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 documents, indicate that the system's methods for assessing whether child sexual ...

Facebook’s Child Pornography Problem

An ongoing FoxNews.com investigation has revealed that Facebook is failing to prevent child predators from posting suggestive and potentially illegal photographs of children on its website. The world's largest social network employs content filters that automatically scan for basic keywords commonly associated with child exploitive material. Those filters, if they are properly employed, should flag much of the offensive material found on the site, cybersecurity experts say. But in a lengthy telephone interview on Oct. 6, FoxNews.com took two Facebook executives on a click-by-click tour of their own website, bringing them face-to-face with some of its ...

Constitution Cannot Keep Special Ed Students in School

In a recent little noticed unpublished First Circuit decision, former USSC Justice Souter held that "whatever the scope of a school’s responsibility towards its students . . . there is no apparent constitutional obligation to impose physical restraint upon teenagers not at immediate risk of harm to themselves or others." This case was brought by mothers of teenagers who were not physically restrained by school officials from leaving their schools during instructional hours. The mothers brought action under state law as well as 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and § 1988 seeking monetary and injunctive relief for violating Fourteenth Amendment due process, ...

Improving the Legal Representation of Children

In October 2009, the U.S. Children’s Bureau named University of Michigan Law School the National Quality Improvement Center on the Representation of Children in the Child Welfare System (QIC-ChildRep). The QIC-ChildRep, is a five-year, $5 million dollar project to gather, develop and communicate knowledge on child representation, promote consensus on the role of the child’s legal representative, and provide one of the first empirically-based analyses of how legal representation for the child might best be delivered. The Center, which is run by the legendary child advocate Don Duquette, has a great website and promises to answer the ...

Girl’s Little Daddy

In an apparently lighthearted attempt to bring some perspective to the multi-national adoption biz, the Indian Association for Promotion of Adoption and Child Welfare, with a little help from Ogilvy & Mather, created a series of freaky ads with blissful children cuddling needy parents. Finally, truth in advertising! Here's my favorite: After all, why should the daddy's do all the choosing? And it certainly beats the Adoption.com special edition print, From God's Hands, To My Hands, To Yours, which I blogged about in 2004: Madison Avenue is finally in da house. I can hardly wait to see what they do with the "rent-a-womb" outsourcing business. ...

Adopted Children and Stepchildren: 2002 Census Special Report

Check out this Census report on the number of adopted children and stepchildren. The numbers are surprising. Adopted Children and Stepchildren: 2000 - Census 2000 Special Report

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