Protecting Children, Empowering Birth Parents: New Approaches in Family Justice

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue of Societies will present insights from new interdisciplinary research in the family justice field.  The contributors work across a number of disciplines, drawing on theoretical perspectives from law, sociology, social work, health, psychiatry, and psychology. In addition, they all have experience with applied and action research in these fields. The Special Issue sets out to explore the design, delivery, and impact of new initiatives that seek to enhance the protection of children at risk of harm by engaging more directly and proactively with their parents and wider families. Articles will address particular aspects of these innovations, including:

• new ways of defining risks to infants, children, and parents;
• new actions seeking to mitigate these risks;
• recent developments in edge-of-care work, and community, therapeutic, and clinical initiatives to reduce the likelihood of birth parents losing one or more of their children to care;
• the particular experiences of (birth) mothers, (birth) fathers, kinship carers, and practitioners working in the family justice arena.

This open call for further contributed articles opens 1 April 2020 and closes 15 Sept 2020. The Special Issue will include a maximum of 10 articles in total. The editors are particularly interested in receiving submissions in the form of scholarly articles and concept papers of up to 8000 words drawing on initiatives from outside the United Kingdom.

All invited and open call submissions should be submitted via the Societies online submission system by 15 Sept 2020 but the editors welcome submissions made before this date.

Prof. Pamela Cox
Dr. Susan McPherson
Dr. Frances Blumenfeld
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as conceptual papers are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Societies is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.