Subjects with agency? Children’s participation in family law proceedings

Galvanised by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, many jurisdictions now recognise children’s rights to participate in decisions that affect them. While such legal rights have increased, research on family law proceedings shows how children’s views can still be undermined, ignored or not even sought in decisions about them. This article uses the academic resources of childhood studies, to consider dominant and alternative narratives of children’s participation within Scottish family law. Drawing upon reported case law and empirical research, the article concludes that children’s participation gains protection by being institutionalised but children’s participation is attenuated because it is not recognised as relational and contextual. As rationality, consistency and autonomy are privileged, the weight given to children’s views is lessened by concerns about children being manipulated or distressed. Courts and their decisions may be child-focused, centring on children’s welfare, but they are not child-inclusive, involving children in decision-making.     

Legal responses to child sexual abuse cases in the Children’s Court of Victoria: study findings on a case-management approach

Child sexual abuse cases present Children’s Courts with distinctive challenges. The highly conflictual nature of child sexual abuse cases means they do not lend themselves to the usual adversarial court processes that characterise the conduct of Magistrate Court matters in Australia. With this in mind, the Children’s Court in Victoria established for 12 months in 2013 a pilot specialised judicial list (known as the ‘D’ List) which offered an intensive Magistrate-led case management approach to child sexual abuse cases in the Family (child protection) Division of the Court. The operation of the List was evaluated to assess the suitability and effectiveness of this approach, and to investigate the challenges associated with managing and deciding this class of cases. The findings confirmed that the List provided better management of cases and reduced delay. Given this, the Court is continuing the judicially proactive intensive case management approach and dedicated list for child sexual abuse matters and extending it to regional courts; believing it to be a more effective approach to managing and deciding this complex class of cases.     

Political trust during the Covid-19 pandemic: Rally around the flag or lockdown effects?

How can we explain the rise in diffuse political support during the Covid-19 pandemic? Recent research has argued that the lockdown measures generated political support. In contrast, I argue that the intensity of the pandemic rallied people around political institutions. Collective angst in the face of exponentially rising Covid-19 cases depresses the usual cognitive evaluations of institutions and leads citizens to rally around existing intuitions as a lifebuoy. Using a representative Dutch household survey conducted over March 2020, I compare the lockdown effect to the dynamic of the pandemic. I find that the lockdown effect is driven by pre-existing time trends. Accounting for non-linearities in time makes the lockdown effect disappear. In contrast, more flexible modelling techniques reveal a robust effect of Covid-19 infections on political trust. In line with an anxiety effect, I find that standard determinants of political trust – such as economic evaluations and social trust – lose explanatory power as the pandemic spreads. This speaks to an emotionally driven rally effect that pushes cognitive evaluations to the background.