This compilation of works highlights the historical, economic, and human dynamics behind youth offending in the nations of the West Indies. Youth Crime and Violence in the Caribbean offers insights into the slow rate of system change yet leaves readers with an optimistic picture of possibilities. Recent events in Haiti and neighboring Venezuela demonstrate how quickly dynamics in the Caribbean area can shift if crime is not addressed and people increasingly disengage from systems in a manner that allows despots to rise to power. When this happens, the impacts are not localized.

This two-volume encyclopedia looks at the lives of teenagers around the world, examining topics from a typical school day to major issues that teens face today, including bullying, violence, sexuality, and social and financial pressures. Teenagers are living in a rapidly changing and increasingly interconnected yet unequal world. Whether they live in Australia or Zimbabwe, they have in common that they are between childhood and adulthood and increasingly aware of how inequality is affecting their lives and futures. This encyclopedia gives a different perspective based on the experiences of teens in 60 countries. Each entry gives the reader a brief sketch of a country to helps readers to understand how geography, history, economics, and politics shape teen life. The entries include a country overview and cover the following topics: Schooling and Education; Extracurricular Activities: Art, Music, and Sports; Family and Social Life; Religions and Cultural Rites of Passage; Rights and Legal Status; and Issues Today. Special sidebars, called Teen Voices, appear throughout the text, and include a description of a typical day in the life of a teen in various countries. Students will be able to gain a better understanding of what life is like around the world for their peers and will be able to easily make cross-cultural comparisons between different countries.

This Yearbook aims to contribute to a greater awareness of the functions and activities of the organs of the Inter-American system for the protection of human rights. The Yearbook is partly published as an English-Spanish bilingual edition. NB: This book is part of a three volume set. Each volume should be ordered separately!Vol 1 isbn 978-90-04-44560-4Vol 2 isbn 978-90-04-50440-0Vol 3 isbn 978-90-04-50991-7

Social work has long been working directly with the criminal and civil courts of the justice system. The work of Latin American practitioners in the legal system, however, is little known at global and local levels. This book is the first to go beyond Western-centric appraisals and presents a truly Latin American portrait of social work in the justice system. The long-term interaction of social work practitioners with the judicial system enabled them to develop an expertise to dialogue with other disciplines such as law and psychology. This knowledge is very important to identify and share with other professionals to develop specialized programs for education and training. In this sense, positive and negative experiences of social work in the justice system allow one to improve its practice. It is crucial to identify local experiences and the great dilemmas that the profession faces on this subject. The volume's chapters deal with these dynamics in Latin American countries including: Forensic Social Work: The construction of possible ways of the criminal intervention Socio-Legal Social Work in the Field of Criminal Defense Family and Community Life: Contributions of Social Work to the Debate in Family Courts Support to Victims in High-conflict Scenarios: An approach from the socio-legal, the pedagogical, and the care perspectives The Assessment of Child and Adolescent Sexual Abuse Allegations from a Social Work Perspective Latin American Social Work in the Justice System is essential reading for students, researchers, academicians, policymakers, and practitioners who are interested in international social work with a special focus on Latin American countries and legal culture. Students and scholars in law, development studies, and public policy as well as psychologists working with and interested in the judicial system would also find this book a useful resource.

Provides a comparison of criminal justice and juvenile justice systems across the world, looking for points of comparison and policy variance that can lead to positive change in the United States. Contributors discuss important issues such as the relationship between political change and juvenile justice, the common labels used to unify juvenile systems in different regions and in different forms of government, the types of juvenile systems that exist and how they differ, and more. Furthermore, they use data on criminal versus juvenile justice in a wide variety of nations to create a new explanation of why separate juvenile and criminal courts are felt to be necessary. --From publisher description.

A compelling, dramatic narrative of how an American housewife discovered that the Guatemalan child she was about to adopt had been stolen from her birth mother, shedding light on the alarming and growing problem of international adoption fraud. Over the past five years, over 100,000 children were adopted into the United States, 20,000 of whom came from Guatemala. Finding Fernanda, a dramatic true story paired with investigative reporting, tells the side-by-side tales of an American housewife who adopts a two-year-old girl from Guatemala and the birth mother whose two children were stolen from her. Each woman gradually comes to realize her role in what was one of Guatemala's most profitable black-market industries: the buying and selling of children for international adoption. Finding Fernanda is an overdue, unprecedented look at adoption corruption--and a poignant, riveting human story about the power of hope, faith, and determination.

This comprehensive reference work presents an in-depth analysis of juvenile justice systems across the world. The second edition of this Handbook has been updated with 13 new chapters, now covering a total of 34 countries, across North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East from an international and comparative perspective. The International Handbook of Juvenile Justice is the result of research conducted by a group of outstanding scholars working in the field of juvenile justice. It reflects a collective concern about trends in juvenile justice over the past two decades, trends that have begun to blur the difference between criminal and juvenile justice. Also new to the second edition, each chapter is formatted to increase the comparative aspect of the book, highlighting: · The legal status of juveniles · Age of majority · The country’s stance toward the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child · Trends in juvenile crime over the period 2004-2014 · Causes of juvenile crime · Policing and juveniles · Courts and juveniles · Custodial rules for juveniles (detention, prison, mixing juveniles with adults) · Alternative sanctions for juveniles: home confinement, restorative justice, restitution, etc. · Differences in treatment of boys and girls This seminal work highlights similarities and differences between the various systems, and will be an important reference for researchers in criminology and criminal justice, particularly interested in juvenile delinquency and youth crime, as well as related disciplines like sociology, social work, and public policy.