Tagged With "Jersey Supreme Court"

By Vashti Harris | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com and Matthew Stanmyre | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com For Tionni Kennedy, Bridgewater Commons mall is a place she frequently visits to hang out with friends, browse through stores, and gab over meals in the food court. It’s also where Kennedy, who is Black, said she often encounters racism. The 17-year-old from Piscataway feels the glare of store workers when she walks into shops and notices how they always seem to follow her as she looks at...

In recent years, more than a quarter of a million children each year have been removed from their families and placed in foster care because of alleged neglect and these children are disproportionately Black or Indigenous. Too often, circumstances stemming from poverty are construed as neglect, but underlying both poverty and neglect is historic and present-day racism. This report outlines the history of how child protective services developed to over-surveil families of color, examines how...

Another record year for reported bias incidents in New Jersey Dino Flammia | NJ1015 For the third straight year, New Jersey has experienced a record number of reported acts of prejudice, according to a report compiled by the New Jersey State Police. New Jersey was home to 1,871 reported bias incidents in 2021, preliminary numbers suggest. That total represents a 29% increase from the 1,447 bias incidents reported for 2020. "New Jersey is proudly one of the most diverse states in the country,...

History of Denim Day Denim Day grew out of a 1998 Italian Supreme Court decision that overturned a rape conviction because the victim wore tight jeans. The accused in the case was found guilty of rape and appealed the decision, claiming that they had consensual sex. The case makes it all the way to the Italian High Court where the conviction is overturned because the justices felt that since the victim was wearing tight jeans she must have helped the person who raped her remove her jeans,...

Thank you for sharing this, Dwana. However, I must tell you that reading about that Supreme Court judgement disturbed my sense of justice 😠

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released a report today showing the rate of children identified with an autism spectrum disorder rose to 1 in 54 nationally. This statistic is based on the CDC’s evaluation of health and educational records of 8-year-old children in 2016 in 11 states, including New Jersey. New Jersey again has the highest rate of those states evaluated, with 1 in 32 (3.1% of children). This percentage is higher than the average percentage identified with ASD (1.85%) in...

I use two maps of the city of Buffalo, NY to demonstrate gun violence and cancer that over lap in the same areas. By a stretch of imagination, can autism be the results of a fetus coping with the surge of stress hormones the mother is experiencing in an environment that has been normalized? Let's see how Ukraine children fare post war.

Patrick Wall Senior Reporter, Chalkbeat Newark Black-white segregation rate is three times the national average. The schools in Newark and nearby communities are among the most severely segregated in the nation, according to a new nationwide analysis. The Newark area ranks first in economic segregation and second in Black-white segregation, according to the analysis of public and private schools in all 403 metropolitan areas in the United States. The rate of segregation between Black and...

CASA stands for Court Appointed Special Advocates, serving Somerset, Hunterdon, and Warren Counties. Check out our partner's webpage and the various resources that they provide to the community here . Their dedication and commitment to ensure the wishes and needs of each child is not overlooked by the many competing interests at play is impeccable. Be on the lookout for additional blog post about their amazing work. If you are interested in learning more or need services, please reach out to...

(Washington, NJ) Tracey Wilson Heisler, MA is known for many things in our community: child advocate, trauma educator, and protector of farmland from warehouse development. She now has a new identity: local author. Her inaugural book, The Shadow in Our Lives : One family’s recovery from child sexual abuse , was recently released. “It’s never been a secret,” says Heisler, “but my first husband molested one of our children. She disclosed the abuse to me 20 years ago, and we have worked hard...

Norwescap Child and Family Resource Services will be hosting a virtual Connections Matter training on August 7 th , 2023, at 12:00 -2:00 pm. Connections Matter is a program funded by NJ Department of Children and Families and led by Prevent Child Abuse New Jersey. This training is designed to engage community members in building caring connections to improve resiliency. Please share this flyer and the link below with anyone who might be interested. We hope you can join us! Questions: Molly...

Work within or interact with the child welfare community in New Jersey and want to get involved in a movement to prevent childhood adversity? You're invited to participate in embrella's P.E.A.C.E. Initiative! Our goal is to Help Build a Connected and Healthy New Jersey Child Welfare Community embrella’s inaugural Power to End Adverse Childhood Experiences (P.E.A.C.E.) Initiative is a year-long series of Educational Workshops and Family/Community Engagement Events for foster, adoptive, and...

DCF Documentary, Truth to Transformation , to Screen at Garden State Film Festival Documentary Short Follows the Stories of Three People Affected by the Child Welfare System as They Work with the Department to Co-Design the Future of Child Welfare in NJ ASBURY PARK, N.J. – Over the last six years, the New Jersey Department of Children and Families has been actively working to change the narrative of child welfare in the state, to promote a vision of a family-serving system that helps all...

“What if I was made for evil?” These are the words of a 15-year-old African American male that I will never forget. He was in an alternative to incarceration program. As a social worker, in my usual capacity of trying to encourage and uplift this young man, I told him that he was made for good and he countered with the aforementioned question. He said, ‘If someone was made for good, then someone had to be made for evil.’ He asked, what if that was him? It stopped me in the middle of my...