Using lay volunteers to represent children in child protection court proceedings

Abstract

Despite a widespread conviction that children ought to be independently represented in child protection court proceedings in the United States, there is little consensus as to what the role of that independent child advocate ought to be or, indeed, who should fulfill that role. This study accomplished three purposes: (1) articulated an aggressive, ambitious and continuous role for the child's representative which encompassed a broad range of the child's interests, both legal and nonlegal; (2) provided training in this role to demonstration groups of attorneys, law students and lay volunteers; and (3) compared the effectiveness of each of the three demonstration groups in representing children to one another and to a control group of attorneys who received no special training from the research team. The findings indicate that carefully selected and trained lay people representing children in child abuse and neglect legal proceedings under lawyer supervision performed similarly to trained lawyers and law students in the way they approached their duties and in case outcomes achieved and significantly different from attorneys who, consistent with the practice in nearly all the United States, received no special training in child advocacy.