What rights does a juvenile defendant have at a trial? How does the law define a Child Requiring Assistance? What are the rights and responsibilities of unmarried fathers? How are students with special needs identified and helped? Kids and the Law/Los Menores y la Ley has answers to these questions and many more. Written in plain English, with Spanish translation, it is a revision of the first book of its kind in MA - an easy-to use, comprehensive guide to Massachusetts' laws and court actions involving children and their families. Topics covered include delinquency proceedings, child neglect and abuse laws, legal issues related to school, mental health and substance use problems, a glossary with clear definitions of legal terms, and a resource section that points the way to further information and services.

Children come into the world completely helpless, and require well-functioning families and schools to meet their needs, protect their interests and nurture their potential. This book argues that healthy child-development depends on values, ideas and structures that promote justice for children and families; in particular, checks and balances that favour: • Fairness: allowing fair distribution of resources, so that every child and family have the best possible chance to reach their potential. • Protection: resources for families, neighbourhoods and schools to help protect and encourage their children, alongside the means to intervene, should this protection fail. • Autonomy: encouraging children's voice and participation in decision-making at a level commensurate with their maturity. Authored by leading experts in the field, the book is comprised of short, highly readable chapters with an interdisciplinary appeal, for practitioners of social science, law, social work, psychology, paediatrics, psychotherapy, psychiatry and public health alike.

In many US courts and internationally, family law cases constitute almost half of the trial caseload. These matters include child abuse and neglect and juvenile delinquency, as well as divorce, custody, paternity, and other traditional family law issues. In this book, the authors argue that reforms to the family justice system are necessary to enable it to assist families and children effectively. The authors propose an approach that envisions the family court as a "care center," by blending existing theories surrounding court reform in family law with an ethic of care and narrative practice. Building on conceptual, procedural, and structural reforms of the past several decades, the authors define the concept of a unified family court created along interdisciplinary lines — a paradigm that is particularly well suited to inform the work of family courts. These prior reforms have contributed to enhancing the family justice system, as courts now can shape comprehensive outcomes designed to improve the lives of families and children by taking into account both their legal and non-legal needs. In doing so, courts can utilize each family’s story as a foundation to fashion a resolution of their unique issues. In the book, the authors aim to strengthen a court’s problem-solving capabilities by discussing how incorporating an ethic of care and appreciating the family narrative can add to the court’s effectiveness in responding to families and children. Creating the court as a care center, the authors conclude, should lie at the heart of how a family justice system operates. The authors are well-known figures in the area and have been involved in family court reform on both a US national and an international scale for many years.

"Crossover" Children in the Youth Justice and Child Protection Systems explores the outcomes faced by the group of children who experience involvement with both child protection and youth justice systems across several countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Situated against a backdrop of international evidence and grounded in a two-year study with the Children’s Court in Victoria, Australia, this book presents a cohesive picture of the backgrounds, characteristics, and pathways traversed by crossover children. It presents statistical data from 300 crossover Children’s Court case files, alongside the expert evidence of 82 professionals, to generate a comprehensive picture of the lives of crossover children, and the individual and systemic challenges that they face. The book investigates the crucial question of why some children involved with child welfare systems experience particularly poor criminal justice outcomes, demonstrating how the convergence of cumulative childhood adversity, complex support needs, and systemic disadvantage produces acutely damaging outcomes for some crossover youth. It outlines the implications of the study, including how these findings might shape diversion and differential justice system responses to child protection-involved youth, and the innovative approaches adopted internationally to avert the care to custody pathway. This book is internationally relevant and will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology and law, social work, psychology, and sociology, as well as legal, welfare, and government agencies and policy developers, non-government peak bodies and services, professional probation services, case managers, health and mental health services, disability and drug treatment agencies, and others who work with both young offenders and the design and implementation of policy and legislation.

With the narrative force of an epic novel and the urgency of first-rate investigative journalism, this important book delves into the daily workings and life-or-death decisions of a typical American family court system. It provides an intimate look at the lives of the parents and children whose fate it decides. A must for social workers and social work students, attorneys, judges, foster parents, law students, child advocates, teachers, journalists and anyone who cares about our nation's children.

Children and youth become involved with the juvenile justice system at a significant rate. While some children move just as quickly out of the system and go on to live productive lives as adults, other children become enmeshed in the system, developing deeper problems and or transferring into the adult criminal justice system. Justice for Kids is a volume of work by leading academics and activists that focuses on ways to intervene at the earliest possible point to rehabilitate and redirect—to keep kids out of the system—rather than to punish and drive kids deeper. Justice for Kids presents a compelling argument for rethinking and restructuring the juvenile justice system as we know it. This unique collection explores the system’s fault lines with respect to all children, and focuses in particular on issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation that skew the system. Most importantly, it provides specific program initiatives that offer alternatives to our thinking about prevention and deterrence, with an ultimate focus on keeping kids out of the system altogether.

Adults are being incarcerated in the United States at an ever-escalating rate, and child welfare professionals are encountering growing numbers of children who have parents in prison. Current estimates indicate that as many as 1.5 million children have an incarcerated parent; many thousands of others have experienced the incarceration of a parent at some point in their lives. These vulnerable children face unique difficulties, and their growing numbers and special needs demand attention.Existing literature indicates that children whose parents are incarcerated experience a variety of negative consequences, particularly in terms of their emotional health and well being. They also may have difficult interactions or limited contact with their parents. There are also issues connected with their physical care and child custody. The many challenges facing the child welfare system as it attempts to work with this population are explored in Children with Parents in Prison. Topics covered include: ""Supporting Families and Children of Mothers in Jail""; ""Meeting the Challenge of Permanency Planning for Children with Incarcerated Mothers""; ""The Impact of Changing Public Policy on Relatives Caring for Children with Incarcerated Parents""; ""Legal Issues and Recommendations""; ""Facilitating Parent-Child Contact in Correctional Settings""; ""Earning Trust from Youths with None to Spare""; ""Developing Quality Services for Offenders and Families""; and in closing, ""Understanding the Forces that Influence Incarcerated Fathers' Relationships with Their Children.""Children and families have long struggled with the difficulties created when a parent goes to prison. What is new is the magnitude of the problem. This volume calls for increased public awareness of the impact of parental incarceration on children. Its goal is to stimulate discussion about how to best meet the special needs of these children and families and how to provide a resource for the child welfare community as it responds to

Current statistics on child abuse, neglect, poverty, and hunger shock the conscience—doubly so as societal structures set up to assist families are failing them. More than ever, the responsibility of the helping professions extends from aiding individuals and families to securing social justice for the larger community. With this duty in clear sight, the contributors to Child and Family Advocacy assert that advocacy is neither a dying art nor a lost cause but a vital platform for improving children's lives beyond the scope of clinical practice. This uniquely practical reference builds an ethical foundation that defines advocacy as a professional competency and identifies skills that clinicians and researchers can use in advocating at the local, state and federal levels. Models of the advocacy process coupled with first-person narratives demonstrate how professionals across disciplines can lobby for change. Among the topics discussed: Promoting children's mental health: collaboration and public understanding. Health reform as a bridge to health equity. Preventing child maltreatment: early intervention and public education Changing juvenile justice practice and policy. A multi-level framework for local policy development and implementation. When evidence and values collide: preventing sexually transmitted infections. Lessons from the legislative history of federal special education law. Child and Family Advocacy is an essential resource for researchers, professionals and graduate students in clinical child and school psychology, family studies, public health, developmental psychology, social work and social policy.

This Edition has been thoroughly updated with the latest cases, statutory references, and scholarly commentary. It also includes coverage of recent Supreme Court decisions such as: Miller v. Alabama/Jackson v. Hobbs (2012), in which the Court held that mandatory imposition of a sentence of life without parole in the case of one who was a juvenile at the time of the offense violates the Eighth Amendment''s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment Graham v. Florida (2010), Miller''s predecessor, in which the Court held that imposition of a sentence of LWOP on a juvenile for a nonhomicide offense violated the Eighth Amendment Florida v. Harris (2013), in which the Court, although in an adult, non-school search context, held that an alert by a trained, drug-sniffing dog constitutes a presumption of probable cause to search J.D.B. v. North Carolina (2011), in which the Court held that a juvenile''s age is a factor that can be taken into account in determining whether one is "in custody" for Miranda and interrogation purposes Stafford Unified School District No. 1 v. Redding (2009), in which the Court held that a strip search of a 13-year-old middle school student violated the Fourth Amendment''s prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl (2013), in which the Court held that the preferences given to members of an Indian child''s family, members of the child''s tribe, or other Indian families, under the federal Indian Child Welfare Act, do not apply where there is no alternative party seeking to adopt the child. The 5th edition has retained the basic overall organizational structure of the previous edition, with one exception. Chapters 5 through 7, which focus on the legal response to child maltreatment, have been reorganized as follows: Chapter 5 addresses the substantive standards defining child abuse or neglect; Chapter 6 deals with processes characterizing the responses of the dependency and criminal justice systems to suspected child abuse or neglect; and Chapter 7 addresses various dispositions in child maltreatment cases. Within each chapter, substantial new material has been incorporated into the treatment of each topic. For example, Chapter 5 includes special attention to issues such as: specificity versus vagueness in construction of child maltreatment statutes; the line between corporal punishment and physical abuse; the relationships among poverty, race, homelessness, and neglect; the challenges of defining and identifying emotional or psychological maltreatment; and the interplay between domestic violence and child maltreatment. At the same time, Chapter 5 retains and updates this casebook''s distinctive in-depth examination of the appropriate legal responses to a range of medical neglect problems. Chapter 6 follows the processing of cases through the dependency and criminal justice systems respectively, examining topics relating to reporting statutes, summary removal, state liability for failure to protect, and constitutional and evidentiary issues encountered in criminal prosecution of alleged child maltreatment. Chapter 7 examines historical shifts in federal and state policy regarding child welfare system dispositional alternatives, considers the implications of the recent findings of developmental neuroscience for child protection policy reform, and contains materials that allow for critical analysis of a range of issues relating to the foster care system and legal mechanisms for the termination of parental rights. One of the distinguishing characteristics of this book, which the authors have retained in this edition, is its breadth of coverage and degree of flexibility in teaching. It deals with every aspect of how the law relates to minors, from free expression in school and other school-related issues to child custody, to private law (e.g.. torts and contracts), to the juvenile justice system (i.e., delinquency and the operation of criminal justice principles to juvenile justice), to abuse and neglect (including medical neglect), to termination of parental rights, to foster care, to adoption, to the status of children as children (i.e., children''s "rights"). For that reason, the book lends itself to use in any number of courses that might be styled "Juvenile Law," or "Juvenile Justice," or "Juvenile and Family Law," or, indeed, "Children in the Legal System" or "Children and the Law." As mentioned below, the flexibility of the book lends itself to varying numbers of credit hours. The book contains a unique blend of cases, statutory materials, and scholarly commentary, including those from the social sciences in addition to law, in such a way that the teacher can draw on a number of sources in examining and teaching about any subject area covered in the book. No supplementary materials are needed; everything is in one book. The organization of the book is an important pedagogical tool as well. It is organized to flow from one area to the next as it explores the overall relationship between the state, parents, and the child, understanding, of course, that a professor in a given course might choose to skip over some parts of the material in the interest of time and coverage. It lends itself particularly to a 2- or 3-hour course, depending on the nature of the course and what the professor chooses to cover. Each course that is taught around the country using this book, whether in law schools or graduate school or even in the undergraduate classroom, will be tailor-made and suited to the particular professor''s preferences and emphases and the interests of the students. For those who adopt the book, a Teacher''s Manual is furnished to serve as a helpful guide in using the book in the classroom from day to day. In addition, occasional electronic updates are furnished to teachers, highlighting recent developments and cases, particularly decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court.