REPRESENTING CHILDREN IN CHILD PROTECTIVE PROCEEDINGS: Ethical and Practical Dimensions

Abstract

A chance e-mail set in motion the chain of events which led to this third, international edition of Representing Children. I had believed this book to be largely done, and had stopped supplementing it in favor of other projects, until Carla Marcucci of AIAF Sezione Toscana invited me to Lucca, Italy in the summer of 2003 to advise attorneys who were preparing to take on the work of representing children in child protective proceedings in Tuscany. While there, I learned for the first time about the provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the European Convention on the Exercise of Children's Rights. However, these developments, especially the child's right to have her voice heard under the CRC, appeared to be of such fundamental importance that the book could not be considered complete until they were described. I drafted the new chapter of the book, but something was missing. There appeared to be no information about the implementation of these provisions of the CRC globally, and still remarkably little comprehensive information about what U.S. legal provisions required of child representatives in these proceedings. On the way to Washington, D.C., to present the draft of the chapter to members of the George Washington University faculty, I suddenly saw in my head a website, describing whether and how the child's voice is heard in child protective proceedings in each of the 194 U.N. Member Nations who signed the CRC, and in the 56 American jurisdictions. Now, less than two years later, thanks to an extraordinary collaborative effort among researchers and staff at the Yale Law School, this website, Representing Children Worldwide, is available at www.law.yale.edu/rcw. This third, international edition contains six charts, contained in Appendix B, detailing the results of our research, as well as two new chapters incorporating our research about international law into practice suggestions and areas of further study for the child's representative.