Family Law Center Lends a Hand to Teenage Mothers

Beatriz Guiterrez realized she couldn’t do it all.

After giving birth to her daughter, the 16-year-old high school student tried to juggle classes and work, in addition to caring for her child.

“I started falling asleep between classes; I couldn’t stay up,” she said. “I thought to myself, ‘I can’t do this. I’d rather go to school than work.’ ”

Guiterrez turned to the folks at the Harriett Buhai Center for Family Law, which helps teenage mothers tackle complex legal issues, ranging from child custody to visitation rights. Suma Mathai, a center staff attorney, is helping Guiterrez establish paternity, so that she may eventually seek child support from the baby’s father.

“My baby’s daddy told me he would help me out financially but he never did,” Guiterrez said.

The center, which provides legal help to poor families in Los Angeles County, has eight staff attorneys and counts as volunteers more than 200 attorneys, law students, paralegals and community members.

Buhai center officials received a $15,000 grant for their “fragile families” program from the Los Angeles Times Holiday Campaign, which raises money for nonprofit agencies in Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

The program provides outreach and legal assistance to teenagers, most of whom meet with Mathai when they visit the center’s Wilshire Boulevard office, near Vermont Avenue.

“A lot of the teens we see come because they need custody or visitation orders,” Mathai said. “But they also often have domestic violence issues.”

Mathai said research shows one in three teenagers experiences violence in their relationships.

Mathai puts on presentations at local high schools and social service agencies where she explains teenage parent rights. She also explains the meaning of custody, guardianship and child support.

“Teens aren’t as likely to access legal services for a lot of reasons,” Mathai said. “A lot of teen parents don’t know they have the right to go to court and ask for help or that they can start a legal case.

“I have to break it down for them,” she added.

Questions posed by teenage girls range from whether a father who does not pay child support has visitation rights to how to seek a court order to establish a visitation schedule when a teenage father, for example, is threatening to take a child.

Guiterrez knew little about family law before meeting with Mathai. She said that she was “kind of afraid to meet with an attorney” but that Mathai quickly helped her get her paternity action underway. “They were nice,” she said.

Guiterrez and her boyfriend, who she said is challenging the paternity action, broke up when she was three months pregnant with her daughter, Ariel, 15 months. She and Ariel have been living with her mother at her Long Beach home. She said she has been receiving help from her mom, in addition to government assistance.

“It’s been kind of hard,” Guiterrez said.

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