Children in Court

Children in Court:A Troubling Presence

Lucy Hudson and Patricia Hrusa Williams

The rise in domestic and community violence andcriminal activity has brought with it a noticeableincrease in the number of children who are present inthe nation's courthouses. This article details thereasons children come to court and the effect theexperience has on their well-being. Drop-in child daycare is discussed as a possible program model tosupport families and counteract the risks to children.

Lucy Hudson, M.S., is Senior Associate, Center for the Study of Social Policy, Wash-ington, D.C. Patricia Hrusa Williams is Ph.D. candidate, Eliot Pearson Department ofChild Study, Tufts University, Medford, MA.

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1224 CHILD WELFARE • Vol. LXXIV, #6 • November-December

For almost all children, going to court is a frighteningexperience which occurs at a time of family crisisalready fraught with anxiety. Courthouse corridors

and even courtrooms are full of children: they accompanyadults who need to be there and have no other place toleave their children, or they are there because they them-selves need to appear in court.

Courts should provide friendly environments, includ-ing trained staff, for children who are waiting to testify incourt cases, child victims who are attending hearings andother court proceedings, and children who have merelyaccompanied their parents to court because there was noone to look after them. Friendly environments andtrained staff can provide a safe, nurturing alternative tothe tension, conflict, and verbal violence that often char-acterize courtrooms. [Higginbotham et al. 1992]

Drop-in child day care can offer a safe haven to children whoincreasingly find themselves in courthouses around the country,where the potential is great for exposure to disturbing and possi-bly dangerous situations. Judges, attorneys, and other court em-ployees in several states have recognized the harm that childrenmay suffer by virtue of their presence in court, and have organ-ized efforts to provide court-based child day care settings for thechildren of litigants and for children who are themselves court-involved. This article documents the reasons children are appear-ing in court and why child welfare and related professionsshould take steps to limit children's exposure to this intimidatingadult environment.

The presence of children in courthouses is escalating due toseveral factors. An increasing number of parents and other adultguardians are getting divorced and thus arguing about custodyand child support. Parents are seeking restraining orders to pro-tect themselves from abusive spouses. Substance abuse is wrack-ing the integrity of the family, resulting in criminal charges and

Lucy Hudson / Patricia Hrusa Williams 1225

abusive or neglectful parenting. The court is deciding the fate ofchildren in the custody of the state's child welfare system. Par-ents and children are victims of, or witnesses to, violent crime.

Many court-involved families lack the personal and financialresources to arrange for alternative care for their children whilethey are in court, leaving them with no choice but to bring theirchildren with them to court. The presence of children in courts iscause for serious concern for two major reasons. First, childrencan disrupt the timely administration of justice by behaving asone might expect them to behave in such stressful circumstances:they cry, shout, run, taunt, laugh, argue, complain, and fidget,and they throw things. Second, the presence of children in courtsmay subject them to testimony and/or situations potentially dis-turbing or even damaging to them. They may hear their parentsand other adult guardians accused of vicious crimes; they mayhear a parent describe the torture inflicted by a vindictive spouse;they may hear sobs from victims of rape still distraught fromtheir traumatizing experience. Adults find such situationsanxiety-provoking at best; children can easily be traumatized.

While common sense firmly supports the notion that childrenare easily harmed by the adult events that unfold in courthouses,a review of the literature showed that this particular aspect ofharm to children has received little attention. (The bulk of theresearch on children's presence in court focuses on the childrenas witnesses.) Most of the research illustrates the damage chil-dren experience when exposed to violence in their homes orcommunities; because there are parallels, this literature is brieflyreviewed.

Children who witness violence and trauma are likely to ex-hibit aggressive behavior themselves. Theoretical work suggeststhat exposure to environments that (1) provide aggressive mod-els, (2) reinforce aggression, and (3) frustrate and victimize thechild, contribute to the development of aggressive tendencies[Perry et al. 1990]. Applied research supports this view and ex-pands our understanding of the variety of negative consequences


experienced by children exposed to violence. School-age childrenexposed to violence in both their home and community are morelikely than those not so exposed to engage in aggressive actsthemselves. Teens have an increased likelihood of perpetrating aviolent act if they have been a victim of or a witness to violence[Bell & Jenkins 1993; Jenkins & Thompson 1986; Jenkins et al.undated; Shakoor & Chalmers 1991; Uehara et al. 1990]. Thus,early exposure to adult aggression may perpetuate the cycle ofcriminal behavior, making a court-based child day care center anespecially valuable resource inasmuch as it reduces children'sexposure to adult aggression.

Court Activity and Usage

It's very distracting. Children cry. They run around. Par-ents concentrate on the children instead of the case andeverything takes longer. They go back and forth betweenMommy and Daddy like it's a tug-of-war. Not to mentionthe mess they make. I've seen children bite court officers.I've seen children watch as parents hyperventilate or gointo cardiac arrest. [West 1995]

Each year, a growing number of children are brought intocourt as increases in criminal activity require more adults toappear in court. In 1991,14,475,613 criminal offenses were com-mitted—a 10% increase since 1987 [Federal Bureau of Investiga-tion (FBI) 1992]. This translates into a crime every two seconds.On average, someone is robbed eveiy two seconds, raped everyfive minutes, and murdered every 21 minutes [FBI 1992]. In 1991,over one million people were arrested in the U.S. for drug abuseviolations, a 56% increase in such arrests since 1982.

The rising crime rate has resulted in the presence of millionsof persons brought into court as victims, witnesses, defendants,and jurors. Many of these adults bring their children with them.


In addition, the number of cases specifically involving familiesand children have increased. Civil matters such as divorce, childcustody, and support cases involve some ten million children[Hewlett 1991]. The legal establishment of paternity is estimatedto affect another five million children born to single mothers[Hewlett 1991].

Criminal cases also involve children and families. Violence inthe home increasingly claims the attention of courts as they ad-judicate restraining orders and determine parental suitability tocare for neglected and abused children. The incidence of domes-tic violence is substantial: 20% of American families can expect toexperience some kind of spouse-on-spouse abuse [CoalitionAgainst Rape & Abuse 1992].

In many instances, children do not need to be present in thecourtroom, but simply accompany their parents and other adultguardians because of a lack of child day care. In the courtroom,they become spectators while the trauma they have privatelysuffered at home becomes a topic for public consumption.

Children Who Appear in Court: A Profile

The children who come to court constitute a particularly vulner-able segment of America's children. They are likely to come fromimpoverished families. Living in poor communities, they haveprobably been exposed to criminal activity and/or violence intheir homes or neighborhoods [Garbarino et al. 1992]. Theirparents' involvement with the courts suggests troubled homeenvironments—stressful places where financial stability is uncer-tain, where marriages or other adult relationships are dissolving,and where the future custody of children is an open question.

For example, at the Roxbury District Court Child Care Centerin Boston, 60% of the children served in 1992 came from low-income families and 40% lived in publicly subsidized housing[Associated Day Care Services of Metropolitan Boston 1992]. Agroup of studies examining the backgrounds of abused and ne-


glected children whose cases were being adjudicated in BostonJuvenile Court found that the families of these children wereimpoverished, mostly headed by single mothers. More than halfof the parents had a serious psychiatric disorder, and 81 % had anaverage of four reports of abuse and neglect over a three-yearperiod [Jellineck et al. 1990; IVlurphy et al. 1991; Taylor et al.1991]. A child day care needs-assessment conducted by the NewYork Permanent Judicial Commission on Justice for Childrenconfirmed the daily presence of hundreds of children in thecourts, the majority of whom were from New York's lowestincome and most vulnerable families [Heidt 1992].

The threat to healthy growth and development is exacerbatedfor these children because of their socioeconomic status. Explora-tion of the relationship between child development and poverty[Kaplan-Sanoff et al. 1991; Tarnowski & Rohrbeck 1993] findsthat impoverished children are more likely than their more afflu-ent counterparts to experience health problems such as low birthweight, intrauterine growth retardation, failure to thrive, infantmortality, chronic ear infections, pediatric AIDS, lead exposure,accidental injury, learning disabilities, adolescent pregnancy,asthma, and problems secondary to vaccination; stress in the formof disruptions, moves, and losses; parenting risks including druguse; and behavioral disturbances including high rates of child andmaternal pathology. Not only do child ren living in poverty encoun-ter more risks to their healthy development than their middle- andupper-class counterparts, but they experience more serious conse-quences from their exposure to those risks than do middle- andupper-class children [Kaplan-Sanoff et al. 1991].

Children's Exposure to Traumatic Events in Courthouses

Courthouses and court rooms can be incredibly intimi-dating places for children, especially when their future isat issue. Children, even very young ones, understand that


serious subjects are discussed in court. Parents, if present,are often tense and preoccupied. As a result, children incourt are often frightened, and in many cases have little totake their minds off the grave proceedings at hand. Observ-ers who have taken the time to really notice how childrenspend their time in court have seen them playing on dirtyfloors and in trash cans for lack of anything else to do. Theyhave also observed children creating disturbances after longhours of waiting for their cases to come up, and in somecases, have seen exasperated parents discipline harshly,which only worsens matters. [Burke 1995]

Courthouses are intimidating places, especially for children.Experimental work suggests that simply being questioned in acourtroom about something as familiar as a school lesson is stressinducing for children [Saywitz & Nathanson 1993]. Institutionalsurroundings coupled with events that frighten children can dosignificant damage. Even very young children are harmed byexposure to violence and other traumatic events. In courthouses,children are often witnesses to disturbing events. Altercationsbetween court officers and prisoners, angry voices, and wildgesticulation are adult behaviors that young children are not ableto put into a context that would defuse their anxiety.

When the children are themselves parties to the events tran-spiring in the courthouse, the court's need to go over the incidentin detail can cause a secondary victimization. The fear and confu-sion the child felt when the incident took place are repeatedlycalled to mind. Child victims of sexual assault and their familiesoften experience continued stress and trauma as cases make theirway through the legal system. Children may experience recur-rent trauma as they are repeatedly required to recount events toauthorities. As stories are questioned in court, the child's emo-tional well-being may further be jeopardized, because the court-room cross-examination seems to be a betrayal by the adults whosaid they believed the child's story [Higgins 1988].


Inappropriate and frightening adult behavior is not limited tofamily court. Williams [1993] found that there were nearly asmany children under the age of 12 present per hour of court timein an inner-city municipal court (seven children) as during afamily court session (nine children). During two hours of obser-vation at the municipal court, an average of 3.4 children underthe age of 12 were exposed to six cases involving neighborhoodviolence (assault, breaking and entering, etc.), five cases involv-ing substance abuse (driving while intoxicated, drug possessionand sale), and two domestic violence cases (assault on a familymember and violation of a restraining order) [Williams 1993].

Courtroom proceedings are not the only cause for concern.Courthouses pose a distinct threat to children's physical safety.The nation has seen an epidemic of violence in courthouses inrecent years. Newspaper articles around the country detail themyriad security issues facing the courts. In Massachusetts, forexample, data reported by the district courts over a three-yearperiod indicated the occurence of 35 escapes, 29 attempted es-capes, 10 attempted suicides, 69 violent struggles or assaults oncourt officers, and 42 incidents where court officers were injured[Wong 1992]. Gang presence has heightened the threat of vio-lence. The District of Columbia's Superior Court has beenplagued by the presence of teenage gangs who wait in corridorsnext to women with young children, disrupting proceedings andheightening the potential for violence and intimidation ofwitnesses [Lewis 1994]. No one incident better illustrates thepotentially devastating events children may experience than acase in California: in court, a mother took the law into her ownhands and shot to death a man accused of molesting her son,fearful that the man would receive a Hght sentence and return tohurt her family again [Adams 1993].

Some courts have devised means to shield child witnessesfrom courtrooms [Higgins 1988; Lloyd-Bostock 1988]. Researchhas revealed, however, that technological advances such asclosed circuit television and videotaped testimony are not often


used, and, even if used, do not deal with the problem that courtinvolvement is an ongoing process that continues to challengethe coping resources of children and families long after the testi-fying is over [Whitcomb 1986]. These issues are even more press-ing for children and families in inner-city areas who are comingto court in increasing numbers due to escalating domestic andcommunity violence.

Children who are forced to witness violence and traumaticevents in their homes and communities are at tremendous riskfor a host of problems, including depression, behavior problems,and decreased developmental opportunities [Martinez & Rich-ters 1993; Osofsky et al. 1993; Pagelow 1990; Jaffe et al. 1986;Caesar 1988; Adalist-Estrin 1994; Widom 1992; Emde 1993]. Gar-barino and his colleagues described the effects of violence in thefollowing way:

In the developmental process, the child forms a picture ordraws a map of the world and his or her place in it. Aschildren draw these maps, they move forward on thepaths they believe exist. If a child's map of the worlddepicts people and places as hostile, and the child as aninsignificant speck relegated to one small corner, we mustexpect troubled development of one sort or another: a lifeof suspicion, low self-esteem, self-denigration, and per-haps violence and rage. We can also expect a diminutionof cognitive development and impediments to academicachievement and in-school behavior. [Garbarino et al.1992]

Counteracting the Risks to Children

There is little disagreement that court is not a good placefor young children, under almost any circumstances, andthat steps should be taken to minimize the trauma of the


experience when it cannot be avoided. Children are dra-matically affected by family crises, even when the crisisdoesn't directly involve them, and in times of turmoil,parents and other family members are the persons leastavailable to comfort and support their children. Offeringcare and support to these children and their families at acritical time may have long-term preventive benefits forthe children. [Carter 1993]

The harmful effects of courthouse events can be mitigated byan innovative form of child day care currently practiced in 23courthouses in six states around the country. Court-based, drop-in day care originated in the Municipal Court of Philadelphia in1915 with the establishment of a nursery where children couldwait while their parents and other adult guardians transactedtheir court business. Not until 1973 was the idea translated tonew settings when courts in Chicago (1973), Washington, D.C.(1974), and New York City (1975) initiated similar programs.Since then, additional programs have opened in California,Illinois, Massachusetts,* and New York State. Though each pro-gram implements the concept in unique ways, they all sharecertain characteristics—at least one staff person whose sole func-tion is the management of the court-based child care program,and a self-enclosed site designed as a child care center. The U.S.Department of Justice, under the leadership of Attorney GeneralJanet Reno, grew interested in this development and subse-quently funded the National CourtCare Demonstration Project toexamine it and to provide technical assistance to court jurisdic-tions interested in establishing such programs.

The Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP) in Washing-ton, D.C, launched the National CourtCare Demonstration Proj-

*The two Massachusetts programs are operated by agency members of the Child WelfareLeague of America: at Roxbury District Court by Associated Day Care Services of Metro-politan Boston, and at the Hampden County Courts by Springfield Day Nursery.


ect as a way of demonstrating the utility of court-based, drop-inchild day care and family support centers in the courts. Theproject seeks to provide pertinent information to judges andcourt administrators so that they can evaluate the efficacy ofcourt-based child day care programs and, if needed, establishtheir own programs. The center became interested in the Na-tional CourtCare Demonstration Project* because it provided apotentially important forum to contribute to three related efforts:improving the administration of justice, shielding children fromtraumatizing experiences, and linking needy families with othersupport services.

What makes this project unique is that court-based child carebrings together two very disparate professional systems—thejudiciary and the social services system for children and families.Jointly, they offer the promise of integrated services that cansimultaneously benefit both the courts and the families. •

References

Adalist-Estrin, A. (1994). Family support and criminal justice. In S. L. Kagan & B.Weissbourd (Eds.), Putting families first (p. 161). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Adams, J. M. (1993, April 18). Killing of accused child molester stirs justice debate. BostonGlobe, pp. 1,24.

Associated Day Care Services of Metropolitan Boston. (1992). 1992 annual report to theUnited YJay of Massachusetts Bay; Roxbury District Court Child Care Center. Boston, MA:Author.

Bell, C C, & Jenkins, E. J. (1993). Community violence and children on Chicago's south-side. Psychiatry, 56,46-54.

*For more information about the National CourtCare Demonstration Project or a copy ofthe annotated bibliography that further details our review of the literature, contact: LucyHudson, Project Director, National CourtCare Demonstration Project, Center for theStudy of Social Policy, 1250 Eye Street, NW, Washington, DC 20005, (202/371-1565).

1234 CHILD WELFARE • Vol. LXXIV. #6 • November-December

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