Four days after Samantha Chavarria’s 10th birthday, her mother died, along with much of the life the girl had known. Born to a single mother serving in the military, Samantha had been raised by a stepfather, who informed her at her mother’s funeral, “I’m not your father no more.”

He tolerated her presence for a few more years, using her as a surrogate mother for her two younger siblings before finally kicking her out for good at age 15.

Survival became a daily struggle for Samantha, who often slept on San Antonio’s streets or under the city’s bridges. “Older couples would sometimes ask me why I was crying at night in the middle of a parking lot,” remembers Samantha, who was scared to approach the authorities for fear of being “picked up and sent to juvenile hall” as a runaway. Being a minor alone in the world created other problems, too. At one point she moved in with two older girls, but they were unable to put her name on their lease because of her age—in what became a recurring problem of her forfeited youth.

It was those roommates who first suggested Samantha seek legal emancipation, since she was already functioning as an adult. Having no clue how to go about such a thing, she hopped on the Internet and ran across a toll-free number for Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, which provides free legal services to indigent residents across 69 counties in south, central, and west Texas. Samantha, who deserved a bit of good fortune, had finally caught a break. “They filled out my application over the phone,” she recalls, “and within a week or so I had [an attorney] calling my friend’s house trying to get a hold of me.”

Protecting families and children is a top priority for legal aid programs across America, but scarce resources prevent most providers from taking on kids directly as clients. Instead, children typically are aided indirectly when legal services lawyers help a parent file a domestic violence restraining order against an abusive spouse or secure custody or child support payments in a divorce settlement. But what happens when the parents are absent, or worse, causing or enabling the harm?

Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, it turns out, is one of the few legal aid programs nationally that runs a special proj­ect serving the specific legal needs of minors. TRLA’s Children’s Rights Project is the brainchild of Executive Director David Hall, who says, “The way our delivery system is set up, if you don’t identify these specific-needs populations, they get ignored. We try to avoid doing that. When kids get into the juvenile justice system, it’s not a pretty sight.”

Sandra Avila, the attorney in charge of the project, says Samantha is typical of the abandoned and neglected teenagers who seek out TRLA’s help because they have nowhere else to turn. Homeless shelters and police are often unaware that a child is a victim and have been known to turn desperate kids away, she explains. Avila says that some youngsters have been told at homeless shelters that, as a matter of policy, minors aren’t accepted. “I think sometimes minors are perceived as being irresponsible or immature or just troublemakers,” Avila says. “Different labels get put on children. There are different situations that children face that adults don’t face, which basically make them an even more vulnerable population than victims of domestic violence. We basically look at them and say, ‘How can we best try to help this individual?’”

Avila cites the example of one 15-year-old teenage mother. “She herself had been abandoned. Her mother had died, and her father was in prison. Her boyfriend, who was very bad news, took the child from her. So this girl went to the police, and they told her to come back with an adult. But she didn’t have an adult!”

TRLA’s advocacy for minors comes in a variety of forms, Avila says. The program has assisted 40 or 50 juveniles who’ve needed legal counseling, advice, or representation relating to misdemeanor charges such as graffiti vandalism or misdemeanor assault. “You’ve got minors who are 13 and are alcoholics, but they aren’t bad kids,” she says. “Maybe they learned the behavior from a parent, or it’s the abuse that they’re just mimicking.”

Samantha won legal emancipation with the help of TRLA attorneys, the process unfolding without a hitch. “It didn’t take that long for all the paperwork to go through and get a court date,” Samantha recalls. “My case was sort of easy, because, for one thing, I didn’t have anybody fighting it. My mom had passed away, and I did not have a biological father on my birth certificate.” A newspaper notice still had to run for a few weeks, but after a brief meeting with the judge in his chambers in which she explained her situation, “He said, ‘Okay, your emancipation is granted.’”

Of the approximately 50 minors who have sought out TRLA lawyers for emancipation since the Children’s Rights Project’s inception, some 40 have been turned away, Avila estimates. She and her colleagues are careful not to help kids who don’t like the rules at home or those who are merely seeking legal permission to live with a boyfriend or girlfriend. “The law doesn’t say, ‘Whoever wants to get emancipated for whatever reason can do so,’ ” she explains. “You have to meet statutory qualifications, and the court has to find that it’s in your best interest. If somebody’s coming in and saying, ‘Look, I’m being physically abused by my stepfather, and my mom doesn’t protect me…as a matter of fact, my stepfather’s got an emergency protective order [against him], but my mom is still letting him live in the home,’ then obviously you’re dealing with a very different situation. I can tell you from looking into the background and preparing for trials—these children are not just looking for freedom. They’re looking for protection.”

TRLA’s Children’s Rights Project also helps children who have been victims of domestic violence or trafficking. Avila says in some cases the remedy is a T-visa or a U-visa that frees the victims from fear of deportation. In other cases, project attorneys have sought protective orders on the child’s behalf. In one recent case, although the father had legal custody of his daughter, the mother brought the girl into TRLA with a huge purple bruise. Avila says although the father had been brought up on felony charges, he still had custody during the investigation. “So we assisted the girl in getting a protective order against her father, which legally supercedes the custody order.”

On occasion, Avila and her colleagues have run into judicial displeasure with the project because of perceptions that it is pitting child against parent. She sympathizes with this reaction but points out that such a presumption can lead to questionable decisions from the bench. She recounts a recent case in which “the mom was in the habit of holding this 15-year-old girl down and punching her. The judge threatened the girl with either sending her to foster care or going back to her mom. The judge actually said that holding her down, punching her, and busting her lip was discipline.” Avila concludes, “You have to walk a thin line, saying, ‘Look, this relationship hopefully some day can be repaired…but in the meantime, this child needs protection.’”

The boy once known as Benjamin Lopez Jr. was in need of protection, but he wound up being the protector on the day his father tried to murder his mom. Avila had met the mother, Lorena, back in May 2002 when she came by the office seeking a protective order against Benjamin Sr., whose hostility was beginning to rage out of control. What started out as a stream of insults and verbal abuse had degenerated into sexual and physical attacks. By that Septem­ber Lorena had secured a divorce, but the culmination of the violence came after the legal split. Breaking down her door with an ax, Benjamin Sr. tried to kill his ex-wife, but his 10-year-old namesake ran to the nearby police station and brought help.

The father went to prison for attempted murder and repeated violations of his protective order, but the son suffered severe emotional trauma in the wake of the episode. “He wasn’t the same little boy after that,” Lorena says. “From that moment on, he said he wanted to know nothing about his father.”

After the attacks, young Benjamin insisted his mother call him “Junior.” Just hearing his father’s name would send him into a rage. If Lorena slipped, “he would get upset and start throwing things,” she recalls. A counselor at the Texas Department of Public Safety heard about the boy’s continuing behavioral problems and suggested one way to cut the psychological ties to the father would be a legal name change.

“He was thrilled when he heard that,” says Lorena, who brought him to Avila’s office to find out if this might be possible. When told that it was, Lorena says her son was so excited that he got a baby-name book and pored over the possibilities. He settled on Ian Uriel Lopez. “He started writing that on his books and his backpack,” says Lorena, who got him a little license plate for his bicycle bearing the new name.

This October, a judge officially granted the name change to little Ian. “After the hearing, Ian’s mom hugged him, and he was so talkative and smiling—such a big change! It was truly one of the best days I’ve had in months,” Avila says.

Of course, direct representation of children isn’t the only way legal aid organizations can try to steer youngsters out of harm’s way. The tens of thousands of family violence cases that legal aid programs handle annually help not only battered women facing the most immediate peril but also their kids. Whether children are physically in harm’s way or simply observers to violence in the home, it can cause scars that don’t heal. The emotional toll exacted is even greater when kids are uprooted from their homes and forced to jump from school to school or follow their mothers to shelters in order to stay safe.

In Buffalo, N.Y., attorneys at Neighborhood Legal Services (NLS) do not represent children directly but, as a matter of policy, they consider the impact of domestic violence on the entire family in deciding who to represent and how to proceed. “Not only are the victims scared and damaged, but so are their children. They’re damaged in all kinds of ways,” says Keith Morganheim, an NLS supervising attorney. “When we get a good result for a victim, it means stability for children.”

Reciprocally, it is often the child who compels a battered parent to flee an abusive situation and resist the temptation to go back, notes Sharon Nosenchuck, an NLS staff attorney who works with Morganheim. “You’d think adults would know enough to leave,” she says. “If somebody throws you down the stairs or breaks your collarbone, you’d think that would do it. But often the victims don’t leave until the children say something. We see women in their 20s coming in here because their 6-year-olds convinced them to do so.

“Just this morning I had a client mention that she had been talking to her abuser,” Nosenchuck continues. “I asked if she was thinking of going back with him, but she said she couldn’t because her son was so terrified. People owe more allegiance to their children than they do to their abusers. So a lot of times the children will dictate the behavior.”

If an abusive parent wants visitation or custody of a child, legal aid programs often are called upon to ensure the family’s safety. Nosenchuck recalls a case in which a deranged father would play a “game” in which he forced his 7-year-old daughter to lead him across busy streets while he kept his eyes closed. She recalls an even more horrific instance in which a teenage boy was forced to videotape a father abusing his mother. In such circumstances, NLS attorneys will assist in divorce proceedings and work to ensure an outcome that is in the best interest of the child, whether that means court-supervised visitation, sole custody for the non-abusive parent, or another remedy.

“The bottom line is letting these children know that they do have rights,” asserts TRLA’s Avila. “I think a lot of times people just assume, well, your parents are responsible for taking care of you. But what happens when that doesn’t happen? Basically what we’re trying to do is give minors a voice.”

n Jeannette De Wyze has worked as an investigative reporter for more than 25 years. Based in San Diego, Calif., she currently serves as a staff writer for the San Diego Reader, covering topics ranging from law to science.