Rethinking Protection: Raising the Bar on Legal Protections for Survivors and Children
When: 7/1/2024
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How can child- and family-serving agencies, advocates, and communities help ensure access to the high-quality legal advocacy needed to keep families together? Join this critical conversation to learn about the challenges to survivor safety and well-being created by the legal structure of child welfare.
Expand your knowledge on the ways legal protections and social supports can create meaningful pathways to keep families out of child welfare and children out of foster care.
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Speakers
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Sharwline Nicholson
Mother, Survivor and Lead Plaintiff on Nicholson v. Scoppetta· A Moment With Sharwline
In January of 1999, Sharwline Nicholson decided to end her relationship with the father of her infant daughter. But when she ended the relationship, he responded with violence. After she was assaulted, Sharwline reached out to the police and to a friend asking that her friend watch her children while she went to the hospital. While she was at the hospital, the child welfare system removed her children for reasons of failure to protect. Sharwline fought to get her children back and along with other women filed a class action suit citing deprivation of their 14th amendment right of due process protecting familial relationships. Nicholson v. Williams would eventually lead the New York Court of Appeals to rule in 2004 that a parent's inability to prevent a child from witnessing abuse could not be a sole factor for removing a child and that you had to balance the harm of removal with the harm of exposure to domestic violence.
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Melody Webb, Esq.
Executive Director· Mother's Outreach Network (D.C.)
Melody Webb is the executive director of Mother's Outreach Network, which convenes the DC Guaranteed Income Coalition. A movement lawyer, Melody advocates on behalf of and with marginalized communities and seeks to reimagine broken systems. Melody's work in many legal capacities includes direct representation and federal and local advocacy on behalf of unhoused individuals at the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless. She served as Legislative Counsel for US Senator Robert Casey; and Associate General Counsel for Service Employees International Union. She has served as a parents' defense attorney representing parents whose children were torn away from their families by the government as a DC Superior Court Counsel for Child Abuse and Neglect. SHe is a member of the steering committee of the American Bar Association Parents' Attorney Representatives Committee and the Hidden Foster Care Coalition, she authored Building A Guaranteed Income to End the "Child Welfare" System in the the Columbia Journal of Race and Law, Strengthened Bonds: Abolishing the Child Welfare System and Re-Envisioning Child Well-Being Symposium issue. Mother's Outreach Network (MON) is an advocacy organization that advances the inclusion and empowerment of Black mothers in the struggle for family preservation by transforming government income and child welfare/family regulation laws, policies and practices from punitive to empowering.
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