Posts Tagged ‘Child Abuse and Neglect’

The link between animal cruelty and domestic violence

When I was in my late teens my best friend was a brilliant, iconoclastic, Catholic, conservative, whose parents has escaped Communist Poland and lived in Apartheid South Africa before emigrating to the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles.  My political beliefs were not nearly as well thought out or firmly held but I came from [...]

State of Abuse

The first in a series on Child Protective Services in South Carolina was published in today’s Charleston Post & Courier:  State of Abuse.   This initial piece accurately describes what I see in family court abuse and neglect cases. Subsequent articles in the series can be found here: DSS not meeting requirements; here: The guardians; and here: Norton center [...]

Updated abuse and neglect materials

Less than a year after undertaking extensive research in 2007 to draft materials for lectures on representing parents in abuse and neglect cases, South Carolina’s legislature recodified the abuse an neglect code.  Unlike the recent recodification of the children’s code, this was not mostly labeling old statutes with new statute numbers in a one-to-one mapping. [...]

Court of Appeals finds reversible error to go forward with DSS Judicial Review Hearing when incarcerated mother had order of transport and the Department of Corrections failed to transport her to hearing

Today the Court of Appeals, in Department of Social Services v. Laura D., 386 S.C. 382, 688 S.E.2d 130 (2009), reversed and remanded a family court’s decision to proceed with a DSS Judicial Review Hearing when the incarcerated Mother was not present but when another judge had previously issued an order of transport to the hearing.  Her [...]

In a DSS abuse and neglect case, when the treatment plan is resolved, should the guardian ad litem have an opinion on the merits?

I have mediated a couple of DSS abuse and neglect cases recently in which the treatment plan was resolved (that is, everyone agreed what the defendant(s) needed to do to resume contact or custody of the children at issue) but in which the merits (that is, whether or not the defendant(s) had abused or neglected the [...]

Co-mediation

My wife, Karen Klickstein-Forman, LISW-CP, and I co-mediated our first cases today, mediating three abuse and neglect cases in the Charleston County Family Court, completely settling two and settling the treatment plan, but not the merits finding, in the third case. Social worker-attorney teams are considered quite effective in co-mediating family law issues, as are [...]

Despite guilty plea to simple assault and battery on child at issue, Court of Appeals reverses family court finding that defendant abused child

The Court of Appeals’ decision in South Carolina Department of Social Services v. C.H., L.K., T.M. and D.M., 386 S.C. 58, 685 S.E.2d 835 (2009), reversed the family court’s finding that L.K. abused her friend’s child, and placing her on the Central Registry, despite L.K. pleading guilty to simple assault and battery on child at issue.  The [...]

Abuse and neglect mediations

The Chief Administrative Judge for the Charleston County Family Court, F.P. Segars-Andrews, has instituted mandatory mediation for all DSS abuse and neglect cases.  Volunteers, such as myself, spend Friday mornings acting as mediators. I have mediated two abuse and neglect cases the past two weeks, with both reaching settlement, and will be volunteering one Friday [...]