Browsing by Author "Bartholet, E."
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Item Creating a Child-Friendly Child Welfare System: Effective Early Intervention to Prevent Maltreatment and Protect Victimized Children(Buffalo Law Review, 2012) Bartholet, E.This article argues that what we call the “child welfare” system has traditionally focused more on adult than on child welfare, placing greater emphasis on family preservation than warranted. It argues further that while the system purports to value research as a guide to policy, research is too often designed to serve predefined ideological goals, and to advance family preservation rather than examining what policies best serve child interests. It shows how these themes played out in two recent conferences sponsored by the author’s Child Advocacy Program at Harvard Law School. The first conference addressed claims made by the “Racial Disproportionality Movement,” and showed that actual black and white maltreatment rates closely track official rates, indicating that a child-friendly system would focus not on claimed racial discrimination but on reducing actual maltreatment. The second revealed the existence of many promising prevention and protection strategies, but also the ongoing power of the adult rights agenda and the constraints it puts on promising reforms and truly illuminating research. We could do better by children. But to do so we must transform the values that guide the child welfare system, honor child rights equally with adult, and recognize the centrality for children of the right to grow up in a nurturing family.Item Creating a Child-Friendly Child Welfare System: The Use and Misuse of Research(Harvard Law Review, 2013) Bartholet, E.This article, a revised speech, contends that what we call the child welfare system is skewed in an adult-rights direction, and is often quite hostile to child interests. The field is characterized by an unusual amount of social science research, which should be helpful in guiding policy. However that research is similarly skewed in an adult-rights direction. This is largely because the same entities fund the research as fund policy advocacy, and they have promoted research designed to validate the kinds of family preservation policies they favor, policies that are often inconsistent with child best interests. We need to develop new mechanisms to fund the kind of truly independent research that would illuminate the child-best-interest issues, and enable policy-makers to design a truly child-friendly child welfare system.Item Differential Response: A Dangerous Experiment in Child Welfare(Harvard University, 2014) Bartholet, E.Differential Response (DR) represents the most important child welfare initiative of the day, with DR programs rapidly expanding throughout the country. It would radically change our child welfare system, diverting the great majority of Child Protective Services (CPS) cases to an entirely voluntary system. This article describes the serious risks DR poses for children, and the flawed research being used to promote DR as “evidence-based.” It puts the DR movement in historical context, as one of a series of extreme family preservation movements supported by a corrupt merger of advocacy with research. It argues for reform that would honor children’s rights, confront the problems of poverty underlying child maltreatment in a serious way, and expand rather than reduce the capacity of CPS to address child maltreatment. It calls for a change in the dynamics of child welfare research and policy so that we can avoid history endlessly repeating itself. (Author Abstract)Item Intergenerational Justice for Children: Restructuring Adoption, Reproduction & Child Welfare Policy(Harvard University, 2013) Bartholet, E.This article takes seriously the idea of intergenerational justice for children, and takes as starting premises that child interests count as equivalent to adult, and that we owe justice not just to existing children but also to the next generation. It argues that intergenerational justice demands a major restructuring of policies throughout the world governing adoption, reproduction, and child welfare. We now encourage the reproduction of more children than we can care for, provide limited child welfare enabling poor parents to care for their children, and discourage adoption of existing children who need homes. These policies are perverse, unfair not just to children but adults as well. Societies that damage their children will have to live with those children when they grow up, children at high risk for crime, substance abuse, unemployment, poverty and for mistreating the next generation. We need to reverse the perverse. We need to change the pronatalist and anti-contraception policies that encourage the reproduction of children who won’t be born healthy or receive nurturing care, and we need to encourage adoption both domestic and international.Item Intergenerational Justice for Children: Restructuring Adoption, Reproduction & Child Welfare Policy(2013) Bartholet, E.This article takes seriously the idea of intergenerational justice for children, and takes as starting premises that child interests count as equivalent to adult, and that we owe justice not just to existing children but also to the next generation. It argues that intergenerational justice demands a major restructuring of policies throughout the world governing adoption, reproduction, and child welfare. We now encourage the reproduction of more children than we can care for, provide limited child welfare enabling poor parents to care for their children, and discourage adoption of existing children who need homes. These policies are perverse, unfair not just to children but adults as well. Societies that damage their children will have to live with those children when they grow up, children at high risk for crime, substance abuse, unemployment, poverty and for mistreating the next generation. We need to reverse the perverse. We need to change the pronatalist and anti-contraception policies that encourage the reproduction of children who won’t be born healthy or receive nurturing care, and we need to encourage adoption both domestic and international.Item The International Adoption Cliff: Do Child Human Rights Matter?(Harvard University, 2013) Bartholet, E.This revised speech characterizes the dramatic decline in international adoption since 2004 as a major child human rights tragedy, deliberately created by governmental and NGO policy-makers. It contrasts U.S. human rights policy imposing sanctions for the violation of adult human rights, to U.S. failure to act in the face of child human rights violations. It calls for a change in U.S. policy that would: (1) Hold countries accountable for the human rights violations inherent in their shutdowns of international adoption and their institutionalization of children; and (2) Stop enabling UNICEF, through our funding, to eliminate international adoption as an option for children.Item International Adoption: A Way Forward(New York Law School Review, 2010) Bartholet, E.This is the introduction to a special issue of articles on international adoption, summing up their relevance to the debate in the field. International adoption is in turmoil, with a dramatic reduction in recent years in the number of children placed in adoptive homes. These articles provide important new support for international adoption as an appropriate way to advance children’s rights and interests. And they provide information about ways to address any problems of corruption and abuse, without penalizing unparented children by denying them the homes they need.Item International adoption: The human rights position.(Global Policy, 2010) Bartholet, E.International adoption is under siege, with the number of children placed dropping each of the last several years, and many countries imposing severe new restrictions. Key forces mounting the attack claim the child human rights mantle, arguing that such adoption denies heritage rights, and often involves abusive practices. Many nations assert rights to hold onto the children born within their borders, and others support these demands citing subsidiarity principles. But children’s most basic human rights, at the heart of the true meaning of subsidiarity, are to grow up in the families that will often be found only in international adoption. These rights should trump any conflicting state sovereignty claims.Item Race and Child Welfare: Disproportionality, Disparity, Discrimination: Re-assessing the Facts, Re-Thinking the Policy Options(2011) Bartholet, E.This paper summarizes what the author believes can be learned from the evidence presented at a conference co-sponsored by Harvard Law School’s Child Advocacy Program and Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago on what has generally been termed racial disproportionality in child welfare. The conference was designed to present some of the best available evidence analyzing the high representation of black children in foster care, and exploring policy implications. Some have contended that black/white maltreatment rates are similar, and accordingly that child welfare system bias is responsible for this high representation. However the evidence presented helped demonstrate that overall, higher rates of black contact with child welfare reflect differences in the underlying incidence of actual maltreatment. This paper incorporates material from a short Chapin Hall “Issue Brief” on the same topic co-authored with three others, but goes beyond that Issue Brief to provide a more complete description of the evidence, with links to the conference videos, powerpoints, and related papers. It describes in more detail the evidence both on high black maltreatment rates, and on the potential of certain targeted program to prevent maltreatment and to protect victimized children. It argues that the focus on alleged child welfare system bias with its emphasis on anti-racism training and on immediate reduction in the number of black children removed to foster care, diverts attention from the most significant problems facing black families and poses dangers to black children victimized by maltreatment. It concludes that reducing the number of children in care without reducing the prevalence of child maltreatment will endanger children, and that the work to facilitate real reform is much more challenging.Item The Challenge of Children's Rights Advocacy: Problems & Progress in Area of Child Abuse & Neglect(Whittier Journal of Child and Family Advocacy, 2013) Bartholet, E.Item The Racial Disproportionality Movement in Child Welfare: False Facts and Dangerous Directions(Arizona Law Review, 2009) Bartholet, E.Item Whose Children?: A Response to Professor Guggenheim(Harvard Law Review, 2000) Bartholet, E.This article responds to Martin Guggenheim's book review of Bartholet's book, Nobody's Children: Abuse and Neglect, Foster Drift, and the Adoption Alternative (Beacon Press, 1999). Nobody's Children challenges the family preservation tradition that has dominated child welfare policy, and argues that we should take adoption seriously, for the first time in our history, as an option for abused and neglected children. It describes and critiques various reform moves that child welfare traditionalists are promoting, including family group decision making, community partnerships, and new permanency initiatives such as subsidized guardianships. It also describes reform moves that the author sees as moving in genuinely new and promising directions, which include early intervention in the form of intensive home visitation, and new adoption-friendly programs. Guggenheim in his book review attacks Bartholet's book and defends family preservation, arguing that she is too ready to give up on troubled families, to transfer children from poor black families to more privileged white families, and to sacrifice our nation's traditional respect for parental privacy and autonomy. Bartholet's reply, in turn, claims that Guggenheim mischaracterizes her arguments and misconceives the evidence and the issues.Item Whose Children?: A Response to Professor Guggenheim(2013) Bartholet, E.