Group #9 Children & Youth
• Health Justice for Children
Yael Cannon, Georgetown University Law Center
In Health Justice for Children, I argue that in order for our country to be more healthy and more equitable, law must be leveraged to address vital conditions for health for children from marginalized communities. I apply Life Course Health Development (LCHD) Theory to the health justice framework to provide a theoretical basis for this argument. Under-examined in legal scholarship, LCHD is a well-developed approach to understanding human development and health. This theory posits that key periods in a person’s life course is particularly impacted by health harms that can lead to lifelong health conditions, such as gestation, early childhood, and adolescence. Conversely, interventions at these periods can also have lifelong positive impacts and can disrupt pathways to poor health caused by harmful health determinants. Applying LCHD to health justice, this article examines several areas of law that serve as harmful determinants of health for children, such as areas of child welfare, family, education, housing, and public benefits law that remain under-enforced. Research shows that educational attainment, for example, is one of the greatest predictors of lifelong health, but when educational laws are not adequately enforced for children of color and children from low-income families, they can experience not only educational impacts but also lifelong health harms. But robust enforcement of protective and supportive provisions of those laws, such as laws that put limits on school exclusion, promote educational achievement for children with disabilities, and seek to ensure educational access to children who are homeless, can serve as positive interventions that promote vital conditions for health for children- and with impacts that reach far into adulthood. Using the law to facilitate interventions to promote vital conditions for the health of children from marginalized communities is a critical step towards ensuring we have healthier adults and health equity.
• Legal Sexual Harassment
Emily Suski, University of South Carolina School of Law
Title IX prohibits sex discrimination, including sexual harassment, in public schools. Yet, it only prohibits some sexual harassment. Twenty-five years ago, when the Supreme Court concluded Title IX protects against sexual harassment, it said such harassment must be severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive. In the two and half decades since, cultural understandings have shifted on what constitutes sexual harassment, and empirical research has demonstrated its harms, particularly for children who are in K-12 public schools. This article interrogates and critiques the "severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive" standard as hopelessly anachronistic and inconsistent with current empirical research on sexual harassment. It proposes changes to the standard to modernize it and better protect students from sexual harassment and its harms.