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Standing In Babylon, Looking Toward Zion, Kate Kruse
Standing In Babylon, Looking Toward Zion, Kate Kruse
Faculty Scholarship
The UNLV Conference on Representing Children in Families convened an impressive group of academics, policymakers, practitioners, and participants in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems to consider how to move beyond recommendations made ten years earlier about how lawyers for children should approach their work. This essay examines the interrelationship between idealism and realism in the definition of lawyers’ roles as representatives of children and the importance of idealized visions to the process of reforming dysfunctional systems, using examples of child welfare and juvenile justice system reform.
Mutual Dependency In Child Welfare, Clare Huntington
Mutual Dependency In Child Welfare, Clare Huntington
Faculty Scholarship
The child welfare system is in need of fundamental reform. To the great detriment of parents and children, in the current system the state waits for a crisis in a family and then intervenes in a heavy-handed fashion. The state pays scant attention to the prevention of child abuse and neglect. This article argues that the principle conceptual barrier to the adoption of a prevention-oriented approach to child welfare is the dominant conception of family autonomy, which venerates freedom from state control. This article proposes a novel reconfiguration of family autonomy that encourages engagement with the state, rather than simply …
Rights Myopia In Child Welfare, Clare Huntington
Rights Myopia In Child Welfare, Clare Huntington
Faculty Scholarship
For decades, legal scholars have debated the proper balance of parents' rights and children's rights in the child welfare system. This Article argues that the debate mistakenly privileges rights. Neither parents' rights nor children's rights serve families well because, as implemented, a solely rights-based model of child welfare does not protect the interests of parents or children. Additionally, even if well-implemented, the model still would not serve parents or children because it obscures the important role of poverty in child abuse and neglect and fosters conflict, rather than collaboration, between the state and families. In lieu of a solely rights-based …