Mediating Child Protection Cases.
1995; Child Welfare League of America; Volume: 74; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0009-4021
Autores Tópico(s)Child Abuse and Trauma
ResumoThe provision of child protection services to families in Ontario has changed dramatically in the past decade. The passage of the Child and Family Services Act in 1984 led to increasingly technical litigation of these cases in the courts. Child protection agencies throughout the province have responded with major organizational shifts designed to reduce the necessity of bringing cases to court. Unfortunately, a significant number of cases continue to require legal intervention.Once a child protection case enters the litigation stream, the nature of the interaction between the social worker and the family often changes. The legal system is based upon an adversarial model, with the parties pitted against one another. Each document filed with the court is designed to forward the case of one litigant and to damage the case of the others. The social worker who begins work with the family in the capacity of a helping professional is thrust into the position of building a case against the family, and bearing witness against his or her client. Parents begin to view the child protection agency as intrusive and coercing, rather than cooperative and helping.The litigation process is governed by strict and rigid rules that define the amount and type of information placed before the court, the timing of the hearing of the information, and the form the information must take. The information is often provided to the court not by the parties directly but by their legal representatives. Communications between the parties are usually filtered through their representatives and may become distorted or shut down completely, thus closing down the possibility of therapeutic intervention.Once cases have commenced in court, the parties have little control over the length of time it may take the court to reachfinal resolution. The process fails to take into considerationchild's sense of time. In many jurisdictions, months may go by before a finding is made that a child is in need of protection, and many more months may pass before the matter is brought to trial. Despite efforts in three Ontario jurisdictions (Toronto, Sault St. Marie, and Windsor) to shorten the time for case resolution by using case management, child protection litigation remains protracted and complex.Involvement in the court process also requires the parties to invest significant amounts of time and energy in preparation of their cases, time that could otherwise be spent in dealing with the problems that confront the family. The litigation of a case requires the expenditure of resources: money, court time, staff services, and all of the myriad elements that support the court structure. Perhaps the greatest costs of all are the psychological and emotional costs borne by the parties, and particularly the children.Decisions made by courts and imposed upon parties are often resented by the families they are intended to benefit. Parents and sometimes children may sabotage the interventions and/or placements ordered, especially when they have opposed them at trial. The lack of active input into the formulation of solutions to family problems reduces the incentive to ensure that the interventions ordered actually work.Model-Building ConsiderationsIt seemed prudent, even necessary, therefore, to develop a model of intervention in the resolution of child protection disputes that would deal with the primary detrimental effects of the legal system. These effects were identified as breakdown in communications between social workers and families, damage to relationships between social workers and their clients, unacceptable delays in the resolution of disputes, high costs of the litigation process, and lack of cooperation with court-imposed orders.Mediation was seen to be a potentially viable response to these concerns. Mediation has been defined as the voluntary process of negotiation between parties, with the assistance of a neutral, impartial third party, which has as its aim the consensual resolution of the dispute between the parties. …
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