Press Contact:

Meche Aguirre
Media Coordinator
meche@lookingglass.org
+1.510.848.1112 x8176

Press Materials:

The Legal Program of the National Center for Parents with Disabilities (a project of Through the Looking Glass) has over 1,900 contacts a year with parents, advocates, social workers and others participating in cases involving parents with disabilities. In these cases, the parent's custody is being challenged by the state or an able bodied partner, in part or in whole, on the basis of their disability.

Ella Callow, J.D., directs the Legal Program. She assists parents, advocates and professionals in the legal and social service systems when they are involved in custody litigation involving the child of a parent with a disability. This can be in the context of dependency, family or adoption cases.

The Legal Program was launched in 2006, a result of overwhelming requests for help from this population of parents aimed at TLG, which has served families where there is disability in the parent or child for thirty years. TLG is a child-centric organization motived by the belief that an unnecessary removal of a child from a safe and loving home, on the basis of a parent's disability, is an inexcusable traumatization of children and a violation of the civil rights of parents with disabilities. We believe that all parties should be motivated by compassion for children to avoid this outcome whenever possible. Unfortunately, what we have found specifically is that for some disability populations, child custody loss rates are as high as 60-80% and there is a significant lack of expertise within existing social service and court systems that undermines meaningful adjudication in these cases. TLG has trained on the issue of parents with disabilities and their families in all 50 states and 45 nations worldwide.

The Legal Program is the only organization in the country dedicating research resources to the impact of this dynamic on American Indian and Alaskan Native communities in the U.S. These communities have almost triple the rate of disability in the general population and continue to struggle to retain their children after a history of stunningly discriminatory and oppressive government removal policies.