This project provides specialized and comprehensive legal services to children in foster care who have been exposed to domestic violence. In LFC’s experience, the lack of targeted services for this population, and the system’s failure to focus on and support efforts to avoid the unnecessary removal of children from their homes solely because their caretakers are victims of domestic violence, is an issue of critical importance. The project director identifies foster care, abuse, neglect, family offense, custody, and visitation cases involving domestic violence issues, and, where appropriate:

• provides individual advocacy to the subject-children to insure the provision of appropriate services and the prevention of unnecessary placements into foster care;

• advocates for batterer exclusion and accountability;

• identifies and advocates referral of domestic violence victims and their children to protective shelters as an alternative to removal;

• identifies cases in which repetitive and retaliatory reports of abuse are used by one spouse against the other as a form harassment and intimidation;

• supports expansion of the Integrated Domestic Violence Part to all five boroughs of New York City; and

• works with the director of LFC’s Public Policy & Impact Litigation Project to propose and support relevant legislative reform and participate in the ad hoc "Failure to Protect" working group.