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BURDEN OF PROOF BEGONE
Author(s) -
Chill Paul
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
family court review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.171
H-Index - 4
eISSN - 1744-1617
pISSN - 1531-2445
DOI - 10.1111/j.174-1617.2004.tb00668.x
Subject(s) - countdown , phenomenon , foster care , juvenile court , psychology , child protection , law , closure (psychology) , face (sociological concept) , political science , criminology , sociology , juvenile delinquency , engineering , social science , physics , quantum mechanics , aerospace engineering
This article examines the tendency of emergency child removal decisions—by social workers, police officers, and judges—to become self‐reinforcing and self‐perpetuating in subsequent child protective proceedings. This snowball effect, as one court has referred to it, is widely acknowledged by lawyers who practice in juvenile court, yet is largely unknown beyond those circles. The article explores the causes and consequnces of this phenomenon in the age of the 1997 federal Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), which converts every day that a child spends in foster care into one more tick of the clock in a countdown toward termination of parental rights. The article provides some background on the law and practice of emergency child removal in the United States today, analyzes the factors that make initial removals outcome determinative in many child protection cases, considers the implications of this phenomenon in light of ASFA, and identifies possible solutions.