Legal marijuana possession = child abuse?

Today's New York Times contains an article about state child welfare investigations of parents who legally possess marijuana:

The police found about 10 grams of marijuana, or about a third of an ounce, when they searched Penelope Harris’s apartment in the Bronx last year. The amount was below the legal threshold for even a misdemeanor, and prosecutors declined to charge her. But Ms. Harris, a mother whose son and niece were home when she was briefly in custody, could hardly rest easy.

The police had reported her arrest to the state’s child welfare hot line, and city caseworkers quickly arrived and took the children away.

Her son, then 10, spent more than a week in foster care. Her niece, who was 8 and living with her as a foster child, was placed in another home and not returned by the foster care agency for more than a year. Ms. Harris, 31, had to weather a lengthy child neglect inquiry, though she had no criminal record and had never before been investigated by the child welfare authorities, Ms. Harris and her lawyer said.

“I felt like less of a parent, like I had failed my children,” Ms. Harris said. “It tore me up.”

Hundreds of New Yorkers who have been caught with small amounts of marijuana, or who have simply admitted to using it, have become ensnared in civil child neglect cases in recent years, though they did not face even the least of criminal charges, according to city records and defense lawyers. A small number of parents in these cases have even lost custody of their children.

New York City’s child welfare agency said that it was pursuing these cases for appropriate reasons, and that marijuana use by parents could often hint at other serious problems in the way they cared for their children.

Is this good case work or child protection overkill?

Now consider this. Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided in Dougherty v. City of Covina that a warrant to search a suspected child molester's computer was illegal when the only evidence linking the suspect to possession of child pornography was the experience of the requesting police officer.

In other words, while NYC caseworkers have lawful authority to remove kids from parents who possess legal amounts of marijuana based solely on their training and experience, law enforcement officials cannot search the computers of suspected child molesters based solely on their training and experience.

Should child welfare case workers be governed by the same Fourth Amendment constraints as law enforcement officers? Should a case worker be allowed to search the computers of suspected child sex abusers without a warrant? Is searching a computer any different from searching a refrigerator and finding a small amount of marijuana?

Brazilian Bass Fishing Offers More Than A Good Catch

Brazilian bass fishing is more than big business, it's also apparently a vehicle for child sex tourism. For the past 20 years, U.S. fishing aficionados have been spending up to $10,000 for trips to remote lodges in the interior reaches of Brazil or Venezuela. American sport tour ads are filled with promises of "uncompromising luxury" in plush jungle lodges, complete with resort-like amenities, fine dining and satellite phones to keep in hailing distance of the office.

Now a federal investigation and two related actions — a parallel criminal inquiry in Brazil and an unusual lawsuit filed in federal court in Georgia — could provide a rare look at the business operations of the multibillion-dollar international sex tour industry, which has increasingly focused on Brazil. The Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation of sports fishing expeditions in the Amazon that may have been used as covers for Americans to have sex with underage girls.

Four indigenous Brazilian women, allegedly sex trafficked as minors by an American fishing tour operator, Richard Schair, operating Wet-A-Line Tours in the Amazon for many years up until 2009, filed a lawsuit for damages in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. Initiated and coordinated by international human rights organization Equality Now, the landmark civil case will be filed by Atlanta law firm King & Spalding. The case is noteworthy because it is the first time that the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) will be used by alleged victims of trafficking to seek damages from a sex tour operation.

The four women allege an American operating fishing tours in the Amazon lured girls onto his fishing boats with the promise of earning money and that they were then given alcohol and drugs and made to perform sexual acts with male customers. All four plaintiffs were minors when they were allegedly sold for sex.

For more background on this lawsuit, see these articles in the New York Times, ABC News, and the Dallas Morning News.

Here is the Complaint, Motion for Stay, and Answer filed in the federal civil case.

Foster Children Speak to Congress - is anyone listening?

This summer, fifteen former foster children worked as Capitol Hill interns and developed a set of policy recommendations outlined in a recently released report entitled "The Future of Foster Care - a revolution for change."

Among the recommendations created by these former foster youth:

• Congress should require that an education advocate be trained and assigned to every foster child in special education;


• Congress should require that surrogate parents be trained on the unique needs of foster youth in special education;


• Documented and undocumented immigrant children within the foster care system deserve the same basic rights and freedoms that are granted to children in other demographics, yet the child welfare system is not set up to allow these children to access the services that they deserve;


• The greater prevalence of mental health issues among foster youth does not justify the assumption which too often exists among foster parents, child welfare professionals, or other adults involved in the foster child’s life that the best way to help alleviate issues is through medication;


• States need to be held accountable to the foster child’s education outcomes;


• To ensure that the foster youth is receiving a proper education, there should be an education point person placed within the foster youth’s school district;


• One option for ensuring the success of foster youth is to provide them with a consistent and stable mentoring relationship;


• Congress should fund individual charter schools dedicated entirely to early childhood and preschool education of foster children in the ten cities in the nation with the largest foster care populations;


• Each foster parent should be given the same monthly maintenance payment, regardless of behavioral, mental or physical health needs. If a youth needs more services, this is where the money needs to be invested. More resources, such as individual therapy, tutoring, parenting classes, family counseling, wraparound services, a behavior coach, or other services should be made available, however, not as direct funds to foster parents;


• Congress should require the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to collect from the relevant agency of each state information on the type and quality of legal representation that children in the dependency court process receive and the laws and regulations that pertain to this representation;


• Congress should pass legislation requiring all states to recognize children in dependency court proceedings as a legal party to the case;


• Congress should require all states to implement a client directed model of legal representation for all children in the dependency court process. States should be allowed no more than three years to fully comply with this implementation, and those that do not fully comply should be penalized by a reduction in federal child welfare funding.

Congressional leaders and members should read and heed this excellent report. If there's something everyone should be able to agree upon, it's that foster children deserve our continued and tireless concern and advocacy. Given Congress' record low standing and the American people's absolute disgust with the functioning of government and the foul stench of mindless partisanship, perhaps this is one agenda which can bring members together to do what's right and decent for a change.

Handling Lost/Destroyed Records in Child Welfare Tort Litigation

A recently published article in the American Bar Association's Child Law Practice examines the potential effects of failing to preserve or produce evidence in the child welfare context. Best practices are offered from three perspectives—the plaintiff, the defending agency, and the court.

Litigation involving public and private social services agencies should make administrators and attorneys keenly aware of the obligation to preserve evidence. Across the country, torts regarding individual children in the child welfare system are common.

Professor Daniel Pollack and his co-author Associate Professor Dale Margolin explain that while lost records are common in child welfare torts, the issue has long been overlooked by litigators and courts. Recently, however, it is starting to receive attention. Attorneys and judges must be mindful of incomplete, altered, and destroyed case records. This includes taking preventative steps, while also being prepared to ask for evidentiary and other sanctions or pursuing separate tort actions when lost or destroyed records are harming a party.

Contact Professor Pollack by email for a copy of this timely in-depth article.

Chinese Babies Kidnapped and Sold for Adoption

From today's New York Times:

The abduction of children is a continuing problem in China, where a lingering preference for boys coupled with strict controls on the number of births have helped create a lucrative black market in children. Just last week, the police announced that they had rescued 89 babies from child traffickers, and the deputy director of the Public Security Ministry assailed what he called the practice of “buying and selling children in this country.”

But parents in Longhui say that in their case, it was local government officials who treated babies as a source of revenue, routinely imposing fines of $1,000 or more — five times as much as an average local family’s yearly income. If parents could not pay the fines, the babies were illegally taken from their families and often put up for adoption by foreigners, another big source of revenue.

The powers handed to local officials under national family planning regulations remain excessive and ripe for exploitation.

“The larger issue is that the one-child policy is so extreme that it emboldened local officials to act so inhumanely,” said Wang Feng, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who directs the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing.

The scandal also has renewed questions about whether Americans and other foreigners have adopted Chinese children who were falsely depicted as abandoned or orphaned. At least one American adoption agency organized adoptions from the government-run Shaoyang orphanage.

Lillian Zhang, the director of China Adoption With Love, based in Boston, said by telephone last month that the agency had found adoptive parents in 2006 for six Shaoyang children — all girls, all renamed Shao, after the city. The Chinese authorities certified in each case that the child was eligible for adoption, she said, and her agency cannot now independently investigate their backgrounds without a specific request backed by evidence.

“I’m an adoption agency, not a policeman,” Ms. Zhang said.

The Shaoyang welfare agency’s orphanage is required to post a notice of each newly received child for 60 days in Hunan Daily, a newspaper delivered only to subscribers in Longhui County. Unclaimed children are renamed with the surname Shao and approved for adoption. Foreign parents who adopt must donate about $5,400 to the orphanage.

Reports that family planning officials stole children, beat parents, forcibly sterilized mothers and destroyed families’ homes sowed a quiet terror through parts of Longhui County in the first half of the past decade. The casualties of that terror remain suffused with heartbreak and rage years later.

Read the entire story here.