Fordham Hosts Domestic Violence Policy Meeting

Tomorrow, Fordham University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Family and Child Advocacy will host a forum, “Mandated Reporting of Neglect, In Light of the Nicholson Decision.”  The Nicholson case was a class action lawsuit that challenged the child welfare practices of New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS).  Children’s and women’s advocates claimed that the City's welfare practices punished domestic violence victims and their children rather than protecting them. ACS recently settled the suit by agreeing not to remove children from battered mothers and not to charge that victims of domestic violence are neglectful parents.

The Interdisciplinary Center for Family and Child Advocacy is a joint project of the Graduate School of Social Services, Fordham Law School, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of Psychology. The center’s mission is to promote collaboration between law, social work and psychology, in the areas of child abuse and neglect and domestic violence. At the Fordham Law School Clinic, students from all three schools work on interdisciplinary teams supervised by law, social work and psychology faculty with cases involving child abuse and neglect, intimate partner violence, special education and children's disability. A full-time social work professor is housed at the clinic.

The forum will take place on Tuesday, June 14, 2005 at 1:00 p.m. in the McNally Amphitheatre, 140 West 62nd Street, New York, New York.   

Panelists will include: Charles Carson, Esq., general counsel at the New York State Office of Children and Family Services; David Lansner, Esq., a partner at Lansner and Kubistchek; Lyn Doris of Women in Need, Inc.; Kenneth Lau of Children FIRST; and George Lewert from the New York Presbyterian Medical Center. Mary Jane Cotter, J.D., M.S.W., will moderate the panel discussion.

For more information about the forum, contact Dorothy Johnson-Laird at (212) 636-6342 or johnsonlair@fordham.edu.