Law students interested in acquiring intensive training in areas of adoption and child welfare might consider an innovative program at Capital University Law School. This summer, the National Center for Adoption Law & Policy at Capital University Law School will be hosting two intensive summer courses focused on adoption and child welfare.

The Interdisciplinary Child Welfare Institute (ICWI) is a two credit, one-week intensive multidisciplinary class that is offered to law students and graduate level social work students across the country. This course is scheduled for Monday, July 26 through Friday, July 30. This course will provide students with a mutual understanding of the legal and sociological principles central to child welfare practice.

The Summer Adoption Law Institute (SALI) is a two credit, one-week intensive class that is open to law students across the country. The class will be offered Monday, August 2 through Friday, August 6. This course is dedicated to exploring the world of adoption from both academic and practitioner perspectives.

It has been a long-standing practice in the court system to treat juveniles differently from adults – and for good reason. While they may be physically mature, adolescents are not miniature adults; their brains are still developing in areas such as impulse control and judgment.

In most cases, juveniles are not subject to the adversarial court system of adults and are treated as developing individuals in need of rehabilitation rather than retribution. Yet some judges, such as Louisiana Judge Mark Doherty, believe that denying a jury trial to a juvenile who is facing a confinement of greater than six months is a violation of due process.

The question is: Does the juvenile justice system function as it was intended – a rehabilitative system to keep adolescents from becoming adult violators? Or is it simply a miniature adult prison system? Perhaps it is something in between.

Yesterday, the Louisiana Supreme Court decided they are not yet ready to give up on the current juvenile justice system. In a unanimous decision, the Court upheld the current system’s denial of jury trials for juveniles in favor of a system that allows the judge to act as “finder of fact” and take into consideration social, behavioral and environmental factors when determining whether or not an adolescent is delinquent and what rehabilitative measures are appropriate.

Last Wednesday, in his State of the City address, New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced an imminent and significant change to the city’s juvenile justice system: the Department of Juvenile Justice will combine with the Administration for Children’s Services.

Some media outlets, including The New York Times, have interpreted this move as a signal that the city intends to send fewer of its teenagers to jail, opting for a more therapeutic, community-oriented approach. Recent reports have painted a bleak picture of the juvenile justice system in the state of New York, citing recidivism rates well above the national average. Within the state’s youth prisons thrives a “culture of violence”, one report said, with frequent broken bones and sexual assaults. The Bloomberg administration’s new approach, effective immediately, will attempt to deal with some of these shortcomings.

Rather than being sent to prison, some offenders will now remain in their neighborhoods under the supervision of child welfare. For some, this means New York City is “going soft on crime,” but Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs refuted these claims. Essentially, Gibbs said that the new approach to juvenile crime in the city of New York could not be worse than the previous one; combining the Department of Juvenile Justice and the Administration of Children’s Services will place more emphasis on improvements in home life and education, simultaneously saving the city a substantial amount of money. An offender who might otherwise spend the rest of her life in the penal system has a chance, under the new structure, to return to society better equipped to avoid criminal activity as an adult because she committed a crime as a juvenile.

Vietnam’s National Assembly struggles to answer a familiar but labyrinthine question: how do you create an international adoption framework that doesn’t allow for abuse?

Last month, an adoption fraud trial opened in Vietnam, naming sixteen charity and medical workers as defendants. All of the individuals were found guilty of fraud in over 266 adoptions, generating fake documents for adoption agencies to facilitate foreign adoptions. (The official charge was “abuse of official position”, and six of the defendants were sentenced to jail time.) In some cases, the infants’ parents had not actually given their consent.

The widespread nature of the fraud has persuaded many countries (including the United States) to halt Vietnamese adoptions without exception. Ireland has said that an adoption of a Vietnamese baby under the current law “might not be recognized” by the state. The international attention has granted a renewed sense of urgency to the National Assembly’s pending revisions of its adoption law.

The significance of foreign adoptions in Vietnam can be put into context by sheer numbers: of the 20,000 infants adopted in the last five years, 7,000 were adopted by international petitioners. To ensure the legitimacy of future foreign adoptions, changes are being considered for both the structure and oversight of the process. Under new law (Draft Article 15), a child will first be eligible for adoption within Vietnam. After a 30-day period, if the child has not found a placement, foreign families may pursue adoption of the child. The only children for whom this regulation would not apply are those suffering from specific disabilities, HIV/AIDS, or another serious illness. The new law would also increase the involvement of the Ministry of Justice and other state agencies; the former would be inserted in the process as a liaison between foreign parents and domestic, eligible infants. Some disagreement remains, particularly as to whether or not the Ministry of Justice is well-suited for this proposed role.

Slate: Children of Bad Memories - Photographing a generation born of rape during the Rwandan genocide

They call them “enfants mauvais souvenirs,” children of bad memories. During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, hundreds of thousands of Tutsi women were systematically raped and forced into sexual servitude by members of extremist Hutu militia groups. Many of these women became pregnant. Since abortion is illegal in Rwanda, some resorted to back-alley procedures or traveled to the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo to terminate their pregnancies. Others gave birth and abandoned the babies or gave them away to orphanages. Still others kept their children and are now struggling to raise them alone in post-genocide Rwanda.

Photojournalist Jonathan Torgovnik first became aware of the estimated 20,000 Rwandan children born of rape in 2006. He was traveling on assignment for a Newsweek story pegged to the 25th anniversary of the AIDS epidemic. While in Rwanda, he met Odette, a young Tutsi woman who had been raped repeatedly during the genocide and had contracted HIV as a result. During the interview, she revealed that she was raising a son fathered by one of the Hutu militiamen who had raped her and slaughtered her family. (The subjects’ names have been changed to protect their identitites. While the women want the world to know what happened to them, they hope to protect themselves and their children from the censure of their own communities.)