Child Advocacy

For thirty years, lawyers, pundits, professors, and politicians had said that section 293 of the Criminal Code of Canada—the criminal prohibition of polygamy—was unconstitutional, a Victorian anachronism that, in a modern rights-based democracy, deserved to be swept aside in the name of individual liberty and religious freedom. Polygamy per …

Canadian Child Welfare Law: Children, Families, and the State (2nd edition) provides students in social work and law with an introduction to child welfare law. This complex, demanding and important area of law and social work practice receives relatively little attention in professional schools and academic journals. For practicing lawyers and soci …

Child Support Guidelines in Canada, 2006 has been updated from the 2004 edition. New text and a substantial number of new cases have been added to the existing commentary. The book is current to July 31, 2006. It includes two important Supreme Court decisions: D.B.S. v. S.R.G., dealing with the circumstances under which retroactive awards of child …

Children who receive child welfare services are a vulnerable group, and their numbers are growing. All who care about them need to be fully informed about current outcomes, indicators of success and failure, and best practices. This second edition of Child Welfare: Connecting Research, Policy, and Practice has a special focus on Canadian child wel …

This collection of essays addresses some of the most important and challenging issues related to the legal status of children, and the volume makes an important contribution to the growing but still small Canadian literature on children’s rights. These essays are being published together to honour the scholarship of Nicholas Bala, professor of l …

In the 1980s, Canada witnessed a public outcry over child sexualabuse cases. Elected officials sought a remedy through legal reforms.Amendments were made to the Criminal Code of Canada and sexualassault was redefined. The word “rape” was replaced with acontinuum of categories intended to reflect the full range of sexuallyintrusive behaviours. M …

Why does our society think it is okay to hit children?

Almost everyone thinks it is wrong to abuse a child. But many parents and teachers believe it is okay to spank children, rap their knuckles, slap their faces, pull their hair and yank their arms, as long as the punishment does not result in serious injury or death, and is intended to improve …