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Social Information in Court Decisions of Compulsory Child Adoption in Israel

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Abstract

Ambiguity over the concepts of “parental capability” and “the child’s best interests” in the Israeli adoption law, and a lack of sufficient professional knowledge can lead to bias in the professional decision-making process regarding child adoption. This study investigates the idea that judges do not use only legal considerations and relevant information relating to the child-parent relationship but also social information about the biological parent whose parental capability is under legal consideration. The study makes use of the priming paradigm as a conceptual framework for understanding the possible effect of social information on legal judgments in child adoption cases. The textual narrative analysis of 130 court decisions in favor of compulsory adoption reveals the use in courts of three kinds of social information about biological parents: familial information, sexual information, and social-functional information. The study discusses the role of such information in establishing the judicial narrative of parental incapability. In order to “de-bias” the judicial decision-making process regarding child placement, a number of strategies for consideration as social policy are proposed.

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Notes

  1. All the references to "her" or "his" in this section and the next ones refer to the parent, the mother and/or the father, whose parental capability was being legally tested.

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  1. School of Social Work, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Vered Ben-David

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  1. Vered Ben-David
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Ben-David, V. Social Information in Court Decisions of Compulsory Child Adoption in Israel. Child Youth Care Forum 40, 233–249 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-010-9133-3

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