Echos of the Masha Allen case play out in a New York courtroom

I first wrote about the disturbing case of adoptive parent Judith Leekin back in 2008. Now new details of that case are emerging which share shocking similarities to Masha Allen's second adoption. According to the New York Times: More than 30 years ago, a Queens foster mother was investigated and cited for scalding a boy in her care. But despite that finding, the city did nothing in the decades that followed to prevent the woman, Judith Leekin, from carrying out one of the most brazen and disturbing child welfare schemes in recent memory. The failure of child welfare officials to bar Ms. Leekin from the system after that 1980 episode is one of the ...

Legal marijuana possession = child abuse?

Today's New York Times contains an article about state child welfare investigations of parents who legally possess marijuana: The police found about 10 grams of marijuana, or about a third of an ounce, when they searched Penelope Harris’s apartment in the Bronx last year. The amount was below the legal threshold for even a misdemeanor, and prosecutors declined to charge her. But Ms. Harris, a mother whose son and niece were home when she was briefly in custody, could hardly rest easy. The police had reported her arrest to the state’s child welfare hot line, and city caseworkers quickly arrived and took the children away. Her son, then ...

Foster Children Speak to Congress – is anyone listening?

This summer, fifteen former foster children worked as Capitol Hill interns and developed a set of policy recommendations outlined in a recently released report entitled "The Future of Foster Care - a revolution for change." Among the recommendations created by these former foster youth: Congress should require that an education advocate be trained and assigned to every foster child in special education; Congress should require that surrogate parents be trained on the unique needs of foster youth in special education; Documented and undocumented immigrant children within the foster care system deserve the same basic rights and freedoms that are ...

Handling Lost/Destroyed Records in Child Welfare Tort Litigation

A recently published article in the American Bar Association's Child Law Practice examines the potential effects of failing to preserve or produce evidence in the child welfare context. Best practices are offered from three perspectives—the plaintiff, the defending agency, and the court. Litigation involving public and private social services agencies should make administrators and attorneys keenly aware of the obligation to preserve evidence. Across the country, torts regarding individual children in the child welfare system are common. Professor Daniel Pollack and his co-author Associate Professor Dale Margolin explain that while lost records ...

Child Welfare Response to Child Trafficking

Human trafficking is arguably one of the most disturbing human rights abuses of our time. The United States Department of Justice has estimated that between 14,500 and 17,500 foreign men, women, and children are trafficked into the United States each year. While estimates indicate that thousands of child trafficking victims exist in the United States, very few have been identified and recovered. Between 2001 and 2009, only 212 foreign minors were successfully recognized by U.S. authorities as victims of trafficking. Human trafficking is a relatively new issue and emerging area of knowledge for most social service, legal, and law enforcement profess...

Supreme Court Tosses Child Welfare Fourth Amendment Case

Nearly a decade ago, a state child protective services worker and a county deputy sheriff interviewed then 9-year-old S.G. at her Oregon elementary school about allegations that her father had sexually abused her. They did not have a warrant or parental consent to conduct the interview. S.G. eventually stated that she had been abused. Her father stood trial for that abuse, but the jury failed to reach a verdict and the charges were later dismissed. S.G.’s mother subsequently sued on S.G.’s behalf for damages under 42 U.S.C. §1983, alleging that the in-school interview breached the Fourth Amendment ’s proscription on unreasonable ...

Highlights of the CAPTA Reauthorization Act of 2010

The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) Reauthorization Act of 2010 (S.3817) was signed into law on December 20, 2010, as Public Law 111-320. The act leaves funding for discretionary grants (research, training, technical assistance, information collection, and program innovations) and for basic State grants at the old authorized level of $120 million in FY 2010 and at "such sums as may be necessary" for FY 2011 through 2015. A new funding section regarding allotments of the basic State grant funds for improving child protective services establishes a minimum State grant of $50,000, with additional distribution based on child ...

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