Explores values, ideas and structures promoting justice for children and families, under the headings of fairness, protection and autonomy.

This book explores important current social justice issues that confront young children in America. A broad range of topics related to the fair treatment of young children and their families are approached with a fresh and hopeful energy. The central argument of this volume is that a fair and just society must protect the basic needs of all children so they are able to reach their full potential to learn, grow, and ultimately become productive democratic citizens. The book includes contributions from an impressive group of authors who have been consistent voices for the fair and equitable treatment of children in school and society. Each chapter examines a critical issue in child social justice with a focus on the current problem, historical importance of the issue, potential solutions, and a vision for the future. The book has been developed to reach a wide audience of professionals whose work involves children and who have grown concerned about social forces that cause child suffering and threaten the well-being or even the survival of children in the United States. Readers will come away with up to date information and a renewed commitment to being life-long advocates for children.

"Crossover" Children in the Youth Justice and Child Protection Systems explores the outcomes faced by the group of children who experience involvement with both child protection and youth justice systems across several countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Situated against a backdrop of international evidence and grounded in a two-year study with the Children’s Court in Victoria, Australia, this book presents a cohesive picture of the backgrounds, characteristics, and pathways traversed by crossover children. It presents statistical data from 300 crossover Children’s Court case files, alongside the expert evidence of 82 professionals, to generate a comprehensive picture of the lives of crossover children, and the individual and systemic challenges that they face. The book investigates the crucial question of why some children involved with child welfare systems experience particularly poor criminal justice outcomes, demonstrating how the convergence of cumulative childhood adversity, complex support needs, and systemic disadvantage produces acutely damaging outcomes for some crossover youth. It outlines the implications of the study, including how these findings might shape diversion and differential justice system responses to child protection-involved youth, and the innovative approaches adopted internationally to avert the care to custody pathway. This book is internationally relevant and will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology and law, social work, psychology, and sociology, as well as legal, welfare, and government agencies and policy developers, non-government peak bodies and services, professional probation services, case managers, health and mental health services, disability and drug treatment agencies, and others who work with both young offenders and the design and implementation of policy and legislation.

The first volume of its kind to take a comprehensive view of social justice issues and interventions for young people from a global perspective.

Hearing on the reauthorization of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, which was first written in 1974 with the goal of supporting states¿ actions to prevent youth crime and to provide core protections for children. The law recognized that clear biological differences between teenagers and adults meant that youth should not be treated in the same manner as adults. Witnesses: Michael Belton, Ramsey County, MN, Dep. Dir. of Juvenile Corrections; Scott Burns, Exec. Dir., National DA¿s Assoc.; A. Hasan Davis, Dep. Commissioner for Operations, Kentucky Dept. of Juvenile Justice; Tracy McClard, Parent; John Solberg, Exec. Dir., Rawhide Boys Ranch, New London, WI; Steven Teske, Judge, Clayton County Juvenile Court, GA. Illus.

Understanding practices of family separation and child removal necessitates considering the impacts of globalizing capitalism, colonialism, empire building and the establishment and normalization of systemic racism. In Reproductive Justice, Adoption, and Foster Care, the authors situate the colonial legacies of family separation, what it means to center the right parent, and Reproductive Justice and transnational feminist frameworks in conversation with one another in order to elucidate a more nuanced and comprehensive approach to recognizing the significance of contemporary examples of family separation. In doing so, the book showcases the connections between adoption and foster care within the intellectual and activist frameworks of human rights, Critical Adoption Studies, Reproductive Justice, and transnational feminisms. Epistemologically, Reproductive Justice and transnational feminisms meet at the point where both consider and interrogate globalizing capitalism, neoliberal economic and political ideologies, and the ways that various people—mostly people of color, poor people, women, children, and Indigenous people—are considered disposable. Critical Adoption Studies also importantly highlights the ways that adoption and foster care function as forms of family formation and as mechanisms of globalizing capitalism and state formation. Thus, it is critical that any exploration of the reproductive experiences of marginalized individuals interrogate and complicate notions of “choice” to advocate for justice. Reproductive Justice, Adoption, and Foster Care will be of interest to students of sociology, psychology, and social work, as well as scholars, activists, policymakers, and adoption and foster care practitioners.