Couple accused of beating, starving two foster children
Last Update: 2/18 8:27 am
Foster parents accused of abusing children
Maria and Robert Salinas SAN ANTONIO -- A San Antonio couple has been indicted on charges of beating and starving some foster children who were in their care.
Court documents show Robert Salinas, 40, and Maria Salinas, 39, are accused of choking, pushing, and striking a little boy and girl using their hands and a belt.
Police say one of the foster children had bruises on the face and scars along the back, buttocks, chest and neck. The Salinas's are also accused of starving that child.
A San Antonio Police spokesman told News 4 WOAI a Child Protective Service investigator spotted the injuries during a home visit back in 2008. He says the young siblings were quickly removed from the couple's house and placed into different foster homes.
This case has been under investigation for more than two years, according to investigators. Detectives say it took them a while to track down the children and gather the evidence needed to finally put the Salinas's in jail.
http://www.woai.com/news/local/story/Couple-accused-of-beating-starving-two-foster/od9hWlC-SESnVBNlFMDPOg.cspx?rss=68
Isabella Brooke Knightly and Austin Gamez-Knightly
In Memory of my Loving Husband, William F. Knightly Jr. Murdered by ILLEGAL Palliative Care at a Nashua, NH Hospital
Friday, February 19, 2010
Study: Parents need more services to regain custody of children
Study: Parents need more services to regain custody of children
Youth advocates say family support teams, more funding would help foster care cases
County Notes | Daniel Valentine
Prince George's County parents whose children are in the foster-care system face significant barriers to getting drug treatment and other help, a recent study found.
In a Jan. 21 review by the Advocates for Children and Youth group based in Silver Spring, officials said the parents of children placed in foster care only get the necessary services to get their children back about half the time.
The report is based on a review the nonprofit organization did of 19 cases early last year where children were removed from their parents' care. While 10 of the children were eventually placed back with their parent, nine others remain in foster care.
While some parents were evaluated for mental health issues, substance abuse or other matters, most did not receive necessary counseling, according to the report. Often, parents themselves were responsible for missing appointments or refusing treatment, the study noted, but county Department of Social Services officials were too behind or underfunded to provide other options.
The study calls for more action by the county Department of Social Services to hold "family support teams" to coordinate treatment and for more funding by the state to prevent children from being placed in foster care.
"The Governor needs to provide the Prince George's Department of Social Services with sufficient funding for services to parents seeking to keep or regain custody of their children," wrote ACY spokesman Matthew Joseph. "The Department and courts need to be sure that the services are truly necessary and cannot be provided while the child remains at home."
About 600 children are in foster care in Prince George's County, ranking second in the state and making up about 7 percent of Maryland's overall foster population. For information on the ACY study, visit www.acy.org.
Zoning proposal seeks to speed up transit development
Prince George's County Council members plan to hold public hearings March 9 on zoning changes that would allow developers to build mixes of homes, shops and offices in mini-villages near designated transit stops.
The bills for "corridor node" developments failed to pass late last year and are the first items being considered as the council starts its legislative year.
Under County Bills 5, 6 and 7, developers who agree to abide by specific rules near transit stops would get expedited reviews from the county planning board and District Council for approval to move on their projects.
The intent is to give developers early promises of support and guarantees that rules for development will not change as they move forward with the often expensive and highly prized mixed-use projects, said Councilman Samuel L. Dean (D-Dist. 6) of Mitchellville, the chief sponsor.
"If you don't change, you maintain the same crap you always do," Dean said at a council discussion of the bills at a county retreat last month. "The problem I always hear is that people aren't sure we're going to change the rules next week."
Council members are still debating the bills, which would also require developers to employ certain percentages of county residents at stores and meet architectural standards.
E-mail Daniel Valentine at dvalentine@gazette.net.
http://www.gazette.net/stories/02182010/bowinew121759_32553.php
Youth advocates say family support teams, more funding would help foster care cases
County Notes | Daniel Valentine
Prince George's County parents whose children are in the foster-care system face significant barriers to getting drug treatment and other help, a recent study found.
In a Jan. 21 review by the Advocates for Children and Youth group based in Silver Spring, officials said the parents of children placed in foster care only get the necessary services to get their children back about half the time.
The report is based on a review the nonprofit organization did of 19 cases early last year where children were removed from their parents' care. While 10 of the children were eventually placed back with their parent, nine others remain in foster care.
While some parents were evaluated for mental health issues, substance abuse or other matters, most did not receive necessary counseling, according to the report. Often, parents themselves were responsible for missing appointments or refusing treatment, the study noted, but county Department of Social Services officials were too behind or underfunded to provide other options.
The study calls for more action by the county Department of Social Services to hold "family support teams" to coordinate treatment and for more funding by the state to prevent children from being placed in foster care.
"The Governor needs to provide the Prince George's Department of Social Services with sufficient funding for services to parents seeking to keep or regain custody of their children," wrote ACY spokesman Matthew Joseph. "The Department and courts need to be sure that the services are truly necessary and cannot be provided while the child remains at home."
About 600 children are in foster care in Prince George's County, ranking second in the state and making up about 7 percent of Maryland's overall foster population. For information on the ACY study, visit www.acy.org.
Zoning proposal seeks to speed up transit development
Prince George's County Council members plan to hold public hearings March 9 on zoning changes that would allow developers to build mixes of homes, shops and offices in mini-villages near designated transit stops.
The bills for "corridor node" developments failed to pass late last year and are the first items being considered as the council starts its legislative year.
Under County Bills 5, 6 and 7, developers who agree to abide by specific rules near transit stops would get expedited reviews from the county planning board and District Council for approval to move on their projects.
The intent is to give developers early promises of support and guarantees that rules for development will not change as they move forward with the often expensive and highly prized mixed-use projects, said Councilman Samuel L. Dean (D-Dist. 6) of Mitchellville, the chief sponsor.
"If you don't change, you maintain the same crap you always do," Dean said at a council discussion of the bills at a county retreat last month. "The problem I always hear is that people aren't sure we're going to change the rules next week."
Council members are still debating the bills, which would also require developers to employ certain percentages of county residents at stores and meet architectural standards.
E-mail Daniel Valentine at dvalentine@gazette.net.
http://www.gazette.net/stories/02182010/bowinew121759_32553.php
All things Adoption Pro This Anti That
Pro This Anti That
"Everything you are against weakens you. Everything you are for empowers you."
-- Wayne Dyer
It's been quite a long time since I poked my nose in and around the online adoption community. Early on in my post surrender online experiences I ran across a lot of heated and often triggering comments and discussions. I learned pretty quickly that there are definite camps from all different sides of the adoption world. Recently in a facebook forum, a flood of comments and points of view flew back and forth. The issues were highly emotional and political. I think any type of open discussion where everyone is included is positive and can sometimes be educational. It made me really think about my position on adoption in general. According to Life Strategist Wayne Dwyer, everything you are against weakens you, and everything you are for empowers you.
I strongly believe that adoption in all of its many forms needs to be reformed. I am for family preservation. I believe that children should be raised with their family of origin and in their own cultures and communities. I think that creating an industry, whereby agencies and individuals earn millions in profits by actively separating babies from their mothers, is wrong. I support open records for those who have been adopted. I believe that every human being has a basic human right to know their parents names, any relevant history and that their identity shouldnt be a state sealed secret.
I think the entire system called adoption should be put to an end. I believe guardianships would completely cover the legal rights and needs of a minor infant or child, whereby they keep their identity and are allowed appropriate contact with their family. Guardianships can be monitored by the courts and change as the family situation and needs change. I believe the focus should be on children's rights and women's rights. Every mother should be recoginized as such and should be given every opportunity and support to raise her child. If she chooses a plan to share custody or appoint a guardian, she will not be termed a 'birth mother' or 'biological mother'. She will always be mother.
International adoptions need to be halted. More international support and attention should be paid to countries struggling with poverty and broken down child welfare systems. These communities need long term investments and programs to help foster social and economic change. No human being should be coerced or otherwised forced to surrender a child because of corruption or poverty. No child should have to endure the often inhumane and desperate conditions of an orphanage. No person on earth should be able to simply walk through a facility, surf a website or otherwise purchase a baby or child like you would a common house pet.
Society needs to stop buying into the adoption myth. There will always be orphans in our world who will require loving homes and parents willing to raise them. It doesnt mean erasing their identity, it isn't about making some lucky couple parents, they aren't precious gifts that grow in people's hearts. Love does know a color and a culture and children desperately need to be told the truth of who they are and where they come from. We can provide all children with the love and stability they need, recognizing their loss when their mothers arent able to raise them. They need not feel loyal or grateful to their guardians and they most certainly should be allowed to be who they are and feel how they feel about their situation.
As you can see, a lot needs to change in the world we call adoption. It's very basis is founded on a lie and is built upon covering up the truth. There is a humane and ethical way to deliver safe and healthy homes built upon the principles of justice, love and equality. We are constantly being bombarded with images and messages that tell us adoption is acceptable. As a first mother, other members of the adoption community feel they need to flame me. When I speak the truth it really irks people. Yet I know that I know that I know, that what I stand for is right and that there is a solution to helping those in need, that doesnt require all the elaborate schemes, false ideologies and trappings of the industry that is adoption.
Posted by Other Mother at Friday, February 05, 2010
Labels: adoptee rights, adoption loss, adoption sucks, child welfare, international adoption, open adoption, open records, single parenting, womens rights, world poverty
http://all-thingsadoption.blogspot.com/2010/02/pro-this-anti-that.html
"Everything you are against weakens you. Everything you are for empowers you."
-- Wayne Dyer
It's been quite a long time since I poked my nose in and around the online adoption community. Early on in my post surrender online experiences I ran across a lot of heated and often triggering comments and discussions. I learned pretty quickly that there are definite camps from all different sides of the adoption world. Recently in a facebook forum, a flood of comments and points of view flew back and forth. The issues were highly emotional and political. I think any type of open discussion where everyone is included is positive and can sometimes be educational. It made me really think about my position on adoption in general. According to Life Strategist Wayne Dwyer, everything you are against weakens you, and everything you are for empowers you.
I strongly believe that adoption in all of its many forms needs to be reformed. I am for family preservation. I believe that children should be raised with their family of origin and in their own cultures and communities. I think that creating an industry, whereby agencies and individuals earn millions in profits by actively separating babies from their mothers, is wrong. I support open records for those who have been adopted. I believe that every human being has a basic human right to know their parents names, any relevant history and that their identity shouldnt be a state sealed secret.
I think the entire system called adoption should be put to an end. I believe guardianships would completely cover the legal rights and needs of a minor infant or child, whereby they keep their identity and are allowed appropriate contact with their family. Guardianships can be monitored by the courts and change as the family situation and needs change. I believe the focus should be on children's rights and women's rights. Every mother should be recoginized as such and should be given every opportunity and support to raise her child. If she chooses a plan to share custody or appoint a guardian, she will not be termed a 'birth mother' or 'biological mother'. She will always be mother.
International adoptions need to be halted. More international support and attention should be paid to countries struggling with poverty and broken down child welfare systems. These communities need long term investments and programs to help foster social and economic change. No human being should be coerced or otherwised forced to surrender a child because of corruption or poverty. No child should have to endure the often inhumane and desperate conditions of an orphanage. No person on earth should be able to simply walk through a facility, surf a website or otherwise purchase a baby or child like you would a common house pet.
Society needs to stop buying into the adoption myth. There will always be orphans in our world who will require loving homes and parents willing to raise them. It doesnt mean erasing their identity, it isn't about making some lucky couple parents, they aren't precious gifts that grow in people's hearts. Love does know a color and a culture and children desperately need to be told the truth of who they are and where they come from. We can provide all children with the love and stability they need, recognizing their loss when their mothers arent able to raise them. They need not feel loyal or grateful to their guardians and they most certainly should be allowed to be who they are and feel how they feel about their situation.
As you can see, a lot needs to change in the world we call adoption. It's very basis is founded on a lie and is built upon covering up the truth. There is a humane and ethical way to deliver safe and healthy homes built upon the principles of justice, love and equality. We are constantly being bombarded with images and messages that tell us adoption is acceptable. As a first mother, other members of the adoption community feel they need to flame me. When I speak the truth it really irks people. Yet I know that I know that I know, that what I stand for is right and that there is a solution to helping those in need, that doesnt require all the elaborate schemes, false ideologies and trappings of the industry that is adoption.
Posted by Other Mother at Friday, February 05, 2010
Labels: adoptee rights, adoption loss, adoption sucks, child welfare, international adoption, open adoption, open records, single parenting, womens rights, world poverty
http://all-thingsadoption.blogspot.com/2010/02/pro-this-anti-that.html
Revising Book on Disorders of the Mind
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/health/10psych.html
February 10, 2010
Revising Book on Disorders of the Mind
By BENEDICT CAREY
Far fewer children would get a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. “Binge eating disorder” and “hypersexuality” might become part of the everyday language. And the way many mental disorders are diagnosed and treated would be sharply revised.
These are a few of the changes proposed on Tuesday by doctors charged with revising psychiatry’s encyclopedia of mental disorders, the guidebook that largely determines where society draws the line between normal and not normal, between eccentricity and illness, between self-indulgence and self-destruction — and, by extension, when and how patients should be treated.
The eagerly awaited revisions — to be published, if adopted, in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, due in 2013 — would be the first in a decade.
For months they have been the subject of intense speculation and lobbying by advocacy groups, and some proposed changes have already been widely discussed — including folding the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome into a broader category, autism spectrum disorder.
But others, including a proposed alternative for bipolar disorder in many children, were unveiled on Tuesday. Experts said the recommendations, posted online at DSM5.org for public comment, could bring rapid change in several areas.
“Anything you put in that book, any little change you make, has huge implications not only for psychiatry but for pharmaceutical marketing, research, for the legal system, for who’s considered to be normal or not, for who’s considered disabled,” said Dr. Michael First, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University who edited the fourth edition of the manual but is not involved in the fifth.
“And it has huge implications for stigma,” Dr. First continued, “because the more disorders you put in, the more people get labels, and the higher the risk that some get inappropriate treatment.”
One significant change would be adding a childhood disorder called temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria, a recommendation that grew out of recent findings that many wildly aggressive, irritable children who have been given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder do not have it.
The misdiagnosis led many children to be given powerful antipsychotic drugs, which have serious side effects, including metabolic changes.
“The treatment of bipolar disorder is meds first, meds second and meds third,” said Dr. Jack McClellan, a psychiatrist at the University of Washington who is not working on the manual. “Whereas if these kids have a behavior disorder, then behavioral treatment should be considered the primary treatment.”
Some diagnoses of bipolar disorder have been in children as young as 2, and there have been widespread reports that doctors promoting the diagnosis received consulting and speaking fees from the makers of the drugs.
In a conference call on Tuesday, Dr. David Shaffer, a child psychiatrist at Columbia, said he and his colleagues on the panel working on the manual “wanted to come up with a diagnosis that captures the behavioral disturbance and mood upset, and hope the people contemplating a diagnosis of bipolar for these patients would think again.”
Experts gave the American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the manual, predictably mixed reviews. Some were relieved that the task force working on the manual — which includes neurologists and psychologists as well as psychiatrists — had revised the previous version rather than trying to rewrite it.
Others criticized the authors, saying many diagnoses in the manual would still lack a rigorous scientific basis.
The good news, said Edward Shorter, a historian of psychiatry who has been critical of the manual, is that most patients will be spared the confusion of a changed diagnosis. But “the bad news,” he added, “is that the scientific status of the main diseases in previous editions of the D.S.M. — the keystones of the vault of psychiatry — is fragile.”
To more completely characterize all patients, the authors propose using measures of severity, from mild to severe, and ratings of symptoms, like anxiety, that are found as often with personality disorders as with depression.
“In the current version of the manual, people either meet the threshold by having a certain number of symptoms, or they don’t,” said Dr. Darrel A. Regier, the psychiatric association’s research director and, with Dr. David J. Kupfer of the University of Pittsburgh, the co-chairman of the task force. “But often that doesn’t fit reality. Someone with schizophrenia might have symptoms of insomnia, of anxiety; these aren’t the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, but they affect the patient’s life, and we’d like to have a standard way of measuring them.”
In a conference call on Tuesday, Dr. Regier, Dr. Kupfer and several other members of the task force outlined their favored revisions. The task force favored making semantic changes that some psychiatrists have long argued for, trading the term “mental retardation” for “intellectual disability,” for instance, and “substance abuse” for “addiction.”
One of the most controversial proposals was to identify “risk syndromes,” that is, a risk of developing a disorder like schizophrenia or dementia. Studies of teenagers identified as at high risk of developing psychosis, for instance, find that 70 percent or more in fact do not come down with the disorder.
“I completely understand the idea of trying to catch something early,” Dr. First said, “but there’s a huge potential that many unusual, semi-deviant, creative kids could fall under this umbrella and carry this label for the rest of their lives.”
Dr. William T. Carpenter, a psychiatrist at the University of Maryland and part of the group proposing the idea, said it needed more testing. “Concerns about stigma and excessive treatment must be there,” he said. “But keep in mind that these are individuals seeking help, who have distress, and the question is, What’s wrong with them?”
The panel proposed adding several disorders with a high likelihood of entering the pop vernacular. One, a new description of sex addiction, is “hypersexuality,” which, in part, is when “a great deal of time is consumed by sexual fantasies and urges; and in planning for and engaging in sexual behavior.”
Another is “binge eating disorder,” defined as at least one binge a week for three months — eating platefuls of food, fast, and to the point of discomfort — accompanied by severe guilt and plunges in mood.
“This is not the normative overeating that we all do, by any means,” said Dr. B. Timothy Walsh, a psychiatrist at Columbia and the New York State Psychiatric Institute who is working on the manual. “It involves much more loss of control, more distress, deeper feelings of guilt and unhappiness.”
Copyright 2010The New York Times Company
February 10, 2010
Revising Book on Disorders of the Mind
By BENEDICT CAREY
Far fewer children would get a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. “Binge eating disorder” and “hypersexuality” might become part of the everyday language. And the way many mental disorders are diagnosed and treated would be sharply revised.
These are a few of the changes proposed on Tuesday by doctors charged with revising psychiatry’s encyclopedia of mental disorders, the guidebook that largely determines where society draws the line between normal and not normal, between eccentricity and illness, between self-indulgence and self-destruction — and, by extension, when and how patients should be treated.
The eagerly awaited revisions — to be published, if adopted, in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, due in 2013 — would be the first in a decade.
For months they have been the subject of intense speculation and lobbying by advocacy groups, and some proposed changes have already been widely discussed — including folding the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome into a broader category, autism spectrum disorder.
But others, including a proposed alternative for bipolar disorder in many children, were unveiled on Tuesday. Experts said the recommendations, posted online at DSM5.org for public comment, could bring rapid change in several areas.
“Anything you put in that book, any little change you make, has huge implications not only for psychiatry but for pharmaceutical marketing, research, for the legal system, for who’s considered to be normal or not, for who’s considered disabled,” said Dr. Michael First, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University who edited the fourth edition of the manual but is not involved in the fifth.
“And it has huge implications for stigma,” Dr. First continued, “because the more disorders you put in, the more people get labels, and the higher the risk that some get inappropriate treatment.”
One significant change would be adding a childhood disorder called temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria, a recommendation that grew out of recent findings that many wildly aggressive, irritable children who have been given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder do not have it.
The misdiagnosis led many children to be given powerful antipsychotic drugs, which have serious side effects, including metabolic changes.
“The treatment of bipolar disorder is meds first, meds second and meds third,” said Dr. Jack McClellan, a psychiatrist at the University of Washington who is not working on the manual. “Whereas if these kids have a behavior disorder, then behavioral treatment should be considered the primary treatment.”
Some diagnoses of bipolar disorder have been in children as young as 2, and there have been widespread reports that doctors promoting the diagnosis received consulting and speaking fees from the makers of the drugs.
In a conference call on Tuesday, Dr. David Shaffer, a child psychiatrist at Columbia, said he and his colleagues on the panel working on the manual “wanted to come up with a diagnosis that captures the behavioral disturbance and mood upset, and hope the people contemplating a diagnosis of bipolar for these patients would think again.”
Experts gave the American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the manual, predictably mixed reviews. Some were relieved that the task force working on the manual — which includes neurologists and psychologists as well as psychiatrists — had revised the previous version rather than trying to rewrite it.
Others criticized the authors, saying many diagnoses in the manual would still lack a rigorous scientific basis.
The good news, said Edward Shorter, a historian of psychiatry who has been critical of the manual, is that most patients will be spared the confusion of a changed diagnosis. But “the bad news,” he added, “is that the scientific status of the main diseases in previous editions of the D.S.M. — the keystones of the vault of psychiatry — is fragile.”
To more completely characterize all patients, the authors propose using measures of severity, from mild to severe, and ratings of symptoms, like anxiety, that are found as often with personality disorders as with depression.
“In the current version of the manual, people either meet the threshold by having a certain number of symptoms, or they don’t,” said Dr. Darrel A. Regier, the psychiatric association’s research director and, with Dr. David J. Kupfer of the University of Pittsburgh, the co-chairman of the task force. “But often that doesn’t fit reality. Someone with schizophrenia might have symptoms of insomnia, of anxiety; these aren’t the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, but they affect the patient’s life, and we’d like to have a standard way of measuring them.”
In a conference call on Tuesday, Dr. Regier, Dr. Kupfer and several other members of the task force outlined their favored revisions. The task force favored making semantic changes that some psychiatrists have long argued for, trading the term “mental retardation” for “intellectual disability,” for instance, and “substance abuse” for “addiction.”
One of the most controversial proposals was to identify “risk syndromes,” that is, a risk of developing a disorder like schizophrenia or dementia. Studies of teenagers identified as at high risk of developing psychosis, for instance, find that 70 percent or more in fact do not come down with the disorder.
“I completely understand the idea of trying to catch something early,” Dr. First said, “but there’s a huge potential that many unusual, semi-deviant, creative kids could fall under this umbrella and carry this label for the rest of their lives.”
Dr. William T. Carpenter, a psychiatrist at the University of Maryland and part of the group proposing the idea, said it needed more testing. “Concerns about stigma and excessive treatment must be there,” he said. “But keep in mind that these are individuals seeking help, who have distress, and the question is, What’s wrong with them?”
The panel proposed adding several disorders with a high likelihood of entering the pop vernacular. One, a new description of sex addiction, is “hypersexuality,” which, in part, is when “a great deal of time is consumed by sexual fantasies and urges; and in planning for and engaging in sexual behavior.”
Another is “binge eating disorder,” defined as at least one binge a week for three months — eating platefuls of food, fast, and to the point of discomfort — accompanied by severe guilt and plunges in mood.
“This is not the normative overeating that we all do, by any means,” said Dr. B. Timothy Walsh, a psychiatrist at Columbia and the New York State Psychiatric Institute who is working on the manual. “It involves much more loss of control, more distress, deeper feelings of guilt and unhappiness.”
Copyright 2010The New York Times Company
Child Protective Services - HISTORICAL OVERVIEW, CURRENT SYSTEM
Child Protective Services - HISTORICAL OVERVIEW, CURRENT SYSTEM
Read more: Child Protective Services - HISTORICAL OVERVIEW, CURRENT SYSTEM http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/1828/Child-Protective-Services.html#ixzz0g1EgCjQb
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
William Wesley Patton
CURRENT SYSTEM
William Wesley Patton
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
No ancient civilization considered child protection to be a governmental function. In ancient Rome, for instance, fathers were vested with an almost unlimited natural right to determine the welfare of their children. The welfare of minors was a family matter, not a governmental interest or obligation. Most other governments of the ancient world provided no limits to a father's right to inflict corporal punishment, including infanticide.
English Common Law
In addition to the case-by-case determinations by the chancery court regarding children's property and guardianships, Parliament, in 1601, promulgated the Poor Law Act, which, among other provisions, provided the government jurisdiction to separate children from pauper parents and to place poor children in apprenticeships until the age of majority (21 for males and 16 for females). In 1660 Parliament passed the Tenures Abolition Act, which presaged the end of feudalism, including guardianships in chivalry that had formed the basis for the earlier Court of Wards and Court of Chancery over the guardianship of both children's and the Crown's inheritance and property interests. ("Guardianships in chivalry" provided that when a tenant on a lord's land died leaving an heir under the age of majority, the lord could control the minor heir's inheritance until the child became an adult.) The Tenures Abolition Act was revolutionary because it vested in the father the right to appoint a guardian for his child heir, which was previously forbidden under the feudal inheritance laws.
From 1660 until 1873 the Court of Chancery administered equity jurisdiction in conflicts between private parties over testamentary guardianships. It was during these equity determinations that the Court of Chancery expanded the substantive scope of child protection to include, in addition to inheritance and property, concerns over a ward's rights to marry, to a particular type of education or school, to the choice of religious training, and to child custody arrangements. In 1839 Parliament dramatically expanded the court's jurisdiction to determine the best interest of children through the Custody of Infants Act, which provided court jurisdiction to over-ride a father's parental rights, including rights to custody and visitation. Most historians would agree that by the nineteenth century governmental concern in the child's best interest were perfected directly through the doctrine of parens patriae, rather than indirectly through legal contests over property and guardianships.
The American Colonies
The child protection policies of the early American colonists closely mirrored those of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Britain. The colonists emphasized two aspects of English child protection theory: "the common law rules of family government; and the traditions and child-care practices of the Elizabethan Poor Laws of 1601" (Thomas, p. 299). Although colonial remedies of placing pauper children into involuntary apprenticeships or into poorhouses initially followed English legal customs, soon colonial theorists expanded court jurisdiction over juveniles to include contexts beyond poverty. For instance, in eighteenth-century Virginia, courts separated children not just from poor parents, but also from parents who were not providing "'good breeding,' neglecting their formal education, not teaching a trade, or were idle, dissolute, unchristian or 'uncapable"' (Rendleman, p. 210). Calvinist notions of poverty as idleness and sin permitted court expansion into the normative definitions of the "best interest" of children.
Until the mid-1800s, child protection laws did not differentiate among different classes of children; so that dependent children, status offenders, and juvenile delinquents were either housed together in poorhouses with adults or involuntarily apprenticed. However, by 1830, "an embryonic reform movement had begun," which removed dependent children from the teeming poorhouses and placed them in large orphan asylums. (Thomas, pp. 302–303). Due to the refuge movement (1824–1857), private corporations such as the New York House of Refuge (founded in 1824) received public funds and cared for both neglected and delinquent children in large institutions that separated juveniles from adult criminals and paupers. However, by the mid-1850s an anti-institution movement had developed, with the goal of placing poor city children in country foster placements rather than in large city institutions. Even though numerous state statutes were promulgated in the nineteenth century to care for abused and neglected children, government machinery was inadequate to implement sufficient protection.
In 1875 in New York, the first Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC) was founded to help enforce child protection laws. However, since the SPCC was composed primarily of "wealthy, white men, almost all of them Protestant," who hired middle-class men as family investigators, the families that were targeted were largely poor immigrant families, who were judged by middle-class mores and vague standards such as "without proper parental guardianship" (Schiff, p. 413). The numerous competing reform movements and children's aid societies of the mid-to late 1800s focused on the child as a member of a family group, not as an autonomous individual, and most emphasized removing children from their own families and placing them into a different home environment. By 1879 the New York Children's Aid Society had sent 48,000 children out of New York to live with other families. After its first fourteen years, the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children "investigated nearly 70,000 complaints of ill-treatment of 209,000 children. Prosecutions were pursued in 24,500 of these cases, resulting in almost 24,000 convictions and the removal of 36,300 children" (Schiff, pp. 413–414).
By the beginning of the twentieth century the tide had turned away from family separation and toward family preservation. At the 1909 White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, it was declared that "[h]ome life is the highest and finest product of civilization. It is the great molding force of mind and of character" (Tanenhaus, p. 550). The twentieth century ushered in a dramatic shift away from private child protective services in favor of governmental control by public agencies authorized under both federal and state child protection statutory schemes. In 1899 Illinois promulgated the first juvenile court, whose stated purpose was to provide for the care and custody of children in a manner that was an alternative equivalent to that of their parents. By 1920 all but three states had a juvenile court system.
But the goal of family reunification was rarely realized by the early juvenile courts, because few services were made available to assist poor uneducated parents in curing the conditions that led to state intervention. Instead, children remained in out-of-home placements for considerable periods of time. For instance, in Chicago, the city with the nation's first juvenile court, the rate of family reunification in 1921 was about the same as in 1912 (70%), but in 1921 more children were staying in institutions for longer periods than in 1912.
The Constitution and Child Protection Laws
Between 1875 and 1900 numerous challenges to the vague legal definitions of child dependency and the informal legal proceedings leading to the separation of parents and children were denied. Early court decisions did not speak in terms of parents' constitutional rights to rear their children, did not closely circumscribe the state's parens patriae power to protect children, rejected arguments based upon criminal law analogies, and failed to articulate procedural due process protections for families caught in the child protection legal maelstrom.
Although state and county juvenile courts continued to evolve and to provide different levels of due process in child protection proceedings, the modern child dependency court development was shaped by several decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, which formalized the court process. In Meyers v. Nebraska (1923) the Court held that parents have a fundamental constitutional liberty interest in rearing their children. Based upon that liberty interest, the Court held in Lassiter v. Department of Social Services (1981) that, under certain circumstances, parents are entitled to court-appointed attorneys when they face involuntary termination of their parental rights in child protection proceedings. And in Santosky v. Kramer (1982) the Court held that the state has the burden of demonstrating, by clear and convincing evidence, that termination of parental rights is necessary to protect children. Local juvenile courts no longer had unbridled discretion to informally and permanently separate parents and children. However, the U.S. Constitution became the sounding board only in cases involving permanent severance of parental rights. States are still free to provide fewer due-process procedural rights in temporary child protection cases.
Federal Statutory Policy
In the 1980s and 1990s the autonomy of state child protection schemes was further compromised and homogenized by a series of federal statutes. In 1980, Congress passed the first comprehensive federal child protective services act, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 (Pub. L. 96-272), which focused on state economic incentives to substantially decrease the length and number of foster care placements. This act also required specific family reunification services, reflecting the goals of the 1909 White House Conference. However, in 1997, in order to cure many of the defects in the 1980 act, Congress passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which shifted the focus from family reunification to expeditious permanency for children in adoptive placements. All state child protection systems adopted the federal guidelines as a requirement for receiving federal subsidies. Thus, because of constitutional and federal statutory requirements, the genesis of America's child protection system has led to great uniformity among state programs.
See also: CHILD ABUSE AND NEGLECT; CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES, subentry on CURRENT SYSTEM; VIOLENCE, CHILDREN'S EXPOSURE TO.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABRAMOWICZ, SARAH. 1999. "English Child Custody Law, 1660-1839: The Origins of Judicial Intervention in Paternal Custody." Columbia Law Review 90:1344–1391.
COGAN, NEIL HOWARD. 1970. "Juvenile Law, Before and After the Entrance of Parens Patriae." South Carolina Law Review 22:147–181.
COUPLET, SACHA M. 2000. "What to Do with the Sheep in Wolf's Clothing: The Role of Rhetoric and Reality about Youth Offenders in the Constructive Dismantling of the Juvenile Justice System." University of Pennsylvania Law Review 148:1303–1346.
ESPENOZA, CECELIA M. 1996. "Good Kids, Bad Kids: A Revelation about the Due Process Rights of Children." Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 23:407–545.
FOX, SANFORD J. 1970. "Juvenile Justice Reform: An Historical Perspective." Stanford Law Review 22:1187–1239.
LOKEN, GREGORY A. 1995. "'Thrownaway' Children and Throwaway Parenthood." Temple Law Review 68:1715–1762.
MACK, JULIAN W. 1909. "The Juvenile Court." Harvard Law Review 23:104–122.
RENDLEMAN, DOUGLAS R. 1971. " Parens Patriae: From Chancery to the Juvenile Court." South Carolina Law Review 23:205–259.
SCHIFF, CORINNE. 1997. "Child Custody and the Ideal of Motherhood in Late Nineteenth-Century New York." Georgetown Journal on Fighting Poverty 4:403–420.
SCHWARTZ, IRA M.; WEINER, NEIL ALAN; and ENOSH, GUY. 1998. "Nine Lives and Then Some: Why the Juvenile Court Does Not Roll Over and Die." Wake Forest Law Review 33:533–552.
SCHWARTZ, IRA M.; WEINER, NEIL ALAN; and ENOSH, GUY. 1999. "Myopic Justice? The Juvenile Court and Child Welfare Systems." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 564:126–141.
SCOTT, ELIZABETH S. 2000. "The Legal Construction of Adolescence." Hofstra Law Review 29:547–582.
TANENHAUS, DAVID S. 2001. "Growing Up Dependent: Family Preservation in Early Twentieth-Century Chicago." Law and History Review 19:547–582.
THOMAS, MASON P. 1972. "Child Abuse and Neglect Part I: Historical Overview, Legal Matrix, and Social Perceptions." North Carolina Law Review 50:293–349.
WILLIAM WESLEY PATTON
In the United States, methods for protecting abused and neglected children have progressed over the years. During the colonial era, the policy was to house pauper children in poorhouses or assign them to apprenticeships, while in the early nineteenth century the preference was to place these children in orphanages and industrial schools run by private societies. During the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, state child-dependency statutory schemes became prominent, based upon the state's jurisdiction, through parens patriae ("father of the country," used in law to denote the government's power to protect its citizens), to intervene in family affairs for the protection of at-risk children. Contemporary children's services are characterized by a shift in power from state to federal policy control, with a resultant structural uniformity among state child-protection models.
Federal Policy
Federal child-protection policy has historically favored family preservation over the institutionalization of dependent minors. As early as 1909, through the White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, the federal government identified the importance of the home as the central forum for child development. Until recently, the history of child protection in America has reflected this presumption of family preservation being preferable to moving an at-risk child to a possibly better or safer environment. However, it was not until 1980 that Congress passed the first comprehensive federal child protective services act, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act (Pub. L. 96-272), which focused on state economic incentives to substantially decrease the length and number of foster care placements. This law also required specific family reunification services, reflecting the goals of the 1909 White House Conference.
In 1997, however, in order to cure many of the defects in the 1980 act, Congress passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which shifted the focus from family reunification to the best interests of children in expeditious permanency, which aims to rapidly finalize a permanent custodial home for minors rather than placing them temporarily in a series of different foster homes. Unlike the lengthy reunification services under the 1980 act, which often resulted in the termination of parental rights after two or three years of juvenile court intervention, the 1997 act required states to engage in "concurrent planning" at case intake. The federal goal of child protection had substantially shifted toward the child's individual needs, rather than primarily attempting family reunification through state services. In fact, in cases involving allegations of serious abuse, the 1997 act deleted the prior requirement of state reunification services and permitted states to immediately seek to sever parental rights and place children into the new preferred placement, adoption. The 1997 act created adoption subsidies and incentives to states. This federal adoption preference soon resulted in unprecedented increases in the number of dependent children being adopted.
Problems with the 1997 Act
Even though the 1997 act reduced the time within which dependent children placed outside the home would remain in temporary placements and increased the number of adoptions, it has also created new problems. First, the federal adoption subsidy program has convinced many potential foster parents to become adoptive parents, thus reducing the number of temporary placements for abused children. The adoption subsidy has also driven social service agencies toward decisions to sever parental rights in close cases, rather than continuing family reunification and temporary foster placements.
The greatest impact of this new rush to permanent adoption has been on sibling relationships. Most state statutory schemes do not recognize that significant sibling bonds are a sufficient reason to continue temporary placements, rather than splitting siblings into different adoptive homes. Child welfare theorists argue that the speedy adoption permanency requirement of the 1997 act is having a significant deleterious cultural impact on poor and minority families. "Black families, who dominate foster care caseloads, are the main casualties of this shift away from a service provision toward coercive state intervention, which includes the requirement to relinquish custody of children as a condition of financial assistance" (Roberts, pp. 1641–1642).
Educational Implications
Prior to the 1997 act, dependent children often lived with many different foster families in different neighborhoods, and they therefore lacked any continuity in their formal education, either with teachers or with curricula. For instance, in 1993 California foster children "attend[ed] an average of 9 different schools by the age of 18 … [and] demonstrate[d] significantly lower achievement and lower performance in school" (Kelly, pp. 759–760).
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- Select One - Less than 1 month 1-3 months 3-6 months 6 months - 1 year Fall 2010 Fall 2011 Fall 2012 Fall 2013 Powered by CampusExplorer.com This educational discontinuity results in a continuing introduction and departure of new and different friends and teachers, inadequate transfer of educational records, and lost academic credit. Even though "60% of children in foster care have measurable behavior or mental health problems … [and][a]pproximately 35–45% … have developmental problems," most do not receive appropriate diagnosis for special education classes or psychological treatment (Practicing Law Institute, p. 115). It is clear that children with disabilities trapped in this legal maelstrom are not receiving the education promised by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which established legal means "to ensure that all children with disabilities have available to them a free appropriate public education that emphasizes special education and related services designed to meet their unique needs and prepare them for employment and independent living."
The Decline in Child Dependency Cases
Child neglect and abuse reports increased an average of 6 percent annually from 1985 to 1991, when the number of reports reached 2.9 million. However, since 1991 there has been a continual decrease in the number sexual abuse reports, with a 26 percent decline from 1991 to 1998 in the number of reports and an average decline for all states of 37 percent in substantiated cases. In Los Angeles County, which has more foster children than any other county in America, the number of foster care children dropped from 18.7 per thousand in 1997 to 13.1 per thousand in 2001, and the number of reported child abuse cases dropped from 71.2 reports per thousand in 1996 to 53.1 per thousand in 2000.
In 1990 the United States Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect determined that the most significant factor in failing to provide dependent children with adequate services was the overload of cases. If the decline in the number of reported child abuse cases continues, and if social services agencies do not respond by a corresponding reduction of current staff, it may become possible to provide dependent children the social services and educational services commensurate with their needs.
See also: CHILD ABUSE AND NEGLECT; CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES, subentry on HISTORICAL OVERVIEW; VIOLENCE, CHILDREN'S EXPOSURE TO.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BAKER, KATHERINE K. 2001. "Alternative Caretaking and Family Autonomy: Some Thoughts in Response to Dorothy Roberts." Chicago-Kent Law Review 76:1643–1650.
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act Amendments of 1997. U.S. Public Law 105-17. U.S. Code. Vol. 20, secs. 1400 et seq.
JONES, LISA, and FINKELHOR, DAVID. 2001. The Decline in Child Sexual Abuse Cases. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
KELLEY, KATHLEEN. 2001. "The Education Crisis for Children in the California Juvenile Court System." Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 27:758–773.
MYERS, JOHN E. 1994. "Definition and Origins of the Backlash Against Child Protection." In Excellence in Children's Law. Denver, CO: National Association of Counsel for Children.
PRACTICING LAW INSTITUTE. 2000. "Early Intervention and Special Education Advocacy: A Missing Link in the Representation of Children in Foster Care." Practicing Law Institute, Litigation and Administrative Practice Course Handbook Series, Criminal Law and Urban Problems 185 (C0-0016):103–166.
RIVERA, CARLA. 2001. "State's Children Facing Fewer Risks, Study Says." Los Angeles Times November 28:3.
ROBERTS, DOROTHY E. 2001. "Kinship Care and the Price of State Support for Children." Chicago-Kent Law Review 76:1619–1641.
SANDERS, DEBORAH. 2001. "Toward a Policy of Permanence for America's Disposable Children: A Survey of the Evolution of Federal Funding Statutes for Foster Care from 1961 to Present." In Advocacy for Children and Families: Moving from Sympathy to Empathy. Denver, CO: National Association of Counsel for Children.
TANENHAUS, DAVID S. 2001. "Growing Up Dependent: Family Preservation In Early Twentieth-Century Chicago." Law and History Review 19:547–582.
THOMAS, MASON P. 1972. "Child Abuse and Neglect, Part I: Historical Overview, Legal Matrix, and Social Perspectives." North Carolina Law Review 50:293–349.
WILLIAM WESLEY PATTON
Additional Topics
Child Protective Services - Current System
In the United States, methods for protecting abused and neglected children have progressed over the years. During the colonial era, the policy was to house pauper children in poorhouses or assign them to apprenticeships, while in the early nineteenth century the preference was to place these children in orphanages and industrial schools run by private societies. During the late nineteenth century …
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HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
William Wesley Patton
CURRENT SYSTEM
William Wesley Patton
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
No ancient civilization considered child protection to be a governmental function. In ancient Rome, for instance, fathers were vested with an almost unlimited natural right to determine the welfare of their children. The welfare of minors was a family matter, not a governmental interest or obligation. Most other governments of the ancient world provided no limits to a father's right to inflict corporal punishment, including infanticide.
English Common Law
In addition to the case-by-case determinations by the chancery court regarding children's property and guardianships, Parliament, in 1601, promulgated the Poor Law Act, which, among other provisions, provided the government jurisdiction to separate children from pauper parents and to place poor children in apprenticeships until the age of majority (21 for males and 16 for females). In 1660 Parliament passed the Tenures Abolition Act, which presaged the end of feudalism, including guardianships in chivalry that had formed the basis for the earlier Court of Wards and Court of Chancery over the guardianship of both children's and the Crown's inheritance and property interests. ("Guardianships in chivalry" provided that when a tenant on a lord's land died leaving an heir under the age of majority, the lord could control the minor heir's inheritance until the child became an adult.) The Tenures Abolition Act was revolutionary because it vested in the father the right to appoint a guardian for his child heir, which was previously forbidden under the feudal inheritance laws.
From 1660 until 1873 the Court of Chancery administered equity jurisdiction in conflicts between private parties over testamentary guardianships. It was during these equity determinations that the Court of Chancery expanded the substantive scope of child protection to include, in addition to inheritance and property, concerns over a ward's rights to marry, to a particular type of education or school, to the choice of religious training, and to child custody arrangements. In 1839 Parliament dramatically expanded the court's jurisdiction to determine the best interest of children through the Custody of Infants Act, which provided court jurisdiction to over-ride a father's parental rights, including rights to custody and visitation. Most historians would agree that by the nineteenth century governmental concern in the child's best interest were perfected directly through the doctrine of parens patriae, rather than indirectly through legal contests over property and guardianships.
The American Colonies
The child protection policies of the early American colonists closely mirrored those of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Britain. The colonists emphasized two aspects of English child protection theory: "the common law rules of family government; and the traditions and child-care practices of the Elizabethan Poor Laws of 1601" (Thomas, p. 299). Although colonial remedies of placing pauper children into involuntary apprenticeships or into poorhouses initially followed English legal customs, soon colonial theorists expanded court jurisdiction over juveniles to include contexts beyond poverty. For instance, in eighteenth-century Virginia, courts separated children not just from poor parents, but also from parents who were not providing "'good breeding,' neglecting their formal education, not teaching a trade, or were idle, dissolute, unchristian or 'uncapable"' (Rendleman, p. 210). Calvinist notions of poverty as idleness and sin permitted court expansion into the normative definitions of the "best interest" of children.
Until the mid-1800s, child protection laws did not differentiate among different classes of children; so that dependent children, status offenders, and juvenile delinquents were either housed together in poorhouses with adults or involuntarily apprenticed. However, by 1830, "an embryonic reform movement had begun," which removed dependent children from the teeming poorhouses and placed them in large orphan asylums. (Thomas, pp. 302–303). Due to the refuge movement (1824–1857), private corporations such as the New York House of Refuge (founded in 1824) received public funds and cared for both neglected and delinquent children in large institutions that separated juveniles from adult criminals and paupers. However, by the mid-1850s an anti-institution movement had developed, with the goal of placing poor city children in country foster placements rather than in large city institutions. Even though numerous state statutes were promulgated in the nineteenth century to care for abused and neglected children, government machinery was inadequate to implement sufficient protection.
In 1875 in New York, the first Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC) was founded to help enforce child protection laws. However, since the SPCC was composed primarily of "wealthy, white men, almost all of them Protestant," who hired middle-class men as family investigators, the families that were targeted were largely poor immigrant families, who were judged by middle-class mores and vague standards such as "without proper parental guardianship" (Schiff, p. 413). The numerous competing reform movements and children's aid societies of the mid-to late 1800s focused on the child as a member of a family group, not as an autonomous individual, and most emphasized removing children from their own families and placing them into a different home environment. By 1879 the New York Children's Aid Society had sent 48,000 children out of New York to live with other families. After its first fourteen years, the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children "investigated nearly 70,000 complaints of ill-treatment of 209,000 children. Prosecutions were pursued in 24,500 of these cases, resulting in almost 24,000 convictions and the removal of 36,300 children" (Schiff, pp. 413–414).
By the beginning of the twentieth century the tide had turned away from family separation and toward family preservation. At the 1909 White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, it was declared that "[h]ome life is the highest and finest product of civilization. It is the great molding force of mind and of character" (Tanenhaus, p. 550). The twentieth century ushered in a dramatic shift away from private child protective services in favor of governmental control by public agencies authorized under both federal and state child protection statutory schemes. In 1899 Illinois promulgated the first juvenile court, whose stated purpose was to provide for the care and custody of children in a manner that was an alternative equivalent to that of their parents. By 1920 all but three states had a juvenile court system.
But the goal of family reunification was rarely realized by the early juvenile courts, because few services were made available to assist poor uneducated parents in curing the conditions that led to state intervention. Instead, children remained in out-of-home placements for considerable periods of time. For instance, in Chicago, the city with the nation's first juvenile court, the rate of family reunification in 1921 was about the same as in 1912 (70%), but in 1921 more children were staying in institutions for longer periods than in 1912.
The Constitution and Child Protection Laws
Between 1875 and 1900 numerous challenges to the vague legal definitions of child dependency and the informal legal proceedings leading to the separation of parents and children were denied. Early court decisions did not speak in terms of parents' constitutional rights to rear their children, did not closely circumscribe the state's parens patriae power to protect children, rejected arguments based upon criminal law analogies, and failed to articulate procedural due process protections for families caught in the child protection legal maelstrom.
Although state and county juvenile courts continued to evolve and to provide different levels of due process in child protection proceedings, the modern child dependency court development was shaped by several decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, which formalized the court process. In Meyers v. Nebraska (1923) the Court held that parents have a fundamental constitutional liberty interest in rearing their children. Based upon that liberty interest, the Court held in Lassiter v. Department of Social Services (1981) that, under certain circumstances, parents are entitled to court-appointed attorneys when they face involuntary termination of their parental rights in child protection proceedings. And in Santosky v. Kramer (1982) the Court held that the state has the burden of demonstrating, by clear and convincing evidence, that termination of parental rights is necessary to protect children. Local juvenile courts no longer had unbridled discretion to informally and permanently separate parents and children. However, the U.S. Constitution became the sounding board only in cases involving permanent severance of parental rights. States are still free to provide fewer due-process procedural rights in temporary child protection cases.
Federal Statutory Policy
In the 1980s and 1990s the autonomy of state child protection schemes was further compromised and homogenized by a series of federal statutes. In 1980, Congress passed the first comprehensive federal child protective services act, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 (Pub. L. 96-272), which focused on state economic incentives to substantially decrease the length and number of foster care placements. This act also required specific family reunification services, reflecting the goals of the 1909 White House Conference. However, in 1997, in order to cure many of the defects in the 1980 act, Congress passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which shifted the focus from family reunification to expeditious permanency for children in adoptive placements. All state child protection systems adopted the federal guidelines as a requirement for receiving federal subsidies. Thus, because of constitutional and federal statutory requirements, the genesis of America's child protection system has led to great uniformity among state programs.
See also: CHILD ABUSE AND NEGLECT; CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES, subentry on CURRENT SYSTEM; VIOLENCE, CHILDREN'S EXPOSURE TO.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABRAMOWICZ, SARAH. 1999. "English Child Custody Law, 1660-1839: The Origins of Judicial Intervention in Paternal Custody." Columbia Law Review 90:1344–1391.
COGAN, NEIL HOWARD. 1970. "Juvenile Law, Before and After the Entrance of Parens Patriae." South Carolina Law Review 22:147–181.
COUPLET, SACHA M. 2000. "What to Do with the Sheep in Wolf's Clothing: The Role of Rhetoric and Reality about Youth Offenders in the Constructive Dismantling of the Juvenile Justice System." University of Pennsylvania Law Review 148:1303–1346.
ESPENOZA, CECELIA M. 1996. "Good Kids, Bad Kids: A Revelation about the Due Process Rights of Children." Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 23:407–545.
FOX, SANFORD J. 1970. "Juvenile Justice Reform: An Historical Perspective." Stanford Law Review 22:1187–1239.
LOKEN, GREGORY A. 1995. "'Thrownaway' Children and Throwaway Parenthood." Temple Law Review 68:1715–1762.
MACK, JULIAN W. 1909. "The Juvenile Court." Harvard Law Review 23:104–122.
RENDLEMAN, DOUGLAS R. 1971. " Parens Patriae: From Chancery to the Juvenile Court." South Carolina Law Review 23:205–259.
SCHIFF, CORINNE. 1997. "Child Custody and the Ideal of Motherhood in Late Nineteenth-Century New York." Georgetown Journal on Fighting Poverty 4:403–420.
SCHWARTZ, IRA M.; WEINER, NEIL ALAN; and ENOSH, GUY. 1998. "Nine Lives and Then Some: Why the Juvenile Court Does Not Roll Over and Die." Wake Forest Law Review 33:533–552.
SCHWARTZ, IRA M.; WEINER, NEIL ALAN; and ENOSH, GUY. 1999. "Myopic Justice? The Juvenile Court and Child Welfare Systems." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 564:126–141.
SCOTT, ELIZABETH S. 2000. "The Legal Construction of Adolescence." Hofstra Law Review 29:547–582.
TANENHAUS, DAVID S. 2001. "Growing Up Dependent: Family Preservation in Early Twentieth-Century Chicago." Law and History Review 19:547–582.
THOMAS, MASON P. 1972. "Child Abuse and Neglect Part I: Historical Overview, Legal Matrix, and Social Perceptions." North Carolina Law Review 50:293–349.
WILLIAM WESLEY PATTON
In the United States, methods for protecting abused and neglected children have progressed over the years. During the colonial era, the policy was to house pauper children in poorhouses or assign them to apprenticeships, while in the early nineteenth century the preference was to place these children in orphanages and industrial schools run by private societies. During the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, state child-dependency statutory schemes became prominent, based upon the state's jurisdiction, through parens patriae ("father of the country," used in law to denote the government's power to protect its citizens), to intervene in family affairs for the protection of at-risk children. Contemporary children's services are characterized by a shift in power from state to federal policy control, with a resultant structural uniformity among state child-protection models.
Federal Policy
Federal child-protection policy has historically favored family preservation over the institutionalization of dependent minors. As early as 1909, through the White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, the federal government identified the importance of the home as the central forum for child development. Until recently, the history of child protection in America has reflected this presumption of family preservation being preferable to moving an at-risk child to a possibly better or safer environment. However, it was not until 1980 that Congress passed the first comprehensive federal child protective services act, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act (Pub. L. 96-272), which focused on state economic incentives to substantially decrease the length and number of foster care placements. This law also required specific family reunification services, reflecting the goals of the 1909 White House Conference.
In 1997, however, in order to cure many of the defects in the 1980 act, Congress passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which shifted the focus from family reunification to the best interests of children in expeditious permanency, which aims to rapidly finalize a permanent custodial home for minors rather than placing them temporarily in a series of different foster homes. Unlike the lengthy reunification services under the 1980 act, which often resulted in the termination of parental rights after two or three years of juvenile court intervention, the 1997 act required states to engage in "concurrent planning" at case intake. The federal goal of child protection had substantially shifted toward the child's individual needs, rather than primarily attempting family reunification through state services. In fact, in cases involving allegations of serious abuse, the 1997 act deleted the prior requirement of state reunification services and permitted states to immediately seek to sever parental rights and place children into the new preferred placement, adoption. The 1997 act created adoption subsidies and incentives to states. This federal adoption preference soon resulted in unprecedented increases in the number of dependent children being adopted.
Problems with the 1997 Act
Even though the 1997 act reduced the time within which dependent children placed outside the home would remain in temporary placements and increased the number of adoptions, it has also created new problems. First, the federal adoption subsidy program has convinced many potential foster parents to become adoptive parents, thus reducing the number of temporary placements for abused children. The adoption subsidy has also driven social service agencies toward decisions to sever parental rights in close cases, rather than continuing family reunification and temporary foster placements.
The greatest impact of this new rush to permanent adoption has been on sibling relationships. Most state statutory schemes do not recognize that significant sibling bonds are a sufficient reason to continue temporary placements, rather than splitting siblings into different adoptive homes. Child welfare theorists argue that the speedy adoption permanency requirement of the 1997 act is having a significant deleterious cultural impact on poor and minority families. "Black families, who dominate foster care caseloads, are the main casualties of this shift away from a service provision toward coercive state intervention, which includes the requirement to relinquish custody of children as a condition of financial assistance" (Roberts, pp. 1641–1642).
Educational Implications
Prior to the 1997 act, dependent children often lived with many different foster families in different neighborhoods, and they therefore lacked any continuity in their formal education, either with teachers or with curricula. For instance, in 1993 California foster children "attend[ed] an average of 9 different schools by the age of 18 … [and] demonstrate[d] significantly lower achievement and lower performance in school" (Kelly, pp. 759–760).
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- Select One - Less than 1 month 1-3 months 3-6 months 6 months - 1 year Fall 2010 Fall 2011 Fall 2012 Fall 2013 Powered by CampusExplorer.com This educational discontinuity results in a continuing introduction and departure of new and different friends and teachers, inadequate transfer of educational records, and lost academic credit. Even though "60% of children in foster care have measurable behavior or mental health problems … [and][a]pproximately 35–45% … have developmental problems," most do not receive appropriate diagnosis for special education classes or psychological treatment (Practicing Law Institute, p. 115). It is clear that children with disabilities trapped in this legal maelstrom are not receiving the education promised by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which established legal means "to ensure that all children with disabilities have available to them a free appropriate public education that emphasizes special education and related services designed to meet their unique needs and prepare them for employment and independent living."
The Decline in Child Dependency Cases
Child neglect and abuse reports increased an average of 6 percent annually from 1985 to 1991, when the number of reports reached 2.9 million. However, since 1991 there has been a continual decrease in the number sexual abuse reports, with a 26 percent decline from 1991 to 1998 in the number of reports and an average decline for all states of 37 percent in substantiated cases. In Los Angeles County, which has more foster children than any other county in America, the number of foster care children dropped from 18.7 per thousand in 1997 to 13.1 per thousand in 2001, and the number of reported child abuse cases dropped from 71.2 reports per thousand in 1996 to 53.1 per thousand in 2000.
In 1990 the United States Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect determined that the most significant factor in failing to provide dependent children with adequate services was the overload of cases. If the decline in the number of reported child abuse cases continues, and if social services agencies do not respond by a corresponding reduction of current staff, it may become possible to provide dependent children the social services and educational services commensurate with their needs.
See also: CHILD ABUSE AND NEGLECT; CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES, subentry on HISTORICAL OVERVIEW; VIOLENCE, CHILDREN'S EXPOSURE TO.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BAKER, KATHERINE K. 2001. "Alternative Caretaking and Family Autonomy: Some Thoughts in Response to Dorothy Roberts." Chicago-Kent Law Review 76:1643–1650.
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act Amendments of 1997. U.S. Public Law 105-17. U.S. Code. Vol. 20, secs. 1400 et seq.
JONES, LISA, and FINKELHOR, DAVID. 2001. The Decline in Child Sexual Abuse Cases. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
KELLEY, KATHLEEN. 2001. "The Education Crisis for Children in the California Juvenile Court System." Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 27:758–773.
MYERS, JOHN E. 1994. "Definition and Origins of the Backlash Against Child Protection." In Excellence in Children's Law. Denver, CO: National Association of Counsel for Children.
PRACTICING LAW INSTITUTE. 2000. "Early Intervention and Special Education Advocacy: A Missing Link in the Representation of Children in Foster Care." Practicing Law Institute, Litigation and Administrative Practice Course Handbook Series, Criminal Law and Urban Problems 185 (C0-0016):103–166.
RIVERA, CARLA. 2001. "State's Children Facing Fewer Risks, Study Says." Los Angeles Times November 28:3.
ROBERTS, DOROTHY E. 2001. "Kinship Care and the Price of State Support for Children." Chicago-Kent Law Review 76:1619–1641.
SANDERS, DEBORAH. 2001. "Toward a Policy of Permanence for America's Disposable Children: A Survey of the Evolution of Federal Funding Statutes for Foster Care from 1961 to Present." In Advocacy for Children and Families: Moving from Sympathy to Empathy. Denver, CO: National Association of Counsel for Children.
TANENHAUS, DAVID S. 2001. "Growing Up Dependent: Family Preservation In Early Twentieth-Century Chicago." Law and History Review 19:547–582.
THOMAS, MASON P. 1972. "Child Abuse and Neglect, Part I: Historical Overview, Legal Matrix, and Social Perspectives." North Carolina Law Review 50:293–349.
WILLIAM WESLEY PATTON
Additional Topics
Child Protective Services - Current System
In the United States, methods for protecting abused and neglected children have progressed over the years. During the colonial era, the policy was to house pauper children in poorhouses or assign them to apprenticeships, while in the early nineteenth century the preference was to place these children in orphanages and industrial schools run by private societies. During the late nineteenth century …
Children's Literature - History, Literature in the Lives of Children, Environment, Awards [next]
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http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/1828/Child-Protective-Services.html
Thursday, February 18, 2010
GOP 'cuts' cost more in long run - Family resource centers save money
State House Memo
GOP 'cuts' cost more in long run
Family resource centers save money
By Rep. BARBARA FRENCH For the Monitor
February 17, 2010 - 12:00 am
I'm tired of being called an irresponsible tax-and-spender by the Republicans, especially after what happened Feb. 3.
The House passed a bill that would return additional rooms and meals tax revenue to the cities and towns against the recommendation of the Finance Committee. Republican Rep. David Hess told us that it was a longstanding promise to our constituents and that our cities and towns need the money.
It is a fair assumption that cities and towns need more money, but the real question - "Where is the money going to come from?" (in this instance, $5 million of general funding) - was never asked or answered.
At the same time, a Republican bill, HB 1664, calls for a series of cuts to the state's operating budget for fiscal year 2011. Many of the agencies affected have already been hit hard. And some of the "cuts" would end up costing the state dramatically more money in the long run.
Numerous services and programs would be affected: Concord fire and municipal services, state arts development, LCHIP, the civil legal services fund, the Small Business Development Center, the Department of Health and Human Services, juvenile justice services, the Division for Children, Youth and Families, family resource centers, foster homes, the Division of Parks and Recreation, Resource Protection and Development, adult in-home care, catastrophic health care, the developmental services wait list, brain disorder services, dropout prevention, and adequate education grants.
I am very familiar with one of the targeted programs: family resource centers. It was my legislation that first proposed establishing these centers in 1993; it took five years to pass and another five years to get some funding. There are 12 centers, each of which receives $10,000 a year. This is not a lot of money, but it means a lot to the centers as they are continually challenged in seeking stable and sustainable sources of money for the important work that they do. The centers make a significant contribution to the lives of their constituents and to communities.
Family resource centers provide child-abuse prevention and family strengthening supports and services that work to keep children safe at home with their family in their home community.
In 2006, 684 potentially "high-risk" children completed the program, 92 percent of whom were not in need of more costly services provided by the Division for Children, Youth and Families for three years. In 2007, of the 1,186 children who completed the programs, 92 percent continued to avoid DCYF services.
Services provided by DCYF include extensive home and community-based counseling and, when necessary, out-of-home placement in foster care or perhaps a more intensive residential setting.
The cost for one youth to spend one year at the Sununu Youth Services Center far exceeds the state's contribution toward supporting the statewide network of 12 family resource centers at a cost of $120,000 per year. Foster-care placement for one child for one year is $10,800, approximately the same amount that could be provided to a community-based family resource center to provide valuable services to upward of 100 families.
The cost savings from family resource centers are significant, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. If the Republican cuts were adopted, there would be more children needing out-of-home placement - yet at the same time, another of the Republican budget proposals is to cut the funding for out-of-home placements. Where are these children supposed to go? This is a double whammy!
This would ultimately mean downshifting to our communities, which would mean increasing property taxes, since our children and their families would have to have somewhere to go for help. It seems to me to be more important to help our families and keep them together. Not only do these services benefit children at home with their families, but the lessons learned also carry on into the school setting, helping them to achieve greater success as students.
I'm happy to say that the state budget for this cycle has continued to provide partial funding for the statewide network of family resource centers. It would be extremely shortsighted and irresponsible to turn our backs on these valuable and effective services when an increasing number of children and families are challenged more than ever. Family resource centers provide documented positive outcomes for children and their families, leading to documented cost-savings for our state and local communities. I will continue to advocate for our ongoing support of these important community-based centers.
(State Rep. Barbara French is a Democrat from Henniker.)
http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100217/OPINION/2170324#comment-111513
GOP 'cuts' cost more in long run
Family resource centers save money
By Rep. BARBARA FRENCH For the Monitor
February 17, 2010 - 12:00 am
I'm tired of being called an irresponsible tax-and-spender by the Republicans, especially after what happened Feb. 3.
The House passed a bill that would return additional rooms and meals tax revenue to the cities and towns against the recommendation of the Finance Committee. Republican Rep. David Hess told us that it was a longstanding promise to our constituents and that our cities and towns need the money.
It is a fair assumption that cities and towns need more money, but the real question - "Where is the money going to come from?" (in this instance, $5 million of general funding) - was never asked or answered.
At the same time, a Republican bill, HB 1664, calls for a series of cuts to the state's operating budget for fiscal year 2011. Many of the agencies affected have already been hit hard. And some of the "cuts" would end up costing the state dramatically more money in the long run.
Numerous services and programs would be affected: Concord fire and municipal services, state arts development, LCHIP, the civil legal services fund, the Small Business Development Center, the Department of Health and Human Services, juvenile justice services, the Division for Children, Youth and Families, family resource centers, foster homes, the Division of Parks and Recreation, Resource Protection and Development, adult in-home care, catastrophic health care, the developmental services wait list, brain disorder services, dropout prevention, and adequate education grants.
I am very familiar with one of the targeted programs: family resource centers. It was my legislation that first proposed establishing these centers in 1993; it took five years to pass and another five years to get some funding. There are 12 centers, each of which receives $10,000 a year. This is not a lot of money, but it means a lot to the centers as they are continually challenged in seeking stable and sustainable sources of money for the important work that they do. The centers make a significant contribution to the lives of their constituents and to communities.
Family resource centers provide child-abuse prevention and family strengthening supports and services that work to keep children safe at home with their family in their home community.
In 2006, 684 potentially "high-risk" children completed the program, 92 percent of whom were not in need of more costly services provided by the Division for Children, Youth and Families for three years. In 2007, of the 1,186 children who completed the programs, 92 percent continued to avoid DCYF services.
Services provided by DCYF include extensive home and community-based counseling and, when necessary, out-of-home placement in foster care or perhaps a more intensive residential setting.
The cost for one youth to spend one year at the Sununu Youth Services Center far exceeds the state's contribution toward supporting the statewide network of 12 family resource centers at a cost of $120,000 per year. Foster-care placement for one child for one year is $10,800, approximately the same amount that could be provided to a community-based family resource center to provide valuable services to upward of 100 families.
The cost savings from family resource centers are significant, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. If the Republican cuts were adopted, there would be more children needing out-of-home placement - yet at the same time, another of the Republican budget proposals is to cut the funding for out-of-home placements. Where are these children supposed to go? This is a double whammy!
This would ultimately mean downshifting to our communities, which would mean increasing property taxes, since our children and their families would have to have somewhere to go for help. It seems to me to be more important to help our families and keep them together. Not only do these services benefit children at home with their families, but the lessons learned also carry on into the school setting, helping them to achieve greater success as students.
I'm happy to say that the state budget for this cycle has continued to provide partial funding for the statewide network of family resource centers. It would be extremely shortsighted and irresponsible to turn our backs on these valuable and effective services when an increasing number of children and families are challenged more than ever. Family resource centers provide documented positive outcomes for children and their families, leading to documented cost-savings for our state and local communities. I will continue to advocate for our ongoing support of these important community-based centers.
(State Rep. Barbara French is a Democrat from Henniker.)
http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100217/OPINION/2170324#comment-111513
Child Protection Investigator Accused of Falsifying Documents
Tampa, Florida – Child Protection Investigator Accused of Falsifying Documents
The Hillsborough County, Florida Sheriff’s Office will be changing how it handles child abuse cases. The changes are due to the recent resignation of Heather Stokes, a child protection investigator who has been charged with falsifying documents.
An internal affairs investigation revealed that Ms. Stokes allegedly falsified and / or fabricated twenty five investigations. Ms. Stokes has said that she did so because she was overwhelmed by the number of cases she had to deal with. She resigned shortly after the results of the probe were brought to her attention. She is the second investigator from her office to resign after being charged with falsifying documents. According to the Tampa Tribune, no children or families were harmed by the falsifications.
Investigators will now be required to photograph every child at their home, and place the photo in the case file to prove that they visited the child when they said they did. Supervisors will randomly review cases and make up to thirty quality assurance checks every month.
Statewide, more than seventy Florida child welfare workers have been caught lying about their activities in the last two years. When caught, workers almost always point to work overload to excuse their behavior.
Ms. Stokes has avoided criminal prosecution by performing more than two hundred hours of community service.
Read more about the falsification of child protection documents in Florida at Falsifications bring change in child abuse cases.
Posted by David A. Wolf
http://www.floridachildinjurylawyer.com/2010/02/tampa_florida_child_protection_investigator_accused_of_falsifying_documents.html
The Hillsborough County, Florida Sheriff’s Office will be changing how it handles child abuse cases. The changes are due to the recent resignation of Heather Stokes, a child protection investigator who has been charged with falsifying documents.
An internal affairs investigation revealed that Ms. Stokes allegedly falsified and / or fabricated twenty five investigations. Ms. Stokes has said that she did so because she was overwhelmed by the number of cases she had to deal with. She resigned shortly after the results of the probe were brought to her attention. She is the second investigator from her office to resign after being charged with falsifying documents. According to the Tampa Tribune, no children or families were harmed by the falsifications.
Investigators will now be required to photograph every child at their home, and place the photo in the case file to prove that they visited the child when they said they did. Supervisors will randomly review cases and make up to thirty quality assurance checks every month.
Statewide, more than seventy Florida child welfare workers have been caught lying about their activities in the last two years. When caught, workers almost always point to work overload to excuse their behavior.
Ms. Stokes has avoided criminal prosecution by performing more than two hundred hours of community service.
Read more about the falsification of child protection documents in Florida at Falsifications bring change in child abuse cases.
Posted by David A. Wolf
http://www.floridachildinjurylawyer.com/2010/02/tampa_florida_child_protection_investigator_accused_of_falsifying_documents.html
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