Child Elopement from Foster Care and Residential Settings

The National Runaway Switchboard reports that between 1.6 and 2.8 million youth run away each year. It also reports that there has been “a significant increase in the number of crisis calls identifying abuse or neglect as a reason for the call, with abuse calls up 33 percent and neglect calls up 54 percent between 2005-2008" (National Runaway Switchboard Crisis Caller Trends, 2009, p. 2). Youth in out-of-home care often choose conduct that does not ensure their own safety. They elope from foster homes, group homes, or other residential settings at an unknown rate. When children are known risks for eloping a court may find that is the legal duty ...

CAPTA Reauthorized

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 ...

Six Million Children Maltreated in 2009?

In 2009, an estimated 3.3 million referrals involving the alleged maltreatment of approximately 6.0 million children were received by CPS agencies nationwide. Of these, CPS determined that at least one child was a unique victim of abuse and neglect in 702,000 cases. The rest were unsubstantiated or closed with no finding. These and other data appear in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Child Maltreatment 2009, the 20th in a series of reports designed to provide national statistics on child abuse and neglect. Most states recognize four major types of maltreatment: neglect, physical abuse, psychological maltreatment, and sexual abuse. ...

Lawyer’s Guide to Representing Very Young Children

The American Bar Association (ABA) Center on Children and the Law recently published a Practice and Policy Brief designed for attorneys and those representing very young children in dependency proceedings. The brief outlines some of the ethical dilemmas faced by these representatives, and it outlines the four types of advocacy essential to achieving the best outcomes for young children in these cases: Child-centered Research-informed Permanency-driven Holistic Ethical guidance for attorneys who represent children of any age in child abuse and neglect cases comes from the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct. Recognizing that ...

70% of Child Prostitutes are Foster Children

According to FBI agent Gregory Christopher--who was recently named the State/Federal Law Enforcement Officer of the Year--"about 70 percent" of child prostitutes in the Tampa area are foster children. "A lot of these kids are foster kids, runaway kids. There's not a lot of people looking out for them. I'd say about 70 percent or so are foster kids." Last year, 22 children were removed from their pimps in Hillsborough and Pinellas county Florida. According to Christopher, "I have no doubt there's a lot more out there. I get at least two or three leads a week. We can't act on everything. There's no way." For the complete interview of Agent Christop...

International Perspective on Public Access to Juvenile Proceedings

Longtime contributer to this blog and internationally known social work expert Daniel Pollack has just published a fascinating article in the International Social Work Journal entitled Opening Juvenile Proceedings to the Public and the Media: An international Social Work Perspective. According to Professor Pollack, for youth offenders around the world, any contact with their country's juvenile justice system is serious business. In this concise legal note, Pollack discusses whether there should be a presumption that juvenile proceedings to be open or closed to the public and the media. Similarly, the article challenges the reader to consider how we ...

CPS Investigation of Child Abuse is Worthless

Child Protective Services investigated more than three million cases of suspected child abuse in 2007, but a new study suggests that the investigations did little or nothing to improve the lives of those children. Household investigations for suspected child maltreatment by Child Protective Services may not be associated with improvements in common, modifiable risk factors including social support, family functioning, poverty and others, according to a report in the October issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. Researchers evaluated a total of 595 children between the ages of 4 and 8 to determine if a CPS investigation for suspec...

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