The Mental Elf

Warren Binford is an internationally recognized children’s rights scholar and advocate who is a frequent writer and speaker on a variety of children’s issues, including 21st century forms of child abuse, exploitation, and neglect. She founded the Child and Family Advocacy Law Clinic at Willamette Law School and has provided legal expertise to many international organizations, including Save the Children and the International Red Cross, as well as major media outlets, including the New York Times, the BBC, the New Yorker, and CNN.

Professor Binford was selected as both a Fulbright Scholar in South Africa in 2012 and the inaugural Fulbright Canada-Palix Foundation Distinguished Visiting Chair in Brain Science and Child and Family Health and Wellness at the University of Calgary in 2015. She joined the University of Colorado faculty in 2020 after 15 years as a law school professor and administrator. From 2017-2020, she interviewed children and families at detention centers along the U.S.-Mexican border. She started a GoFundMe to raise money for other volunteers to document the children’s experiences and co-founded Project Amplify to raise public awareness about the mistreatment of children arriving to the U.S. She recently compiled the award-winning children’s book Hear My Voice/Escucha Mi Voz, which describes the experiences of children arriving to the U.S. in their own words.