Margaret C. Stevenson, Bette L. Bottoms, and Kelly C. Burke: The Legacy of Racism for Children: Psychology, Law, and Public Policy

Excerpt

The upbringing of minority children is complex and filled with sensitive and burdensome issues that must be anticipated and confronted by psychology, public policy, and law. There is often striking disparity in the experiences and consequential decisions and outcomes of minority children that definitively steers the course of their lives and characterizes the demographic’s experience as fraught with problems and risk unparalleled by their White contemporaries. This causes a special need for concern and consideration by lawmakers, policymakers, psychologists, social workers, etc. The Legacy of Racism for Children: Psychology, Law and Public Policy addresses the sundry and perplexing issues that revolve around and impact the world of minority children through an amalgamation of chapters authored by several experts in their respective subjects, edited and organized by established professional psychologists and professors Margaret C. Stevenson et al. (2020). Valuable contributions from various experts in their field illumine a clearer understanding of the hurdles of minority children, giving considerable information on such topics as child maltreatment, child dependency court, custody and adoption, familial incarceration, school discipline and the “school-to-prison pipeline”, juvenile justice, police/youth interactions, and jurors’ perceptions of child and adolescent victims and defendants. It also brings attention to more neglected research topics, such as the role of race and racism in child sex trafficking and U.S. immigration law and policy. Using historical backgrounds as foundations that color the present issues and emphasize the urgency to tackle such current obstacles in the lives of racial minority children, this book successfully champions the interests of minority children and educates on how to help ameliorate and remedy their tribulations. …