Despite the therapeutic justice that law and society apply to children’s encounters with violence and other trauma, child-serving agencies, courts, lawyers, and GALs can compound children’s trauma by failing to recognize and address the traumatic effects of legal intervention and long-term effects of the trauma itself. This program will identify and address the trauma that brings children into juridical and administrative proceedings, as well was the jurogenic harms of the legal system itself. Disciplines outside of law have begun to radically rethink basic institutional and practice responses to childhood trauma. While foundations, non-profits, legal practitioners, and some model courts begin to develop trauma-informed guidelines for the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, the legal academy has not fully engaged in this important dialogue or fully interrogated the theoretical and practical implications of trauma-informed policies and practices for the child or within the institutions at the child, family, institution or policy levels. The emergence of legal scholarship on childhood trauma is a crucial component of multidisciplinary discussions on the proper way to consider and respond to childhood trauma. This panel will address childhood trauma from several perspectives in hopes of stimulating a scholarly debate on this emerging topic.
Business meeting at program conclusion.