Strengthening Representation of Parents in Child Welfare
The National Project to Improve Representation for Parents Involved in the Child Welfare System aims to strengthen representation of parents and provide them a voice in the child welfare process. The project website details the project's work in the area of training and technical assistance, assessments, and relevant articles, including standards of practice. To help attorneys who represent parents in child welfare cases, the project maintains a listserv, offers specialized training, and holds an annual conference.
The project is a collaboration between the American Bar ...
Restoring Parental Rights After Termination
Every State has statutes providing for the termination of parental rights by a court. Once parental rights have been terminated, the child is legally free to be placed for adoption.
A new factsheet from the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) provides an overview of laws in nine States that allow for the reinstatement of parental rights following termination of parental rights. If a permanent placement has not been achieved within a specific timeframe, a petition may be filed with the court requesting reinstatement of the parent’s rights. If the court ...
The Missing Girls of China
This article by law professor David M. Smolin analyzes the causes and possible solutions to the sex ratio imbalance of China, as well as the causes of the diminishing numbers of intercountry adoptions from China.
Part I provides statistical, historical, and cultural analysis of China's "missing girls" (sex-ratio imbalance), concluding that sex selective abortion has become the primary cause of China missing approximately ten percent of females at birth. The article focuses on both cultural factors and China's population control policies as causative factors.
Part II ...
CA Family Courts Helping Pedophiles Get Child Custody
According to this article in SF Weekly,
Looking out for the children who find themselves in the middle of bitter divorces is the most important function of the state's family courts, and arguably one of the most significant duties of the judiciary as a whole. Yet evidence has mounted in recent years that it is a responsibility in which family court officials are sometimes failing dramatically.
Interviews with dozens of parents, activists, lawyers, judges, children, and former family court employees, as well as a review of hundreds of pages of family and criminal court ...
Child Elopement from Foster Care and Residential Settings
The National Runaway Switchboard reports that between 1.6 and 2.8 million youth run away each year. It also reports that there has been “a significant increase in the number of crisis calls identifying abuse or neglect as a reason for the call, with abuse calls up 33 percent and neglect calls up 54 percent between 2005-2008" (National Runaway Switchboard Crisis Caller Trends, 2009, p. 2).
Youth in out-of-home care often choose conduct that does not ensure their own safety. They elope from foster homes, group homes, or other residential settings at an unknown rate. ...
CAPTA Reauthorized
The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) Reauthorization Act of 2010 (S.3817) was signed into law on December 20, 2010, as Public Law 111-320.
The act leaves funding for discretionary grants (research, training, technical assistance, information collection, and program innovations) and for basic State grants at the old authorized level of $120 million in FY 2010 and at "such sums as may be necessary" for FY 2011 through 2015. A new funding section regarding allotments of the basic State grant funds for improving child protective services establishes ...
Six Million Children Maltreated in 2009?
In 2009, an estimated 3.3 million referrals involving the alleged maltreatment of approximately 6.0 million children were received by CPS agencies nationwide. Of these, CPS determined that at least one child was a unique victim of abuse and neglect in 702,000 cases. The rest were unsubstantiated or closed with no finding.
These and other data appear in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Child Maltreatment 2009, the 20th in a series of reports designed to provide national statistics on child abuse and neglect.
Most states recognize four major types of ...