Peer-reviewed article
Seen and Heard: A New Look At Child Participation in Family Disputes
Karni Perlman, Tamar Morag ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This article examines how Israeli family law enables children to participate in court proceedings involving family disputes. It reviews evaluation findings through the lens of therapeutic jurisprudence, which considers how legal processes affect people's well-being. The article discusses how this participation model works in adversarial court settings and explores how children's right to be heard could be extended to out-of-court dispute resolution.
Key points
- Israel has adopted a unique legislative model for children's participation in family court disputes
- The model is evaluated through therapeutic jurisprudence principles, which examine legal processes' psychological and social effects
- Two evaluation studies and one follow-up study provide findings on the model's implementation
- The article identifies potential for broader adoption of therapeutic jurisprudence ideas to strengthen the model
- Developments in Israeli law are promoting non-adversarial family dispute resolution with potential for child participation
Limitations
The document is a literature and policy review rather than reporting primary empirical data; it does not provide specific quantitative findings, sample sizes, or details about the evaluation studies' methodologies and results. The relevance of findings to children in other legal systems remains unclear.
Abstract
Israeli legislation adopted a unique model of children's participation in conflicts adjudicated in family courts. The article looks at this model and at the findings of one evaluation study and one follow‐up study through the lens of therapeutic jurisprudence. It considers aspects of therapeutic jurisprudence manifest in the model and in these studies' findings as well as the potential entailed by broader adoption of this movement's ideas for the model's continued and effective implementation. Insights that emerged from these studies' findings, which could enrich therapeutic jurisprudence and contribute to its implementation in various countries, are also suggested. In the last section, we look through a therapeutic jurisprudence perspective at a development in Israeli law that promotes referral of family conflicts to non‐adversarial proceedings and considers how the children's right to participation can also be implemented in these collaborative, out–of‐court settings.