Mandating Cultural Competence Training for Dependency Attorneys

Abstract

Dependency attorneys who represent children in child abuse and neglect proceedings engage in cross‐cultural lawyering. Beyond the inevitable cultural differences between lawyer and child client in terms of education, development, and age, there are often differences in race, sexual orientation, language, neighborhood of residence, and countless other cultural dimensions. Cultural differences can lead to miscommunications and misunderstandings between attorney and client, which in turn hurt the quality of representation. Increasing the cultural competence of an attorney can improve the attorney's ability to work effectively with children from different cultures. Unfortunately, very few states currently require cultural competence training for attorneys who represent children. This article calls for making cultural competence training mandatory for all dependency attorneys to improve the quality of representation for children involved in the dependency system.

A Theoretical Model of Intercultural Legal Competence for Law Students in the Context of Higher Education in China

“…Moreover, the professors clearly expounded the importance of integrating intercultural competence into the existing training objectives of legal talents, of improving the existing teaching methods to meet the needs of legal talents' development in the globalization era [12]. As far as the intercultural competence of transnational or international legal talents concerned, scholars [4,9,12,20,28,38] at home and abroad have carried out a lot of studies from multidimensional perspectives and made many achievements, including the necessity of training [24], training objectives, concept defining, theory building [3,35], teaching methods [23], curriculum design, curriculum evaluation, and the contribution of intercultural communicative competence to the competence of practicing lawyers [16,29].…”

“…Therefore, a set of reflection and observation skills, awareness of cultural differences, knowledge about differences in communication styles and differences in conflict resolution, knowledge about intercultural theory and practice, and motivation to cross-cultural adaptation altogether make attorneys interculturally competent [27]. Schutte argues that cultural competence for attorneys should include three core elements: the ability to communicate and build relationships effectively across cultural barriers; respect for cultural differences, and includes efforts to reduce biased feelings toward other cultures; an awareness of one's own cultural lens and how that affects the other two competencies [29].…”

Exploring a Process‐Oriented Forensic Family Observation Protocol

“…Interpreting these process‐oriented data, like everything else in this field, is necessarily context dependent. The parents’ and the child's behavior must be understood as a function of factors including culture (Schute, ; Camp, ), development (Garber, ), personality, and the family's unique relational history (Sroufe, Egeland, Carlson, & Collins, ), as well as the sequence of the day's events.…”