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The aim of every law is to serve as instrument for positive social change, control of human behaviour and regulation of human conduct. It is necessary therefore for every law to take into consideration the socio-cultural and religious background of the people for whom it is made. If the law keeps a blind eye to those considerations, it will not command respect and obedience; hence the desired social change and respectability will not be achieved. Using this parameter, the paper examines the controversy surrounding the promulgation of Nigeria's Child's Right Act which has been passed into law by the National Assembly and duly assented to by the President in July, 2003. The Act is about the most important document which has incorporated the rights of the Nigerian child. The document had sought to set out human rights of the Nigerian child using the standard obtainable at international level. Specifically, the Act derived its inspiration from the following instruments: United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child, 1959 and the Millennium Development Goals. The Child's Right Act has made adequate provision for promotion of the welfare of Nigerian Child and promotes unity amongst the various interest groups in Nigeria.. The Act no doubt contained adequate provisions that will give legal cover to the all round development and welfare of the Nigerian child regardless of the circumstances of his birth, religion, culture and ethnic background. However, in a multi- ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-religious society as Nigeria, any form of legislation that affects the cultural life is bound to be greeted with opposition and protests. For instance, the Muslims were quick to point out certain gray areas that seem to be inconsistent with their cultural and religious values.Let's take a look at Section 10(1) and (2) under part two of this Act provides that "any discrimination against child on the grounds of sex … or deprivation by reason of circumstances of birth is prohibited". These provisions are in conflict with some rules under Islamic law and they have the capacity of negating those rules. The provision will render negative the Islamic rule which precludes an illegitimate child from inheriting the estate of his illegitimate father. Likewise, the section will invalidate the formula under Islamic law of inheritance where the male child gets twice the share of female child or a non-Muslim child cannot inherit his Muslim father and vice-versa. Under Chapter 4, Verse 11 of the Qur'an, a male child is entitled to twice the share of a female child in cases of inheritance. Likewise Shariah law prohibited right of inheritance between two persons of different religion. Not surprisingly, the Muslim- dominated Northern Nigeria mounted fierce opposition against the law since, according to them, a number of its provisions are violently opposed to their culture and religionKey Words: socio-cultural values, law, religion, shari,ahDr. Sulaiman Khalid is Associate Professor and Head, Department of Sociology, Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto- Nigeria ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little systematic, international research has been conducted on the welfare of children and laws and policies affecting their well being. Therborn emphasizes that 'law?is a major determinant of childhood.' Important studies on children's well being exist, but these studies tend to focus on single countries. Consequently, researchers tend to concentrate on countries recognized for their human rights problems. Yet little comparative research has examined the impact of laws and policies on children's interests and rights. Without comparative research, however, social scientists cannot make claims about levels of children's rights or what explains variation in children's rights. This paper makes two important contributions. First, it introduces the Children's Rights Index. We believe this index is the first international measure of children's rights; we provide results on 193 countries. This index is significant because it allows researchers to compare levels of children's rights across countries. Second, this paper seeks to explain various scores on the children's rights index. It employs OLS regression analysis and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to consider the explanatory power of legal institutions, political power, country wealth, and demographic structures on levels of children's rights. QCA is an innovative analytic technique based on Boolean algebra. QCA is especially useful for examining combinations of actors, interests, and resources associated with some theories of policy innovation. Using QCA we will assess heterogeneity and context to examine the various configurations of legal, political, economic, and demographic traits that characterize countries that have higher levels of children's rights compared to countries that do not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging ideals of restorative justice and alternative mechanisms of victim-offender mediation brought forward in the last decades, offer new legal methods and public mechanisms for treating traumatic events. These methods focus on direct encounters between perpetrators and victims, and claim to substitute or complement the traditional administration of justice through trial and formal punishment. The paper examines the strength and limitation of such encounters as represented in two films, which focus on victim's 'private' initiatives to face their offenders. One of them is Festen a Dogma film by Thomas Winterberg, where a severe case of child abuse is exposed within a familial celebration, providing a drama of initial denial and concluding transformation of the bourgeoisie order. The second is The Son, by the brothers Dardenne, where a father confronts the murderer of his child and becomes his mentor. In both films the victims act as neutral observers mediating the drama and at the same time they operate as involved and biased actors, unable to control their temper and nearly causing crisis. The analysis of the films emphasizes themes as: The prominent role of law in the domain of the subject in mediation; The 'private legislation' as a tool to overcome trauma; The equivalence between alternative methods of dispute resolution and alternative film making, as rebelling against 'modern' institutions, coming back to direct encounters between individuals in a multiple framework of identity construction; The strength of the non neutral position for victims in mediating traumatic events; The tension between repression and blaming in handling traumatic events. The paper suggests that conflict management studies should continue to address the notion of trauma, aspiring both to overcome and reconstruct it, and mostly prevent its severe manifestations through the adoption of an appropriate 'traumatic' epistemology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike most of the world's nations, the United States has not adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child and has not engaged with the broader, and perhaps more holistic, questions of voice and access arising out of attempts to comply with the Convention. Instead, although the United States has several well developed children's bars, these bars confine themselves primarily to legal proceedings in defensive matters affecting children's liberty, child protection and juvenile justice. These legalistic approaches, while important, do little to address the larger problems facing children as a result of increasing privatization of need and privilege and abdication of even a pretense of commitment to social, racial, or economic justice. This paper examines the limits and possibilities of representing or projecting children's voice in a context in which they have little control over their social, economic, familial, cultural, or material conditions. The paper explores how advocates might work with children to find strategies to reduce the negative or harmful aspects of their lives while preserving their identities and places in their communities. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michele GoodwinUniversity of Minnesota Law SchoolContact author at: goodwin@uchicago.edu773.702.9566The free market in children, as a concept, is rejected based on what it symbolizes, including its argued resemblance to slavery or the auction block. Yet, directly and indirectly, market forces or economic considerations influence adoptions in the United States to a greater extent than traditionally acknowledged. Conventional wisdom and early legislation held the best interest of children at the center of all adoptions. Adoptions functioned as a child welfare model for abandoned, abused, neglected and orphaned youth. However, contemporary adoption services resemble free markets where aesthetic profiles of race, hair texture, eye color and other market variables determine the welfare of children or at least their likelihood of placement. Between two ends of a spectrum, one representing child welfare, and the other "adult needs," the later influences U.S. adoptions far more than imagined.This paper illuminates market consciousness in the adoption process. It argues that absolute altruism in the adoption process belies reality. It demonstrates that the adoption process is more like a market than less so. The paper scrutinizes financial considerations involved in adoption including "baby valuing" and rationing and suggests that those transactions illustrate the market nature of adoptions in the United States. The paper explores the moral and ethical obstacles to recognition of a market in adoption: the degradation of personhood, the charitable roots of child placement, and the costs associated with adoption. The paper concludes by proposing greater transparency in the adoption process and offers alternative frameworks, including taxation to address the unique qualities of baby markets. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern child law practice places a requirement on courts, when deciding issues concerning disputes over children, to have regard to the ascertainable wishes and feelings of children in light of their age and understanding. However the final decision remains with the judges who take into account not only the child's wishes but her right to protection from future harm.This paper will be a comparative analysis of the best interests principle as interpreted and applied in the UK and US courts. The theoretical framework employed will be that of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas does not seek to supplant Western philosophical thinking but rather adopts a parallel approach as an alternative, privileging ethics over ontology. His work has the potential to open up a fresh approach to the child law discourse by helping us to appreciate the otherness of the child and to expose the limits of cognitive decision making. The main theme of the paper will be an exploration of the insight that Levinas can offer the child law discourse and whether it is possible to incorporate this into legal discourse, in itself the antithesis of his philosophical works. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CULTURE CLASH: "THE BEST INTEREST OF THE CHILD" IDEOLOGY AND CUSTOMARY NORMS IN AFRICA.This paper will examine the intersection between modern legal conceptions of children's rights and the legal framework in which children's rights are enforced in Africa.The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and its protocols establishes the global threshold for the rights of the child. However, CRC is widely believed to be deficient for its conspicuous silence on certain customary and traditional practices that affect the welfare and best interest of the child. The contention is that the CRC itself is based on western conceptions and legal traditions which are different from the cultural norms of many state signatories to the CRC in Africa.This paper will, question the credibility of the CRC as a universal instrument and examine how the international context of the protection of children's rights with its seeming contradictions plays out in Africa. Are there truly universal standards or can there be a balance and accommodation of different perspectives? Can we develop an understanding of what children's rights mean in the context of a rich variety of cultures as found in Africa in order to protect the children in their local space? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the UK, taboo media content is often understood as threatening to penetrate a protective boundary drawn around the family home by responsible parents. On this view, concerned adults, including parents and commercial and public policy makers, need to focus their attention on managing children's use of information and communications technology so as to protect them from harm. The proposed paper will report on the events leading up to and following an English mother learning that her 11 year old daughter has watched a pornographic film on DVD. It will pay close attention to the narrative offered to the author by the mother in the course of the author's ethnographic study of 'emotional intelligence' in English schooling. A number of empirical observations will be made on the strength of this narrative: *Within this domestic space multiple boundaries were created around pornography.*Likewise, multiple forms of protection were in play.*Some of these boundaries and forms of protection were created by adults, some by children, some by adults and children in concert.*There were at least two types of boundary in play; (a) those that all participants expected each other to know about and, (b) those that only some participants are supposed, by each other, to know aboutThe paper will then examine the relation between these findings and key discourses of child media protection, paying particular attention to the themes of curiosity and secrecy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia has just seen its first case of a man suing a mother in deceit for paternity fraud: Magill v Magill [2006] HCA 51. The case went to the High Court, and caused considerable public debate, prompting the conservative federal government to consider introducing remedial legislation, as the action was unsuccessful. In reaching its decision, the High Court had the benefit of considering a range of varied responses to this issue in other jurisdictions. This paper discusses how the majority of the High Court came to find that deceit was not an appropriate vehicle for resolving such claims of economic harm within marriage and outlines the limits of this decision. The paper then explores how this decision fits with Australian family and child support law and decision making in its treatment of the economic consequences of partnering and parenting, both before and after separation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will examine developments in criminal justice legislation in relation to the custodial disposal of children in Northern Ireland since the implementation of the Criminal Justice (Children) (Northern Ireland) Order 1998. It will critically analyse the approach adopted to the use of custody for children in light of children's experiences of custody within the juvenile justice and adult prison systems in Northern Ireland. The main body of the paper will report findings from interviews with young male and female offenders who were committed to custody by the criminal courts. Children's perceptions of the court's decision and of the custodial disposals, including their regimes and impact will be discussed. It will be argued that there is a wide gap between rhetorical evocations that the child's best interests are paramount and the reality that since 1998, the custodial disposal system for children in Northern Ireland has failed to undergo fundamental reform in order to ensure the protection of the rights and welfare of children. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the gender variables of a survey on child maintenance titles of youth wel-fare offices in Germany. Results were: The titles, male legal advisers in youth welfare offices achieve, are higher than the titles achieved by female legal advisers. The chance of single parents, predominantly single mothers, to get a higher amount of child maintenance may therefore depend on the sex of their officials in charge of their case. In Germany youth welfare offices supply free legal aid, advice, and assistance inter alia for child maintenance and maintenance claims of single parents against the other parent. Children and sin-gle parents unable to afford lawyers have to take up this kind of legal aid. In consequence the youth welfare offices make more maintenance arrangements and adjustments than lawyers, nota-ries and courts. The legal advisers in youth welfare offices in Germany are civil servants and salaried public em-ployees. Most have acquired their legal training in state managed schools of administration or at universities of applied sciences. Although they do not have the qualification as fully qualified lawyers their influence on the application family, social and administrative law is enormous and accordingly their influence on the lives of children and single parents. The paper will analyse the reasons for the differences between the titles female and male legal advisors achieved. The results stand in line with findings in other countries (Brazil, Poland, Ger-many) that male judges are more generous in decisions on alimony for women than their female counterparts. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses the very current topic of ex-partner stalking in the context of family disputes, especially the consequences that such stalking may have on future custody and visitation rights over children. Most empirical studies concentrate on the problem of stalking itself and the potential effects on the victim. Therefore my research project focuses on the effect on the children in the case one parent stalks the other. The problem in these cases is that stalking generally requires a total breakdown in the communication, but this is almost impossible as long as minor children are involved. One question of the research is how the legal professionals and other experts from various disciplines deal with this problem, what special aspects have to be taken into consideration of the child's best interest, what kind of support to the child can be offered, and how elements of the legal disputes, custody arrangements and visitation rights interact. The aim is to find criteria which would enable the professionals involved better to regard the particular dynamics of stalking, when delivering opinions for the protection of the child and the stalked parent. The paper will present preliminary results from interviews with seventeen experts dealing with stalking cases (family lawyers, family court judges, psychological experts). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The successful London bid for the 2012 Olympics has provided increased momentum for Government policy to support and develop a sporting culture that encourages widespread participation in recreational sport, particularly amongst the young. There are however longstanding concerns about the safety of children, and the ability of the Governing Bodies to provide an effective regime that both prevents, and detects, abuse. Abuse of children is not limited to the most highly publicized examples of sexual abuse but also covers physical abuse, emotional abuse and neglect.This paper will look at regulatory frameworks protecting children within the context of sport. It will concentrate on specific sports and identify policies adopted and any problems with implementation. In particular, it will analyse an under-researched area of abuse; the 'overplaying' of sport. As well as looking at policies of governing bodies and their implementation, this study will include analysis of role of child protection officers, education programmes, role of coaches etc. The paper will address the question as to whether voluntary bodies are capable of providing sufficient protection for children or whether a legal regime of child protection law should be extended specifically to sport. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been important shifts in the last three decades, across the advanced industrial world, in the understanding and management of the rearing of children after a divorce or separation. Up until the 1970s there was a general acceptance of a loss of contact with one parent, usually the father, after divorce or separation, but since then the 'best interests of the child' have increasingly been defined to include continuity of contact with both parents. Family law has been seen as playing a central part in this shift, and many analyses see law as driving the whole process of change. This paper will examine both the consistencies and differences in the changing legal regulation of the relations between separated parents and their children across a number of jurisdictions. It will then outline a selection of the issues which emerge from a concern with their significance for the comparative understanding of the legal regulation of family life: is there a global convergence in train around a particular set of norms concerning separation and children, and if so, how should it be understood? Can the national differences be explained in terms of legal culture or broader cultural specificities? To what extent are to be understood in terms of 'legal transplants', or the 'mirroring' of similar overall developments in family life and gender relations? The paper will conclude with some reflections on the implications of this particular case study for the broader conceptualization of comparative legal analysis. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of mediation in child protection cases is inherently rife with power imbalance: in most instances, the state - in the person of the social worker - negotiates with the parent regarding the best interests of the child(ren) already in state care. Obvious challenges face the parent in these circumstances, ranging from the situational pressure to accede to the social worker's requests (or "jump through the hoops") in hopes of a speedy return of the child(ren) to personal and social issues of mental health, active addictions, and educational and economic disadvantage. Mediators working in this area struggle with the challenge of "empowering" the parent's voice at the table while always cognizant that the child's safety must remain paramount. This challenge is all the greater where cultural norms conflict with the state's notions of the child's best interests. This paper explores this conflict in the context the British Columbia child protection mediation, especially within regions of the province where as many as half of the children in care are aboriginal. Is a collaborative process which respects, or even reflects, cultural norms and still serves the purpose of child protection possible? This paper will critically reflect upon the challenges and successes of developing a process with that goal. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past, women have bore the primary responsibility for pregnancy, maintaining the health of the unborn child, as well as the well-being and caretaking of their live children. However, the law is beginning to place more focus on men and fathers, holding them just as responsible as women. For example, some courts have recently ordered men not to have any more children until they can demonstrate that they can pay the child support on their existing children. This paper discusses the positions that courts are taking on the roles and responsibilities of men and fathers. In some cases, the courts have been successful in holding men and fathers more responsible, while in others they have not. This paper will look at past and current cases and evaluate the constitutionality in regards to the rights of all individuals involved. The paper will also include possible repercussions and slippery slopes of new laws, as well as a projection of where the laws are headed. In ending, the paper will conclude with the suggestion that man do need to be held accountable for their actions in regards to procreation, safe sexual behavior, and supporting existing children. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the Indian Child Welfare Act in American courts. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children in the United States are often thought of as a sympathetic group that deserves government support. Yet, most federal programs which serve children in the United States are poorly funded and targeted to low income families. Moreover, they may not always serve child well-being. The United States is one of few developed nations that provide no support for universal childcare. For many families with children, little attention is paid to the conditions and circumstances in which they live until they are brought to the attention of child welfare authorities. When this occurs, we continue to provide poorly funded programs that view families outside of their socioeconomic context and ultimately fail to give families the tools they need to adequately provide for their children. Using child care and child welfare as examples, this paper discusses the inherent problems of targeted safety net programs (for children). We talk about the kind of broad-based coalition that might be necessary to bring attention to children and families in the U.S. and the challenges that such a coalition might face. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the nebulous concept of �family� is constructed in Alberta�s (2004) Child, Youth and Family Enhancement Act. It highlights the various discourses that collide to create heterogeneous images of family that are hierarchically arranged in an attempt to govern familial relations. It then reflects on how these constructions of family reveal the power of law and subvert the promise of family through calculations thereof. In presenting these reflections I draw upon themes in the thought of Foucault, Smart, and Derrida. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, neo-liberal concepts of rights and autonomy have dominated discussions about development and power in the global context. At the same time, human populations have never been more fragile. Rights-talk paradoxically may render vulnerable groups even more vulnerable in the ways that it places responsibility upon the rights-bearer and shifts attention away from issues of state capacity and substantive equality. Indeed, tossing 'rights', without more, at a disempowered population may provide an excuse to continue ignoring problems of vulnerability. For that reason, it is critically important to probe the ways that discourses of rights might mask privilege and inequality, and to focus attention on vulnerability and dependency. This paper inquires into this issue through the lens of children's rights, both domestically and internationally, and explores how a focus on dependency may provide a more promising approach to placing the distinct needs of such a vulnerable group into the broad social and political context that creates vulnerability in the first place. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few areas of the law raise emotions more than sex crimes against children. This paper examines one such crime—possession of child pornography and the conflicting views between whether it is serious crime with actual victims or merely an anticipatory offense that does not merit much punishment. It discusses that child pornography falls outside first amendment protections because children are harmed both when the producer creates the pornographic images and when the possessor views the image. It then demonstrates the perception held by some judges, scholars and the public that possession of child pornography is a victimless offense. It traces this perception to a number of factors, including the attenuated link between possessor and victim, the role of the Internet in creating the perception of a victimless crime, and to scholarly criticism of possession offenses in general. It suggests that we recognize the unique nature of possession child pornography as both a completed and an anticipatory offense that should not be painted with the same critical brush as other possession offenses. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Child welfare agencies make determinations about what does and/or should constitute families. Whether it is in (withholding) recognition of kinship care or in decisions about whether or not to terminate parental rights, child welfare professionals make claims about whether families deserve to stay together. They determine who is recognized as a family and set standards about when and how the state should intervene. These decisions, and the judgments of what constitutes adequate parenting that inform them, often contradict families' own understanding of family responsibility and relationships. This paper explores themes related to belonging and responsibility that came out of a qualitative study with 18 child welfare professionals, including judges, lawyers, and masters-level social workers and 6 child-welfare involved parents, all of them biological mothers. It examines these decisions in the context of child-welfare policy as understood by the participants. The majority of participants' believe that existing families (blood or otherwise) are nearly always better caregivers to children than legally created and mandated ones. Yet, participants perceive the policies and resources derived from them to prefer substitute, legally created families over already existing families. Such policies do legal violence to families and contradict professionals' assessment of what is best for children and families involved in the child welfare system. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978 recognizes tribal authority in decision-making about Native kids in state custody. In Alaska, however, tribes have had to continually assert their claims to authority in these cases in state courts where, for the last decade, tribal authority in Native child welfare cases has been contested on jurisdictional and definitional grounds. That is, cases originally about the care and custody of Native children are first informed by the tensions involved in defining Alaska Native people as cultural groups with legal standing. Once a culturally defined authority is established, cases focus on jurisdictional questions of whose authority will prevail. This paper examines the effects of recasting cases about kids into cases about jurisdiction, and what this process elides about the complicated relations between Native communities and the state and within Native communities themselves. Definitional and jurisdictional questions, as the legal basis of Native voices within larger governmental structures, shape what can be seen and argued about - and what disappears - from official representations of these relationships. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will consider recent and significant changes to child support law in England and Australia. In England, recent shifts have been away from detailed regulation and toward private agreement, with the safety net of State enforcement (and ultimately financial support) being available when private transfers do not occur, in Australia the messages are more mixed, with the recent changes involving a more complex child support formula than ever before, yet also increasing encouragement of private agreement. Our particular interest is to explore the practical implications of these changes for carers (usually mothers) and their children. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses legislation and administrative practices concerning separated children. These minors live out of their country and are separated by their parents. Nevertheless, sometimes they are in contact with members of the extended family living in the country where they migrated. In compliance with the established streams of the juvenile legal culture, these children are entitled of the human rights recognised by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. According to the Convention children are subjects asking special protection because of their specific needs, depending on their specific conditions of life (refugees, migrants, victims of exploitation). Therefore, in legal and administrative procedures affecting them, their best interest has to be evaluated starting from these specific conditions.Italian legislation on separated children is very incoherent: different and contrasting interpretations and practices are enacted by public and private charity associations that have to apply it. Moreover, even if legislation refers with emphasis to the UN Convention, it provides only weak measures aimed to protect these minors. Furthermore, the legislation shows very serious gaps concerning the promotion of immigrant children's right to autonomy, especially with relation to education and job training. It is important to stress that most of separated children in Italy are adolescents who made a personal migratory plan and who were considered adult workers in their culture. For these reasons, administrative actions adopted towards separated children can be considered violations of their fundamental rights and can be interpreted as expression of institutional racism. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inadequate housing is often a proxy for poverty. Despite official pronouncements that parents and children should not be separated or kept apart for reasons of poverty, housing often serves as a direct or an indirect wedge that the state holds between families in its role as protectors of vulnerable children. This paper reports preliminary findings from a qualitative study based on interviews with parents, judges, lawyers, and social workers involved in child welfare in the city of Philadelphia. All claim to serve the best interests of the almost exclusively destitute families involved in child protective services, and all agree that there is insufficient affordable adequate housing in the city. Parents and child welfare professionals hold conflicting views of: 1) who should set the standard for adequate housing, 2) who should be held responsible for inappropriate housing, and 3) who should be held accountable for remedying inadequate housing conditions for children supervised by the state. These debates stem from contested understandings of the proper role of the state and state actors as protectors of vulnerable children when housing precipitates and/or prolongs state oversight. This to large extent explains why there has been so little agreement on policy and practices, despite the apparent agreement that housing plays a role in child welfare involvement. So long as the different constituencies fail to address the vastly different underlying assumptions and values, a coherent and just child welfare policy that addresses housing and other poverty-related concerns will continue to elude us. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents one aspect of the legal treatment of parents accused of severe crimes against their children - the level of the language and discourse involved in the legal proceedings and criminal trials. There are twelve cases involving public legal proceedings that are examined, seven of which are also analyzed in-depth through the examinations of the complete trial transcripts.Five aspects of the legal processes and their contexts are isolated and analyzed in this paper:1. Expanding Criminal Justice Control. 2. The "Target" Population. 3. "Middle Class" Standards and Practices - Lower Class Defendants.4. A Right to Assist in Own Defense.5. The Mysteries of Forensics.The data presented suggests that there are violations of the spirit of legal processes that often occur in the criminal justice system when crimes against children are prosecuted. These trespasses, connected to the social and economic class of the offenders, are poorly justified by the otherwise immensely compelling objective of child-protection. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The attorney-client relationship creates an individuated and private space which shields communications and work product from external view. In child welfare and other dependency matters, children are often young and without the ability to forcefully, if at all, direct their attorneys. Yet rules of professional responsibility suggest that attorneys advocate exclusively for their clients, often separating children from their families and larger communities. Thus, attorneys for children have an extraordinary amount of power and autonomy in the attorney-client relationship to determine the content of justice for their clients. How and whether attorneys use this power depends on their (often unexamined) approach to justice and lawyering. This paper explores the role of children's attorneys in reinforcing or challenging child welfare system norms of professionalization, psychological well-being, and appropriate parental conduct and functioning. Depending on their approach to representing children, attorneys can uphold and choose among child welfare system norms; they can seek to change the laws to meet their own, or their clients', norms; or they can challenge dominant legal and child welfare norms by representing children in families and in communities. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Adoption and Safe Families Act (AFSA), enacted by the United States Congress in 1997, was considered by many child welfare advocates as a milestone in efforts to prevent children in foster care from languishing in out-of home placements. AFSA and its most recent amendment in 2001 mandates states to initiate steps towards the termination of parental rights for a child who has been in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months. The law also provides states with an opportunity to move children who have experienced serious maltreatment to be placed on a fast track for adoption. AFSA has many opponents, many of whom are concerned with the preservation of parental rights and the role of the State in protecting children from harm. Although the need for permanency and safety are of paramount concern for most child welfare and family advocates, debates about how best to achieve these goals are indicative of larger cultural debates over parental autonomy and the State's role as parens patriae. This paper will outline a number of complications inherent in current federal and state laws that have been enacted to protect children from physical, emotional and sexual abuse and neglect. Interviews conducted with 20 professionals working with children in foster care in Massachusetts will help illuminate some of the tensions that often arise between family preservation policies and safety and permanency planning for children in state care. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assisted reproduction raises many complicated questions about parentage determination. One of these is how clinical screening practices that deny individuals access to assisted reproduction act as roadblocks to parentage. This paper argues that the clinical evaluation of applicants for infertility treatment currently suffers from a misapplication of the best interests of the child standard and results in invidious discrimination that policymakers should seek to curb. Instead of the best interests standard, infertility clinic gatekeepers should employ the harm standard to screen applicants for treatment. This practice would better account for the interests of prospective parents, the values of health care professionals, and society's interest in child welfare. Use of the harm standard will protect applicants against unjustifiable denials of access to infertility treatment and will promote consistency and neutrality in decisions about who should become a parent through assisted reproduction. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (the "Communications Decency Acts") prompted immediate legal challenges from traditional civil rights organizations such as the ACLU, as well as newer organizations oriented toward legal issues affecting the internet and the world-wide web (e.g., the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Electronic Privacy Information Center). Using both methods of discourse analysis and more conventional content analysis, this paper compares the framing of this legislation in popular discourse and legal discourse. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE CHILD PROTECTION SYSTEM: HAVE WE REACHED A CROSSROAD? Rachel Birnbaum, Ph.D., R.S.W. Dena Moyal, LL.B. The child protection system in both Canada and the United States operates with a mandate to protect children from risk and/or harm and promote their optimal psychosocial development. However, this same system can and does create risk and delay for the children it is meant to protect. In Ontario, the 54 child protection agencies and related children's mental health services are faced with a complex array of challenges that may place them in the position of exacerbating an already difficult situation for the children they are mandated to help and protect. This presentation has two objectives. The first objective is to discuss the context of the present problems in Ontario's child welfare system, with a particular emphasis on understanding how the new legislation and the court system are responding to the needs of children. The second objective is to provide future directions for policy makers and program administrators that focus on a multisystemic response to children's changing developmental needs. The presenters will examine the literature and legislation, provide data and an analysis of the Ontario experience to support the premise that children may be at risk of facing further social injustice within the child welfare system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two important global discourses concern economic neoliberalism and nation-state norms to provide comprehensive education to their children. Despite the interplay of these discourses, the literature on the effects of neoliberal economic globalization and the parallel literature on the effects of cultural globalization operate in relative isolation. This article addresses these issues using pooled cross-sectional time-series data on 82 non-OECD countries to examine whether and how different components of child rights mobilization and economic neoliberalism effect education spending within countries. The results show that both World Polity Theory, which emphasizes the cultural side of globalization, and World Systems Theory, which emphasizes the economic side of globalization, are useful. The authors find evidence that neoliberal structural adjustment agreements had negative consequences for education spending while countries with more child rights NGOs spent more on education than other countries. The analysis here points to the value of deconstructing globalization into its component parts when analyzing its impact on developing countries in order to determine the independent effects and interactions of different global forces. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, in the vast majority of states, the rules governing the parentage of children born through assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) only address children born to married couples. Those who support exclusionary marriage-based parenting rules often argue that they do so based on child-welfare concerns. A number of scholars have responded by challenging the link between marriage or marriage-based parenting rules and positive child welfare outcomes. Relatedly, a number of other scholars have discussed how marriage-based parenting rules not only do not further child welfare ends, but in fact can result in emotional harms for children born to same-sex and other unmarried couples. This article seeks to build on the work of these scholars, by examining an issue that, to date, has been largely unexplored - which is how marriage-based parenting rules affect the financial stability and security of children born to unmarried couples through alternative insemination. Specifically, the Article considers the eligibility of children born to nonmarital couples through ARTs for a number of specific protections that are crucial to a child's financial well-being including: child support, child's social security benefits, and the right to intestate succession. Through this review, the Article seeks to demonstrate that exclusionary, marriage-only ARTs rules are contrary to the welfare and best interests of children. The Article concludes by offering some suggestions to address the current inadequacies in the law. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Section 71 of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code requires inclusion in income of alimony paid to support the ex-spouse, and Sec. 215 allows the payor a deduction. Although taxing the payee may seem bad for the payee, a well-advised payee will insist on a larger payment which the payor can afford because the payment is deductible, so that the payee receives more after paying taxes than under a system of non-deduction/non-inclusion. This generous treatment for alimony, however, does not extend to child support. Moreover, to protect the rule that favorable treatment is only available for periodic payments to support the ex-spouse, the payments must cease with the death of the payee spouse, thus adding to the danger the payor ex-spouse may pose to the payee ex-spouse. The complicated and ambiguous rules designed to allow deduction/inclusion only for periodic payments to support the ex-spouse often produce unintended consequences. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critical review of Supreme Court of Canada decisions since 1999 concerning tort liability of public and private authorities for physical and sexual abuse of children displaced from their families and communities by the state into institutional care reveals three disturbing features: privileged disregard for the role or centrality of structural inequalities in enabling such abuse and in compromising legal recognition of and redress for its profound harms; privileged disinterest in three decades of multidisciplinary scholarship explicating the relationships between systemic inequality and sexual abuse and between systemic inequality and unequal protection of the law; and the conceptual and doctrinal closing of privileged ranks against plaintiffs' claims. In the result, a jurisprudence of and for the empowered locates systemic abuse beyond the range of the deterrent and compensatory reach of tort law. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prominent tendencies in the development of contemporary welfare systems are challenging the notions of legal rights and legal accountability developed in these systems in the last century. In particular, the emphasis on flexibility and individuation in the revised programs is in tension with both bureaucratic and judicial models of legal accountability. We suggest that certain "new governance" practices being developed in the welfare context provide important clues about both effective public service provision and the vindication of rule-of-law values in the revised welfare system. We focus on court-annexed reform of state child protective services for abused and neglected children now underway in 32 American states. We identify two competing models in these efforts, and suggest that one is especially promising and has general implications for public services provision across a broad range of domains. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's rights in Polish families - theory and practice. In my lecture I would like to present Polish legal regulations concerning the situation of children in the family, their rights and the duties that parents have towards them. I plan to make reference to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Poland ratified fifteen years ago. This is subject to some important reservations which expressly limit the rights of children guaranteed in the Convention, especially in the family and public life. I aim to show how acceptance of the Convention has impacted on changes in Polish family law, the extent it contributed to expansion of children's rights in the family and other significant issues requiring additional regulation or changes to regulations to-date. I will compare existing regulations concerning children's rights in the family with legal practices. Making reference to research conducted with families and children (including my own research), statistics of crimes committed against children, analysis of educational and media programs conducted by social organisations acting for the benefit of children's rights, I strive to show the level of awareness of children's rights among adults and the level of awareness children themselves have of their rights, which of the guaranteed children's rights are most frequently broken in Polish families and why, how this can be prevented, and what is being done to change this state of affairs. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parental responsibility laws, in their current form, are a relatively new phenomenon in American jurisprudence. Many of the current laws were only introduced around the 1950s or later; however, the concepts of these laws can easily be traced back to the Elizabethan Poor Laws of 1601 that placed the responsibility of the children on their parents. Historically and today, parental responsibility laws also speak to the greater notion of child welfare, the role of the family in society, and the role the state plays when it steps in to act for the parents. Parental responsibility statutes are quite common in the Unites States and increasingly they are emerging as popular legislative tactics in other countries as well. The current presentation will discuss the public opinion, prevalence, forms, and the history related to these statutes in the United States and other Western nations. In addition, the presentation will move beyond the current status of these laws and propose that parental responsibility is a central feature of the set of ideals that provide the rationale for a separate system of justice for juveniles, for child welfare policies, and the more general area of family law. Thus parental responsibility and the ways these laws and attendant policies impact juveniles, families, and general culture is critically important. This presentation will demonstrate that they are an essential component for a full understanding of the status of childhood, youth justice, and family law and that future research must focus on their effectiveness and application. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]