Refocusing the Lens of Child Advocacy Reform on the Child
When placed within family court jurisdiction, children need lawyers. Dependency [FN1] cases in the family court--in which parents are accused of abusing or neglecting their children--are fraught with constitutional tensions regarding the state's and parents' rights to regulate the well-being of children, [FN2] along with systemic pressures such as federal statutes and state funding [FN3] that substantially affect family relationships. Children sit at *482 the heart of these proceedings; indeed they are the very reason for them. Facing abrupt state intervention into their family life and the oft-accompanying physical removal [FN4] from their homes, these children travel a tumultuous and uncertain road from the time the alleged abuse or neglect occurs until the allegations are resolved. Threatened also with termination of parental rights, [FN5] they--for better or worse--face the potential permanent loss of their natural family life. The recognition that children are not mere property to be tossed between their parents and the state has prompted states to require representation of children as independent parties. Children possess unique rights and interests--to be free from harm and to access relevant social services, among others--that need separate advocacy, particularly in light of the frequent conflicts between the respective interests of parents and children. [FN6] Though a relatively common practice, child representation in dependency proceedings remains both inconsistent and disputed across the country.
Past, present, and future roles of child protective services.
Contemporary social issues typically spring from historical roots, and, as this article points out, that is particularly true of the effort to find a balanced, fair, and helpful way of responding to child abuse and neglect. This article examines how today's child protective services system evolved from a past of almshouses, orphan trains, anticruelty societies, and legislation establishing the protection of children as a government function. The author finds that the history of child protection in the United States is marked by a continuing, unresolved tension between the aim of rescuing children from abusive homes and that of strengthening the care their families can provide. Against that backdrop, this article explains the structure of the typical child protective services (CPS) agency (the unit within a broader public child welfare department that focuses on abuse and neglect) and outlines the roles in child protection that are played by the police, the courts, private and public social service agencies, and the community at large. According to the author's analysis, the fundamental challenges facing CPS can be captured in two questions regarding appropriate boundaries for the agency: Which situations require the agency's intervention? And how can the broader resources of the community be mobilized in the effort to protect children?
Experimental observation of a strange nonchaotic attractor.
Evidence is presented for the existence of a strange nonchaotic attractor in a two-frequency quasi-periodically driven, buckled, magnetoelastic ribbon experiment. Scaling behavior in the Fourier amplitude spectrum is observed in agreement with predicted scaling behavior for strange nonchaotic attractors. Dimension measurements also support the existence of a strange nonchaotic attractor