Issues Surrounding Initial Intervention

• Author: Martin Guggenheim
• Position: Professor of Clinical Law, New York University School of Law
• Pages: 359-381

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Professor Guggenheim is the author of What is Wrong with Children's Rights (forthcoming, Harvard University Press, 2005) from which some of these remarks have been adapted.

This Panel discussion and symposium is of great importance because child welfare law and policy looms ever larger in American society. The organizers of this symposium are to be commended for bringing together so many prominent speakers. One of the things you will quickly come to appreciate is the breadth and diversity of views among these various speakers. In light of that, my goal today is to try to leave you with one idea. If each of the speakers were able to do the same, we would, by the end of the day, have a pretty good sense of the metes and bounds of child welfare problems. One of the fascinating things about this field is that everybody who toils in it does so for good reasons. We also share a deep concern for, and commitment to, advancing the well-being of children. We all also recognize that childrens' policy issues, particularly as they affect children born into poor families, need and deserve our careful attention. There will be no disagreement from anybody speaking here today on this fundamental point. Our disagreements will be over how to achieve a better world for children. With this in mind, I would ask each speaker to try to leave you with one idea. And then when you have as many different core ideas as each speaker stressed, at the end of the day, you will be in an ideal position to try to balance them. With that said, let me start with an overview that, hopefully, will set the tone for my one idea.

A man visits a village late one evening. He notices a lot of activity on the street when he enters the town, but he is very tired from a long journey, so he takes a room in the only hotel. The next morning after breakfast, he leaves the hotel and sees the same activity as the night before. He goes over to the scores of people working furiously near the stream that runs through the town. The townspeople are taking babies out of the stream as they pass by. They form a sort of assembly line with those at the front wading into the stream and picking up the babiesPage360 as they float by. They hand them to others who continue to hand them off until they are wrapped and made warm, and taken for more assistance.

When the stranger asks someone what is happening, he is asked to join in their efforts to save the babies. He quickly learns that the townspeople have been at this process of picking up babies at all hours of the day and night. They tell him they need his help and ask him to assist. When the stranger refuses, the townspeople become indignant. They ask, "How can you refuse to help us in this crisis? Don't you...