Child Advocacy at Law School

Two experts on child advocacy urged law school students to use creative means to effect social change during a Harvard Law School course yesterday, emphasizing the need for lawyers to train in issues pertaining to child protection.

The course, called “Art of Social Change: Child Welfare, Education, and Juvenile Justice,” is part of a four-course series under the Child Advocacy Program (CAP) at the law school.

The first speaker in yesterday’s lecture was Gail Garinger, the first Child Advocate for the Commonwealth—a position that had not existed previously in the state.

Garinger pointed out the necessity of increasing funding for child protection.

“We pay a lot of lip service to how much we value children, but I am not sure we do enough to protect children and faithfully keep them in their families,” Garinger said. “We don’t put our money where our mouth is.”

In contrast, Erik Pitchal, an assistant clinical professor of law at Suffolk Law School and yesterday’s second guest speaker, said that the country’s youth needed to participate more in child welfare processes.

“There needs to be far more involvement by children and youth themselves, those in the system and children in general who care about what is happening with their peers,” he said.

CAP founder and Harvard Law School lecturer Jessica S. Budnitz said that the program exposes students to a variety of viewpoints.

“We really want to inspire students to see the range in which they can use their legal skills training,” she said.

“Art of Social Change,” which has an enrollment of over 100 students, invites leaders in a diverse range of child advocacy roles to speak and connect with Harvard students.

The course attempts to encourage involvement in community social change, particularly in the traditionally underrepresented field of child advocacy in law institutions.

“There are interesting exchanges and lots of participation at the end of the class,” said Maeve O’Rourke, a law school student enrolled in the class. “We definitely get a chance to interact.”

One of the ways the Child Advocacy Program attempts to expose students to opportunities to be agents of change in society is the Child Advocacy Clinic, which partners with dozens of community organizations in the fields of abuse and neglect, adoption, and foster care, providing direct service experiences for Law School students.

But both Budnitz and Elizabeth Bartholet ’62, the faculty director of CAP, agreed that what they do is still not enough.

“There’s more we would like to do that we can’t possibly do with limited staff that we have,” Bartholet said.

Currently, the program is supported entirely by the Law School and receives no funding from outside sources.

—Staff writer Linda Zhang can be reached at zhang53@fas.harvard.edu.