After spending this summer working in the Fulton County Juvenile Court Office of the Child Advocate, I can say that there is a lot of work to be done in the field of child advocacy, and that anyone who is interested in and committed to children's justice can easily find that out by working in child advocacy in any capacity. The more difficult thing is to figure out what to do after taking note of all of the system's shortcomings. My perception of the Juvenile Court system in Georgia, at least in deprivation matters, is that it has such strong dynamics -- positive forces trying to improve the system and to work within it with dedication, and negative ones that overwhelm its structure, overburdening some important players and wasting much of their energy.

First of all, no matter how temporary and unplanned the current courthouse arrangement is, it is altogether unacceptable. The parents of kids who have entered into the system are already distrustful of DFCS (an entirely different topic), and are totally underwhelmed by the lack of gravity in the air when they come before the court. They wait hours to have their cases called, only to have them continued because their case manager is over at the other courtroom, or is now here, but the SAAG had a case at the other courtroom, or the parents' court-appointed attorney had a case at the other courtroom or in Gwinnett County or wherever. It is not organized, and the parents who do take the time to obey their subpoenas should be treated with the respect given to other citizens involved in court proceedings. They should have a venue that reflects the County's commitment to making sure their children are raised safely and happily, and fortunately, that will come soon.

Secondly, everyone's jobs are made much harder by the lack of a communications network that allows for all the people who have to come together on one case to do so. Part of this problem is the multiple courthouse situation, but also the facts that case managers' caseloads seem to be too large to allow them to be able to answer the phone and talk to people, for example, a child's attorney. Maybe they need cell phones instead of desk phones -- I don't know, but DFCS seems to need to coordinate their efforts better, because they're often lucky to have their efforts deemed "reasonable". The problem is that there's no way to really track cases without expending a lot of effort. There REALLY needs to be a centralized computer network that everyone can access and put notes on or whatever that will also work between counties, maybe states. I waited for the Fulton County Shuttle with a DFCS investigative worker for over 40 minutes once; she wasted over an hour of her time just to file a complaint. Couldn't this be done over the web, with forms that could print out to official court documents? Then Child Advocates could get the complaint right there, instead of spending court days in a frenzy just trying to make sure they have all the proper paperwork. They could concentrate on the law, which seems to me to be quite underdeveloped -- the appellate courts don't really come into consideration much, at least that's my perspective.

My point is, it's been a very good experience to see something "real", that I know I can do better, and it's exciting to think what could happen once the system is committed to. It's been fun using limited resources to try to accomplish the best possible thing for a kid's life, which is hard enough as it is, without all the technical difficulties. There's nothing more depressing than a suicidal 13 year old who is so turned off to the world that he can't even speak to his attorney -- someone whose job it is to represent the child's best interests. These are the kinds of kids the system ends up with, whether or not it creates them. But as it is, it's hard to even say what the best thing is for a child because coming into the care of the state has such negative connotations, real and perceived.

Working as a child advocate has also given me insight into the struggle that legal advocates deal with involving the relationship between parents, children, and the state. My experiences have informed me that the courts spend way too much time worrying about the parents and not enough time worrying about the kids. The court can attach a rule nisi to punish the parent, but this does nothing for the child. The court orders drug treatment and parenting classes like it's penicillin, whether it helps the parents or not, regardless of how the whole waiting game affects the kids. Much time in court is spent weighing the worth of the parent -- an important and emotional issue, but it often clouds reality, not to mention the child's interests. Reality is, these kids have it rotten, and their rights are always ignored by the law in subtle ways. Parents who hit other adults face criminal charges, parents who hit their kids are told not to leave marks. Parents who kill their kids receive much more lenient treatment than other murderers. Parents with unrehabilitated drug problems are given chance after chance, and their kids are given temporary foster home after foster home. The law doesn't want to intrude on the parents' rights to raise something they created, but the kid is beneath all these struggles.

It's something that I almost lost sight of the longer I got into the court process because it becomes so ingrained, but after a whole summer of seeing kids that come out of the system, it's easy to see how the system needs to change its perspective to do whatever it can for the kid and just forget about the parents, to some extent. Because these kids will become those next parents, and we'll all be playing the same game in 15-30 years.