American Mothers Political Party: May 2010

BELIEVE THE MOTHERS!!!!!BELIEVE THE MOTHERS!!!!!BELIEVE THE MOTHERS!!!!!BELIEVE THE MOTHERS!!!!!!!!!

Inland Empire Mom Blames Judge For Baby's Murder

ReportingDave Bryan

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPI3Zh-OHEA&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

 Wyatt Garcia, killed by his own father.

A judge in San Bernardino is fighting for his political life. Critics say it was his decision on the bench -- to give joint custody to a man who threatened his own son's life -- that was truly a life and death decision.

And that decision, could have led to the baby's death.

The baby was murdered. And the baby's father described the horrific crime on facebook.

Dave Bryan spoke to the judge, Superior Court Justice Robert Lemkau, for his first TV interview. Bryan also spoke with the man who wants Lemkau's job. Literally.

"When Judge Lemkau gave custody back to him, that was it. I just knew that my baby's death sentence was signed that day." -- Katie Tagle

The him was Tagle's ex-boyfriend, Steven Garcia, father of the couple's 9-month-old son, Wyatt.

And he had written her long, rambling E mails saying he was going to kill the baby and himself if she didn't reconcile with him.

But the judge didn't believe the E mails.

Tagle said the tragedy didn't have to happen.

Tagle asked the judge for a restraining order against her ex in January.

She said she supplied the court with the E mails as well as a temporary restraining order and "a mountain of evidence" including police reports.

Lemkau told Bryant he saw the E mails but they were signed "by a John Hancock, not Steven Garcia and he denied signing them. It could not be authenticated that he signed them."

Lemkau went on to tell Bryant that he thought Tagle might have even made up the E mails. "I made comments based on my comments based on the file and based on their demeanor...and prior history."

Lemkau restored joint custody.

Ten days later, Garcia poisoned the boy and shot himself in a murder-suicide. Just as he promised to do.

Lemkau says he was "shocked and very traumatized by what occured."

He apologized to Tagle in open court.

The judge feels like he made the right call. "We don't have crystal balls," he said, "there was no abuse, no history, just an allegation. You have to be cognizant of the rights of all parties."

Tagle isn't having it. "I do blame him," she says.

The judge defends his action. "A restraining order is not a magic shield. Steven Garcia was a homicidal, suicidal psychopath. A restraining order would not have stopped him."

Asked if he felt guilty, Lemkau said, matter-of-fact, "No. I mean, I made...I made the appropriate decision based on the facts and circumstances that appeared before me at that time."

James Hosking, the deputy D.A. in San Bernardino was so outraged by Lemkau's decision in this case, he decided to run against him when he realized no one else was.

"He showed an absolute callousness, I cannot fathom," says Hosking.

WordPress Tags: BELIEVE,Judge,Lemkau,Baby,Murder,Father,Rights,Childs,Inland,Empire,Dave,Bryan,Wyatt,Garcia,Bernardino,life,decision,bench,custody,death,crime,Superior,Court,Justice,Robert,Katie,Tagle,Steven,tragedy,January,mountain,reports,Bryant,John,Hancock,comments,demeanor,history,Just,crystal,allegation,action,fact,James,Fathers,Critics,balls,himself,didn

My mother and daughter, April 2010. The death of a child is unimaginable for most of us, and for those who have experienced it, surely a tragic, life-altering event.
The Chicago Sun-Times ran an emotional piece this week serving as a reminder that Mother’s Day lacks all sense of celebration for those who’ve lost a child to violence.
Mothers gathered Sunday at St. Sabina Church in Chicago to attend a ceremony unveiling a sculpture by J.S. Kenar depicting “a young girl being menaced by an unformed stick-like human figure with a gun,” ”aimed at reminding all who see it that the battle to save lives is an ongoing one.” 
Violence against children and teens in Chicago has been a major issue in the last year or more; CNN reported in May of 2009 that 36 school children had been murdered, more than one a week during the school year.  At that time, “The Rev. Michael Pfleger… ordered the American flag at St. Sabina Church hung upside-down — a historic sign of distress — to symbolize the growing death toll among the city’s youngsters.”
Other types of loss were noted this Mother’s Day, including a silent vigil in front of the White House by Mothers of Lost Children, which according to CNN’s iReport represents women whose children are in the custody of abusive fathers.  Attendees included “Mildred Muhammad, ex-wife of the DC sniper, and… Katie Tagle and Amy Leichtenberg, both who lost their children in murder-suicides with their abusive fathers.”  And of course mothers who have lost children to illness and accident feel the same grief.
Though women mourning their children have heavy hearts on what should be a holiday, losing a mother in young adulthood can sting badly, too.  New York comedian Mindy Raf, who was 28 when her mother passed away, says she tries to keep a sense of humor about being bombarded with all of the Mother’s Day gift ads that pop up each May.  “It’s hard not to feel left out, or feel like there’s extra salt in the wound on Mother’s Day. Like when you get an e-mail reminding you it’s not too late to save on your flower order. Um, sorry, but you’re wrong ProFlowers. It IS too late to. . .”save 10% on my mother’s day bouquet to Carol.”  Bex Schwartz, a 31-year-old writer/director and pop culture commentator, is still grieving the loss of her mother, who died of cancer last year. Continue reading »
WordPress Tags: Mother,Mourner,daughter,April,death,life,event,Chicago,Times,piece,reminder,celebration,violence,Sabina,Church,ceremony,sculpture,Kenar,girl,human,children,teens,Michael,Pfleger,American,upside,youngsters,White,House,Lost,custody,Attendees,Muhammad,wife,Katie,Tagle,Leichtenberg,accident,grief,Though,York,comedian,Mindy,gift,ProFlowers,bouquet,Carol,Schwartz,writer,director,culture,commentator,cancer,Continue,fathers,hearts,week,women

 

NEW Coercive Control: Review by Diane Post

Despite its great achievements, the domestic violence revolution is stalled, Evan Stark argues, a provocative conclusion he documents by showing that interventions have failed to improve womens long-term safety in relationships or to hold perpetrators accountable.

Stark traces this failure to a startling paradox, that the singular focus on violence against women masks an even more devastating reality. In millions of abusive relationships, men use a largely unidentified form of subjugation that more closely resembles kidnapping or indentured servitude than assault. He calls this pattern coercive control. Drawing on sources that range from FBI statistics and film to dozens of actual cases from his thirty years of experience as an award-winning researcher, advocate, and forensic expert, Stark shows in terrifying detail how men can use coercive control to extend their dominance over time and through social space in ways that subvert womens autonomy, isolate them, and infiltrate the most intimate corners of their lives.

Against this backdrop, Stark analyzes the cases of three women tried for crimes committed in the context of abuse, showing that their reactions are only intelligible when they are reframed as victims of coercive control rather than as battered wives. The story of physical and sexual violence against women has been told often.

But this is the first book to show that most abused women who seek help do so because their rights and liberties have been jeopardized, not because they have been injured. The coercive control model Stark develops resolves three of the most perplexing challenges posed by abuse: why these relationships endure, why abused women develop a profile of problems seen among no other group of assault victims, and why the legal system has failed to win them justice.

Elevating coercive control from a second-class misdemeanor to a human rights violation, Stark explains why law, policy, and advocacy must shift its focus to emphasize how coercive control jeopardizes womens freedom in everyday life. Fiercely argued and eminently readable, Starks work is certain to breathe new life into the domestic violence revolution.

More comments by the author, Dr. Stark.

 Coercive control is a model of abuse that attempts to encompass the range of strategies employed to dominate individual women in personal life. Alternately referred to as coerced persuasion; conjugal, patriarchal or intimate terrorism; emotional or psychological abuse; indirect abuse; or emotional torture, it describes an ongoing pattern of sexual mastery by which abusive partners, almost exclusively males, interweave repeated physical abuse with three equally important tactics: intimidation, isolation, and control.

The easiest way to understand coercive control is to contrast it to the widespread equation of partner abuse with “domestic violence.” Domestic violence laws and most research in the field take an incident-specific focus and weigh the severity of abuse by the level of force used or injury inflicted what I call a “calculus of harms.” In marked contrast, the coercive control model relies on evidence that most battered women who seek help experience coercion as “ongoing” rather than as merely “repeated” and that the main marker of these assaults is their frequency or even their “routine” nature rather than their severity, a fact that gives abuse a “cumulative” effect found in no other assault crime. Physical harm and psychological trauma remain important in the coercive control model. But its theory of harms replaces the violation of physical integrity with an emphasis on violations of “liberty” that entail the deprivation of rights and resources essential to personhood and citizenship. In this view, the psychological language of victimization and dependence is replaced by the political language of domination, resistance, and subordination. . In the coercive control model, what men do to women is less important than what they prevent women from doing for themselves.

In the forensic context where I work, women’s right to use whatever means are available to liberate themselves from coercive control derives from the right afforded to all persons to free themselves from tyranny not from the proximate physical or psychological means used to do this

The domestic violence model emphasizes the familial, cultural, interpersonal and psychological roots of abusive behavior. The coercive control model views the dynamics in abusive relationships from the vantage of the historical struggle for women’s liberation and men’s efforts to preserve their traditional privileges in personal life in the face of this struggle. The incredible strides women have made towards full equality, particularly since the l960’s, have been widely documented. These gains make it increasingly difficult for men to ensure women’s obedience and dependence through violence alone. In the face of this reality, millions of men have expanded their oppressive repertoire to include a range of constraints on women’s autonomy formerly imposed by law, religion, and women’s exclusion from the economic, cultural and political mainstream, in essence trying to construct a “patriarchy in miniature” in each individual relationship, the course of malevolent conduct known as coercive control. Although the aim of this conspicuous form of subjugation is to quash, offset or coopt women’s social gains (taking the money they earn, for instance), this strategy relies for success on the persistent inequalities based on sex that remain, including the huge gap in job opportunities and earnings that continues to advantage men.

Coercive control shares general elements with other capture or course-of-conduct crimes such as kidnapping, stalking, and harassment, including the facts that it is ongoing and its perpetrators use various means to hurt, humiliate, intimidate, exploit, isolate, and dominate their victims. Like hostages, victims of coercive control are frequently deprived of money, food, access to communication or transportation, and other survival resources even as they are cut off from family, friends, and other supports through the process of “isolation.” But unlike other capture crimes, coercive control is personalized, extends through social space as well as over time, and is gendered in that it relies for its impact on women’s vulnerability as women due to sexual inequality. Another difference is its aim. Men deploy coercive control to secure privileges that involve the use of time, control over material resources, access to sex, and personal service. A main means men use to establish control is the microregulation of everyday behaviors associated with stereotypic female roles, such as how women dress, cook, clean, socialize, care for their children, or perform sexually. These dynamics give coercive control a role in sexual politics that distinguishes it from all other crimes.

The coercive control framework does not downplay women’s own use of violence either in fights or to hurt or control men or same-sex partners. Numerous studies in the United States indicate that women of all ages assault male and female partners in large numbers and for many of the same reasons and with much the same consequences as men. However, there is no counterpart in men’s lives to women’s entrapment by men in personal life due to coercive control.

The Origins of the Coercive Control Model

The coercive control model reflects two concurrent realities, that the domestic violence is stalled and that our current predicament can be traced to the gap that separates how abuse is understood and the actual experiences of battered women with abusive men.

Nothing in the coercive control model is meant to discount the enormous gains achieved by the domestic violence revolution since we opened the first battered women’s shelters in the l970’s. Nor, as some critics of our movement have argued, do I want to turn back the clock by retreating from the important protections we have won for women in the legal, criminal justice, health or mental health arenas. Hundreds of thousands of women and children owe the fact that they are alive to the availability of shelters and to criminal justice and legal reforms. What is less clear is whether women as a group are safer today or are less likely to be beaten, controlled, or killed by their partners than they were before the domestic violence revolution began.

Partner violence against women is no longer just life. But anyone with reasonable sympathies and a passing acquaintance with interventions to stem men’s abuse of woman will sense the failure of a range of systems to mount an adequate response, the justice system included. Among the most dramatic facts are these:

• Partner homicides have dropped precipitously. But this change has benefited men far more than women. The number of men killed by female partners has dropped dramatically since we opened the first shelters, particularly among blacks. But the number of women killed by male partners has changed very little. While severe violence by men against women has dropped, the so-called “minor” violence that makes up the infrastructure of coercive control has increased sharply. Women as a group are not appreciably safer today than when the domestic violence revolution began.

• Though domestic violence is an ongoing crime and is almost always complemented by acts of intimidation, humiliation, isolation and control, in most communities abuse is treated as a second-class misdemeanor. While victims repeatedly insist that “violence isn’t the worst part” and mounting evidence points to structural constraints on independence and personhood as the most devastating aspects of abuse, these dimensions remain officially invisible. Millions of men may be arrested each year for domestic violence. But the chance that a perpetrator will go to jail in any given incident is just slightly better than the chance of winning a lottery.

• Batterer intervention programs (BIPs) are widely offered as an alternative to incarceration. But these programs are little more effective than doing nothing at all. Regardless of intervention, the vast majority of perpetrators continue their abuse.

• Shelters are the core response to abused women and so they should remain. But in hundreds of communities, shelters today are indistinguishable from the traditional, paternalistic service system they arose to challenge.

. Perhaps the key fact is that the domestic violence revolution appears to have had little or no effect on coercive control, the pattern evidence shows characterizes between 60-80% of the relationships for which women seek outside assistance. Refocusing on coercive control would be a giant step toward changing this situation. The domestic violence movement began with a vision, to provide women worldwide with a safety net that protected them against harm in personal life. Such a net is in place in most countries. But long-term protection still eludes us.

The limits of current interventions can be directly traced to a failure of vision, not of nerve. Conservatives attack the advocacy movement for exaggerating the nature and extent of abuse. In fact, because of its singular emphasis on physical violence, the prevailing model minimizes both the extent of women’s entrapment by male partners in personal life and its consequences.

Viewing woman abuse through the prism of the incident-specific and injury-based definition of violence has concealed its major components, dynamics, and effects, including the fact that it is neither “domestic” nor primarily about “violence.” Failure to appreciate the multidimensionality of oppression in personal life has been disastrous for abuse victims. Regardless of its chronic nature, courts treat each abuse incident they see as a first offense. Because well over 95% of these incidents are minor, in that the physical assault involved is not injurious, almost no one goes to jail. In custody or divorce cases, because abuse is framed as incident specific or as only involving injurious violence, when women or children present with claims based on the ongoing, multidimensional and cumulative nature of abuse, these are often treated as fabricated. Worse, a protective mother may be blamed when her expressed level of concern or fear is at odds with evidence of assault: in the dependency court, her children may be placed in foster care; in family court, she is alleged to be engaged in alienating her children from the “good enough father.” As calls to the police or visits to the emergency room are repeated over time, the helping response becomes more perfunctory and may actually contribute to making abuse routine, a process called normalization.

Coercive Control

The coercive control model is built on earlier work that has remained marginal to mainstream intervention, a mountain of data that contradicts every major tenet of the domestic violence model; and a growing body of literature documenting the prevalence of tactics to isolate, intimidate and control women in abusive relationships. But its major source is the real-life experiences of perpetrators and victims of abuse

As I’ve suggested, the most important anomalous evidence indicates that violence in abusive relationships is ongoing rather than episodic, that its effects are cumulative rather than incident-specific, and that the harms it causes are more readily explained by these factors than by its severity. Among these harms, the dominant approach identifies two for which it fails to adequately account, the entrapment of victims in relationships where ongoing abuse is virtually inevitable, and the development of a problem profile that distinguishes abused women from every other class of assault victim. The prevailing view is that women stay and develop a range of mental health and behavioral problems because exposure to severe violence induces trauma-related syndromes, such as PTSD or BWS that can disable a woman’s capacity to cope or escape. In fact, however, only a small proportion of abuse victims evidence these syndromes. Most victims of abuse do not develop significant psychological or behavioral problems. Abused women exhibit a range of problems that are unrelated to trauma, the vast majority of assault incidents are too minor to induce trauma, and abuse victims can be entrapped even in the absence of assault. The duration of abusive relationships is made even more problematic when we appreciate that abuse victims are aggressive help seekers and are as likely to be assaulted and even entrapped when they are physically separated as when married or living together. Thus, whatever harms are involved can cross social space as well as extend over time and appear to persist regardless of how women respond. If violence doesn’t account for the entrapment of millions of women in personal life, what does?

The answer is coercive control, a strategy that remains officially invisible despite the fact that it has been in plain sight at least since the earliest shelter residents told us in no uncertain terms that “violence wasn’t the worst part.” Cognitive psychologists in the late 1970s and 1980s tried to capture what these women were experiencing by comparing it to “coercive persuasion,” brainwashing, and other tactics used with hostages, prisoners of war, kidnap victims, and by pimps with prostitutes. Largely ignored by researchers, the understanding of abuse as coercive control was developed in popular literature and incorporated at least implicitly into how various practitioners approached the problem. Working on men’s control skills has provided one template for batterers programs since the founding of Emerge in Boston. Prosecutors are increasingly charging batterers with stalking, or harassment as well as domestic violence, crimes that typically involve a course of intimidating and controlling conduct as well of violence. Scotland and Canada are examples of countries that now define violence against women or abuse from a human rights perspective that includes a range of coercive and controlling behaviors in addition to assault. The most widely used graphic representation of abuse is the Power and Control Wheel introduced by the Domestic Violence Intervention Project (DAIP) in Duluth, Minnesota. Although violence is the hub of the original wheel, its spokes depict isolation, economic control, emotional and sexual abuse, and other facets of coercive control. This attention is merited. The several dozen studies that attempt to measure control and psychological abuse suggest that victims have been subjected to multiple control tactics, among which the denial of money, the monitoring of time, and restricted mobility and communication are prominent.

Despite these inroads, coercive control remains marginal to mainstream thinking. It is rarely acknowledged in policy circles, has had almost no impact on domestic violence policing or criminal law, and commands no special funding. Although providers and advocates may ask about elements of coercive control, I know of no programs or interventions that address it. Everyone acknowledges that domestic violence is about power and control. But we have yet to incorporate this truism into our understanding of abuse or our response.

The major source for the model of coercive control are the victims and perpetrators of abuse with whom I and others have worked. The women in my practice have repeatedly made clear that the most serious harms they have suffered involve how their partners have kept them from fulfilling their life projects by appropriating their resources; undermining their social support; subverting their rights to privacy, self-respect, and autonomy; and depriving them of substantive equality. This is the evidence on which I base my claim that coercive control is a liberty crime. Preventing a substantial group of women from freely applying their agency in economic and political life obstructs overall social development .

The new model is rooted in the same tenets that gave birth to the battered women’s movement—that the abuse of women in personal life is inextricably bound up with their standing in the larger society and therefore that women’s entrapment in their personal lives can be significantly reduced only if sexual discrimination is addressed simultaneously. In the early shelters, the interrelatedness of these tenets was grounded in the practice of empowerment, whereby the suffering of individual victims was mollified by mobilizing their collective power to help one another and change the institutional structures that caused and perpetuated women’s second-class status, an example of women doing for themselves. Our challenge is to resurrect this collective practice and broaden its political focus to the sources of coercive control.

.

Control: Invisible in Plain Sight

The victims and perpetrators of coercive control are easily identified. Many of the rights violated in battering are so fundamental to the conduct of everyday life that is hard to conceive of meaningful human existence without them. How is it possible then that it has attracted so little attention?

I have already pointed to the prominence of the domestic violence model. Another explanation is the compelling nature of violence. Once injury became the major medium for presenting abuse, its sights and sounds were so dramatic that other experiences seemed muted by comparison. The radical feminists who led the fight against rape and pornography also inadvertently contributed to the invisibility of coercive control. Placing so much political currency on violence against women as the ultimate weapon in men’s arsenal made it a surrogate for male domination rather than merely one of its means. It was a short step to replacing the political discussions of women’s liberation with the talks of “victims” and “perpetrators.” Another explanation for why coercive control has had such little impact is that no one knows what to do about it.

The entrapment of women in personal life is also hard to discern because many of the rights it violates are so basic—so much a part of the taken-for-granted fabric of the everyday lives we lead as adults, and so embedded in female behaviors that are constrained by their normative consignment to women—that their abridgement passes largely without notice. Among my clients are women who had to answer the phone by the third ring, record every penny they spent, vacuum “till you can see the lines,” and dress, walk, cook, talk, and make love in specific ways and not in others, always with the “or else” proviso hanging over their heads. What status should we accord to a woman’s right to have toilet paper in the downstairs bathroom or to the right of a woman I will call Laura who had to beep in periodically so her boyfriend would know her whereabouts or who could not go to the gym without being beeped home? Given the prominence of physical bruising, how can we take these little indignities seriously or appreciate that they comprise the heart of a hostage-like syndrome against which the slap, punch, or kick pale in significance? Most people take it for granted that normal, healthy adults determine their own sleep patterns or how they drive or laugh or make love. The first women who used our home as her safe house described her partner a tyrant. We thought she was speaking metaphorically.

Violence is easy to understand. But the deprivations that come packaged in coercive control are no more a part of my personal life than they are of most men’s. This is true both literally, because many of the regulations involved in coercive control target behaviors that are identified with the female role, and figuratively, because it is hard for me to conceive of a situation outside of prison, a mental hospital, or a POW camp where another adult would control or even care to control my everyday routines.

What is taken from the women whose stories I hear almost daily—and what some victims use violence to restore—is the capacity for independent decision making in the areas by which we distinguish adults from children and free citizens from indentured servants. Coercive control entails a malevolent course of conduct that subordinates women to an alien will by violating their physical integrity (domestic violence), denying them respect and autonomy (intimidation), depriving them of social connectedness (isolation), and appropriating or denying them access to the resources required for personhood and citizenship (control). Nothing men experience in the normal course of their everyday lives resembles this conspicuous form of subjugation.

Some of the rights batterers deny to women are already protected in the public sphere, such as the rights to physical integrity and property. In these instances, law is challenged to extend protections to personal life. But most of the harms involved in coercive control are gender-specific infringements of adult autonomy that have no counterpart in public life and are currently invisible to the law. The combination of these big and little indignities best explains why women suffer and respond as they do in abusive relationships, including why so many women become entrapped, why some battered women kill their partners, why they themselves may be killed, or why they are prone to develop a range of psychosocial problems and exhibit behaviors or commit a range of acts that are contrary to their nature or to basic common sense or decency.

In the late 1970s, we reached into the shadows to retrieve physical abuse from the canon of “just life.” Now it appears, we did not reach nearly far enough.

Evan Stark

Eds203@juno.com

Parenting News Network™

 

Bizarre quote by abuse denier Richard Gardner who promoted child custody theories such as Parental Alienation that cover up child abuse

Linda Marie Sacks of Volusia County was denied a fair hearing and was not allowed to have an expert witness testify again on Tuesday, April 20, 2010. This is one more example of how women and children are treated in family court. Mothers are repeatedly denied due process when trying to submit evidence of abuse. Wealthy fathers use aggressive attorneys who do mostly whatever they want in court and often get away with it. One of this father’s lawyers is such good friends with Judge Shawn Briese that one time years ago Judge Briese said that he needed to recuse himself due to the relationship. When the mother’s legal representation accepted the recusal, Judge Briese then unrecused himself.

Besides his lawyers, this father had involved some of the most powerful psychologists in Florida to also repeat his version of events and use the old victim blaming scam. Psychologist Deborah Day had her own business associate Dr. Alan Grieco do the evaluation to claim that this father’s sexual behavior was within “normal limits” as if a paper and pencil test can tell whether or not sexual abuse actually occurred. No paper and pencil test can give this information. The only use that these psychologists have is to obscure the evidence that the children have made vivid disclosures as well as the father’s own admission to certain inappropriate behaviors such as wiping down the vaginas of school age girls.

From the website of Psychological Affiliates, a group of mental health professionals established by Deborah O. Day, Psy.D.

http://psychologicalaffiliates.com/pa-staff-alan-grieco.asp

Dr. Grieco conducts psychological and psychosexual evaluations (See Services For More Information), often at the request of a defense attorney whose client has been accused of a sexual offense.  He is also available for courtroom testimony.

Since when would a psychologist who advertises excusing away sexual abuse be appropriate to have opining regarding the well-being of children? The psychologists that the father wanted are allowed submit opinions, but an expert trying to present actual evidence is not allowed to speak in Judge Shawn Briese’s courtroom. Where is the concern for these “MOTHERLESS” children?

PRESS RELEASE April 21, 2010

Daytona Beach – Despite a state law requiring judges to hear any evidence of child abuse, a Volusia County Judge refused to allow the testimony of a Melbourne psychologist ready to tell the court that she believes two Ormond Beach teens are victims of child sexual abuse.

Clinical Psychologist Dr. Kathy Pearce was subpoenaed to court yesterday for a scheduled custody hearing concerning the teens before Volusia County Judge Shawn L. Briese. But the hearing, which began Monday, was again postponed after Briese ruled the mother must first submit to a deposition by opposing council. “This is the third time I’ve tried to testify before this judge and he does not let me,” said Pearce, who has often been an expert witness in child sexual abuse cases.

The mother, pro se litigant Linda Marie Sacks, subpoenaed Pearce for a hearing, scheduled six months ago, to reunite with her children. But Judge Briese changed his mind Monday morning about allowing the hearing and instead ruled the mother must first submit to a deposition by the father’s attorneys. For the past three years Sacks has had only two hours a month of supervised visitations with her daughters.

Sacks filed for a divorce in 2004 after her daughters began acting out sexually. The eldest daughter, at age 8, drew a picture of the father as an erect penis during a therapy session and made an outcry during Sunday School that she had performed a sex act on her father. Sacks has spent six years in the family court trying unsuccessfully to protect to her daughters.

On Tuesday 4/20/10, Sacks filed a pro se emergency motion requesting the judge listen to Pearce’s testimony concerning the children’s safety during her originally scheduled hearing time.

Pearce planned to testify about case notes from the children’s therapist’s file that Pearce reviewed for the first time Monday. “I had seen the summary of her (the therapist’s) files but I had never seen her actual notes,” Pearce said. “There was much more there than I ever knew.”

Pearce said she immediately called Florida’s sexual abuse hotline.”I’m required to by law,” said Pearce, noting that the state officials accepted the report. “She told me a DCF investigation would begin immediately.”

About four years ago, Pearce said she heard Briese say from the bench that the sexual abuse against Sacks children must not be true because none of the professionals reported the abuse. “I thought gee, he’s misinformed,” Pearce said. “I’ve been trying to set the record straight with this judge ever since without success.”

Florida Custody Laws 61.13 (2)(b)1. states that all judges “shall consider evidence of domestic violence or child abuse as evidence of detriment to the child” and 61.13 (3) “the best interests of the child shall include an evaluation of all of the factors affecting the welfare and interests of the child including, but not limited to: (1) evidence of domestic violence or child abuse.

But, during the 7-minute hearing, Briese refused to hear the testimony, refused the mother’s emergency motion to allow the witness to testify or to allow the scheduled hearing on the mother’s motion for unsupervised visitation and total contact to minor children to take place.

Judge Briese told the mother until she is deposed, she will not be allowed to present her case on being reunited with her daughters or have any witness testify regarding documented abuse regarding her daughters and their safety. The next scheduled hearing is to continue at 8:30 a.m. April 27, 2010 and Sacks plans to in the courtroom and wonders when will she ever have a fair hearing and will justice ever prevail for children.

For more information please contact:

KATHLEEN RUSSELL

KATHLEEN RUSSELL CONSULTING

1346 4th Street San Rafael, CA 94901

Cell 415.250.1180

Main415.459.9211

Fax 415.459.9210

Telling Stories, Moving Mountains

www.kathleenrussell.com

Kathleen Russell

415.250.1180

Center for Judicial Excellence

1206 3rd Street

San Rafael, CA 94901

www.CenterforJudicialExcellence. org

 

By Barry Goldstein

For many years, protective mothers have complained about a broken custody court system giving custody to abusive fathers. The courts dismissed the complaints by saying they came from disgruntled litigants. Now, a new book based on multi-disciplinary research has confirmed that common mistakes in the custody courts have resulted in thousands of children being forced to live with abusers. Domestic Violence, Abuse and Child Custody: Legal Strategies and Policy Issues, co-edited by Dr. Mo Therese Hannah and Barry Goldstein includes chapters by over 25 of the leading experts in domestic violence and custody in the U.S. and Canada including judges, lawyers, psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, journalists and domestic violence advocates. Although the writers come from different disciplines and professional experience, there is remarkable agreement that the courts’ failure to use up-to-date research is responsible for placing children at risk and undermining laws designed to prevent domestic violence.

The custody court system developed practices to respond to domestic violence allegations over thirty years ago at a time when there was no research. The courts relied on popular assumptions such as the belief domestic violence was caused by mental illness, substance abuse and the victims’ behavior. They assumed domestic violence only involved physical abuse and children were unaffected unless directly assaulted. All of these and many other assumptions relied on by the courts have proven wrong, but the court continues to use outdated and discredited practices. Even worse, after hearing misinformation constantly repeated for over thirty years the myths and stereotypes are so deeply ingrained that courts often don’t believe accurate information based upon up-to-date research because it is so different from what they have heard repeated their entire professional careers. Hopefully by putting all the research together in one volume, the book will force the courts to take a fresh look at practices that have worked so poorly for children.

Most cases are settled more or less amicably. The problem is with the 3.8% of contested custody cases that continue to trial and usually far beyond. The courts think of these as "high conflict" cases and literally they are, but 90% of these cases involve abusive fathers which is why they can’t be settled. Male supremacist groups have developed an unspeakably cruel tactic of encouraging abusers to go after the children as a way to pressure the mother to return, punish her for leaving and avoid child support. As a result, the courts repeatedly see cases in which fathers who had little involvement with the children before the separation suddenly seeking custody, but the court system has been slow to recognize the tactic or respond to it. Judges have constantly been told that children do better with both parents in their lives but not that this is untrue if one of the parents is abusive.

In the typical case, the mother is the primary parent. She complains about the father’s abuse and he counters by claiming alienation. Primary attachment refers to the parent who does most of the child care in the first couple of years of a child’s life. If the child is separated from their primary attachment figure, the child is more likely to commit suicide, suffer depression, have low self-esteem and other harmful attributes. Children who witness domestic violence are more likely to engage in a wide range of dysfunctional behaviors when they are older and their developmental progress is interfered with. On the other hand, it is common even in intact families for parents to make negative statements about the other parent and there is no research that alienation causes long-term harm to children.

At the same time, in our still sexist society, mothers continue to do most of the child care so claims of primary attachment are virtually always true and often not contested by the father. Contrary to popular myths, women rarely make false allegations of abuse so that at least 98% of a mother’s allegations of abuse in custody cases are accurate. Fathers on the other hand, are 16 times more likely to make false allegations in contested custody cases than mothers. This is not because women are so much more honest, but that most fathers in custody cases are abusers using the children to maintain control of their ex-partner and they seem to believe they are entitled to use any tactics to win custody.

Accordingly most allegations of alienation by fathers in custody cases are false. In other words the allegations by the mothers have the most consequences for the children and are most likely to be true, but the courts are paying more attention to the allegations by the fathers that are likely to be false and of little consequence to the children.

The book can be used by mothers and their attorneys to challenge the common mistakes made in domestic violence cases. One of the big problems is that because of the original mistaken assumption that domestic violence is caused by mental health or substance abuse issues, the courts have relied on mental health professionals who have little or no understanding or training in domestic violence. They rarely have any familiarity with up-to-date research and instead frequently rely on myths and stereotypes.

Although professional ethics require psychologists and psychiatrists to consult with an expert if they are handling a case involving an issue in which they lack expertise, evaluators and other court professionals routinely ignore this requirement by pretending they have expertise even with only an hour or two of training.

Evaluators often rely on psychological tests to create the illusion of a scientific basis for their opinions. These tests were developed for a population very different from the parents seen in custody court. When advocates for mothers tell courts that most abusers tend to be manipulative or mothers rarely make deliberately false allegations they respond by saying they are judging THIS case and cannot rely on probabilities. Under the best of circumstances the psychological tests are accurate between 55-65% of the time. So what happens if the mother is part of the 35-45% for which it is not accurate? Even worse factors like domestic violence or the pressure of going through a contested custody case reduce the accuracy significantly.

Furthermore, many of the tests are gender biased and criticize women but not men for the same responses. Of course the evaluators rarely inform courts of this information and most attorneys don’t know enough to raise these issues.

A critical problem that does not receive the attention it deserves is that judges and the professionals they rely on repeatedly fail to recognize domestic violence because they don’t know what to look for. Judge Mike Brigner wrote a chapter for the book in which he discusses his training of judges about domestic violence. They constantly ask him what to do about women who are lying. When he asks what they mean they refer to women who return to their abuser, seek protective orders, but don’t follow-up or don’t have police or medical reports after alleged assaults. In reality battered mothers do all these things for safety and other good reasons, but when ignorant professionals use this to discredit allegations of abuse, they have no chance to get it right.

Another common example is when judges, lawyers or evaluators watch fathers interact with the children. If the children show no fear, it convinces these professionals that the abuse allegations must be false. What the children understand is that their father would never hurt them in front of witnesses, especially someone he is trying to impress and in fact they could be punished if they showed fear. At the same time the mental health professionals are discrediting valid allegations based on information that is not probative, they tend to look only for physical abuse and miss many other domestic violence tactics that demonstrate the control and coercion he practices.

The mistaken practices give the courts little chance to recognize the father’s abuse, but it is even worse than that. The mental health professionals often use their failure to recognize domestic violence as an excuse to pathologize the mother. She is often called delusional or paranoid because she believes something they missed. This or the assumption she is deliberately trying to interfere with the father’s relationship with the children often results in extreme outcomes in which the mother is given supervised or no visitation based on the court’s mistakes.

In her chapter on retaliation and manipulation, Joan Zorza says that in light of the frequency in which courts fail to recognize domestic violence they should avoid retaliating or penalizing mothers who continue to believe the allegations of abuse after the court finds against them. This recommendation can be used to ask courts to modify orders with extreme results when there is no proof the mother is unsafe.

Some child protective agencies have participated in programs in which they work with the local domestic violence agency. The train each other and when there is a case with possible domestic violence issues, the child protective caseworkers consult with domestic violence advocates. This helps them recognize and respond more appropriately to domestic violence cases. This should be considered best practices and needs to be expanded to the custody courts.

The custody courts do a particularly bad job of responding to allegations of sexual abuse. By the time a child reaches the age of 18, one-third of the girls and one-sixth of the boys have been sexually abused. The myth is that rape and sexual abuse are mostly committed by strangers but in fact 83% of the time it is someone they know, often the father. Courts don’t want to believe a father could do something so heinous especially if he is successful in other parts of his life. Accordingly a very high percentage of sexual abuse allegations result in custody to the alleged abuser.

One of the problems is that sexual abuse of children is very hard to prove. Often there is no physical evidence particularly if the child does not reveal it immediately. Younger children may not have the language to describe what was done to them and older children may have been threatened or don’t want someone they love to get in trouble. Few of the evaluators relied on by courts have expertise in child sexual abuse. What is a mother supposed to do when the child’s behavior or other clues suggest sexual abuse? If she does nothing she is placing the safety and well-being of her child at risk, but if she asks for an investigation she can lose custody.

We have seen many cases in which a child acts out because the father violated the child’s boundaries such as by sleeping with the child. The father did not inappropriately touch the child. The issue could easily be handled by instructing the father to change his routine and it would be totally safe for the father to continue with normal visitation. This would be a win-win situation, but instead courts and the unqualified professionals they rely on assume the mother is making deliberately false allegations and so separate the child from their primary attachment figure and deny the child a relationship with her.

The book also takes on Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) which is one of the major reasons courts get so many cases wrong. Dr. Paul Fink past president of the American Psychiatric Association wrote a chapter about PAS and Nancy Erickson who is an attorney and law professor who went back to school to become a psychologist wrote about how to challenge false allegations of PAS. Richard Gardner concocted PAS based on his belief system which included many statements to the effect that sex between adults and children is appropriate. Many of his quotations are in the chapter and can be cited to judges who presumably will not want to be associated with such behavior.

There is no scientific basis to PAS and it is not recognized by any reputable professional organization. It is based on the myth that most allegations of abuse are false. Psychologists are starting to lose their licenses for using PAS because they are in effect diagnosing something that does not exist. As PAS has become more discredited, abusers and the professionals they pay to support them have started using PAS by other names such as parental alienation or just alienation. It the idea is to assume allegations of abuse must be wrong or to justify giving custody to the alleged abuser and supervised or no visitation to the protective mothers they are using the discredited PAS by another name.

Professor Garland Waller wrote a chapter about the failure of the media to cover the crisis in the custody court system. She writes about the tipping point when enough information reaches the public so that they will no longer tolerate frequent court mistakes that place children in jeopardy. We believe this book can move us towards the tipping point and hope those committed to ending the injustice in the custody court system will consider some of the following actions to help us reach the tipping point.

1. Inform the courts in your area about this book. They can find additional information atwww.domesticviolenceabuseandchildcustody.com Ask the courts to use the research in the book to train judges and other court personnel and to reform practices that the research demonstrates are working poorly for children.

2. Contact your local media to cover the crisis in the custody court system by using the research in the book to understand the harm the courts are doing to children. If you want to seek publicity for your case use the book to show the context and national problem and then your case illustrates how it played out in a local case. When there are local domestic violence stories bring the information in the book to the reporters.

3. If you have local colleges, universities or law schools in the area, ask them to incorporate the research from the book into the curriculum and to sponsor programs about the custody courts based on this research.

4. Ask local and college libraries to obtain a copy of the book. This would be particularly helpful for protective mothers who cannot afford to purchase the book.

5. Cite the book in court cases and appeals. Use the research to challenge unqualified evaluators and other court professionals and to obtain experts who can put this research into evidence.

6. Use the book to inform legislators of the problems in the court. Ask them to hold hearings and sponsor legislation to protect children and prevent abuse. We will soon have legislative proposals available based on the research in the book.

7. Work together with domestic violence agencies, women’s groups and anyone else sympathetic to the cause.

8. Come up with your own ideas. We cannot tolerate a system that continues to place children in jeopardy because they fail to use the up-to-date research now available.

Claudine Dombrowski Photos of Abuse | Stop Family Violence There is a crisis in our nation’s family courts. Judges are awarding child custody to abusers and pedophiles and punishing the safe parent who tries to … As you view these photos keep in mind that the court awarded FULL CUSTODY of their daughter to the[more...]

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by R. Dianne Bartlow ·

“The dirtiest little secret in America” is that family courts, in deciding custody, often wreak devastation upon mothers and children.

So argue Mo Therese Hannah and Barry Goldstein, editors of the new anthology Domestic Violence, Abuse, and Child Custody, which brings to light what many familiar with the family court system have long known: Designed to dispense justice, the system has become instead “an instrument of oppression,” particularly in cases involving domestic violence.

To find a chilling example of what the editors mean, we need look no further than the recent murder of infant Wyatt Garcia,reported in the Daily Beast:

Wyatt Garcia was born in April 2009. Nine months later, he was shot and killed by his father, who then turned the gun on himself.

It might have turned out differently—if a family-court judge had listened to Wyatt’s mother.

Wyatt’s mother, Katie Tagle, had previously filed three motions in family court for an order of protection against the baby’s father, Stephen Garcia, alleging that he had physically assaulted her and harassed her and her family. Garcia was apparently jealous that she was dating again. In the last motion, Tagle charged that Garcia “had threatened to kill her and their baby.”

The San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Robert Lemkau chose to believe Garcia’s denials over the evidence supplied by Tagle–which included emails, text messages, and voice messages, according to the Daily Beast. Tagle says she was treated like a “criminal” and “complaining woman.”

One goal of Hannah and Goldstein’s book is to convince judges, attorneys, and others who work in the court system that all forms of abusive behavior, whether physical, verbal, financial or legal, cause harm to women and children. On the legal side, men who abuse their female intimate partners have successfully used strategies such as false accusations, harassment, manipulation, and intimidation to win custody while often driving their victims into poverty. According to contributing author and lawyer Joan Zorza:

Abusive men not only harass their victims, many harass their partners’ lawyers and manipulate those in and connected with the court system who are supposed to insure that children are placed with their better parent in a safe, nurturing environment.

This makes it all the stranger that about half of the time batterers win custody in family courts. They are actually more likely to win custody than men who do not abuse their partners, according to Zorza. Over the past nine months, 75 children have been murdered by abusive fathers who used custody battles to get even with the mothers, according to the Daily Beast.

Yet Katie Tagle’s dismissive treatment by family courts is all-too-familiar. While there has been a growing awareness over the last 30 years of the harm domestic violence causes, courts are more and more ignoring women’s allegations of domestic violence and holding them responsible for their own abuse. This is largely due to courts’ reliance upon mental health experts who have inadequate training in intimate violence or child sexual abuse and who are easily manipulated by batterers.

Gender bias plays a large role in this backlash, according to the editors:

Compared to men, women are disbelieved more often, held to much higher standards, and judged far more punitively for failings such as drinking, use of drugs, adultery, or hostility to their partners. …Such behaviors are readily seen as grounds for giving the father custody.

Hannah and Goldstein hope to also expose two particularly harmful court practices that have evolved over the last several decades: Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), and “friendly parent” statutes. PAS provides a handy–and utterly without basis–refutation to incest and abuse claims by blaming mothers for any hostility that the children feel towards their fathers, maintaining that children love and respect their fathers unless a “poisonous” mother has convinced them otherwise. Even alleged incest and violence are not deemed reason enough for children to independently turn against their fathers.

Since PAS has been deemed by the American Psychological Association to have no scientific backing, at least 32 states have incorporated the milder sounding “friendly parent” concept into their custody laws. This gives custody to the parent who will encourage the child to have more contact and a better relationship with the other parent. Often mothers are hurt by the friendly parent concept, since they can be deemed “unfriendly” for saying anything against the father, including alleging abuse. Zorza says that, ironically enough:

The unfriendly behavior of noncustodial parents (usually the father), such as not paying child support, physically or verbally abusing the mother, or stalking her, is not considered as meeting the definition of unfriendly.

With such an approach, Zorza says, family violence is discounted, and abusers are empowered while battered women are disempowered. Ultimately, children are harmed.

Domestic Violence, Abuse, and Child Custody will be instructive for policymakers, those working in the family justice system, and members of the media–which the authors say has by-and-large failed to expose custody court scandals. But it is a must-read for any mother involved in a child custody battle, and especially for mothers trying get free from an abusive relationship.

by Elizabeth Black ·Ms.Magazine

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Abused Women in Maryland Aren’t Lying

This spring, the Maryland legislature killed a bill that would have brought Maryland’s restraining order policies into line with every other state in the union. Remarkably, in Maryland, a stalking victim seeking help is required to prove her case with “clear and convincing” evidence, a higher standard than “preponderance of the evidence,” which is the universal standard for civil dispute.

There can be only one reason for this absurd requirement: that the Maryland legislators who voted for the bill, listed here, believe that women who testify that they’ve been abused are less credible than men who deny being abusers. That’s not a level playing field, and it’s an absolutely unacceptable attitude for a legislator to hold.

But it’s no mystery where they’re getting this idea. Father’s and men’s rights activists have long promoted the myth that false allegations of domestic violence are rampant, especially in custody cases, and that women frequently file for protective orders in order to gain an upper hand in court. The group Fathers and Families in particular has promoted fathers’ rights propaganda around the country, and has directly targeted legislators. When Maryland Rep. Luis Simmons stated in an interview that he believed it only fair to expunge records of those who had been given a Temporary Restraining Order that didn’t lead to a final order (because a judge dismissed or denied it), Fathers and Families encouraged its supporters to contact Simmons to applaud his statement.

In fact, bona fide false allegations of domestic violence are rare. Dr. Michael Flood wrote in his paper “Fact Sheet #2: The Myth Of Women False Accusation Of Domestic Violence And Misuse Of Protective Orders” that most abused women are reluctant to take out restraining orders:

The risk of domestic violence increases at the time of separation … Women living with domestic violence often do not take out protection orders and do so only as a last resort … Protection orders provide an effective means of reducing women’s vulnerability to violence.

It is only when women experience more severe forms of violence, such as choking, beating, or being shot at, that they are more likely to take out a protective order.

As experts Rita Smith and Pamela Coukos of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violencewrote in an article for the peer-reviewed Judges Journal:

Although both common sense and the prevailing legal standard dictate careful consideration of evidence in domestic or family violence when determining custody, allegations of domestic violence and/or child sexual abuse made during a divorce or custody proceeding are not always taken seriously. These allegations often are wrongly perceived as false because they are asserted in a contentious environment and because of the widespread myth that parents fabricate domestic violence and child abuse allegations in order to gain an advantage in court. When combined with the misuse of psychological syndrome evidence, the perception that a parent has fabricated the allegations often results in unfair retribution against the reporting protective parent.

Furthermore, obtaining a restraining order does not guarantee that an abused woman will be able to gain custody of her children or see her abuse taken seriously. According to Attorney Elizabeth Kates, citing Zorza, Dore, and Rosen:

Research does not substantiate this popular myth [that women frequently lie about domestic violence]. However, research does substantiate that there is no tactical advantage to making domestic violence claims. Fathers are more likely to get visitation when domestic violence is alleged, even in states with custody presumptions enacted to protect battered women. Abusive fathers are more likely to obtain primary custody when domestic violence is present, alleged or not.

More evidence that women don’t lie comes from a 1994 study of a Massachusetts database tracking restraining orders (RO’s):

[T]he high frequency with which RO’s are issued might lead some skeptics to assume that these orders are granted too easily for minor offenses and almost any man is at risk of being a defendant. The data from the new RO database in Massachusetts reflect otherwise. Men against whom RO’s have been used are clearly not a random draw from the population. They are likely to have a criminal history, often reflective of violent behavior toward others.

Thus, it simply isn’t true that women are likely to lodge false charges of child abuse or battering against their spouses in an effort to manipulate or retaliate–the rate of false reports in these circumstances is no greater than for other crimes.

This research and testimony needs to get out there to combat men’s and father’s rights group propaganda, so legislators are not influenced by untruths. To do anything less places an unfair burden of proof on abused women.

 

“Time’s Up!”

Courts Awarding Custody to Abusers and Domestic Violence Homicides Is There a Connection?

By Barry Goldstein

The research establishing that the custody court system is broken and has a pattern of mishandling domestic violence cases is now overwhelming.  The new book, DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, ABUSE and CHILD CUSTODY, I co-edited with Dr. Mo Therese Hannah brings all the most up-to-date research together in one place.  It includes a multi-disciplinary review of the relevant professional fields by the leading experts in the US and Canada.  The meticulous citations provide overwhelming proof that common mistakes and the use of myths, stereotypes and gender bias have resulted in thousands of children being sent to live with abusers.  At the same time recent statistics about domestic violence homicide confirm an increase in the murder rate after many years of reductions.  Many have been quick to assume the increase is caused by the poor economy, but in this article, I want to look at what, if any role the problems in the custody court system are having on domestic violence homicides.

Lack of Research on Success of Court Outcomes

The court system operates upon the assumption that once a case is decided, the facts are established and the outcome is accurate.  This assumption may have contributed to the failure to seek research on the validity of court decisions in domestic violence custody cases.  It certainly has contributed to a common problem we see that once a court makes a mistake in a domestic violence case there is a pattern of courts failing to use new information to correct the initial errors made by judges and other court professionals.

The criminal court system has received substantial criticism as an increasing number of defendants convicted of murder, some of whom were sentenced to death were later found to be innocent.  The improvement of scientific tests for DNA and other new evidence has helped courts correct errors after homicide convictions.  In context, such wrong convictions appear to be very rare, but are extremely serious because it results in adults losing the rest of their lives.

In contrast, a large majority of domestic violence custody cases are wrongly decided with abusive fathers receiving custody or joint custody at least 70% of the time in contested custody cases.  Even when the safe parent receives custody, the court usually fails to protect the children from unsupervised visitation with the abuser.  In contrast to murder convictions that affect defendant’s adult lives, the wrong decisions in custody cases often destroy or damage children’s entire lives.

Court’s started relying on mental health professionals in domestic violence custody cases at a time when there was no research and many believed domestic violence was caused by mental health problems, substance abuse and the victim’s behavior.  Although all of these assumptions proved wrong, the courts continue to rely on mental health professionals even when there are no legitimate mental health issues in the case.  These professionals rarely are familiar with up-to-date research and often substitute their personal beliefs, biases, myths and stereotypes for the scientific research now available.  Many use a family systems approach which is totally inappropriate in domestic violence cases.  These mistakes lead to the minimization of the importance of domestic violence and unsafe outcomes.

If evaluations had any validity, the “experts” would be able to tell the court how the approaches used in a particular case had worked in other cases.  In fact there is virtually no such research.  Only in the custody courts can “experts” routinely give their opinions when there is no research to support them.  In contrast we have solid research about the harm of taking children from their primary attachment figure or forcing them to live with abusers.  There is no such research about “alienation” which courts tend to pay much more attention to even though the effects on children are minimal or non-existent.  The closest thing we have to research about custody outcomes are the Courageous Kids.  These are children who were sent to live with alleged abusers and have now aged out of the custody order.  The children are now young adults  and describe disastrous experiences as a result of the common practices used in the custody courts.

Similarly, the court has not commissioned studies to see how its decisions in domestic violence custody cases have worked out.  Anecdotally we have seen many cases in which fathers courts found safe were later convicted or otherwise proven to have engaged in physical assault and sexual abuse.  We have also seen many bad outcomes for children forced to live with alleged abusers.  I strongly recommend systematic studies of the outcomes of child custody decisions.

Failure to Make Children’s Safety the First Priority

Abusers tend to be extremely manipulative and they have had great success in misleading the courts, legislatures and media.  The men who control “fathers’ rights groups are extremists whose goals include eliminating child support, repealing domestic violence laws and in some cases permitting sex between adults and children.  Obviously, if they said this to courts, they would get nowhere.  Instead they disguise their goals by seeking seemingly fair objectives like “shared custody” “friendly parent” protections and equal treatment of parents.  Who could object to such reasonable requests?

The abusers are saying that when parents come to court for custody and visitation the parents should be treated equally regardless of the past parenting, parenting skills or history of abuse. Of course they don’t mention the last part.  Imagine if a group demanded that everyone receive equal income regardless of their contributions to increasing society’s resources.  Liberals and Conservatives would deride such a demand as communism.  If we would not be willing to divide money without consideration of contribution, why would anyone take seriously a proposal to divide something so much more precious, our children, without consideration of the contributions the parents made to the well-being of the children before coming to court?

In the new book, we present our information based upon our belief that safety of children should be the first priority and arrangements that give children the best chance to reach their potential should be the next priority.  The public would be shocked that this is not the priority in the present custody court system.  Most states use the best interest of the child standard for custody and visitation decisions, but this tends to be extremely subjective.  Even when legislation favors safety issues, we have found courts often pay more attention to less important factors like parties’ income, remarriage and “friendly parent” provisions.  In fact in states that have mandated friendly parent consideration, children are even more likely to be sent to live with abusers.

Compounding the failure of legislatures and courts to demand safety be the highest priority in custody cases, judges and the professionals they rely on rarely have the training they need to recognize domestic violence or child abuse.  Judge Mike Brigner frequently trains other judges about domestic violence.  In his chapter for the book, he describes how judges often ask him what to do about women who are lying.  When asked what they mean, they refer to women who return to their abuser, withdraw petitions for a protective order, fail to make police complaints or have hospital records.  In fact none of this is probative as battered women often act this way for safety and other reasons particularly when they are still living with their abuser.   Similarly many professionals observe fathers and children interact and if the children show no fear they believe this proves the allegations of abuse are false.  What the children understand is that their father will not hurt them with witnesses present, particularly ones he is trying to impress.  In fact they could be punished if they showed fear.

Male supremacist groups often refer to sexual abuse allegations as the “atomic bomb” of child custody.  In reality when sexual abuse is alleged, even when strong evidence supports the allegation, the alleged abuser usually wins custody.  In research unrelated to custody, it is well established that by the time children reach the age of 18, one-third of the girls and one-sixth of the boys have been sexually abused.  Although the stereotypical rapist is a stranger in a raincoat, most rape and sexual abuse is committed by someone the victim knows, often the father.  Furthermore children rarely lie about sexual abuse because it is so painful and embarrassing.  Nevertheless, custody courts have proven to be so hostile to allegations of sexual abuse that attorneys regularly discourage these charges because they usually work against the protective mother.  Courts are reluctant to believe a father could do something so heinous, particularly if the father is successful in other parts of his life.

With courts relying on inadequately trained professionals who quickly discount valid abuse complaints based on information that is not probative, there is little chance for them to recognize abuse and therefore be able to protect children.  The research bears this out with courts mishandling contested custody cases (most of which involve abusive fathers) and sending thousands of children to live with abusers.

Connection Between Court Mistakes and Increased Homicide Rate

The media has done a poor job of covering the crisis in the custody court system and particularly the pattern of mistakes that result in thousands of children forced to live with abusers.  Local media cover tragedies involving murders and murder-suicides of family members, but little effort is made to look at the patterns of these tragedies.  On February 11, 2010, the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Center for Judicial Excellence issued a press release about two crimes in California where divorcing dads killed eight and nine-month-old babies after the courts ordered visitation despite concerns for the babies’ safety.  Those who follow this issue see frequent stories of abusive fathers killing children, partners and themselves.  Most of the time there is a connection to custody and divorce proceedings, but the media usually fails to emphasize these causes.  The Dastardly Dads blog chronicles these painful cases and in doing so makes it easy to see the patterns of court practices that lead to these tragedies.  Judges and the court professionals they rely on are very aware of research that children do better with both parents in their lives, but often give less consideration to the research that this is not true if one of the parents is abusive.

I want to be careful here because a lot of misinformation has entered the public debate out of ignorance and bias.  We have seen numerous flawed studies reported in the media purporting to find women abuse men with similar frequency as men abuse women.  Closer review of these studies demonstrate a failure to consider the severity of the assault, seriousness of injury, purpose such as self-defense, context (as part of a pattern of controlling behavior) and sexual abuse which is overwhelmingly committed by men. We don’t have definitive research to determine what percentage of domestic violence homicides and child murders are caused by the crisis in the custody court system, but there is research beyond the anecdotal evidence of individual murders and murder-suicides.

Although we know there have been many fathers who used access provided by court orders or the failure of courts to restrain his access, how do we know they would not have killed anyway?  This is similar to issues surrounding protective orders.  Some people say they are only a piece of paper and cannot protect the victim.  This view is supported by too many cases where a woman with a protective order was murdered by her ex-partner.  The research, however demonstrates that although protective orders do not prevent all homicides, women with protective orders are safer than those without this protection.

The government has used a lot of scarce resources to determine the effectiveness of batterer programs, anger management and therapy to prevent domestic violence.  None of these programs has been shown to reduce men’s abuse of women, but unsupported claims continue to be made by those who have a financial stake in these programs.  The only response research has demonstrated to reduce domestic violence is accountability and monitoring.  Custody courts emphasize the promotion of a father’s relationship with the child rather than holding him accountable for his abuse.  They sometimes send abusers to some form of program or therapy.  If this was used for accountability it might be useful, but generally they use the false assumption that completion of the program means he is then safe.  In other words custody courts are using approaches that the research demonstrates work against the safety of women and children.

The modern movement to end domestic violence has resulted in making it easier for women to obtain criminal prosecution, protective orders, divorce, financial support, shelter and community support.  As women had access to these resources and particularly after communities adopted policies to hold men accountable, the domestic violence homicide rate was reduced.  Significantly, those communities that were stricter in enforcing accountability benefitted with even more dramatic reductions in domestic violence homicide.  Although murders of men and women by their intimate partners went down, surprisingly, the number of men’s lives saved was much higher than for the lives of women.  Why would laws and practices designed to protect women have a bigger affect in saving men’s lives?  Before the reforms, some women believed the only way to get away from his abuse was to kill him.  The added resources gave her other ways of leaving him.  This conclusion is supported by research that demonstrates men and women kill their intimate partners for different reasons.  Men kill to maintain control and so no one else can have her and women kill in self-defense and to stop his abuse (there are of course exceptions).  This is supported by the fact that 75% of men who kill their partners do so after she has left or is trying to leave.

Abusive men, who believe she has no right to leave were upset at the reforms that made it easier for victims to leave their abusers.  These male supremacists developed tactics to maintain what they believe is their right to control their partners and make the major decisions in the relationship.  The cruelest tactic has been to hurt the children.  We see this in the murder or abuse of children by their fathers, but more frequently in fathers who had little involvement with the children during the relationship suddenly seeking custody when she tries to leave.  The courts have been slow to recognize or respond to this tactic and instead pressure mothers to keep the father in the children’s lives regardless of his abusiveness.  Instead of pressuring the father to stop his abuse, courts routinely punish mothers for trying to protect the children.  Ironically, in an attempt to keep both parents in the children’s lives, courts often deny children a meaningful relationship with their mother when she continues to believe the father is harming her children.  In almost all of these cases the mother was the primary parent and the safe parent.  As mothers and domestic violence advocates have recognized the harm and unfairness in the present custody court system, more and more mothers are staying with their abusers and accepting his beatings in order to be near their children so they can protect them.  Inevitably, some of these mothers do not survive this decision.

In the batterer classes I teach, we often talk about how boys are taught it is ok for men to abuse women.  The men often object and say they were told not to hit girls.  They are right that boys are not told to abuse women.  Instead they see their father mistreat their mother with no consequences to the father and this gives them the message that society allows men to abuse women.  Children know much more about the father’s abuse in the home than we think they observe so when the custody courts ignore the father’s abuse to give him custody or unsupervised visitation, this reinforces harmful messages.  Children pay much more attention to the behavior they see then what they are told.  In minimizing and failing to recognize the father’s abuse, courts are encouraging men to continue their abuse.  This is especially harmful when abusers successfully manipulate the courts to abuse the mother.  The research demonstrates that abusive men use a cost-benefit analysis in deciding whether to abuse their partners.  By seeking to support fathers’ involvement with their children REGARDLESS OF THEIR HARMFUL BEHAVIOR, the courts are reinforcing harmful attitudes and behaviors.

The flawed and outdated practices used in the custody courts are causing tremendous harm to children and society.  If the bad decisions in these courts did not result in any deaths of mothers and children they should still be reformed.  We have significant anecdotal evidence and research on related issues that makes it likely some of the murders and murder-suicides could be prevented if the custody courts made better use of the up-to-date research now available.  No one  wants to be known as the judge who hurts children or receive publicity when an abuser the judge protected kills the mother and/or children.  I would urge that research be started to determine how often custody court mistakes result in the deaths of the children they are supposed to protect.  In the meantime, I hope judges will stop sending children to live with abusers.

Barry Goldstein is a domestic violence speaker, writer and advocate.  He is co-editor with Mo Therese Hannah of DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, ABUSE and CHILD CUSTODY.

 

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, ABUSE, AND CHILD CUSTODY
Legal Strategies and Policy Issues
Edited by Mo Therese Hannah, Ph.D. and Barry Goldstein, J.D.

Description of the Book Table of Contents Book Reviews FAQ Contact the Editors

How We Know the Custody Courts Are Broken Advocating for Change: What to Tell Judges

National Coalition Against Domestic Violence Battered Mothers Custody ConferenceBarrygoldstein.net

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In a trend that started in the 1980s, and increasingly since then, family court judges across the U.S. have ordered thousands and thousands of children into unsupervised visitation with abusive biological fathers.  In many cases, mothers have beendenied any form of custody, with some losing all contact with their children. In the last few years, attorneys and social service advocates have met to address this issue at the annual Battered Mother’s Custody Conference.  This book brings together the expertise and perspective of more than thirty contributors to BMCC in a comprehensive resource that arms advocates with the best thinking and most effective legal strategies in the battle to protect mothers and families from a system that often fails to address abuse and sometimes actually worsens the problem.

Domestic Violence, Abuse, and Child Custody presents insights and hands-on practice guidance from the leading experts on child custody cases that involve intimate partner violence and child abuse. Chapter authors address the prevalence of these problems, the complex reasons why protective mothers lose custody of their children, the things court agents and other professionals often do that contribute to bad outcomes, and the corrective measures that must be put into place to ensure legal protections for abused women and their children.

• Understand the harm caused by all types of abusive behavior, whether physical, verbal, financial, legal, or other forms.
• Guide the representation of protective mothers through research, case law, and consultation to improve case outcomes.
• Establish the paramount importance of children’s safety beyond all other priorities that may emerge in a child custody case.
• Provide judges with new insight into the dynamics of violence, recognize when experts and other types of witnesses are providing testimony based on myths, stereotypes, and discredited theories, and provide an empirically based, real-world rationale for orders emphasizing the safety of protective mothers and the accountability of batterers.

Written with the expressed goal of helping battered mothers assert their rights to a safe family life free from violence, the contributors to this book take a firm stand against so-called “balanced” points of view that attempt to explain or justify abusive behavior.  This book is grounded in the belief that battering is never justified, and batterers are not entitled to “equal rights” to custody when the safety of a child is in question.  Advocates who share that view will find this book a uniquely compelling ally in protecting and defending the rights of battered mothers.

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Description of the Book Table of Contents Book Reviews FAQ Contact the Editors

How We Know the Custody Courts Are Broken Advocating for Change: What to Tell Judges

National Coalition Against Domestic Violence Battered Mothers Custody ConferenceBarrygoldstein.net

Announcing The Publication Of

Legal Strategies and Policy Issues
Edited by Mo Therese Hannah, Ph.D. and Barry Goldstein, J.D.
Available April 2010 from Civic Research Institute