“The Specter of Psychological Abuse”: The Disregard for Emotional Harms in Oregon Juvenile Dependency Courts
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Date
2022
Authors
Hollenbeck, Jakob
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
In 2000, the Supreme Court of the United States declared that parents’ rights to the “care, custody, and control of their children” were “perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by this Court.” Yet, U.S. courts have currently established jurisdiction over more than half a million children. These children, the courts determined, have rights to physical and emotional safety that outweigh their parents’ right to control them. The weighing of these competing constitutional claims tasks the courts with simultaneously preventing government overreach into citizens’ private homes while protecting the country’s most vulnerable members from abuse. Recent scholarship has demonstrated that over the past twenty years, the Oregon Court of Appeals has dramatically restricted the state’s ability to intervene in the lives of Oregon families. This paper explores how this shift has affected emotional abuse cases. Emotional abuse is one of the most harmful—but underrecognized—forms of abuse, accounting for over a third of estimated instances of child maltreatment. Yet, emotional abuse cases are relatively rare in juvenile dependency courts. This paper examines four decades of Oregon Supreme Court and Court of Appeals decisions to understand both how Oregon courts treat cases of emotional abuse and harm broadly. With this background, it calls for urgent changes to the way the state approaches emotional abuse cases and child maltreatment in general.
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Keywords
Juvenile dependency, Emotional abuse, Psychological abuse, Department of Human Services, Child development