Parental Disputes, Religious Upbringing and Welfare in English Law and the ECHR

This article assesses the position of English law concerning parental disputes about the religious upbringing of children. Despite the strong emphasis on both parents being able to direct their child’s religious upbringing, courts have interpreted the child’s welfare to restrict the exposure of the child to parental religious beliefs or practices in some circumstances: preserving the child’s future choice of religion, the physical integrity of the child, the child’s contact and relationship with both parents, the child’s educational choices, and the child’s relationship with both parents’ religious community. It is suggested that courts should have a wide understanding of welfare and should be wary to prohibit parents teaching their minority beliefs. This article also compares the position of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and suggests that, despite the stronger emphasis by the ECtHR on parental rights, English law is generally not that much at odds with the ECtHR.

Paramountcy, family rights and contested adoption: does contact with birth relatives balance the scales?

This article combines practitioner insight and research evidence to chart how principles of partnership and paramountcy have led to birth family contact becoming the expected norm following contested adoption from care in Northern Ireland. The article highlights how practice has adapted to the delay in proposed reforms to adoption legislation resulting in the evolution of increasingly open adoption practices. Adoption represents an irrevocable transfer of parental responsibility from birth to adoptive parents and achieves permanence and legal security for children in care who cannot return to their birth family. Its enduring effect, however, makes public adoption a contentious field of child welfare practice, particularly when contested by birth parents. This article explores how post-adoption contact may be viewed as reconciling the uneasy interface between paramountcy principles and parental rights to respect for family life. The article highlights the complexity of adoptive kinship relationships following contested adoption from care, and how contact presents unique challenges that mitigate against meaningful and sustainable connections between the child and their birth relatives. In conclusion, a call is made for sensitive negotiation and support of contact arrangements, and the development of practice models that are informed by an understanding of the workings of adoptive kinship.

The contribution of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to understanding and promoting the interests of young people making the transition from care to adulthood

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) acknowledges that young people without parental care are entitled to special support and assistance from the State. In detailing their expectations, the UN Committee have issued Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children which recognise that State parties have a number of responsibilities towards care leavers. The paper explores how the UNCRC reporting process, and guidelines from the Committee outlining how States should promote the rights of young people making the transition from care to adulthood, can be used as an instrument to track global patterns of change in policy and practice. Content analysis of State Party Reports and Concluding Observations from 15 countries reveals that to date there has been limited engagement with understanding and promoting the needs of this group in the reporting process; although where a government is committed to developing legislation and practice then this does find its way into their national reports. Data supplied by affiliates of the International Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood from Care (INTRAC) reveals that national concerns, political ideology, public awareness, attitudes and knowledge of the vulnerability of care leavers influence service responses to protect and promote the rights of this group and the attention afforded to such issues in reports to the Committee. Findings also suggest that global governance is not simply a matter of top down influence. Future work on both promoting and monitoring of the impact of the UNCRC needs to recognise that what is in play is the management of a complex global/national dynamic with all its uneven development, levels of influence and with a range of institutional actors involved.

Understanding Parental Influence on Educational Outcomes Among 9 Year Olds in Ireland: The Mediating Role of Resources, Attitudes and Children's Own Perspectives

The relationship between parental background and children's educational outcomes has been a dominant theme within the sociology of education. There has been an on-going debate as to the relative merits of explanations which focus on the role of socio-cultural reproduction and those which focus on rational choice. However, many empirical studies within the social stratification tradition fail to allow for children's own agency in shaping the relationship between social background and schooling outcomes. This paper draws on the first wave of a large-scale longitudinal study of over 8,000 nine-year-old children in Ireland, which combines information from parents, school principals, teachers and children themselves. Both social class and parental education are found to have significant effects on reading and mathematics test scores among nine year olds. These effects are partly mediated by home-based educational resources and activities, parents' educational expectations for their child, and parents' formal involvement in the school. More importantly, children's own engagement with, and attitudes to, school significantly influence their academic performance. The influence of children's own attitudes and actions can thus reinforce or mitigate the effect of social background factors. The analysis therefore provides a bridge between the large body of research on the intergenerational transmission of inequality and the emerging research and policy literature on children's rights.

In Two Minds? Parental Attitudes toward Physical Punishment in the UK

Since the Millennium, the use of physical punishment in the home has been a widely debated topic across the UK. Reliance on public opinion has been an important feature of this debate with a variety of UK surveys showing that many find physical punishment acceptable and do not support a complete ban on smacking. Drawing on the results from a comprehensive review of the literature, this article highlights that public/parental opinion is less than straightforward. Parents are often ambivalent about physical discipline, do not view it as an optimal method of behaviour management and are more prone to smack when stressed or angry. Likewise, a survey of the disciplinary practices and attitudes of 1000 parents in Northern Ireland shows that majority of parents have negative attitudes towards physical discipline. Nonetheless, many parents continue to smack despite the fact they do not believe it to be effective. Lack of parental support for legislative reform should be reconsidered in the light of this ambivalence. Most important, the UK Government needs to reframe the smacking debate in terms of children's rights rather than relying on public opinion if it is to fulfil its commitment to protect children from harm as set out in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The Effect of Human RIghts on Criminal Evidentiary Processes: Convergence, Divergence or Realignment?

This article examines the contribution which the European Court of Human Rights has made to the development of common evidentiary processes across the common law and civil law systems of criminal procedure in Europe. It is argued that the continuing use of terms such as 'adversarial' and 'inquisitorial' to describe models of criminal proof and procedure has obscured the genuinely transformative nature of the Court's jurisprudence. It is shown that over a number of years the Court has been steadily developing a new model of proof that is better characterised as 'participatory' than as 'adversarial' or 'inquisitorial'. Instead of leading towards a convergence of existing 'adversarial' and 'inquisitorial' models of proof, this is more likely to lead towards a realignment of existing processes of proof which nonetheless allows plenty of scope for diverse application in different institutional and cultural settings.