Emancipation from your parents as a teenager may have been something many of us dreamt about during years of teen angst. In reality, though, the legal process to obtain independence for some youth in King County comes at a steep price and few complete the process successfully.
It is not a remedy that a teen seeks just because dad wouldn’t let them borrow the car. It is a big decision made by the most disenfranchised children in our county, the youth who have been classified as at-risk. Most often, they are already homeless, perhaps trying to escape from abusive homes or having already been abandoned by their families.
“There are young people who already live on their own and need to be able to act on their own as legal entities,” said Lisa Kelly, the Bobbe & Jonathan Bridge Professor in Children and Family Advocacy and director of the Children and Youth Advocacy Clinic at the University of Washington School of Law.
Most commonly, emancipation is sought by youth because they need housing. On any given night in King County, almost 2,000 young people between the ages of 12 and 24 are without a safe place to sleep.
“Everyone wants to get kids off the street,” said Kelly, “but they can’t live in a shelter forever and they can’t get a lease if they’re not an adult and/or emancipated.”
Kelly said she once worked with a teen mother in foster care who found herself in an impossible situation: no foster family was available to care for her and her baby, but no youth shelter could take them due to liability issues. The young mother found a program that could help with housing, but she would have to be emancipated in order to legally sign the lease.
Casey Trupin, an attorney for Columbia Legal Services, said teen parents often find themselves in the same paradoxical situation. “A teen mother is responsible for making decisions about her baby’s health and welfare, but she cannot legally make those same decisions about herself.”
Because emancipation is permanent, Trupin and other youth advocates try to “run through the gamut of options” that are available to a youth before recommending emancipation. “In evaluating most emancipation cases, the ultimate legal remedy was that something else was a better option,” he added, such as a family friend or relative taking non-parental custody. Once a youth is emancipated, no one is legally responsible for them; they are truly on their own.
It is the fact that more youth are on their own in the first place, with no one to advocate for their legal rights, that is gaining visibility statewide. A study released this May by First Star, a Washington, D.C.-based child advocacy non-profit, reported that Washington has one of the weakest state systems in the country for ensuring children’s rights are represented in foster care decisions. Although state law says all foster children should have an attorney or guardian ad litem available to them, there aren’t enough trained lawyers or guardians for some courts to realistically follow the law.
“The lack of good lawyers available to foster youth is not only unconscionable, it’s unconstitutional,” said Trupin. “The at-risk and homeless youth often have no one to help them.”
Ideally, Trupin says, courts should provide legal counsel for all youth pursuing any legal civil matter, including emancipation.
“My perspective is that we are, as a society, far too focused on parents’ rights and not nearly focused enough on children’s rights,” said Trupin, who readily admits that his perspective may not go over well with many.
“It’s the kids that have the most to lose,” he added. “They are affected the most by court decisions. Somehow, we have cut kids out of the process that was meant to protect them and, in doing so, we’ve often harmed them.”
