police announced that they had rescued 89 babies from child traffickers, and the deputy director of the Public Security Ministry assailed what he called the practice of “buying and selling children in this country.” But parents in Longhui say that in their case, it was local government officials who treated babies as a source of revenue, routinely imposing fines of $1,000 or more ...