State v. Sloan (1995 [Mo. Ct. App.]) was a criminal case of child sexual abuse. A.D., the 6-year-old alleged victim, was dropped off on Friday by her mother at her grandmother's house, where the child's aunt Evelyn and the defendant also resided. Two days later, on Sunday, the child's aunt Anita phoned the child's mother and told her that something was wrong. A.D. then told her mother that the defendant had sexually assaulted her the day before. The mother called the child abuse hot line. On Thursday, 5 days after the alleged abuse, a social worker and a police detective interviewed the child at her school. A.D. reported that her aunt Evelyn had allowed her to get into bed with the defendant and had then left the house. She stated that defendant had “placed his finger in her punkie,” that she had touched his “wiener,” and that defendant “had placed her on his wiener.” Approximately 3 weeks later, the police detective reinterviewed the child, and she gave a similar report. The child testified at the trial, and her testimony was consistent with the testimony of her mother, the social worker, and the detective. The testimony of the child's aunt Evelyn and her grandmother (who both testified for the defense) as to the events subsequent to the alleged abuse was consistent with the child's.

The defendant was convicted, but the conviction was overturned on appeal.

If you've read Children, Social Science, and the Law thus far, you might share my belief that the fiscal and legislative reforms needed to remedy the problems noted by the distinguished authors of these chapters are quite formidable – especially given contemporary political trends. The more we know (and this book has provided a wealth of research synthesis information), the less it seems that critical laws, policies, and practices conform to what, in so many ways, is best for children and their families. Our public systems of intervention for some very vulnerable populations – children in high-conflict parental custody disputes, in abuse/neglect cases, and in the juvenile delinquency arena – continue to fail far too many of them. And we simply have no coherent unifying national children's policies through which proposed new legislation and practice reforms can be evaluated.

In reading these chapters, I sense that we are destined to continue having fragmented, underfunded, and politically expedient approaches to governmental intervention with children and their families (including some poorly thought out laws opportunistically named for deceased children) unless:

1. Policy makers step back before passing new child-related legislation and take time to learn from the experts what has worked and what has not;

2. Program models are adequately funded and evaluated; and

3. Information on successful programs is more widely disseminated so that there can be stronger support for expanding them to serve far more children and families in need.

In 1991, presidential candidate Bill Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it.” With the enthusiastic support of a Republican-controlled Congress, President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in August 1996, thereby effectively carrying out his promise. This legislation fundamentally transformed the nature of the cash welfare program that had been created in 1935 in response to the economic hardships brought about by the Great Depression, replacing a guaranteed entitlement program with a time-limited benefit.

A policy shift of this magnitude raises many questions, but a central concern of many policy analysts and researchers has been the implications of the new welfare system for children in recipient families and in families who may have received welfare benefits under the old law but are now or soon will be excluded from participation. In this chapter we will briefly describe the nature of this policy transformation and review research that offers a glimpse at the potential consequences of these changes for children in low-income families. Additionally, we will briefly describe the work currently in progress on a number of fronts that may provide scholars and policy makers with the data necessary to discern the impact of welfare reform on the well-being of children in low-income families.

The rate of community violence in the United States has increased dramatically over the past two decades (Osofsky, 1998; Parson, 1997). Although the numbers have begun to decline in recent years (e.g., in 1998, FBI crime statistics indicate that violent acts and property offenses dropped 7% nationwide [Morales & Reisner, 1999]), the rates remain high. For example, Saint Louis, Missouri, the city with the highest crime rate in 1998, had 14,952 crimes per 100,000 people. Miami, Florida, was ranked sixth in the nation in terms of crime, with 12,054 crimes per 100,000 people. The high rate of crime and violence in the country has had a profound impact on youth: The nation's young people, particularly those from low socioeconomic, multiethnic, and urban communities, are increasingly exposed to extreme acts of crime or violence, either as witnesses or as victims (Warner & Weist, 1996). As a consequence of this exposure, young people are at increased risk of experiencing myriad disturbing psychological symptoms.

One main set of problems that results in the aftermath of exposure to crime and violence is the development of distress symptoms, particularly those associated with posttraumatic stress reactions. Because of the high levels of distress experienced by youth who suffer from posttraumatic stress, it is important that interventions be developed that will help alleviate this distress. It also is important that social policy be formulated and implemented to curb young people's exposure to the trauma of community violence.

Bottoms, Kovera, and McAuliff have composed their book Children, Social Science, and the Law at a propitious time. We are at a natural point to look back at the ups and downs of interaction between the social sciences and the juvenile justice system. It has been a century since the establishment of the juvenile court and a generation since the Supreme Court's affirmation of the personhood of children and its command that juvenile courts follow the rudiments of due process (In re Gault, 1967).

The juvenile court began as the paradigmatic invention of the legal realists. The court was the entry point into a distinctive system designed to match the realities of life for wayward children and troubled families. Not only were the court's own procedures supposed to reflect knowledge about child development, but the court also acted as creator of new settings for family support, such as child guidance centers (Levine & Levine, 1992). Further, as the import of Gault became clear more than a half-century later, use of social science was a common feature in the panoply of children's cases in the appellate courts, whether testing the limits of autonomy for children on the one hand or applying special entitlements on the other (Mnookin, 1985). Indeed, the ostensible reliance on social science in children's cases has become so widely accepted that whether such work is cited no longer has much to do with judges' ideology (Hafemeister & Melton, 1987).

Although the media spotlight certainly exaggerates the reality, there is no doubt that violence by and against youth is an enormous social problem. Nearly one in six of all violent crime arrests in 1997 involved a juvenile under 18 years of age (FBI, 1997). Arrest rates for violent crimes among juveniles increased 49% between 1988 and 1997 compared with an increase of 19% among persons 18 years of age and over. However, recent data suggest that juvenile arrests for murder and other violent crimes may have peaked in 1994 (Sickmund, Snyder, & Poe-Yamagata, 1997). Moderate decreases in 1995, 1996, and 1997 are evidence of the continuing downward trend in juvenile arrests for violent crimes (FBI, 1996, 1997). Although violence is pervasive in American society, not all groups are equally affected. African American youth are significantly overrepresented among victims and perpetrators of violent crimes (Reiss & Roth, 1993). Arrest data indicate that African American youth account for 52% of youth arrested for violent crimes, even though they make up only 15% of the juvenile population (Dryfoos, 1990). However, data on self-reported violent offenses demonstrate a much narrower difference between the prevalence of violence between Blacks and Whites (Elliot, 1994).

We begin this chapter with a discussion of the difficulties surrounding definitions of violence. Then we review the correlates of youth violence by examining the societal, neighborhood, school, peer, family, and individual factors that predict violent behavior.

Domestic relations cases, including divorce, child custody, child support, paternity, domestic violence, and adoption filings, compose the fastest-growing sector of cases that come before our states' courts. The National Center for State Courts reports a 65% increase in domestic relations filings between 1985 and 1997 (Ostrom & Kauder, 1997).

The widesweeping impact of child custody policy and practice is evident when we consider that more than half of all children born today will live apart from one parent at some time during their childhood (Furstenberg & Cherlin, 1991). All of these children are potentially subject to child custody orders. Although a great deal of research has focused on custody following divorce, this literature is not sufficient to advise child custody policy makers. Divorce accounts for little more than half of the children who live in single-parent households. The others are born to parents who do not marry (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1992). Child custody cases may enter the courts because a divorce is in progress, a paternity case is being heard, child support orders are being established, or as part of domestic violence restraining orders. Because divorce is only one family law proceeding that involves child custody orders, the term family reorganization is used in this chapter to refer the wider spectrum of family circumstances that lead to child custody decisions.

Advocacy on behalf of children is more than simply the provision of needed services to children. Advocacy efforts represent an attempt to increase the responsiveness and accountability of all institutions affecting children. As Melton (1983) notes, “whether the intent is to increase children's self-determination or to enhance the social, education, and medical resources to which children are entitled, child advocates have as their mission social action on behalf of children” (p. 1).

Although social scientists often conduct and report research related to child well-being, these efforts frequently fail to take into account larger social trends affecting children and families. Moreover, they often fall short of informing advocacy efforts – either in helping to set an agenda for advocacy or in evaluating advocacy efforts. The intent of this chapter is to provide an overview of child advocacy issues for social scientists in order to facilitate a greater connection between social scientists and child advocates. We begin by noting some significant social trends influencing the nature of child advocacy. These include the changing nature of the American family, the changing nature of social institutions, and the shift in responsibility for children's welfare from the federal government to state and community organizations. Next, a brief history of advocacy is presented, noting philosophical differences between those who push for increasing self-determination of children and those who primarily advocate for improved health and safety conditions for children.

In terms of numbers alone, child maltreatment is a significant social problem. Although recent studies suggest that rates of some types of maltreatment, especially sexual abuse, have decreased markedly in the last decade (Jones & Finkelhor, 2001), overall many children are harmed each year. For example, using a standard of “demonstrable harm as a result of maltreatment,” it has been estimated that 1,553,800, or 23.1/1,000 children, were victims of maltreatment during 1993 (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1996, pp. 2–9).

In this chapter, we review some examples of newly developed programs, community-based initiatives, and recent legislation designed and implemented to prevent child maltreatment. In this context, we find that although there have been some successes, such programs and legislation are as likely to have been driven by values, biases, and political considerations as they are to have been driven by a research-based understanding of the problem. Stated differently, there tends to be a gap between what we know empirically about prevention and what ultimately gets implemented. We conclude the chapter with some comments about how social scientists might help bridge this gap.

PREVENTING CHILD ABUSE AND NEGLECT

The U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect (ABCAN) (1990) described the problem of child maltreatment and the system developed to help solve that problem as a national emergency. In a subsequent report, they called for a preventive strategy that would be “comprehensive, child-centered, family-focused, and neighborhood-based” (U.S. ABCAN, 1993, p. 16; see Small & Limber, this volume).

Children's legal representation has developed in a largely ad hoc manner among the states, with little concern for traditional ethical principles of zealous advocacy, children's constitutional rights, or attorneys' malpractice liability (Haralambie, 1993). It has not even been clear whether children have any right to be represented in civil litigation by counsel, either appointed or privately retained. Although the U.S. Supreme Court articulated a constitutional right to independdent representation for children in certain delinquency cases (Arizona v. Gault, 1967), no similar constitutional right has been declared for children involved in the child welfare system or family courts. (For a discussion of the history, current status, and future of the children's legal rights advocacy movement, see Small & Limber, this volume.)

Children most often have independent representation in child welfare proceedings filed by child protective services agencies to free children temporarily or permanently from their parents' care because of abuse, neglect, or abandonment. Much less frequently, children have independent representation in custody cases between the child's parents or between a parent and a private third party such as a grandparent. Children are more likely to have independent representation in custody cases when issues of abuse or neglect are raised by one of the private parties. The rationale for appointing independent representation for children is (a) to provide an independent person to advocate for their best interests and (b) to give children a voice for their expressed position in cases that so directly impact their lives.

Before a child can be adopted into a new family, the rights of the child's birth parents must be totally and irrevocably terminated. As a result, thousands of children every year are affected by the legal process of terminating parental rights. In many cases of infant adoption, a birth mother and birth father voluntarily relinquish their rights over a child – a process that they may agree to months before their child is born. In other cases of infant adoption, and often when an older child is adopted, parental rights are terminated involuntarily as a result of a judicial determination that the birth parents are unable to provide adequate parenting. Consequently, every adoption is preceded by a termination, and public policy on adoption is always entangled in legal proceedings regarding the termination of parental rights.

In this chapter we focus on the process and consequences of the termination of parental rights, and in particular on cases in which termination of parental rights is being pursued because children have been chronically or severely maltreated by their parents or other caregivers. We start with a discussion of the need to balance the rights of parents and children in termination cases and efforts of current and past policy to do so. We then describe current laws regarding the legal process involved in the termination of parental rights and the ways in which the needs, rights, and obligations of parents, children, and the state are balanced in such proceedings.

A wave of youth violence and serious juvenile offending experienced in the mid-eighties and extending to the mid-nineties (Puzzanchera, 1998) left in its path legislation that reflected lawmakers' unwillingness to continue to back the rehabilitative policy of the juvenile justice system. Instead of supporting the rehabilitative model, lawmakers' response to the increase in juvenile violence was to alter the laws for prosecution of cases involving juvenile offenders. The most frequent alteration has been legislation that facilitates adolescents' prosecution under adult criminal laws. The mechanisms that allow for youths to be prosecuted under criminal laws are commonly known as waiver or transfer to adult court. Although the rates of violent juvenile offending have settled and even declined somewhat in the last few years (Sickmund, Snyder, & Poe-Yamagata, 1997), juveniles are increasingly treated as adults under the recent crime-control model.

Juvenile waiver to adult court has been an option almost since the inception of the juvenile justice system. In the past, however, juvenile transfers to adult court were based primarily on judicial discretion that considered differences in adolescents' dangerousness, sophistication-maturity, and amenability to treatment (Ewing, 1990; Grisso, 1998; Kruh & Brodsky, 1997; Salekin, Rogers, & Ustad, 2001). As such, juvenile court judges were required to make decisions on a case-by-case basis, considering the individual characteristics of adolescents before transferring youths to adult court. This process has changed substantially over the last decade, and legal reform has resulted in automatic and other transfer mechanisms of adolescents to adult criminal courts.