BOONE COUNTY, W.Va. — A new way of handling the growing number of child abuse and neglect cases in West Virginia linked to parental substance abuse, what’s called Family Treatment Court, is launching Monday in several counties.
In such abuse and neglect cases, “The vast majority of the kids we remove we remove because the parents suffer from some type of addiction problem,” said Circuit Judge Will Thompson from the 25th Judicial Circuit which includes Boone County and Logan County
“What we’re hoping is that we’re going to be able to treat their addiction through the same things we’ve treated them with in our adult drug courts and juvenile drug courts and do a better job of actually giving treatment to them and the great thing about this is we’re hoping to get the kids returned to them quicker because we think we can fix them quicker.”
To start, Family Treatment Courts will be an option in Boone County, Randolph County and Ohio County.
A recently-awarded federal grant to cover court costs in Boone County, though, could help expand the program to a 4th county soon, before other additions in the coming years.
In general, Family Treatment Courts are designed to help families by offering protections to abused and neglected children while assisting parents with substance use disorders before the parents lose permanent custody of their kids.
Right now, Thompson said the court system is “overwhelmed” with such cases.
“Not only are there are a lot of cases, there’s a lot of work associated with them and a lot of heartache associated with them as well,” he said.
Participation in the Family Treatment Courts will be on a voluntary basis with referrals.
“Most of them (the cases) are painfully obvious,” Thompson said. “So filling up the slots, unfortunately, is not going to be very hard.”
The creation of the Family Treatment Courts was part of legislation the Legislature approved in March.
An official launch was scheduled for Monday at 10 a.m. during a ceremony at the Boone County Courthouse in Madison. All five justices of the West Virginia Supreme Court were scheduled to attend.
“Family Treatment Courts try to provide families services to address all the issues that led to the abuse and neglect filing in the hope that we can keep more families together,” said Chief Justice Beth Walker in a statement.
In each of the participating counties, the Family Treatment Court will have its own local advisory committee with a supervising Family Treatment Court judge, the county prosecutor, a defense attorney involved in abuse and neglect cases, the community service manager of the DHHR’s Bureau for Children and Families and a court-appointed special advocate.
Behavior modification therapy will be used for adult participants with rewards for good behavior and punishments for bad behavior and weekly court appearances.
“If there’s a problem, we’re going to know about it within a week as opposed to six weeks or eight weeks,” Thompson said. “The quicker we know about them (the problems), the quicker we can fix it.”
The goal is to eventually roll out Family Treatment Courts throughout West Virginia.
More than 400 such courts currently operate elsewhere in the United States.