Our nation’s child welfare system exists to fulfill society’s collective commitment to protecting children when they become victims of serious abuse. Unfortunately, this system is deeply flawed, and youth involved in child welfare services are often retraumatized, revictimized, or otherwise poorly...

Delores stands next to a pink rosebush planted by counseling center staff to honor her courage and bravery. There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you                                                                                            ~ Maya Angelou As a trauma...

Cognitive biases are tendencies to make certain decisions or behave in certain ways. Cognitive biases are predictable behavioral or decision patterns that all humans share. Often, these biases use mental shortcuts to make decision-making faster and easier. And these shortcuts are usually good....

The latest issue of The Pennsylvania Lawyer magazine features an article by attorney Ashish Joshi, who is a proponent of the so-called “parental alienation defense.”  The article includes extensive discussion on the purported merits of parental alienation theory in our family court system. The...

An Ohio toddler was killed by her mother,[1] despite child protection workers’ awareness of previous instances of abuse. Ohio courts must hold that agency and its workers responsible for their failures.  As outlined in CHILD USA’s amicus curiae brief, found...

I just saw the movie Sipe: Sex, Lies, and the Priesthood. It is about Richard Sipe, an expert on the Catholic clergy’s abuse of children. Sipe was a psychologist and a former priest, who used his expertise to help children and to try to hold the church accountable for its misconduct. This moving...

Before joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of Government and starting CHILD USA five years ago, I was a constitutional law professor at Cardozo School of Law with a chair in public law.  Before that, I had the honor and pleasure of clerking for Judge Edward R....

“I had sex with boys almost every day I was a priest (161).” Those words described the actions of the priest, Father Francis Dubois, that the fictional lawyer, Renon Chattelrault, was asked to defend in this case from the early 1980s. At the same time, a “ten-year-old child victim was bringing a...

You might be reluctant to read this new book. It is very scholarly, written by Professor Elliott, an eloquent professor of medieval history. Its title—The Corrupter of Boys—might scare you away from reading a book whose name suggests something terrible. But its dedication, “to all those, living or...