Kid-Tested Remedies: Strategists call for specialization, teamwork in addressing children'sneedsAuthor(s): TERRY CARTERSource: ABA Journal, Vol. 85, No. 6 (JUNE 1999), p. 90Published by: American Bar AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27840844 .

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W??^m YOUR ABA

Kid-Tested Remedies Strategists call for specialization, teamwork in addressing children's needs BY TERRY CARTER

Lawyers have had a lot of impact the past two decades on matters con cerning children, such as welfare, adoption and fos ter care. They filed indi vidual lawsuits and class actions; they got their arms around very big problems and made key judgments in fashioning the futures of abused, neglected and troubled youths.

In hindsight, they sometimes did too much, sometimes not enough.

The lessons of the past and keys to the fu ture are in specialization, teamwork with other dis ciplines such as social work and investigations, more measured use of the threat of litigation, and guiding "good people" who staff "bad systems" in government and pri vate agencies, according to experts speaking in early April at the aba's Ninth National Confer ence on Children and the Law.

The conference in Washington, D.C., marked the 20th anniversary of the aba Center on Children and the Law, a program of the Young Lawyers Division.

Lawyers and others involved in child welfare matters must use a variety of strategies to achieve goals, said Sheryl Dicker, executive director of the New York Perma nent Judicial Commission on Jus tice for Children. Litigation alone does not work, she said at a confer ence session.

At the same time, "One should never underestimate the power of the threat of litigation. It's my opin ion that the threat is more powerful than the actual litigation," said the former general counsel to the Ark ansas Department of Human Ser vices. "It can spotlight the problems and move things."

The skills and judgment need ed in child welfare law are so im

FOSTER CARE: Carole and Alex Heller play with a baby placed in her J. home. Adoption is now advocated for many such kids.

portant and necessary now, said Donald Bross, another speaker on the panel, that child representation should evolve into a distinct area of practice. "Pediatrie law is the law of child development, care, problems and treatment," said Bross, legal director of the Kempe Children's Center and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado med ical school in Denver.

Other speakers on the panel reviewing child advocacy legal work in the United States included Marcia Robinson Lowry, founder and director of Children's Rights Inc. based in New York City; and Ira Burnim, director of the B?zelon Center for Mental Health in Wash ington, D.C.

Child welfare systems are in very bad shape and probably will get worse, said Lowry, who earned a fearsome reputation for her many class actions against foot-dragging agencies around the country, par

ticularly during her 16 years with the ACLU before launching Children's Rights Inc. in 1995. There is pres sure on cities and states now, said Lowry?partly her own doing?and they are looking for easy alterna tives.

Don't Answer the Phone But simply not an

swering the phones at the abuse hotline might be the easiest alternative, Lowry said. The key is both to force government to reform the system and to help it do so by offering guidance and alternatives.

And those efforts should not focus on just one aspect of the system. If the courts agree to monitor adoptions, then personnel and resources might be shifted there, even at the expense of intake/abuse of fices or other services.

In recent years cities and states have rechan neled efforts from returning neglected and abused chil dren to their natural par ents to instead seeking oth

er, permanent homes for them. The emphasis is moving away from temporary foster care in favor of adoption.

The issue is cast as family preservation vs. safety, said Burn im, "and I don't see the conflict." He advised lawyers to put the question in terms a judge can understand,

with an analogy to a heart patient: Must the choice be between offering an aspirin?counseling?which no one expects to work, or a transplant

?taking the child out of the home? "Anything in between is large

ly unavailable," he said. Lawyers need to do less reac

tive lawyering such as cross-exam ining and objecting, said Dicker, and

more work on giving judges pure information to fashion individual ized remedies. The lawyers must be "solution focused," she said, rather than offering "a semblance of pro cedural due process without any substance."

90 ABA JOURNAL / JUNE 1999 AP PHOTO/DANIEL HULSHIZER

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