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17 St. Thomas L. Rev. 623 (2004-2005)
From Violence and Victimization to Voice and Validation: Incorporating Therapeutic Jurisprudence in a Children's Law Clinic

handle is hein.journals/stlr17 and id is 633 raw text is: FROM VIOLENCE AND VICTIMIZATION TO VOICE AND VALIDATION: INCORPORATING THERAPEUTIC JURISPRUDENCE IN A CHILDREN'S LAW CLINIC CAROLYN S. SALISBURY* Do you know what it feels like to be raped over and over again? Can you understand how it feels when your rapist forces himself inside of you and holds his hand down on your mouth so no one can hear your cries?... They took me away to be safe, but now I'm being raped again by the system, and there's still a hand over my mouth-every time I have court. - Anna, 16-year-old foster child I. INTRODUCTION When I first read Robert Cover's seminal article Violence and the Word, I was still in law school and had just completed an internship at ju- venile dependency court. Having experienced a legal system that was meant to protect child victims but which contributed to further victimizing them, I remember being struck by the force of Cover's words: Legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death .... Legal interpretive acts signal and occasion the imposition of violence upon others... Interpretations in law also constitute justifications for vio- lence which has already occurred or which is about to occur. When in- terpreters have finished their work, they frequently leave behind vic- tims whose lives have been torn apart by these organized, social practices of violence.' *Associate Director and Clinical Instructor of Law, University of Miami Children & Youth Law Clinic; Clinical Fellow, University of Miami Center for Ethics & Public Service. I appreciate the comments of Bruce Winick, David Wexler, and Susan Stefan; the research assistance of Esther Meisels; and the work of Xavier Cortada and the Clinic students who participated in the Voice Project. Besides benefiting from their comments and their mentorship, I am especially grateful to Susan Stefan for teaching me about law's violence that occurs in the context of involuntary psy- chiatric commitment and Bruce Winick, for teaching me how Therapeutic Jurisprudence can help ameliorate that violence. I dedicate this article to the girls who participated in the Voice Project, for the honesty of their self-expression and their courage in surviving the violence that sur- rounded them. 1. Robert M. Cover, Violence and the Word, 95 YALE L.J. 1601, 1601 (1986).

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