From Helping Court to Community‐Based Services: The 30‐Year Evolution of Australia's Family Relationship Centres

As a centrepiece of Australia's 2006 family law reforms, the community‐based Family Relationship Centres (FRCs) represented a major development in the Government's commitment to incorporate family relationship services into its family law system. This paper sees FRCs as a logical development of the original conceptualising the Family Court of Australia as a “helping court”. The paper suggests that the aspiration to create a helping court was partially achieved in 1976 via the creation of an in‐house family court counselling service, which was primarily focused not on law and legal principles, but on supporting the ways in which family members were managing the task of redefining relationships. While generally valued by judges and others, this service nonetheless found itself in tension with the Family Court's continued primary commitment to legally informed and adversarially driven negotiation and decision‐making processes. Since 2006, the creation of FRCs has spearheaded a family law system that provides relationship‐focused interventions away from the courts as the default option for most parenting disputes. Consistent with this aim, there is evidence of a diminished percentage of cases now requiring judicial intervention. The 2006 legislation also provides for courts to conduct “less adversarial trials.” Paradoxically, this has occurred alongside unequivocal evidence from the Australian Institute of Family Studies’ evaluation data that judicial officers are dealing mainly with families displaying seriously dysfunctional attitudes and behaviours. The legal challenge in dealing with these cases is for courts to provide child focused, fair and non‐destructive internal processes. In addition, however, it is increasingly clear that to support and help facilitate their decisions, courts also need good working relationships with FRCs and other community based services. FRCs and the 2006 reforms offer the possibility of moving beyond the ideal of a “helping court” to the broader concept of helping family law system.     

Children Who Have Been Traumatized: One Court's Response

A court that is trauma‐informed can assist with the process of identifying children in need of trauma‐focused services and can provide education and direction to families frustrated by prior treatment failures. The unique role of the juvenile court judge as a community convener offers an opportunity to increase community awareness about the impact of trauma, and to promote the adoption of evidence‐based treatment for trauma victims. This article outlines the way that increased trauma awareness and trauma screening within a family court system mobilized the development of effective resources for children and families affected by trauma.     

Ethical Advocacy for Immigrant Survivors of Family Crisis

The involvement of family courts in the lives of youth and families creates significant opportunities for advocates to assist their clients with immigration‐related issues. Informed and effective advocacy on these issues in family court can make life‐changing, and even life‐saving, differences for immigrants. More specifically, immigration issues are germane to family court because certain vital avenues of immigration relief available to survivors of abuse, neglect, abandonment, and other forms of family crisis explicitly depend on findings, orders, and certifications that are issued in the context of family court proceedings. After describing these forms of relief, and the family court's role in immigrants’ access to them, this essay analyzes how ethical mandates related to client counseling, representational goals, and competence affirmatively require family court practitioners to provide advice and advocacy related to these collateral benefits to family court proceedings.

Key Points for Family Court Community:
• The involvement of family courts in the lives of youth and families creates significant opportunities for advocates to assist their clients with immigration‐related issues
• Certain vital avenues of immigration relief available to survivors of abuse, neglect, abandonment, and other forms of family crisis explicitly depend on findings, orders, and certifications that are issued in the context of family court proceedings
• The substance of immigration‐related findings in family court, and their ultimate affect on family stability, are consistent with the core family court goal of supporting safety, well‐being, and permanency for children and families
• Ethical mandates related to client counseling, representational goals, and competence affirmatively require family court practitioners to provide advice and advocacy related to these collateral benefits to family court proceedings

     

‘Criminal families’ and the court: co-offending in Amsterdam, 1897–1902

This article focuses on a specific aspect of the history of crime: co-offending (offending with one or more accomplices) in a family setting at the end of the nineteenth century. The aims of this article are to analyze how genders interacted in a criminal setting and to show a possible bias in the court's decision to prosecute ‘criminal families’, either in relation to the people involved or to the environment in which the crime was committed. This article also questions the relevance of the concept of the civilizing mission in a court setting towards ‘criminal families’ and compares it with the reality of the court's work. The study is based on the archives of Amsterdam's Arrondissementsgerecht between 1897 and 1902. This court was in charge of trying criminal offences committed in Amsterdam and its surrounding area (a semi-urban environment within a 25-kilometre radius) according to the 1886 Dutch code of laws. Urban and semi-urban co-offending criminal rates in Amsterdam and its surrounding area are compared, as well as gender patterns and class origins in relation to the crimes committed, in order to highlight a possible prejudice towards working-class offenders. The analysis reveals a high rate of co-offending in female criminality and more gender interactions in the urban environment. However, the results also show that, despite a general anxiety towards working-class families and rising crime rates, magistrates were not more inclined to prosecute them. The family situation was taken into account before trials, and semi-urban families were not treated more leniently than urban families.     

Judges’ Perceptions of Screening,Assessment, Prevention,and Treatment for Substance Use, Mental Health,and HIV among Juveniles on Community Supervision: Results of a National Survey

Juvenile Justice‐Translational Research on Interventions for Adolescents in the Legal System (JJ‐TRIALS) National Survey was funded in part to describe the current status of screening, assessment, prevention and treatment for substance use, mental health, and HIV for youth on community supervision within the US juvenile justice system. Surveys were administered to community supervision agencies and their primary behavioral healthcare providers, as well as the juvenile or family court judge with the largest caseload of youth on community supervision. This article presents the findings from the judges’ survey. Survey results indicated juvenile and family court judges were open to innovations for improving the court's performance, rated their relationships with collaborators highly, and appreciated the impact of screening, assessment, prevention, and treatment on judicial practices.     

IV. Unique Role of the Court

The court is a unique and vital institution within the American system of government. The court's fundamental responsibility is to assure that all members of society are protected from harm by law. Juvenile and family courts have, within this system, the equally important responsibility to protect the best interests of children, families, and communities. These responsibilities convey to the courts a vital role on behalf of society and especially on behalf of children and their families, to reduce the harmful effects of substance abuse.     

FAMILY COURT COORDINATION OF HUMAN SERVICES, DESCHUTES COUNTY, OREGON

This article describes an innovative program in Deschutes County, Oregon designed to coordinate services both within the court and within the community to assist families in the family court. One of the important features of this system is the employment of a family advocate to coordinate services to families.     

Child Welfare Workers and Michigan's Family Court Legislation: The Relationship Between Policy and Practice

Michigan created a family court in 1998, combining in a single court jurisdiction over most family law cases. This study examines the child welfare workers' role in creating the family court, the family court's impact on child welfare workers' practice, and child welfare workers' efforts to educate other professionals on the potential benefits of the family court system. This study found that child welfare workers were not actively involved in the creation of the family court and have not aggressively sought to educate other professionals regarding the family court's potential. Further, though child welfare workers' reception of the family court has largely been positive (or at least neutral), child welfare workers must take greater advantage of the family court system to improve the effectiveness of their practice.     

Evaluating the work of Australia's Family Relationship Centres: Evidence from the first 5 years

Family Relationship Centres (FRCs) have been described as a centerpiece of Australia's 2006 family law reforms. This paper places these centres in the larger context of the reforms and their commitment to providing community‐based family services in the family law area. The paper also examines the empirical evidence regarding FRCs' use and effectiveness. It notes that while the objectives and intentions of FRCs place considerable emphasis on strengthening family relationships and assisting families to stay together, the centres themselves have only a modest level of direct involvement with intact families. FRCs tend to have strong links with other community‐based family services, many of whom are more engaged with intact families; but it is difficult to gauge their effectiveness in this area. Most FRCs' direct services are aimed at separating families and most of that work involves family dispute resolution (family mediation) and associated services such as screening and assessment and the provision of relevant information. A substantial majority of clients who attend FDR at an FRC reach agreement about their parenting arrangements either at FDR or subsequent to attending FDR. These agreements also tend to hold up in the medium term. A majority of parents believe that at FDR, the child(ren)'s needs were taken into account; the parenting agreement worked for the child(ren); and the parenting agreement worked for them. A substantial proportion of FRC clients come from families that have experienced family violence or other dysfunctional behaviours, and such behaviours reduce the chances of resolving parenting disputes. The paper concludes by suggesting that having been created mainly as a default alternative to legal interventions and court processes, it is likely that a major future strength of FRCs will lie in their emerging capacity to work constructively not only with other relationship services and networks, but with family lawyers and the courts.     

A Coordinated Approach to Improving Outcomes for Substance‐Abusing Families in Juvenile Dependency Court

This paper describes a coordinated approach to providing enhanced services for substance‐abusing families in the juvenile dependency court. The enhanced services consisted of an interagency collaborative model including the Department of Social Services, Court Appointed Special Advocates, Public Health Nurses, and Family Support Specialists. The purpose of the intervention was to increase the likelihood of family reunification. Families were randomly assigned to either the enhanced services (N=48) or to a regular services group (N=41). Variables included social background factors, data related to court hearings and court orders, and final court outcomes regarding placement and custody. Significant factors predicting final placement of the child were completion of court ordered programs, a stable home, and mothers' cooperation and motivation. Families who received the enhanced services had significantly higher rates of reunification of children with parents.     

Unique Role of the Court

The court is a unique and vital institution within the American system of government. The court's fundamental responsibility is to assure that all members of society are protected under law from harm by others. Juvenile and family courts have, within this system, the equally important responsibility to protect the best interests of children, families, and communities. These responsibilities convey to the courts a role vital to our anti-substance abuse efforts on behalf of society and especially on behalf of children and their families. Such efforts must recognize the existence of non-traditional, as well as traditional, family units within today's society.     

The Politics of Benchcraft: The Role of Judges in Mental Health Courts

Mental health courts (MHCs) offer community‐based treatment in lieu of criminal prosecution for chronic offenders with psychiatric disabilities, and MHC judges enjoy expanded powers to achieve the court's objectives. Because scholars know little about how judges transition into a new occupational role in the problem‐solving courtroom, this ethnographic study of four MHCs in the United States focuses on how judges learn to orchestrate their responses to treatment noncompliance in this novel court setting. The goal of this article is to examine the professionalization of MHC judges and the emergent craft of therapeutic adjudication. To achieve this goal, I investigate judicial strategies for motivating, questioning, and defending participants accused of wrongdoing. I conclude that the art and practice of problem‐solving justice requires judges to rise to the larger institutional challenges embedded in the alternative courtroom, a process I call the politics of benchcraft.     

How Collaborative the Collaboration? Assessing Interagency Collaboration within a Juvenile Court Diversion Program

Juvenile delinquency with co‐occurring substance abuse and mental health disorders has become an increasing problem within the United States. In part this can be attributed to the excessive number of delinquent youth entering the juvenile justice system with untreated substance abuse and/or mental health disorders. In an effort to combat this problem, interagency collaborations have been formed to provide more effective treatment services. One such interagency collaboration is the JETS Program. This study identifies the strengths and limitations of establishing an interagency collaboration within the first year of a juvenile treatment court's inception.     

"For the Protection of the Reputation or Rights of Others ": The European Court of Human Rights' Interpretation of the Defamation Exception in Article 10(2)

Legal observers have praised the European Court of Human Rights' defamation case law as an example to be emulated in international law. Yet scholars who have studied the court's defamation jurisprudence have focused primarily on a handful of the court's noteworthy cases. A broader examination of the court's entire body of defamation case law provides a complete picture of the court's defamation jurisprudence. The ECHR's defamation case law has come increasingly to mirror principles of common law and United States First Amendment law. Although the ECHR has produced some commendable judgments protecting speech critical of governments and politicians, it has developed a hierarchy of protected expression that leaves other expression vulnerable to restriction. Further, even though the court has condemned several specific criminal defamation prosecutions, it has failed to strike down, and has expressly condoned, criminal defamation in general.     

When a Child Rejects a Parent: Working With the Intractable Resist/Refuse Dynamic

A subgroup of intractable families, in which a child refuses postseparation contact with a parent, perplexes and frustrates professionals who work with them. This article discusses the underlying forces that drive the family's intractability, as well as guidelines for working with the family. The guidelines include specific court orders developed from the very beginning of the case that elaborate the court's stance about goals and expectations for the family, along with specialized individual and family therapies that are undertaken within a framework of planned collaboration with the court. The collaborative team of legal and mental health professionals works in an innovative and active way to structure, support, and monitor the family's progress in resolving the resist/refuse dynamic.     

Faith‐Based Programs for Reentry Courts: A Summary of Issues and Recommendations

In 2002, the Bush Administration directed the Department of Justice to include faith‐based organizations in its distribution of funds earmarked for programs targeting the prevention and treatment of juvenile delinquency and substance abuse. Among the initiatives most likely to be affected by this new policy are reentry court programs that endeavor to reintegrate juvenile delinquents into their communities by placing them within local neighborhood‐based programs. However, reentry court personnel and leaders of faith‐based organizations are likely to encounter numerous challenges as they try to establish appropriate programming. In this article, we discuss the current understanding of First Amendment jurisprudence governing the federal funding of faith‐based organizations and summarize key issues identified by a National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges' workgroup on faith‐based programming that are necessary for including faith‐based organizations within a reentry court's continuum of care. We also discuss several concerns that reentry court personnel and faith‐based organizations should consider as they seek to maximize the impact of their programs.     

Eighteen Ways Courts Should use Technology to Better Serve Their Customers

Courts have traditionally used technology to enhance their internal operations. “Outward‐facing” technology focuses on meeting the needs of the court's customers. The article gives 18 examples of such technology and shows how better serving a court's customers provides direct benefits to the court itself.     

Innovative Family Mediation Research Initiative Embedded in the Community In Ireland

The Family Mediation Project is a not‐for‐profit means‐tested research initiative at Waterford Institute of Technology, based on an innovative family mediation model developed by Dr Roisin O’ Shea, following her Irish Research Council funded doctoral research. The project, led by W.I.T.’s Dr Sinéad Conneely (coordinator) and Dr Roisin O’ Shea (principal investigator), is test‐running the next iteration in family mediation, embedded in the community, comprising of the most effective elements sourced globally, with a particular focus on innovations in Canada, and is gathering empirical data to evidence outcomes. The final “real world” phase of the project commenced in May 2018, an exciting collaboration between voluntary, statutory agencies and a research institution to further test the effectiveness of this innovative approach on a larger scale at community level in the south Dublin area. This paper will discuss the project innovations and efficacy of the projects objectives, to provide effective mediation as quickly as possible for families and their children, within their community, by experienced family mediators, with hook‐ups and sign‐posting to trusted existing resources, such as the support services offered by the Family Resource Centres, and on‐line and face‐to‐face resources, with the court‐room as an end of pipe‐line solution or emergency forum only.     

“YOUTH IS ENMESHED IN A HIGHLY DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY SYSTEM”: EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP AMONG DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES,PARENTAL INCARCERATION,AND JUVENILE COURT DECISION MAKING*

Although prior work has substantiated the role of external attributes in juvenile court decision making, no study to date has examined how family situational factors as well as maternal and paternal incarceration affect juvenile court officials' responses to troubled youth. Using quantitative and qualitative juvenile court data from a large urban county in the southwest, this study draws on attribution theory to examine how family structure, perceptions of family dysfunction, and parental incarceration influence out‐of‐home placement decisions. Findings reveal that juvenile court officials' perceptions of good and bad families inform their decision making. This study emphasizes the need to unravel the intricate effects of maternal and paternal incarceration and officials' attributions about families and family structure on juvenile court decision making.     

Actual Malice in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights decided four cases in recent years that represent a positive step for freedom of expression in nations that belong to the Organization of American States. In 2004 and again in 2008, the court stopped short of adopting a standard that would require proof of actual malice in criminal defamation cases brought by public officials. In 2009, however, the court seemed to adopt the actual malice rule without calling it that. The court's progress toward actual malice is chronicled in this article. The article concludes that the court's decision not to explicitly use the phrase “actual malice” may be a positive development for freedom of expression in the Americas.