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The purpose of this paper was to assess whether the criteria that have been developed by mental health professionals to judge the quality of child custody reports matches the criteria employed by members of the legal profession.

The paper reviews the literature on the standards that have been developed to assess the quality of child custody reports and compare it to the criteria used by attorneys and judges.

The broad criteria used by mental health professionals in assessing the quality of child custody reports mostly matches those employed by judges and attorneys.

There is limited research that focusses on a detailed, qualitative analysis of each component of a child custody report.

Is it essential that a qualitative analysis of child custody reports be performed because it would impact on how professional approach such evaluations.

Having research focussing on a detailed qualitative analysis of child custody evaluations may enhance the quality of such products.

This paper investigates why mothers are losing to fathers in contested child custody battles that have occurred between 1980 and 2003. It employs quantitative, qualitative, and contextual strategies to understand the complex set of forces involved. The findings suggest that single mothers and children are increasingly trapped in a war zone between cost conscious policymakers ideologically opposed to the welfare state, angry fathers shouldering the burden of a shift from public to private transfers of funding in the form of child support, religious zealots intent on turning back the clock to a mythical patriarchal Eden, and the legal doctrine of gender neutrality reflecting these political forces.

To document the police protective custody (PPC) process and in doing so develop a predictive model to better inform police decision makers on the factors that are more likely to result in the state maintaining custody of a child.

Data for the current study were gathered through a series of focus groups and 6,607 existing records of PPC admissions into a children's home in the Wichita Children's Home (WCH) (Kansas). Systematic predictive modeling (logistic regression) was used to differentiate between children that are likely to need continued involvement of the child welfare system and those who could remain in the custody of their families.

Documents the PPC process by which a child is referred to be housed by WCH by a law enforcement agency. Reports on the design of a decision model which identifies the factors affecting the outcome of the PPC process.

Provides recommendations for streamlining the PPC process as well as the improvement of police policies and procedures.

This paper aims to explore children’s experiences during their time in custody in England and Wales.

A total of 48 children were interviewed, as part of a wider study on children’s pathways into, through and out of custody. The focus of this paper is on children’s experiences in young offender institutions.

The findings from this study suggest that children’s behaviour during incarceration can be understood largely as strategies for surviving the hostile environment in which they find themselves.

This paper seeks to make a series of recommendations for practitioner and policymakers, based on the findings of this study.

The findings from this study suggest that children’s behaviour during incarceration can be understood largely as strategies for surviving the hostile environment in which they find themselves. This paper seeks to highlight specific elements of this environment and offers an insight into how they may impact upon a child's sense of self and place in the world.

If child custody decisions are based on erroneous beliefs, family courts may not be acting in the best interests of children. This study examined family court professionals' beliefs about family violence. Respondents (N = 410) of diverse professions, including child custody mediators, evaluators, and therapists, family law attorneys and judges, victim advocates and university students, completed a 10‐item multiple‐choice quiz. Results revealed low rates of correct responding, with respondents correctly answering approximately three out of 10 items on average, based on current research in the field. Overall, response rates were highly consistent with the discredited patriarchal paradigm. Shelter workers and victim advocates had the lowest average score, and men were found to have slightly higher scores than women. More troubling, students' scores were not significantly lower than those of family court professionals. Implications are discussed with respect to decision‐making in the context of child custody disputes.

The purpose of the paper is to consider the impact on children in custody of the government response to COVID-19 in England and Wales. As the majority of children are held in young offender institutions, this forms the focus of the piece.

A review and opinion piece on the government response and the impact of decisions about the juvenile custodial estate on incarcerated children.

No specific findings as this is an opinion piece.

This paper offers a viewpoint on the government response to COVID-19 and its impact on children in custody. It considers key publications that have cited concerns since the lockdown and seeks to identify key themes emerging from the publications.

This chapter addresses a five-year phase of protest activity set in motion by fathers’ rights and shared parenting groups’ resistance to the Federal Child Support Guidelines, which were incorporated into Canada’s Divorce Act in 1997. Drawing upon Department of Justice discourses, parliamentary hearings and debates, and advocacy websites it examines the dynamics and outcomes of the protest cycle. It argues that the government’s legislative response signals a failure of fathers’ rights activism in Canada. This failure is a consequence of the collective identity that advocates and their supporters enact and celebrate in various public arenas, the effectiveness of feminist counteraction, and the contingencies of governance in Canada’s left-of-centre advanced liberal democracy.

In this article, I examine the role of judicial narratives in constructing, constraining, and delimiting the boundaries of social scientific and expert knowledge – specifically, in the context of gay and lesbian parents’ custody and adoption cases. Examining not only the judicial narratives in appellate cases over the last fifty years in the United States, but also expert reports and briefs obtained from attorneys in these cases and interviews with judges, attorneys and litigants, I investigate the role of judicial narratives in adjudicating between competing social scientific claims about sexuality and child welfare, constructing expertise, and ultimately deciding what is valid knowledge and what is not. I focus specifically on the ways in which judges credit and discredit social scientific evidence, experts, and knowledge claims. The power of legal actors and particularly judges to police the boundaries of knowledge and expertise in the context of the custody case and the judicial narrative is complicated by the observation that this form of social scientific knowledge is not only the object acted upon and shaped by these power dynamics, but is also itself a source of power and legitimation.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for the treatment of children in penal custody.

This paper is a viewpoint piece that analyses the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for children in custody, drawing on published information where available.

This paper argues that imprisoned children are an extremely vulnerable group, whose experience of incarceration exacerbates that vulnerability at the best of times. Responses to COVID-19 are particularly painful for children in those settings, and the consequences are manifestly unjust.

This paper provides an early attempt to consider the impact of COVID-19 on children in prison.

This paper seeks to consider the inter‐connections between law and child development, particularly in the areas of child custody and child protection, in both the USA and the UK.

The paper is based on analysis of US and UK legal systems and child developmental research.

Although the two legal systems have much in common in their approach to safeguarding children's welfare, there are also notable differences between them in terminology and in concept. Whereas the USA places a greater emphasis on the rights, particularly autonomy rights, of both parents and children, the UK justifies its laws affecting children largely in terms of parental responsibility and child need.

The paper argues that each of these legal regimes has something to learn from the other and a reader interested in thinking about the relationship between child welfare and law will profit from considering the distinctions, as well as the commonalities, between the two regimes.