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Full-Text Articles in Law
Breaking Down The Silos That Harm Children: A Call To Child Welfare, Domestic Violence And Family Court Professionals, Joan S. Meier, Vivek Sankaran
Breaking Down The Silos That Harm Children: A Call To Child Welfare, Domestic Violence And Family Court Professionals, Joan S. Meier, Vivek Sankaran
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
The intersection of domestic violence and child maltreatment has been the subject of research and reform efforts focused on the need to integrate a better understanding of domestic violence into child welfare system practice. But a similar effort at integration of domestic violence and child maltreatment concerns has never been directed at family courts adjudicating private custody litigation. And while such courts’ responses to domestic violence have been analyzed and discussed extensively in the literature, legal discussions of custody courts’ responses to child maltreatment are few and far between. At the same time, there has been an explosion of traumatic …
Denial Of Family Violence In Court: An Empirical Analysis And Path Forward For Family Law, Joan S. Meier
Denial Of Family Violence In Court: An Empirical Analysis And Path Forward For Family Law, Joan S. Meier
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Scores of women and children have suffered grave harm from courts’ punitive responses to mothers’ requests to protect their children from paternal abuse in the context of custody litigation. Rather than responding protectively, family courts frequently turn on the protective parent, ordering the children removed from the protective parent and sending them to live with or spend unprotected time with their allegedly abusive parent. In the worst of these cases, the abusive parent has used this court-ordered access to murder the child(ren), in the ultimate act of revenge against his adult victim. While courts’ resistance to mothers’ and children’s abuse …
Money Can’T Buy You Love: Valuing Contributions By Nonresidential Fathers, Laurie S. Kohn
Money Can’T Buy You Love: Valuing Contributions By Nonresidential Fathers, Laurie S. Kohn
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This article examines the roots of the disproportionate values the legal system assigns to paternal roles in the family law and child support system, looking to social norms, traditional family law, and the state's interests in the well-being of children. This hierarchy of values reveals itself in the current structure of child support laws and in the enforcement of parenting-time orders on the one hand and child support obligations on the other. The article considers how the allocation of disproportionate values impacts low-income fathers, mothers, children, and the state. The article envisions ways in which the family law system could …
The False Promise Of Custody In Domestic Violence Protection Orders, Laurie S. Kohn
The False Promise Of Custody In Domestic Violence Protection Orders, Laurie S. Kohn
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This Article reveals the disconnect between the power and the will to enforce the custody and parenting time provisions of protection orders through criminal mechanisms and explores the further infirmity of civil enforcement by illustrating the shortcomings of available relief. Together, these barriers to effective enforcement threaten to render this court-granted protection meaningless and dangerously misleading. The barriers also undermine the many years of advocacy invested to secure these protections in the first place - reforms aimed at protecting victims and children from abusive parents.
This Article explores ways to bring together the will and the power to enforce all …
Johnson’S Differentiation Theory: Is It Really Empirically Supported?, Joan S. Meier
Johnson’S Differentiation Theory: Is It Really Empirically Supported?, Joan S. Meier
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Michael Johnson’s differentiation of ‘‘types’’ of domestic violence has had a significant impact on courts and providers, in part because of its claim to an empirical basis. Unfortunately, the label ‘‘situational couple violence’’ has already been used by judges and evaluators to minimize abuse claims in custody cases. Johnson’s repeated assertion that SCV is the most common form of domestic violence reinforces the marginalizing of domestic violence. But what do his data actually show? Here Professor Meier takes a close look at the research Johnson relies on and finds that it fails to prove his thesis. Rather, the data suggest …
Red Families V. Blue Families, Naomi R. Cahn, June Carbone
Red Families V. Blue Families, Naomi R. Cahn, June Carbone
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
The "culture wars," as they play out in high profile Supreme Court decisions and legislative fights over abortion and same-sex marriage, are first and foremost about family values. Central to these differences - and the focus of the article - is the fact that different families in different parts of the country are leading different lives. The one clear, organizing principle that distinguishes the two systems: age of family formation. The defining characteristic of what we term the "new middle class morality" is delay in family formation until the late twenties or early thirties. This new morality, which correlates more …
Foster Children Awaiting Adoption Under The Adoption And Safe Families Act Of 1997, Catherine J. Ross
Foster Children Awaiting Adoption Under The Adoption And Safe Families Act Of 1997, Catherine J. Ross
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This article discusses the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 and how it relates to the rules created by constitutional law and federal legislation about shifting children between foster care and adoption. The article focuses on the 15/22 months rule, which provides that a state should pursue adoption for a child who has remained in foster care for fifteen of the preceding 22 months and encourages states to take action to implement the 15/22 months rule to comply with the Constitution and federal law, noting that many children in foster care will need pre-adoptive and adoptive homes.