As much as the family is a unit where we get love and a sense of belonging, things sometimes do go wrong and may require legal intervention to iron out. Family lawyers come in to help in family law relationships such as divorce, spouse support, child support, support obligations, child custody, domestic violence, marital property rights, paternity, juvenile delinquency, and dependency.
In this high paced and sometimes detached world, many children are often neglected by parents and society and left to fend for themselves. These kids fall through the cracks of society and feel left out of their peer groups. The unfortunate result is that many often start running with the wrong group and running afoul of the law.
When a child between the ages of ten and eighteen commits a crime, the act is described in legal term as delinquency and the matter is resolved through the intervention of the juvenile court.
Because of the tenderness of the child’s age, these cases are treated and resolved differently. The lawyer also cannot afford to treat these juvenile delinquency cases like he or she would any other usual crime case involving an adult:
* Juvenile delinquency is a delicate matter, yet it is an issue that calls for special knowledge and expertise.
* The juvenile lawyer needs to be empathetic and understanding towards the child as he or she acts and behaves differently from other children of his age.
* He should have good working knowledge of child psychology in order to be of any help to the child.
* When a child commits a crime, it becomes the responsibility of the lawyer to get to the root of the child’s problems and to weed out any factors in the child’s environment and relations that had any role, direct or indirect, in turning the child into a delinquent.
It has become a strong concern among leading sociologists in Canada about the increasing number of child delinquency cases. Generally the delinquent child is exposed to an unusual environment that molds his mind and behavior in an abnormal and often socially unacceptable way. So the emotional aspect of the child has to be focused upon in order to understand the child’s motive or trigger for committing the crime. Thus ultimately it rests in the hands of the lawyer to draw the sympathy of the jury in order to acquit the child or to be more lenient. The end goal of the lawyer in these cases of juvenile delinquency is to frame the case in a manner that the child is not susceptible to strong legal actions.