Restoring Family Reunification Services for Parents

The American Council supports AB 1201, the Reuniting Engaged Families through Understanding, Nurturing, Individualized Treatment, and Youth (ReUNITY) Act, and urges every member of the California Legislature to vote yes. This bill makes a targeted, principled correction to the law governing when a court may deny a parent reunification services with their child in the dependency system.

Under current law, a violent-felony conviction can trigger denial of reunification services even when the offense had no connection to the parent's children or family. AB 1201 corrects this by narrowing the bar so it applies only when the victim of the qualifying violent felony was a child, or was someone with whom the parent shared a child at the time of the offense. This is the right line to draw. A conviction that posed no danger to a child or co-parent should not automatically foreclose a family's path back together. Restricting the bar to offenses with that direct family nexus is both more honest and more just.

Importantly, the bill does not eliminate judicial oversight. It retains the clear-and-convincing-evidence standard a court must apply before denying services, and it preserves the override allowing a judge to order reunification even for a disqualified parent when doing so is in the child's best interest. All other existing grounds for denying services remain untouched. The bill does not weaken child protection; it ensures that the tools of child protection are aimed precisely where the evidence of risk actually points.

We recognize that the bill also removes the former five-year lookback window and repeals the prior subparagraphs that required additional factual findings before a conviction alone could support denial. Read together, these changes mean that a qualifying conviction of any age, one involving a child or co-parent victim, can trigger the bar without the former layered evidentiary hurdles. We believe this is a sound trade: the conviction-to-victim-relationship requirement adds genuine relevance, and the court's best-interest override remains available to address any hard case on its individual facts.

Family reunification, where it is safe, is not merely a policy preference. It is a moral imperative rooted in the irreplaceable bond between parent and child and in the long-term wellbeing of children who flourish best in stable family connections. The ReUNITY Act keeps children safer by focusing the law's denial mechanisms on genuine risk, and it keeps families together where the evidence does not justify separation. We ask the Legislature to pass this bill without delay.