Legal Rights of Children Found in Peril

America’s children stand in jeopardy because their legal rights are frequently abused or ignored, a special American Bar Assn. panel concluded Tuesday as it recommended government and private sector action to rescue them.

With Atty. Gen. Janet Reno lending her support, the ABA panel, headed by former federal Judge A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., urged American lawyers to provide free legal services to children “in crisis” and called for setting up a unified family court system to combine judicial functions and court-related social services.

The panel, the ABA Working Group on the Unmet Legal Needs of Children, was created in response to a recommendation from the ABA task force that examined racial and ethnic bias in the nation’s justice system after the April, 1992, riots in Los Angeles. Reno, then state attorney in Dade County, Fla., served on the task force and pushed the idea of focusing on children, an ABA official said.

“Our society is failing to protect its children and fails them even more, once they are in crisis,” the working group said in the report entitled “America’s Children at Risk.”

Among facts that the report said illustrate the depth of the crisis facing children in America:

* One in five American children lives below government-acknowledged standards for bare subsistence and 14% of the nation’s preschool children lived in impoverished families in 1991.

* The child poverty rate is higher in rural areas than in the rest of the country and the overall child poverty rate tops that in any comparable country.

* Most of the nation’s poor children have at least one parent who works.

* Gunshot wounds are the leading cause of death for both African-American and white teen-age boys in America.

* African-American and Latino children are more likely than Caucasian children to be poor. While one-third of poor children are black, African-Americans make up only about 15% of the population.

In issuing the report, J. Michael McWilliams, ABA president, called on lawyers “to give children the same level of zealous advocacy they now deliver to their adult and corporate clients.”

He said that this advocacy should include seeking legislative and regulatory reforms. The report cited these examples to illustrate that family and juvenile courts, particularly in urban areas, are too overextended to serve children effectively.

In 1991, the Los Angeles County Juvenile Court estimated that most judges can devote only about 10 minutes to each case. At the rate caseloads are soaring, each judge will have only five minutes five years from now “to determine each child’s fate and each family’s structure,” the report said.

In Cook County, Ill., seven juvenile delinquency court judges receive 13,000 new cases a year.

In addition, many children involved in proceedings dealing with abuse and neglect; custody; visitation disputes; so-called status cases, ranging from truancy to running away; delinquency, and other important matters are not represented by counsel.

The report urged strong gun-control legislation to stem violence but added that drugs and violence should be viewed more broadly in U.S. society and treated as an urgent national public health problem.

In addition to calling for free legal assistance for children before they end up in the court system, with lawyers identifying resources and cutting through red tape, the report called on federal, state and local governments to enforce strong laws and regulations already on the books.

The working group said that new federal and state laws must be enacted to ensure that all families with children have incomes sufficient to provide them with the basic essentials, including safe and affordable housing and health care.

Questioned about the cost of accomplishing the working group’s recommendations, Reno contended during a press conference that expenses turn into savings in the long run and the report cited estimates that every $1 spent on prevention of childhood distress will save at least $3 later in rehabilitation and punishment.