Justice for Children

Sinopse

Under the law as it now stands a magistrate can authorise the removal of a child from his parents for up to 28 days on the word of a social worker and with no right of appeal. Parents have no right to legal aid to participate properly in or to appeal against a court decision to remove their parental rights. Social work professionals can call meetings to discuss children’s families without these families’ knowledge. Even more frighteningly a child can be placed in an institution until he is 18 for even a first or minor offence.
The liberty of children and the privacy of their families are frequently threatened by our present systems of juvenile justice and child care. Justice for Children exposes such injustices and shows how the use of a welfare approach deprives children of the rights afforded by natural justice.
The authors propose radical alternatives: limitation of state intervention in the lives of children and families, expansion of services in the community, use of courts only as a last resort, and separation of criminal and civil proceedings between a Juvenile Criminal Court and a Family Court. They take issue with supporters of both the 1969 Children and Young Persons Act and the ‘law and order’ lobby. Only a policy based on firm guarantees of children’s legal rights, they argue, can provide a genuine system of justice for children.