American Mothers Political Party: July 2011

HELL HAS A SPECIAL PLACE FOR ALL ABUSERS and ENABLERS (aka child traffickers) that have and are continuing the  abuse by Hal Richardson. With the help of the local CourtWhores, M. Jill Dykes, Rene M. Netherton, Judge David Debenham, Don and Jason Hoffman

 

Eleven years ago today Rikki Dombrowski was taken from her mother Claudine Dombrowski and given to a convicted batterer on a ‘snail mail’  from crooked Judge Richard Anderson. He made a ‘deal’ and without motion from either party, without hearing he simply on his own ‘switched custody’ from Mother to ABUSER HAL RICHARDSON.

Mother Claudine Dombrowski has had little to no contact with her daughter since this illegal ‘action’ and ruling was made. The Judges following after this decision could have at anytime corrected a very wrong very unethical very damaging ruling.

 

Instead, they continued ‘litigation abuse’ of a battered mother and forced her only child- HER daughter to live with out her mother and in constant fear.

[scribd id=43805172 key=key-18j7hcjx5kgmiopq3ylk mode=list]

2000 July 31-- Custody Switch-Judge Richard Anderson Gives FULL custody to CRIMINAL HAL RICHARDSON

HAL RICHARDSON - COURT CRIMINAL RECORDS OF; VIOLENCE, BATTERY ON LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER, BATTERY AGAINST CLAUDINE DOMBROWSKI, DRUGS, ALCOHOL, OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE, BAR FIGHTS ETC…

WHAT KIND A EVIL BASTARD WOULD HURT HIS CHILD SO BADLY BY TAKING HER MOTHER AWAY FROM HER? RIKKI DOMBROWSKI THE WORLD IS APPALLED, KANSAS IS SICK. THIS MAN WILL KNOW JUSTICE ONE DAY—GOD WILL JUDGE ALL WHO HELPED TO KEEP YOU SEPERATED FROM YOUR LOVING MOTHER.

GOD’S JUDGEMENT DAY—AND TOPEKA KANSAS WILL BURN

95LA014502-RICHARDSON,HAL,,1P
96D 000217-RICHARDSON,HAL,,1P
96D 000217-RICHARDSON,HAL,, (aka)1OR
96D 000217-RICHARDSON,HAL,, (aka)2OE
95D 000419-RICHARDSON,HAL,,1P
95D 000419-RICHARDSON,HAL,,1OR
97LA009121-RICHARDSON,HAL,,1D
98LA006122-RICHARDSON,HAL,,1D
92CV000432-RICHARDSON,HAL,,1P
96CV000937-RICHARDSON,HAL,,1P
92LA000089-RICHARDSON,HAL,,1D
96LA012692-RICHARDSON,HAL,,1D
97LA017898-RICHARDSON,HAL,,1D
97U 000055-RICHARDSON,HAL,,D/B/A/ TOPEKA VINYL TOP,1D
90LA007629-RICHARDSON,HAL,,DBA GATEWAY FUNDRAISING,1D
97LA018158-RICHARDSON,HAL,,DBA MINUTEMAN SOLAR FILM,1D
96LA003402-RICHARDSON,HAL,,DBA TOPEKA VINYL TOP CENTER,1D
98U 000141-RICHARDSON,HAL,,DBA TOPEKA VINYL TOP CENTER,1D
04SC000200-RICHARDSON,HAL,,III,1D
03C 000086-RICHARDSON,HAL,,JR TRACT 84,184D
95U 000500-RICHARDSON,HAL,,JR,1D
03L 010117-RICHARDSON,HAL,,JR,1D
05L 001833-RICHARDSON,HAL,,JR,1D
95SC000448-RICHARDSON,HAL,,JR,1D
95LN000161-RICHARDSON,HAL,,JR,1OP
05C 001464-RICHARDSON,HAL,,JR,TRACT 76, (aka)133D
94SC000355-RICHARDSON,HAL,,OWNER OF MINUTEMAN SOLAR FILM,1D
89CR 01537-RICHARDSON,HAL,G,, (aka)1D
90CR 01308-RICHARDSON,HAL,G, (aka)1D
96LA019246-RICHARDSON,HAL,G,JR,1D
96LA000348-RICHARDSON,HAL,G,JR,1D
97CV000960-RICHARDSON,HAL,G,JR,1D
97LA011585-RICHARDSON,HAL,G,JR,2D
08SC000096-RICHARDSON,HAL,G,JR,1P
05C 001464-RICHARDSON,HAL,G,JR,TRACT 76, (aka)133D
96D 000217-RICHARDSON,HAL,GEORGE, (aka)1OR
96D 000217-RICHARDSON,HAL,GEORGE, (aka)2OE
97CV000778-RICHARDSON,HAL,GEORGE,JR,

2 p.

95cr 00836 dv against dombrowski conviction

7 p.

12-1-1997 Joan Hamilton DA Refuses to Prosecute Admitted CrowBar Assault

4 p.

1995 DV 95CR836 Mary Kelly PSI Not Good Candidate for RECOMMEND PRISON for Criminal conviction of CLAUDINE DOMBROWSKI

4 p.

1995 DV 95CR836 Mary Kelly PSI Not Good Candiate for Probation_2

2 p.

1999_2nd ABP Heartland Consult an Tans Hal Richardson

3 p.

1996 Alternatives to Battering Per Domestic Violence Conviction against Claudine Dombroeski and Order of Probation Hal Richardson...

1 p.

1995 PSI Mary Kelly Recommends Prison for Hal Richardson as Conviction History of Violence past 15 years

5 p.

1995 ABP Records Hal Richardson CR Conviction of Domestic Violence to Claudine Dombrowski (HE WAS KICKED OUT!)

2 p.

1990 SARP Alcohol Drug TX Hal Richardson From Conviction on Battery of Law Enforcement Officer

2 p.

1995-Feb 21 D.A. Affidavit for Domestic Violence (Conviction) Case No. 94-CR...

3 p.

1997 Closed Camera Inspection of 30 Day Drug Alchohol Hal Richardson Aug_1

With the debt ceiling crisis and the uproar over what programs to cut it's a good time to email your senators & representative and tell them what programs you would like cut and what programs you want to keep.

Let's defund Fatherhood programs, marriage promotion programs, all faith-based funding (faith-based charities are funded by church contributions, which aren't taxed)

Find your senator http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
Find you representative https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml

 

Obama (and Congress) you are killing children with the tax payer’s money. STOP FATHERHOOD FUNDING NOW!

Here is a sample letter that all can write:

YOUR OR YOUR ORGANIZATION ADDRESS
TODAY’S DATE
The Honorable YOUR CONGRESSMEMBER’S NAME
ADDRESS
Washington DC 20510

Re: Cut $500 Million from the Fatherhood Initiative and Hold Congressional Hearings

Dear YOUR CONGRESSMEMBER’S NAME:

I am writing to you today to urge you to cut five hundred million dollars ($500,000,000.00) in funds administered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human services for Fatherhood Initiative programs.  http://fatherhood.hhs.gov/

These programs are designed to improve the lives of children by promoting responsible fatherhood and healthy marriage, authorized under 45 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR): Public Welfare.

45 CFR Section 260.20  The TANF (Temporary Aid to Needy Families) program  has the following four purposes:

(a) Provide assistance to needy families so that children may be cared for in their own homes or in the homes of relatives;
(b) End the dependence of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work, and marriage;
(c) Prevent and reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies and establish annual numerical goals for preventing and reducing the incidence of these pregnancies; and
(d) Encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.

45 CFR Section 263.2(a)(4)(ii) Pro-family healthy marriage and responsible fatherhood activities enumerated in part IV-A of the Act, sections 403(a)(2)(A)(iii) and 403(a)(2)(C)(ii) that are consistent with the goals at §§260.20(c) or (d) of this chapter, but do not constitute “assistance” as defined in §260.31(a) of this chapter….

(g) State funds used to meet the Healthy Marriage Promotion and Responsible Fatherhood Grant match requirement may count to meet the MOE requirement in §263.1, provided the expenditure also meets all the other MOE requirements in this subpart.

Despite the stated positive goals, these programs lead to frighteningly negative outcomes for children. Goals of these funds are for fathers (especially ex-prisoners) to get jobs and pay child support. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/06/obama-visits-se-washington-to.html

Instead, gender-biased legal services are provided solely to fathers.  Opportunistic male batterers, molesters, felons and drug addicts seize the opportunity to use free legal services to avoid paying child support by gaining custody. This is the precise opposite of program goals.

On February 14, 2011, a non-custodial mother testified to Senate aides that she was refused legal services from an HHS federally funded grant program simply because she was a mother. This is an illegal use of federal dollars.http://www.legalmomentum.org/assets/pdfs/regixcomplaint.pdf

Approximately 70% of batterers who ask for custody receive custody.http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/pas/dv.html

Federal funds fuel this litigation.  Because aggressive fathers are able to access free legal assistance through federal Fatherhood Initiative programs, fathers have a distinct advantage in family court.  Custody is given to fathers who have legal representation, regardless of whether they pose a risk to their children.

A self-represented mother has no chance against a father who is advised and represented by an attorney. The result: Every year, 58,000 children (including nursing infants) are taken away from safe mothers and given to violent, abusive men. http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/med/PR3.html

This does not improve the lives of children. Rather, it causes immeasurable harm to them. Children live in situations that would break a seasoned soldier. They are beaten and raped. At least one per week is killed.These programs also lead to widespread fiscal waste, fraud and abuse.

Due to the lack of oversight and clearly defined and monitored outcome measures, these funds are commonly misused. An example is the defunded access to visitation program in Amador County CA.  The program was designed to foster a relationship and ensure contact between children and non-custodial parents, and provide victim protection through supervised visits. Instead, the grant program manager (a family law facilitator who illegally represented a private client, an admittedly violent father) used federal funds to:

1) benefit her custodial father client, rather than the non-custodial victim mother and victim   children;
2) block the mother’s access to her children;
3) suppress clear evidence of domestic violence and child sexual abuse;
4) pay other individuals who she used as witnesses against the mother;
5) collect money from the father for legal representation while billing the access to visitation program $16,000.00 for the father’s litigation costs; and
6) pay $6,000.00 for a wine drinking event disguised as training.

This is one of many programs throughout the country that are subverting the intent of the law. A federal investigation is needed to determine whether this subversion by fatherhood programs is unintentional or deliberate.

During a time of deep fiscal crisis, this pork barrel project, replete with waste, fraud and abuse that produce outcomes that harm children, is a travesty that needs to be defunded. We urgently request you to cut the Fatherhood Initiative funds immediately.

We further request Congressional hearings to allow testimony on the damage done to children due to the failure of family courts, assisted by federally -funded legal services, to protect them from violent and incestuous fathers.

Sincerely,
YOUR SIGNATURE
YOUR PHONE AND EMAIL ADDRESS

 

Listen to the NIJ Conference 2009 panel discussion.

Bethany Backes: So I’m gonna be very brief and just say that today we’ll be hearing about two ongoing NIJ-funded studies on custody evaluation. Both studies will be concluding within the year, and the final reports will be available and accessible through the National Criminal Justice Reference Service.

So our panelists today are Dr. Daniel Saunders, a professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Social Work; Dr. Chris O’Sullivan, who is a research consultant currently working with the New York Legal Assistance Group; and the honorable Dale Koche, Koch, sorry, a senior judge with the state of Oregon. And we hope that today is the start of many discussions on this topic. And at this time I just want to ask everyone to please turn off their cell phones or any electronic devices to vibrate or silent. And we’re gonna begin with Dan.

Daniel Saunders: Good morning, everyone. Hope you’re doing well. It’s good to be here with you. Thank you, Bethany, thank you for putting this panel together and for your introduction. And I wanna commend NIJ for making this move into a new area — the family law side of the law.

In the early days, the focus in helping survivors of domestic violence was to make sure that offenders were arrested just like any other offender and that there were restraining order laws and that we had good stalking legislation. And it’s been only fairly recently that advocates and researchers have become aware of the horrible injustice when survivors finally escape from domestic violence and then are faced with continued stalking, harassment, abuse and then, low and behold, the worst trauma that survivors, I think, can ever go through is to get that piece of paper in the mail that says your partner, your ex-partner wants custody of your children. And so the trauma is multiplied times three where women — it’s usually women — are faced with sometimes losing custody to a person, they believe, will continue their abuse — abuse of the children, abuse of them.

And so my interest was piqued many years ago doing divorce counseling, working with men who batter and then more recently with the supervised visitation program evaluation that I helped conduct of safe havens. And there we saw on average across agencies about 20 percent, 10 to 20 percent of the noncustodial parents were women ordered now to come and visit their children. So the, the awareness I think within Office on Violence Against Women and NIJ has really been heightened, so I really appreciate the focus that’s now being given.

So I’m gonna present some pilot data of a survey of custody evaluators and then a little bit, I’ll give a preview of some of the interviews that we’ve done with survivors.

First, I have to find the right button. Oh, OK.

So my collaborators at the University of Michigan are Rich Tolman, Karen Staller, Kathleen Faller, and then a whole team of research associates and assistants, and then consultants from, from law, from child custody evaluators, social scientists — about two pages worth of names that I could put up there for you.

You probably know this already that when women, and I’m talking primarily about women — men are battered as well, and you know, I have a whole presentation on gender equality and inequality regarding who are perpetrators and who are victims — I’m gonna speak mostly about women as survivors that when people leave an abusive relationship that’s not the end of the abuse, and in fact, there’s a tremendous amount of stalking that goes on; the risk of homicide increases, which is one reason why many women realistically stay in these relationships — they’ve been threatened with their lives.

And then we have many other consequences as well. These men are likely, half of them are likely to find a new partner to abuse; therefore, exposing the children again to more violence in that relationship. They’re likely to undermine the parenting of the non-abusive parent and on and on. I’m sure many of you are aware of, of these consequences.

For a long time, custody evaluators and judges talked about high-conflict relationships and didn’t realize that hidden within these high-conflict relationships, there is a great deal of domestic violence. And now we know from some very good, well-documented studies that 25 to 75 percent of contested custody cases involve domestic violence. And yet we still hear evaluators and judges talk about high conflict and don’t put the emphasis where, I think, it needs to be, which is on the violence that occurs within visitation and exchange cases based on some national surveys. The primary reason that families are referred for visitation and exchange is domestic violence followed very closely by child abuse.

There are a number of negative consequences. I mentioned losing custody to an abuser is an obvious one. We have other negative consequences as well — having unsafe supervision, supervision by a friend or relative when what’s really needed is supervision in a safe environment, a supervised visitation program with close supervision by a paraprofessional or a professional with separate entrances, separate parking lots, you know, all the safety mechanisms. And then we also see where too often, I think, there are referrals for couples counseling for mediation, which can undermine victims’ rights or place them in more danger. In terms of what we know about negative outcomes and the risk factors, it’s a very sad situation that too often the abuse is never even detected by evaluators, by mediators. And then even if it is detected, it is not considered seriously in the determinations, so it may sit there in the record but not be used adequately.

We know that if judges are well trained, there’s a tendency for them to give sole custody to abused mothers. We have a bind in about half the states now: We have what’s called a friendly-parent statute, which means that, you know, one of the factors for determining custody is that the parent must show that they’re willing to facilitate a good relationship with the other parent. But that puts victims in a real bind because they, for good reason, are reluctant to co-parent, to go into mediation, and as a result, they’re labeled as uncooperative, unfriendly, and that goes against them. And that’s a powerful effect, even in cases where there’s a presumption that custody should not go to the abuser. So we’re starting to uncover some of these risk factors for the negative outcomes.

OK, what is this big figure here? This is our conceptual framework that we started with on this project, it lays out the major research questions and hypotheses. So starting in the middle with my red laser pointer that I don’t have, but it’s the one that’s, it’s easy to see because it’s that big bold one, kind of in the middle, off to the right. So the main variable that we’re interested in, “To what extent do evaluators believe that survivors are making up stories, that they’re making false allegations of domestic violence?” And then if you go just up from there, we’re trying to see, ”Is that related to other beliefs that child abuse allegations are made up, that parents are alienating the children from the other parent and other kinds of beliefs? And then backing up, we’re interested to look at the background, the training of evaluators. Does that feed into the belief that survivors are making up stories about abuse? Gender, whether they themselves know survivors of domestic violence. I’m over in the background traits, the lower left here.

And then certainly, we want to look at myths about domestic violence, whether those myths are held by evaluators and if those are related to a belief that stories are being made up. And then what we call these “core beliefs,” these distal factors, which are more abstract beliefs — beliefs that social hierarchies are a good thing, social hierarchies between groups, a social dominance orientation that patriarchal norms will be related to myths about domestic violence. The belief in the “just world,” which is when someone thinks, basically, the world is a just place. People get what they deserve, and deserve what they get. And we don’t have to worry about oppression and differences in power. So we have, we have some of those abstract beliefs put in there, which can still be used in training to help people become aware of their values, their core beliefs and allow them to think and perhaps shift some of their more surface beliefs as a result. So all of this is designed to try to figure out what can we do better for training evaluators, in particular, but also other professionals?

OK, so those are the background kinds of variables that we’re looking at — beliefs, training, gender — and then of course the outcome; these, these negative outcomes that I mentioned already: that joint custody would be given or sole custody to an abuser, that mediation would be pushed, that there’s unsupervised or poor supervision, unsafe supervision.

OK, so this kinda lays out the hypotheses then; you can see many variables, many kinds of possible relationships. And I’ve put for you, in the handouts, these hypotheses in sentences. If you prefer not looking at maps, but, I mean people have a preference, right? When you’re getting directions, do you want to look at a map or do you want to get the directions written out for you? So here are the directions written out for you, the hypotheses, and you know there’s gender differences there, right? So who is it that likes maps and who likes written directions, you know, I think. In the discussion section, if you wanna know the answer, I’ll tell you then. OK, so I’ve laid out the hypotheses here. And I won’t take more time; I want to jump into methods.

What we have done so far is to complete two pilot surveys with a total of 62 evaluators. We used Web-based and mail-based administration. And we were able then to hone down and refine our measures, to improve on them because we also asked them at the end, “What do you think of this survey? Was it any good? What are your reactions? How could it be improved? What questions couldn’t you understand?” But we learned a lot. You know, evaluators don’t like responding to a little case vignette that we had. They said it would be unethical for me to put down a reaction because I would have to do the entire evaluation; you know, I cannot respond to your vignette. So we changed that. We said what hypotheses would you have, not what recommendations would you make? So we learned a lot through these pilots. And we’re about to launch the major survey.

We have measures of history of practice, practice experience with domestic cases, training, the, the scope of training, but also the modality — do you go to workshops or do you read articles? So. And then we have this vignette, which is at the end of your handouts, was modified from a journal article by Claire Dalton. And then we created various responses for them. You know, what’s the likelihood that you think the mother or the father are minimizing, are minimizing the abuse or exaggerating the abuse? What’s likelihood of future harm by either of the mother or the father? And then we have measures of these distal factors. We borrowed and stole items on beliefs about custody visitation and domestic violence from other sources, and then we created many of our own. And through this pilot, we found some very reliable subscales around these different themes.

So, the belief that there are false allegations of domestic violence that are extensive, that domestic violence has a severe impact on the children — that was another subscale — the friendly-parents standard that I mentioned, and then a number of myths, myths that for example, domestic violence ends at the separation, that abusers don’t undermine the other parent’s ability to parent, those kinds of things. So, I mean, the questionnaire, the first one we did was very long — I think 13 pages, 125 questions. And now we’re down to 80 questions. It’s much shorter, it takes about 25 minutes, 20, 25 minutes to complete. And we’re trying to hone it down even further.

So we’re gonna have a wealth of information here when we’re all, when we’re all done with this. So from the pilot survey, or two surveys combined together 60, 62 people. Most of them were in private practice; some worked directly with course. And we need to balance our sample more and, and go out to court settings, where there’s a lot of good training in many of those settings where family court personnel are doing a lot of the evaluations. This tended to be a group that had lots of experience, about half of them 20 years or more. There’s 60 percent men, an older sample. Many of them were Ph.D.s in psychology. And 20 percent had master’s degrees.

We also asked about their own, their own personal acquaintances regarding who, who they knew as a survivor. And so we asked about friends, coworkers, and here you see that about 20 percent of them said that their mother was a victim and survivor, and we’re gonna use that to figure out does that make them more sensitive or less sensitive in responding because previous research shows it can go either way, you know, with child welfare workers and, and other workers it can, it can go both ways, both ways. Forty percent had a friend who was a victim.

OK, here are some results then. Major question was “In your opinion, what percentage of mothers in child custody disputes make false allegations?” And then we asked the same thing about fathers. And this is in general then; this wasn’t first asking, “Of those who make allegations of domestic violence, what percentage are false?” So we’re gonna refine that a bit ’cause this is capturing the whole group — overall, what percentage of mothers do you think make false allegations of domestic violence? So the top one here is the mothers — and this is simply the distribution — so to interpret this, you see on the right-hand side, there were a couple people who thought that 50 percent and 60 percent of the mothers were making false allegations of domestic violence — quite a large grouping around, you know, the belief that 10 percent of them were making false allegations, 5 percent and so forth.

So that’s just a, a distribution across how many people the number of respondents who believe that 0 percent, 10 percent, 30, 50, 60 percent, etc., were making false allegations. OK? And then at the bottom, the question is how many of you believe that, you know, what is your belief about the percentage of fathers who are making false allegations? And there you don’t see it skewed as far on the right, and it’s clumping more around the 0 and 5 percent area. So it looks like in terms of gender of the parent, we’re seeing some effects here. And like I said, we have to refine this further, so we’re tightening all this down to domestic violence cases. But we may have what people have said all along in critiquing some of the theories about parent alienation, for example, that it, in the past it’s been gender, that it’s been more blaming the mothers and having less creditability in their stories. OK? So that might be coming through here. Very interesting.

Okay, then we did find, as we thought, that a belief that there’s false allegations about domestic violence also relates to belief that the stories about child abuse, sexual, physical abuse are being made up in fathers and mothers alike. When it came to child sexual abuse beliefs, those were tied together very closely. If, if an evaluator believed that mom was making up stories about child sexual abuse, they also tended to believe that a father would do the same. OK, and then what are the other relationships here? These beliefs about false allegations?

Well we found — I’m not putting any of the statistics in here; this is all just straight out statements for you — these were bi-variant correlations, so these were significant R-values coming through. Some were quite high, but they were all significant. So the belief in false allegations related to the belief in friendly-parents standard that the mother in the vignette would be likely to harm the son psychologically, that she was exaggerating the violence, that the father was not likely to harm the son psychologically. And when it came to outcomes their, their tendencies in the response to this vignette — what’s the likelihood that you would recommend various actions — the belief in false allegations of DV was related positively to their tendency to recommend joint legal and physical custody, sole physical custody to dad, mediation, couples counseling, no supervision of visits with the child — so unsupervised visits. So some of the concerns that we’ve had in starting the study are coming through. And then there was a negative relationship between false allegations, the belief in false allegations and the tendency to recommend sole physical custody to the mom and supervised visits. So as you’d expect, just the flip of the others.

One of the questions we asked, “How do you ask about domestic violence? Do you directly inquire about domestic violence?” Most of them did. And then we said, “What measures do you use to screen for domestic violence?” and then “What percentage of the time do you screen?” And what this graph shows is that almost 40 percent of them said they never do any formal screening; they don’t have any measure, any protocol that they use. And then a whole other group on the other end use such an instrument all of the time. So we’ve got quite a split here, and we’ll do a lot of other analysis to look at the differences here and how these line up.

So in the follow up question, one person said, “I use a clinicalized version of the conflict-tactics scale measured, about one month apart.” Some used the domestic violence inventory, the SARA — the Spouse Assault Risk Assessment. Quite a few of them used traditional psychological measures — the MMPI, the Rorschach. And one person said, “I find I never have to directly inquire about these problems. If they are present, the abused party always mentions them.” And that is why I think we need to be quite concerned. I mean, we found in many different settings — if you look at hospital settings, mental health settings — there’s a tremendous under detection of violence. And I think evaluators, with their good intentions to come in with a neutral view, don’t want to rock the boat, or they don’t wanna raise issues that aren’t there.

I’m not sure what’s happening here.

And there are some models of conducting evaluations that say, let’s base it on the allegations that come to us; let’s not base it on what we try to uncover. We’re only going to deal with what comes to us from the parties involved. So I hope that as we work on this research that we’re able to have some impact on that.

Regarding background factors, the sample sizes aren’t real large to detect differences here. We did find some gender differences that men are slightly more likely than women to believe that mothers make false allegations, that they’re gonna harm the son in the, in the vignette.

Oh, is this for me? Oh, OK.

That they … OK, we’re gonna wait for the larger sample to analyze knowing a victim personally as it relates to all these beliefs and then, very importantly of course, is how they acquire knowledge. Have they gone to workshops in the past? Have they read articles? Have they learned about post-separation violence, about the impact of violence on the children? We have all of those items in there that we’ll be analyzing.

In relation to core beliefs, as we hypothesized, two out of these three core beliefs were related to belief in false allegations, patriarchal norms, belief in just world. And then patriarchal beliefs also were directly related to some of the outcome measures — referring the mother but not the father for parent education, for example, psychological evaluation for the mom is needed. And then we’ve conducted 11 out of 24 interviews with survivors in four communities, four different states. So we’re gonna have state laws also that differ. California is one where they have a lot of training provided for judges, evaluators, standards that they have. And so we’re interviewing women who have lost custody or children ordered to unsafe supervision. We’re also gonna analyze documents that these women have from their evaluations — the judge’s orders, the court, the custody evaluation, other orders. In some, I mean, one woman had nine different documents, three different evaluators, a domestic violence assessment etc., etc., etc. So there’s a lot of work we’re gonna need to do there.

In terms of themes coming through, I’m not gonna take time to read from this one, but the focus that this survivor said needed to be on the emotional, on the psychological pain, as well as the physical. It’s not, it’s not enough just to focus on the scratches and the obvious injuries but also on the emotional pain that occurs. And then we’ve heard this before, this survivor points this out, but we’ve heard it also, that evaluators often focus on what happened during the relationship and forget to ask about what’s going on now, during the separation period. And this person brings it through that domestic violence, whether it’s past or present, needs to be considered.

We’re gonna … In these four communities, we’re gonna conduct a community analysis, interviewing key players, finding out from them a snap shot of what seems to work well and what doesn’t work well in their communities.

So then, in wrapping up, we certainly have limitations to these pilots as based on self report, and we are gonna supplement that with document reviews. We’ll have a total sample of 445, and we’re gonna expand beyond private practitioners. We have a lot of Web searches that we’ve done. And we’re also gonna approach family court to be able to also survey people that work in family court settings — I think that’s very important. And we’ve got a number of communities that we’ll be going to for that. So to summarize the, the survey results, it was surprising in this very small pilot how many of the hypotheses were affirmed that false allegations of DV were related to the friendly-parent standard, that, that’s related to the belief that mothers are likely to harm the son psychologically, the tendency for joint custody, sole physical custody, relationship with these distal factors —these very abstract ones — patriarchal beliefs, belief in a just world.

So overall, background and core beliefs seem to be related to the belief about false allegations, which in turn are related to a tendency to order joint custody or father sole custody. So we have a number of hypotheses that are affirmed, and with the larger sample, we’ll be able to do a lot more. In terms of which set of predictors, overall, are gonna be the most powerful, we can weigh them with each other, we can put them together additively to figure out, you know, is it patriarchal norms and gender together that is going to be the most powerful predictor? So we can look at all of these effects, direct, direct effects, indirect effects, etc., and have a lot more to tell.

So stay tuned. Bethany says maybe next year we can do a poster. But certainly e-mail me; I have my e-mail address if you want more information. And then stay tuned for the final report, which will be up on the Criminal Justice Reference Service Web site when we’re all done. So thank you very much for your attention. And we don’t have time for questions now, we’re gonna…

Backes: At the end.

Saunders: We’re gonna take questions at the end. So thank you very much.

[Applause.]

Chris O’Sullivan: I’m at a terrible disadvantage behind these podium, which were designed by men, I think, very tall men — sort of disappear back here.

The study that we’re doing is pretty complementary to what Dan is doing. We’ve got a very eclectic group here. Michael is a parent coordinator, clinical psychologist, and divorce researcher in, in Boston with very little domestic violence background, which he’s getting very quickly. Marjorie Fields is a, is a former family court and Supreme Court judge who left the bench because she wanted to become a lawyer in private practice advocating for families in which there was domestic violence in custody cases. And Kim Selcer has been our savior; she’s the one who sort of instigated this study by saying we’re having a real problem with our, our cases in family court and with the evaluators. So that was sort of the basis for starting this. April is an custody evaluator in New York City who’s a consultant on the project. And then we have people from various agencies in New York City who have cases in family court who … these are mostly, they do, they represent victims of domestic violence, primarily women, in contested custody cases and only indigent clients, so they’re, they’re free legal services.

OK, this is, this is a, this is a really difficult area. I don’t know how judges stand it. I hope to hear from Judge Koch. How is a judge to know what’s going on in a family and how can you tell from what, what, how they present themselves in court who is a good parent? So it’s really an impossible task to begin with, and then you add to it a domestic violence allegation, and how do you, how do you know if that’s really going on? So they rely a lot on custody evaluators. And then what do the custody evaluators do is really the — oops — the question for this study.

And we’ve got two different contexts for these cases. The legal context puts the best interests of the child first, parental rights second, and then they have to factor in the impact. In New York State, it’s a factor, in some cases a presumption that a parent should not get custody if they’re perpetrating domestic violence. And then there’s the social clinical context of, you know, what happens to the child in these situations if the parents are fighting just to begin with. If there is domestic violence the custodial parent has to be safe in order to provide a good home for the child, and domestic violence has an impact on parenting as well.

So, we’ve got these two dynamics going on. The custody battles set up one kind of dynamics. In divorce there’s a lot of conflict. It’s a time when evaluators and judges might suspect that, that one party will make false allegations of domestic violence. There may be violence that is just due to the heightened emotions around the time of separation and fighting over custody. And then there’s the issue of whether one parent is trying to turn the children against the other parent.

And then we’ve got the dynamics of intimate partner violence, which may make the, the same actions look very different or the same scenario look very different. Maybe there’s a violence at the time of separation not because it’s, of heightened emotion, because, but because abusers escalate their violence when they feel they’re losing control, so the same behavior can look very different.

One of the things we looked at was evaluator’s perception of causes of domestic violence and whether that influences how they interpret the situation and what the risks are. And then drug and alcohol abuse is another factor that can influence the dangerousness of the situation, how the evaluator of the core perceives each parent. So, we have a huge list of research questions. We also have a huge data set. These are the questions we’re looking at, I’ll try to go through this fairly quickly. These are all the factors that might be considered, what evaluators look at: the impact on the child, domestic violence history, parenting, who they interviewed. Did they interview just the family? Or did they go outside to interview neighbors, teachers, family members on each side? How do they interview the parents and children? Together, separately? Did they interview the kids as a group? What did they ask them? What did they ask the kids? How did they go about it? Did they do it with children? Are they doing stories and pictures or are they just asking them outright, “Does your mother beat your father? Does your father beat your mother?” And do they use psychological tests?” I’m not going to go over that because our findings are very similar to Dan’s. They use the MMPI and the Rorschach; they don’t really rely on it very much.
What way do they get to the different sources? There’s enormous records, criminal court records, family court records. Are they looking at it? Do they think it’s informative? Did they recommend a parenting plan? In New York they’re not supposed to, at least in the city. The judges are supposed to be making the decision; they’re just supposed to do a clinical portrait of the family. In fact, they do. If they’re instructed by the judge not to present a parenting plan, they’ll just make their conclusion so obvious with the way it should go. So this is not worked as a solution to putting it back on the judge. And they all recommend treatment. They are clinicians.

We’re looking at some of these same factors. Are they knowledgeable about domestic violence? Does their basic theoretical orientation influence the way they go about evaluating? What do they think about parental alienation? What do they think about the importance of maintaining a relationship with each parent no matter how lousy they are?

Oops, I skipped one.

So our method was we got 70 cases through these legal assistance agencies in which domestic violencewas alleged and there was a forensic evaluation. We got enormous case files, and we had staff of — we’re not allowed to see them as researchers, but we got staff of these agencies to go through these huge files and create a database with all of the factors in the case. So there might be divorce proceedings, what happened? There might be 10 family offense petitions in family court or Supreme Court. In New York, State  Supreme Court is divorce court basically. We have this big data set; 300 variables on each case. Then we got the redacted evaluation reports, which range from shortest is probably 20 pages, and they go up to 50 pages. So we have these huge stacks, and for each case, we got the evaluation report, we got the order pointing sort of a reverse order, the judge’s order pointing the forensic, because they might want them to look for certain factors. Investigate whether there is domestic violence, investigate whether there is parental alienation, interview multiple people, get all the records, or it might just say interview the parties, and keep it very simple. So we can’t judge the evaluator on what they did without looking at the order. And then we got a copy of the final order. And in addition, we’re interviewing some evaluators from these 70 cases and giving them a brief survey. We’re also looking at their CVs to look at their background and training.

With the interviews, we’re going to try to match it up to whether what they say they do looks like what they do. We have preliminary findings also; we have the kind of data, but, we’re beginning the analysis. The attorneys — this is a cognitive salience issue — the attorneys thought they had these cases happen all of the time, where there is a forensic evaluator and a domestic violence allegation. In fact, it’s quite a small percentage of their cases. We also found that this sample we got from these legal service agencies are a little bit bias to the positive because they tend to get the evaluator they want. So these horror cases that they have are the minority of our examples. There’s a little bit of a distortion. And basically what we know from the interviews and, the evaluators, there’s no standard. They all think they’re different. They don’t know what anybody else does. They all perceive their job differently. Although most of them, I think there’s just one exception, they think their job is to figure out if the allegations are true, and that’s really what they think they’re doing. One said, “I’m really a detective.” So they’re amassing the evidence through interviews, through record reviews, and then they really want to tell the judge what the custody and visitation order should look like. Basically we found that, just a preliminary review, that they all think they’re different, I do it differently from everybody else even if they do it the same. No matter what their beliefs are, they are all pretty conscientious when they get in there. They tend to end up looking pretty much alike. There was one man that said, “There was a domestic violence expert. I hate them. They make such a big deal out of this, a little slap what does it matter? That’s not domestic violence. Psychological abuse, not a big deal.” Yet when you look at his evaluations, he is pretty thorough and just as likely as one who says, “Oh, there is so much domestic violence, and I believe most of the allegations.”
They’re equally likely to find domestic violence, or not, in the cases that we look at that they did. So that’s a little bit reassuring. The biggest difference we’ve found so far is that some of them take a very clinical approach; they don’t look at any records. They just do interviews. They just do their clinical interviews and Rorschach test and protective tests, and they really think they can get at the truth that way, and they don’t need to look at any records; whereas, others just spend enormous amounts of hours going through every petition trying to look for an overall fact pattern, which is not a clinical psychologist’s job. So that’s the biggest difference.

I have a handout — probably not enough — with the statistics, and I want to just talk about a case to illustrate all of the issues. This case was very typical in a lot of ways, but it was atypical in the fact that there were three different custody evaluators on it. It just sort of shifted around, and they came up with different conclusions, so I wanted to show how their approach led them to different conclusions about what was going on in the family. Custody kept shifting back and forth depending on which evaluator held sway over the judge at that moment and that’s sort of a mystery too. Here’s the mother, this is kind of typical in a way — the part about her husband trying to kill the district attorney in a prior case is not typical, but this education class disparity between the father and mother is quite common. She had a learning disability, dropped out of school, got married and had a child. Her husband ended up in prison. She went to prison briefly as an accomplice and was on probation for five years. She met the father in this case, and he helped her win a custody battle with the father of her son who was in prison. And they had two children together. They never married. And then she began to say he was abusive and controlling. And he was quite educated, quite self-grandizing, claimed all these heavy connections, like he worked in the Manhattan D.A.’s office, or he’d done this or done that. He had claimed he knew all the jazz greats because he had been a jazz musician. He described himself as a health nut, and it was quite extreme. He boiled water for five minutes before he drank any or cooked in it. But he also saw himself as helping this woman. He was going to get her through high school, get her through college, so that was part of his controlling, perfectionist personality. He was arrested for physical assault on the mother twice. The first time it was what we call “ACD” in New York. It’s basically if he follows these conditions from the court, the case will be dismissed. He was told to go to an anger management program, and if he went to the anger management program, the case would be dismissed.
But he never went; nobody followed up and the case was dismissed. But the mother got an order of protection, and she eventually signed an agreement with him saying that she wanted to reconcile, and she wouldn’t press charges against him. So they were back together, and then he was arrested for another assault; he pled guilty, and there don’t seem to be any penalties associated with that guilty plea except that she got another one-year order of protection. The family split up. He had to move out. She kept the apartment; she got a new boyfriend. He moved to the suburbs, got a house. She had custody; father had them on weekends; they had to go to a precinct to exchange the kids. The father took the kids to a therapist. He also, after this second arrest, he took them to a hospital to the emergency room, on the grounds that the mother was abusing them when she had them; she strangled the older son. She was beating the younger two girls. So he went to court. The mother went to court. Her attorney left because he didn’t think anything was going to happen that day, so she was unrepresented. He testified that he had hospital records showing that she was abusing the kids, in fact, the kids were seen by a doctor and a social worker, and they said nothing happened to these children. But he went up there and claimed it so the judge yanked the kids and put them with the father. The mother still had unsupervised visitation on weekends. This is sort of a mystery. So that was in November. December, ACS is the child protective services agency in New York City, and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children did investigations; they found no child abuse. They recommended returning the children to the mother. The guardian who represents the children in court recommended returning the kids to the mother. The father hired a forensic evaluator. The first therapist the father took the kids to I’m calling “Dr. A,” and the evaluator hired by the father I’m calling “Dr. B,” just to keep them in order.

He found child abuse and recommended the children remain with the father, so the judge said the kids are going to stay with the father. Then the mother hired a forensic evaluator, and she found no child abuse. Did lots of tests on the mother, found she was average intelligence, and found she was fine and recommended custody to go back to the mother. The judge ordered the kids to stay with the father, but increased her visitation. In March the court appointed an evaluator who produced a report in July. This evaluator did a really thorough review and found that the father had engineered this claim of abuse, said the kids had to go right back to the mother. They moved out to the suburbs. They had been at a different school. They had been with the father for nine months. She said the summer was a good time to put them back in their old school in the city with their mother. And she said the father had done all of these terrible things, but the kids were really attached to him, especially the son whose father was in prison. He had become very attached; he had a lot of issues and was very attached to this guy. So in the end, it took another year or two years. They finally settled with custody of the mother and the father with liberal visitation.

So, isn’t that scary? I put down a couple of reasons it’s scary, and if we had more time, I think there are about five reasons it’s scary, but these are my first two: How did all of these educated evaluators — three of them were clinical psychologists with Ph.D.s; one of them was a clinical social worker — how did they look at this family and come up with such different conclusions? And the other thing I thought was scary is, if the court really abused, the mother had strangled the son and was beating the girls, why is she having unsupervised visits all weekend? And then there are a few more. So how did it happen? These are the factors that I think influenced, and I’ll go through it with each one, these are the typical features. What’s typical about it is there are two stories and who to believe. Is the mother abused by the father and he’s alienating the kids against her or is she making this stuff up, and she’s really abusive and dangerous to the kids, and he’s the better parent? How do you know?

The therapist hired by the father saw all three kids together; they were 8, 6, and 4. So one of the criticisms of “Dr. D,” the court appointed evaluator, was that you don’t see the kids at these different developmental stages with different parents and different issues; you shouldn’t be treating them together. And this gave the kids the chance to provide this united front and talk about what the mother had done to them, and the father is paying the therapist, which is another issue. The evaluators we interviewed said they really believed the child protective services that they do, on the whole, good investigations. Yet that didn’t prevail in this case. They did pretty well, they interviewed the children, the mother, the neighbors, two of the neighbors were friends of the father and said, “You know he never abused her, but she did abuse the children.”

Five minutes? I thought you were going to tell me half way. Okay, rushing along.

The court-appointed evaluator did a really thorough investigation. By now the case file was this thick, looked at everything, looked at the documents. Dr. B, the evaluator hired by the father only interviewed the children. One of my conclusions, just to jump ahead a little bit, is relying on these clinical interviews can work very well. Some of these clinicians are amazing at teasing out the truth from the kids, and they’re very clever. They do things like they show photographs of the family that they got from the mother or the father; well this doesn’t look like what you are describing to me. But others are terrible. They just ask outright, and they get whatever the parent has told them, and they don’t seem to be suspicious when the kid is using language that isn’t really appropriate for their age, so obviously they’re rehearsed. So on the whole, I think it looks better if they really do the investigation even though the judges say they’re not supposed to. There are all of these documents available. Here is what they actually look at. The majority are not really looking at these records, which is a problem. How did they determine the truth, consistency, if they can do a good interview with the kids?

Timing can influence whether they think it’s false. “I can’t do this” — what they look for to see if it’s dangerous. Parental alienation is so controversial, and I came into this with my own set of, “We don’t use that language, this is a myth —” There’s no way around it. It’s going on in these cases all the time. Some of the kids are coached to say things like these three children, “Mom strangled me.” In the end, when the final evaluator did the interviews, the kids said different things each time — she saw them three or four times — each time the story was different. “Mom lies, dad lies. He hits us, she hits us.” So it went back and forth, and it really was clear there wasn’t much going on there.

They were very confident in their conclusions. This is a little disturbing because they really can be wrong. And there’s a much more egregious case, where the judge followed the evaluator, and the evaluator was clearly wrong.

OK, the evaluator is the key person. I saw it a few times when the evaluator says, “There’s no domestic violence here.” And the judge says, “There’s a medical record; I’m giving custody to the mother. I’m going to put protections in place.”

The evaluators complain that the judges don’t read their reports. They really need to read them but read them skeptically and look at the methodology. OK, I’ve already said all this — sorry, three minutes. I’m good; I’m on my last few slides. I think the judges should specify the scope of the evaluation and not limit it to just do interviews, a single interview especially, but sometimes multiple is just not enough.

Some of these evaluators know nothing about domestic violence. There was a case where a psychiatrist interviewed all three parties and said the mother’s allegations were bizarre — they were actually fairly typical. She asked the father. He said, “No, this never happened.” And she said, “Well, there it is.” So she gave custody to the father, and the mother had no visitation because she thought she was fabricating the fact that the father kept her captive and that the father looked at pornography and was sexually abusive to her. And she said, “This doesn’t happen” — the psychiatrist said. So read the reports and question those conclusions.

We still don’t know what’s best for kids. In this sample case I was talking about, the father had alienated the kids from the mother, gotten them to make these accusations, nobody knew what to do about that, because the kids really needed him. And they were very attached to him. So they sort of had no way to deal with that. They were going to go on spending a lot of time with him even though he was going to continue to try and turn the kids against the mother. And we don’t know what to do, so we need further research in these areas. And really, there should be more follow-up; everybody says. They need to be brought back to court, follow-up evaluations. Is it working? And what’s going on? What are the developments, and can we now see the picture better now that we’re like a year away, and is it safe for the kids?

I had quantitative data that I put into the handout, but I think Judge Koch is going to talk about that.

[Applause.]

Dale Koch: My job is to try put a little judicial perspective on the research and maybe what questions it raises for judges and judicial education, so my thoughts are going to be a little bit random in terms of the research that is being done at this point, partly because both these projects still have some work to do before they can really reach all of their conclusions. What they’re doing at this point is raising questions for us and not necessarily providing all of the answers. One of the thoughts from Dr. O’Sullivan’s research project at this point. One of her first assumptions that’s contained in the project is that custody evaluations have a great influence on judicial decision-making. And, that’s really true, but it does depend, and it should depend, at least on the quality of the evaluator and the quality of the evaluation.

It also raises questions in my mind, and the case example that was provided here raised some of these questions, about whether we should be looking to having dedicated family court benches. In other words, whether we need to have judges who are really trained on these issues and just hear domestic relations cases or at least that’s the primary part of the work that they do. Whether we should be looking at the model of “one judge, one family” model so that in this situation that Dr. O’Sullivan is talking about, whether these cases are always coming back in front of the same judicial officer or coming in front of different judicial officers. It raises questions by judicial education and the need for the education on domestic violence issues, on child development issues, on parental alienation issues, on child abuse issues. It also raises some questions in my mind about the appropriate roles and expectations of the evaluators and the decision makers. I think Dr. O’Sullivan’s comment about the fact that the expectations for the evaluator should be made very clear.

The concept that we are going to ask somebody that’s an expert — at least we’re assuming they’re an expert — to go out and do an evaluation and not come to us with a recommendation in regard to that evaluation, that somehow just because we got elected as a judge or appointed as a judge that we’re smarter than the person doing the evaluation doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. So I would agree with her initial assessment that we need to be providing better direction and then asking for recommendations rather than just partial evaluations. But, if we’re doing that, the evaluation has to be worth something to us and the other point raised — and I am probably going to touch on it a couple of times — is that unless the evaluator is looking at collateral sources of information, that’s probably not a very reliable evaluation for us.

I guess I would contrast this, what the judge’s role is in a family court context versus some other context we’re in. Judges in a family court context have a tendency to view their role more traditionally, in terms of being very passive. We receive the information that comes in front of us. We don’t do much ourselves in terms of getting information, whereas in the context of a civil protection order for instance, particularly in the process of issuing a civil protection order, judges at this point are much more active. They’re looking at other court files that are in their court room. They’re looking at, in our case an OJIN printout, which tells us all the different filings that have been made in that file. We don’t do that in the family court context. We perceive ourselves as being back in this more traditional role so it’s an interesting dichotomy, and we rely upon others then to provide us that information, including the attorneys and the evaluators. And that I found interesting.

Going to the research done by Dr. O’Sullivan, in terms of what the evaluators were doing, in the cases that she was looking at and in only about 1 out of 2 cases, only about half were they looking if there’d been a CPS investigation, were they even looking at the CPS investigation. In only 1 out of 3 cases, if there’s a police complaint, were they looking at the police reports and that underlying information.

Now it’s not that because a police complaint was made that it’s necessarily true. It is an allegation at that point, but it is something that should be raising questions that need to be followed up on and looked at further. And then in only 1 out of 6 cases were they looking at the mother’s medical records. When those records and these — and when I’m saying 1 out of 6, these are situations where the records were in the attorney’s file, so they’re available to look at. And in only 1 out of 6 cases were they actually looking at them. So I thought that that was very interesting in terms of what wasn’t happening, and as a result I think it obviously has a very negative impact on the quality of the evaluation that’s being done. Because how can the judge or how can anyone evaluate the context of what’s going on in the relationship without having the full information? The concept that I find troubling from a judge’s perspective is this concept that somebody can just by talking to somebody and looking them in the eye, figure out if they’re telling you the truth or not.

That’s what evaluators are oftentimes doing, and that’s what theoretically we’re doing up on the bench. I could not look somebody in the eye when they’re up on the stand and tell you if they’re telling me the truth or not. Last case I did Friday afternoon before I got on the plane this weekend, two people came in, no children and no allegations of violence. The issue in question, because there’s a temporary support, who’s going to pay the bills, is did mother, two months before have a shoe box in her closet that had $30,000 in cash in it? He said she did, and she said she didn’t.

Well, to tell you the truth, and I told them, “I don’t have a clue which one of you is telling me the truth, and I don’t have any way to figure that out. I know that you both lied to me about the income situation because it’s totally inconsistent with what’s on your tax returns, or you lied to the government, one or the other, but I can’t find that truth.” And in that situation I didn’t have to make that decision, there were other basis on which I could make my decision about what the support issue is going to be. But in the context if they were coming in making an allegation regarding domestic violence, just talking to them there, I wasn’t going to make that decision, but there may have been a lot of collateral information out there that would help me make that decision appropriately.

The role of the attorneys, where there are attorneys, just can’t be underestimated. The best case I ever had an attorney try in front of me, regarding a custody situation, where there’s an evaluation, was a situation where there were allegations among other things of domestic violence — among other things — in the relationship. And the two parties had agreed on somebody to do a custody evaluation through their attorneys. That evaluation was done, and the evaluation came back and recommended custody to the father. The mother wasn’t satisfied with that, and she decided to change attorneys — a very good choice for her at that point. And the rule that we have in our court is we will not order a second evaluation. If the parties have stipulated to an evaluation and we’ve signed the order proving that, we will not order a second evaluation. So that attorney did what the evaluator should have done in the first place. The attorney went and looked at all of the collateral sources that could have confirmed or proven not true the assumptions that the evaluator made when they reached the conclusions for the report.

For instance, and in relation to an instance of domestic violence, where the evaluator concluded, because there had been no complaint filed, that it wasn’t worth looking at, that it must not have been true. And therefore, that’s part of the pattern of the mother making up stuff. The attorney subpoenaed him to court, the police officer who took that report and the eye witness to the event. And those people came in and testified, and it was very clear that there was the significant event of domestic violence that occurred. If the evaluator had even taken a look at the police report, which they hadn’t chosen to do because there’d been no complaint filed, probably would have at least raised some questions in their minds. So, I think it’s extremely important that the attorneys don’t just accept the evaluator’s report either in terms of what comes in front of the court.

Now, just a couple of other points, and then we’ll open this up for questions. It’s kind of — the questions raised to me, first from Dr. Saunders’ study, project is could these same hypotheses be applied to evaluation of judges? In other words, if you’re assuming that evaluators have these predispositions and that their decision-making might be based upon gender, personal family history, training, is that true of judicial officers as well who are making those decisions? And the answer as our Supreme Court nominee indicated in some of her remarks is, “You know how I grew up probably does make a difference in terms of how I view life in general and the lens in which I view cases that come in front of me in a court room.”

Now, it’s probably a little more delicate to do that kind of examination of judicial decision-making than for evaluators, and partly that happens to us on a daily basis anyway because the decision-making the judges make is much more visible than other decision-making because it occurs in an open court room; it’s a reported proceeding, and everybody can come in there, and as you all know, judges have been criticized from both sides about how they view domestic violence issues. But yet it’s true that the lens that judges view cases through does affect that decision-making process. It has to. The decision-making that I do now is a lot different than what I was doing 15 years ago. My gender hasn’t changed, my background hasn’t changed, but my education’s changed significantly, particularly on domestic violence issues.

The other context in which we actually take a look at judicial decision-making, and I touched up on this earlier is what court room we’re sitting in. In other words what hat we’re wearing. It’s interesting in a judicial institute that we do for judges on domestic violence issues, we do an exercise where we give the judges three different scenarios. And in one scenario, they’re sitting as a judge in a dependency court in a child abuse court. One scenario, they’re sitting in child protection court. And the other, they’re sitting in a family court. And we ask them to make decisions. They’re given exactly the same scenario, but it’s interesting. Their decision-making is different because they’re viewing it from a little different context.

The other thing that I don’t think we can lose sight of here in this discussion, we’re talking about evaluators; we’re talking about cases with attorneys. The majority of the cases that come in front of us, there’s never an evaluation done. The majority of the cases that come in front of the courts, one or both of the parties are unrepresented. So, what we need to make sure we do with the research, I think, is it needs to go out beyond the events, evaluators and the researchers and the lawyers. It does definitely need to get to the bench because unfortunately judges are called upon to make these decisions all the time without proper evaluations.

So, I guess my question is where do we go from here? My question last night to Dan was, “OK, we’ve got this great research, so what?” But there are ways that this can use us, help us to make better evaluations to look at the role of attorneys in this process, to look at what weight we should give to evaluations, and to help us take a look at, properly take a look at the context of domestic violence in relation to the decision-making we’re making. So, thank you very much.

[Applause.]

NIJ Home Page.

National Domestic Violence Hotline
1-800-799-SAFE (7233)
1-800-787-3224 (TTY)

We define domestic violence as a pattern of abusive behavior in any relationship that is used by one partner to gain or maintain power and control over another intimate partner.  Domestic violence can be physical, sexual, emotional, economic, or psychological actions or threats of actions that influence another person. This includes any behaviors that intimidate, manipulate, humiliate, isolate, frighten, terrorize, coerce, threaten, blame, hurt, injure, or wound someone.

Physical Abuse: Hitting, slapping, shoving, grabbing, pinching, biting, hair pulling, etc are types of physical abuse. This type of abuse also includes denying a partner medical care or forcing alcohol and/or drug use upon him or her.

Sexual Abuse: Coercing or attempting to coerce any sexual contact or behavior without consent. Sexual abuse includes, but is certainly not limited to, marital rape, attacks on sexual parts of the body, forcing sex after physical violence has occurred, or treating one in a sexually demeaning manner.

Emotional Abuse: Undermining an individual's sense of self-worth and/or self-esteem is abusive. This may include, but is not limited to constant criticism, diminishing one's abilities, name-calling, or damaging one's relationship with his or her children.

Economic Abuse: Is defined as making or attempting to make an individual financially dependent by maintaining total control over financial resources, withholding one's access to money, or forbidding one's attendance at school or employment.

Psychological Abuse: Elements of psychological abuse include  - but are not limited to - causing fear by intimidation; threatening physical harm to self, partner, children, or partner's family or friends; destruction of pets and property; and forcing isolation from family, friends, or school and/or work.

Domestic violence can happen to anyone regardless of race, age, sexual orientation, religion, or gender. Domestic violence affects people of all socioeconomic backgrounds and education levels. Domestic violence occurs in both opposite-sex and same-sex relationships and can happen to intimate partners who are married, living together, or dating.

Domestic violence not only affects those who are abused, but also has a substantial effect on family members, friends, co-workers, other witnesses, and the community at large. Children, who grow up witnessing domestic violence, are among those seriously affected by this crime. Frequent exposure to violence in the home not only predisposes children to numerous social and physical problems, but also teaches them that violence is a normal way of life - therefore, increasing their risk of becoming society's next generation of victims and abusers.

Sources: National Domestic Violence Hotline, National Center for Victims of Crime, and WomensLaw.org.

EXTREME CUSTODY DECISIONS THAT RISK LIVES 

By Barry Goldstein

Dear Custody Court Judge:

The research is now clear that certain extreme decisions in domestic violence custody cases that have become all too common are contributing to an increase in the frequency of domestic violence homicide and other harmful consequences. This is established in the leading resources about domestic violence and custody including THE BATTERER AS PARENT by Lundy Bancroft and Jay Silverman, DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, ABUSE and CHILD CUSTODY edited by Mo Therese Hannah and Barry Goldstein and the major new Department of Justice study led by Dr. Daniel Saunders of the University of Michigan. Judges should be aware of the research that demonstrates the danger of creating these dangerous decisions avoid these decisions in the future and modify existing arrangements that create substantial risks to the children.

The decisions that must be avoided and corrected are ones in which an alleged abuser is given custody and a safe, protective mother is limited to supervised or no visitation. I will more fully describe these dangerous cases below and I am not saying it can never be right to give someone custody who was accused of domestic violence or child abuse or that a mother who makes abuse allegations should never be denied normal visitation.

I will discuss the harm and danger of these extreme decisions below, but judges should be aware that these decisions are probably the largest factor in the recent increase in domestic violence homicide. Furthermore these extreme decisions are never in the best interests of children even when the court is right that the abuse allegations are false and the mother seeks to take the father out of the child's life for bad faith reasons. More commonly, the research demonstrates that court professionals who used flawed practices to justify the extreme decision also got the underlying facts wrong. Judges should look to the specialized body of research now available that can help courts make the best decisions in domestic violence custody cases.

Description of Extreme Cases

The extreme cases I am speaking about include evidence or at least allegations of domestic violence or child abuse. It is not limited to cases in which the allegations are confirmed or believed. The research establishes that courts fail to recognize valid complaints about domestic violence and child abuse with frightening frequency because of the outdated and discredited practices that continue to be used in domestic violence custody cases despite the scientific research now available. Furthermore, even when courts reject abuse allegations because of inadequate proof or in rare cases in which mothers make deliberately false allegations, courts have a tendency to punish mothers in ways that are harmful to the children.

Most of these cases involve mothers who are the primary attachment figures for their children. Primary attachment is created in the first couple of years of a child’s life so later care or custody of a child does not change the primary attachment figure. Some court professionals confuse continuity, which is a valid consideration with primary attachment which is far more significant to children. Primary attachment is often minimized by custody courts because of stereotypes and gender bias. Mothers are often expected to provide most of the child care so they receive little credit or benefit for doing so even though it makes a big difference to the well being of children. In fairness to judges, many attorneys fail to present evidence about the mothers’ early care for her children and the significance of that care.

In attempting to treat both parents equally, courts often fail to understand that the parents may not be of equal importance to the well being of their children based on past parenting such as superior parenting skills, non-abusiveness and primary attachment. When a court treats unequal parents as if their value to the child is the same, this is actually a bias favoring the weaker parent and certainly not in the best interests of the children. Children who are separated from their primary attachment figure are more likely to suffer depression, low self-esteem and to commit suicide when they are older. It cannot be beneficial to subject children to such substantial risks unless the primary attachment figure is unsafe, but courts routinely do so when they treat alienation as if it were more significant than primary attachment or abuse.

If custody courts were acting in the best interests of children as required by statute, they would be weighing the harms and benefits of any proposed custody-visitation arrangement. So if a mother was a drug addict she could not be relied upon to keep her children safe and healthy. If she beat the children, that would create an obvious safety risk. If she had a mental illness so serious that it would prevent her from taking proper care of her children, this would create a safety risk. I must emphasize, however that many of the mental health diagnoses seen in custody court are inaccurate because of flawed practices and biases and in any event do not create a legitimate safety issue. The kinds of safety issues discussed in this paragraph are more serious than the risks of separating a child from her primary attachment figure and would justify the extreme decisions discussed in this article. The problem is that most of the extreme decisions are justified by reasons that do not involve a safety issue and are likely to create more harm than benefit for the children.

The extreme decisions frequently imposed on protective mothers come in the context of a court system that is extremely reluctant to restrict fathers who abused their partners to supervised visitation as recommended by leading domestic violence experts such as Lundy Bancroft and Peter Jaffe. Children who witness domestic violence are prevented from reaching their developmental goals which in turn interferes with their ability to reach future developmental milestones. These children are also more likely to engage in a wide range of harmful behavior when they are older including substance abuse, self-mutilation, suicide, prostitution, crime, teen pregnancy, school drop-out and for boys to abuse future partners and girls to be abused by future partners. Again these are valid safety concerns that justify visitation restrictions. Some unqualified professionals unfamiliar with domestic violence dynamics minimize these risks because the parties are separated or the father stopped assaulting his partner when he no longer had access to her. Domestic violence is not caused by the victim’s behavior, but by the abuser’s belief system. There is no reason to believe the end of the relationship will change his beliefs so if the father is given custody or unsupervised visitation, the children are likely to witness his abuse of future partners. Over forty states have created court-sponsored gender bias committees that have found widespread gender bias particularly against mothers in custody cases. The willingness and almost eagerness to engage in these extreme decisions against protective mothers, together with the reluctance to limit contact with dangerous fathers demonstrates the impact of gender bias in domestic violence custody cases.

For purposes of this article, these extreme cases are ones in which there is no legitimate safety issue to justify decisions that place children in jeopardy. One common example of a non-safety issue is the use of alienation to justify the extreme decisions. One of the problems with alienation is that courts often allow fathers to make a general complaint claiming alienation without specifying exactly what the mother is alleged to have done. This makes it difficult to defend and raises due process concerns. If the concern is that the mother is making negative statements about the father, where is the research that demonstrates the long term harm to children hearing these statements? There is none. Children hear negative statements like this even in intact families. The most likely result is to harm the relationship with the parent making these statements if they are false. Even when the statements cause some harm to the relationship, these effects are generally short term. More often in domestic violence cases the real problem with the father’s relationship is his mistreatment of the mother or children as when Alec Baldwin called his daughter vile names, threatened her and then wanted to blame the mother for the natural effects of his abusive behavior. We often see mental health professionals lacking domestic violence expertise pathologize the victim and use this to justify the kind of extreme decision discussed in this article. I will discuss this in more detail below, but these are rarely safety issues. Courts also sometimes impose the extreme decisions to punish mothers who continue to believe their allegations of abuse after the court denied them, criticize the judge or otherwise act in ways the judge disapproves of. Given the harm to children of separating them from their primary attachment figure, none of these justifications rise to the level of safety issues so that the restrictions on the children’s ability to see their primary attachment figure are far more harmful than any benefit the court believes it is providing for the children.

Extreme Decisions Contribute to Rising Domestic Violence Homicide Rate

When domestic violence first became a public issue over thirty years ago there was no research to inform decision making by institutions charged with responding to domestic violence. The standard police response was to separate the parties and have the abuser walk around the block to cool off. This is how police officers were trained to respond and was considered best practices. Later, researchers found that this response was ineffective. In 95% of cases in which men murdered their intimate partner, the police had been called and used the standard response. On average the police had been called to the home in response to the abuser’s violence five times. The information from the research and lobbying by those working to end domestic violence led police departments across the country to adopt a pro arrest policy. These and other policies designed to hold abusers accountable and make it easier for women to leave their abusers resulted in a significant reduction in domestic violence homicides. The benefit of strict accountability was confirmed by some communities like Quincy, Massachusetts, Nashville, Tennessee and San Diego, California that obtained even more dramatic reductions in domestic violence homicide by stricter enforcement of criminal laws and restraining orders against abusers.

The steady decrease in domestic violence homicides continued until recently when many states reported a resurgence in intimate partner homicides. Some people have suggested the poor economy has caused this increase, but a lot of research and information suggests the frequency of custody court decisions favoring dangerous abusers and particularly the extreme decisions discussed in this article have been a major factor in the increase in domestic violence homicides. A large part of the reduction in domestic violence homicides had been aided by providing victims with safer ways to leave their abuser. Court decisions, particularly in criminal cases taking domestic violence more seriously sent an important message that society no longer tolerated abusive behavior. The frequent custody decisions supporting abusers have undermined this progress and sent the opposite message. Domestic violence advocates have told me that they are seeing more mothers staying with their abusers and taking his beatings because they are afraid the custody court will separate them from their children and they won’t be able to protect them. Of course some of these mothers do not survive this decision. At the same time, custody decisions that minimize the significance or fail to recognize the father’s abuse are sending a terrible message that society will tolerate this abuse. For many years, Dutchess County, New York permitted many court professionals with strong fathers’ rights sympathies to work in the custody court. This led to numerous extreme decisions against safe, protective mothers. This in turn led to a series of domestic violence homicides and now the community is trying to create a coordinated community response and change practices that have encouraged these tragedies including the murder of a police officer by an abusive father in the aftermath of one of these murders.

Custody courts also developed their practices to respond to domestic violence cases at a time when no useful research was available. The courts turned to mental health professionals for expertise based on the widespread assumption that domestic violence was caused by mental illness, substance abuse and the actions of the victim. We now have a substantial body of research that establishes these assumptions were wrong and the standard practices are working poorly for children. The evaluators and other mental health professionals routinely relied on by the courts are not experts in domestic violence and usually unfamiliar with the specialized body of research now available. This has led judges and lawyers to be taught a lot of misinformation and continue to use outdated and discredited practices. Significantly, the Department of Justice study found many evaluators and other court professionals do not have the domestic violence training they need. Those professionals without the needed training are more likely to believe the myth that women frequently make false allegations of abuse and therefore make recommendations harmful to children. We often see court professionals make reference to this myth and it is especially influential in the extreme decisions discussed in this article. Even if you know mothers in contested custody cases make deliberate false allegations only one or two percent of the time, you may be influenced by other court professionals making recommendations based on this myth. Parental Alienation Syndrome (also often referred to as parental alienation or just alienation because of its notoriety), which was recently rejected for inclusion in the DSM-V (that lists all valid mental health diagnoses) because there is no scientific basis for it, is based on the assumption that virtually all allegations of abuse by mothers are false. In fairness to judges, they were often never told that PAS is based not on any research but the beliefs and biases of Richard Gardner. Gardner, who made a fortune providing expert testimony for abusers made many statements to the effect that sex between adults and children can be acceptable. It is hard to imagine many judges would want to be connected with such beliefs if they had known the basis for the PAS formulation. Alienation tactics based on PAS are probably the most common basis for the extreme decisions as the theory recommends punitive actions against protective mothers without considering the harm to children.

Most court professionals have been taught that contested custody are ”high conflict” cases by which they mean the parents are angry with each other and act out in ways that hurt their children. The actual research shows a different story. Most custody cases are settled more or less amicably. Even abusive fathers who are willing to seek custody for strategic reasons will ultimately settle usually for an unfair financial advantage and often a custodial arrangement that gives him some continued control over his victim. Even though these fathers are abusive they are not willing to hurt their children in order to punish the mother. Of course most custody cases do not involve domestic violence and these are easily settled once the parties get past their hurt. Accordingly over 95% of custody cases are settled more or less amicably.

The real problem is the 3.8% of cases that go to trial and usually far beyond. The vast majority of these cases, probably around 90% are domestic violence cases that involve the worst of the worst abusers. These are usually cases where the father had little involvement with the children during the relationship, but suddenly demands custody as a way to pressure her to return or punish her for leaving. Abusers tend to be good at manipulation and court professionals are usually happy to find a father who appears to want to be involved in his children’s lives. The flawed “high conflict” approach works great for abusers because it requires the parties to interact and cooperate with each other. This gives him the access to his victim he sought by playing the custody card. At the same time it pressures the mother to cooperate with her abuser and punishes her reluctance to interact with someone she experienced as dangerous and difficult. In other words the “high conflict” approach gives abusers a huge advantage.

The most dangerous abusers are the ones who believe she has no right to leave him. They usually respond to her leaving in one or more of three ways. They respond by killing her which is why75% of men who kill their partners do so after she has left. They respond by killing their children. In the last couple of years over 175 children have been murdered by abusive fathers involved in contested custody cases. Most often they respond by going after custody as a tactic to regain control and too often custody courts help them do so.

In one California case featured on the Dr. Phil Program, Katie Tagle asked Judge Lemkau to limit the father to supervised visitation after he threatened to kill the baby. The transcript of the hearing shows that the judge stated he thought the mother was lying and threatened to punish her. During the unsupervised visitation, the father murdered seven-month-old Baby Wyatt and himself. I am sure Judge Lemkau was sincere when he expressed how sorry he was for what happened, but said there was nothing he could have done based on the information before him. In a sense, he is right. As long as he and other judges continue to use the outdated and discredited practices routinely relied on in domestic violence custody cases, you have little chance to protect the children whose futures you must determine.

The first priority in any custody case ought to be safety, but that cannot happen as long as custody courts continue to rely on professionals without the needed expertise in domestic violence. Many communities have developed practices where child protective agencies and domestic violence agencies work together on domestic violence issues. They cross-train staffs and when a potential domestic violence case develops, the caseworker will consult with a domestic violence advocate and even bring her to the home. This has resulted in a better ability to recognize domestic violence when it is present and respond in ways that benefit children. This should be understood as a fundamental part of best practices. Psychiatrists and psychologists are encouraged to consult with experts in fields in which they do not have expertise when that is a vital part of the case they are working on. Evaluators rarely consult with domestic violence advocates or other experts even though they rarely possess the domestic violence expertise they need or familiarity with current scientific research. Domestic violence advocates routinely conduct safety assessments for their clients. There are many common abuser behaviors such as strangling or choking his victim, raping or attempting to rape her and hitting her while pregnant that are associated with higher rates of lethality. We virtually never see evaluators discussing the significance of these and other dangerous behaviors. If they are not doing a lethality assessment, the evaluators cannot tell judges which alleged abusers are unsafe. Instead we routinely see evaluators focus on less important issues because they don’t have the expertise to recognize the dangers. Even worse they frequently seek to punish mothers who know their abusers are dangerous after failing to recognize the danger because of their lack of expertise. This is common in the extreme decisions discussed in this article.

There is good reason to believe there is a strong connection to the extreme decisions discussed in this article and the sudden rise in domestic violence homicides after many years of decline. These cases are dealing with the most dangerous abusers. The frequency of these extreme decisions has led many victims to stay with their abusers. Some of these mothers will not survive the decision. Perhaps most significant is that these decisions send a horrible message of support for abusers which only serves to support their dangerous beliefs. I am sure this is not your intent, but it is the message these extreme decisions send to the community.

These Extreme Decisions are almost Always Harmful to Children

The extreme decisions described in this article are the focus of much of the review of domestic violence custody cases because they trigger the most legitimate complaints. Thousands of these cases have been reviewed and we rarely find any attempt by the court professionals to weigh the harm caused by these decisions with whatever benefit the court believes it is providing to the children. The decisions are virtually always wrong because separating a child from her primary attachment figure significantly increases the child’s risk of depression, low self-esteem and suicide when older. When the justifications for limiting the mother’s contact with the child to supervised or less do not involve safety issues, the restrictions on the mother’s access are more harmful than any benefits. In other words, even if the court’s factual findings are accurate, the decision is a mistake.

Many of these decisions are based on findings that the mother suffers from some kind of mental illness. Repeatedly we have seen unqualified and biased mental health professionals pathologize the victim and impose false or exaggerated diagnoses based upon considering facts out of context. In many cases mothers have been labeled delusional or paranoid because professionals without adequate training in domestic violence failed to recognize the proof of the father’s domestic violence. Other common mistakes are based on the misuse of psychological testing. Most judges and lawyers are not aware that these tests were not created for the populations seen in custody court and are based on probabilities so may not apply to the parties in a specific case. The tests were designed for patients in mental hospitals who have severe mental illnesses. In the context of family court, parents under stress or with minor differences from the average person are diagnosed as if the differences are significant. Under the best of circumstances, the results of psychological tests are accurate between 55-65% of the time. If I went to court and told you that 98% of domestic violence allegations by mothers are accurate, you would quite properly tell me that you have to look at each case separately because this father might be part of the 2% and yet the courts routinely rely on tests that don’t apply to at least 35% of the parties. Even worse, the tests are less reliable when given to parties under stress such as victims of domestic violence and those involved in difficult custody cases. Evaluators rarely explain that the tests are based on probabilities. Repeatedly we have seen mothers who have no problems dealing with family, jobs, school and other parts of their lives labeled with disqualifying mental illnesses. While they may be impacted by the pressure of custody court and the use of litigation abuse by the father, these mothers are safe as parents and sane in every other part of their lives. In almost all of these cases the mother has always taken good care of the children and the father allowed and often demanded she provide the child care right up until she decided to leave him. She did not suddenly become crazy because she left him except in his eyes.

Another common excuse for the kind of extreme decision discussed in this article is some version of alienation. This is a common abuser tactic and in many of these decisions the problems with the relationship between the father and children were caused by the father’s behavior. Court professionals have constantly heard and relied on half a sentence. The half they are familiar with is that children do better with both parents in their lives. This is a true statement, but the rest of the statement is unless one of the parents is abusive. Interestingly this statement seems to get little consideration when a mother is taken out of the child’s life. As mentioned earlier, alienation issues tend to be short lived and there is no research that demonstrates the kind of long term harm that has been shown to children separated from their primary attachment figure. I am not saying that alienating behaviors are not a legitimate issue, but only there is no basis in scientific research that justifies the harm done to a child in losing regular contact with her primary attachment figure. Supervised visitation is not sufficient to avoid this serious harm.

These extreme decisions are also made as a way to punish the mother for continuing to believe her abuse allegations after the court denies them, her continued fear or anger towards her alleged abuser, attempts to obtain publicity, failure to pay support or economic sanctions, criticism of the judge and other similar issues. Courts that limit mothers’ contact with the children for these types of reasons fail to recognize they are really punishing and hurting the children. Significantly, the motivation of most abusers seeking custody is to punish the mother for leaving and it is particularly harmful for courts to help him do so. The fathers understand the best way to hurt the mother is to hurt her children, but the judge is supposed to help the children. Even if the facts the judge believes justifies action against the mother are true, they can never justify extreme decisions that place the future of the children in jeopardy.

Sexual Abuse Cases

Many of the extreme decisions come in cases involving allegations of sexual abuse. By the time children reach the age of eighteen, one-third of the girls and one-sixth of the boys have been sexually abused. The stereotypical rapist or sexual abuser is a stranger, but 83% of rape and sexual abuse is committed by someone the victim knows. For young children, this is often their father, but when allegations are made by mothers in custody cases, the alleged abuser receives custody 85% of the time and the mother is often denied any meaningful relationship with the children she tried to protect. A large majority of these decisions are wrong and it is extremely difficult for judges to get these cases right with the deeply flawed practices that are standard in these cases.

Many years ago, three brave children complained their father was physically and sexually abusing them. The mother obtained a protective order limiting the father to supervised visitation and sought custody. The children told the CPS caseworker, their attorney, the judge and the court-appointed evaluator what their father did to them. As is common in these cases, these professionals decided the mother was brainwashing the children and they threatened to take custody away from her unless she stopped. The judge ordered a resumption of unsupervised visitation that weekend. Before the first visitation could start, the father was confronted by the baby sitter in the presence of the children’s law guardian and admitted kissing his daughters on their privates. The law guardian immediately made a motion to stop the visitation which I supported. The judge consulted the evaluator who said the father used bad judgment, but there was no reason to stop the visitation. During the first visit the four-year-old was penetrated for the first time.

I called CPS based on the father’s admission which had not been part of the original investigation. When the judge found out he yelled and screamed at me saying that the allegations had already been investigated. This time a new caseworker did a thorough job and found the father had done even worse than we alleged. They filed charges against the father and he never again had anything but supervised visitation.

The caseworker and I were invited to a celebratory dinner after the mother won custody. The children had gifts for us, but most important they had a name for us. They called us believers because we believed them when all the professionals charged with protecting them didn’t. There is no greater honor than to be called a believer and the problem is that a lot of custody court professionals are not believers. They instead believe the myth that women frequently make false allegations as again confirmed in the recent Justice Department study.

The evaluator in this case was a psychiatrist who was the favorite evaluator of all the judges in Westchester County, New York. He had a very positive reputation and in fact was excellent in cases that did not involve domestic violence or child abuse. Many years after this case a mother was pressured to accept joint custody with her abuser and this psychiatrist was appointed to resolve any issues the parents could not decide on their own. The mother learned that the father’s new partner had suffered a mental breakdown at a birthday party attended by her son. She called the psychiatrist to discuss how to handle the situation. The psychiatrist responded completely appropriately and then told her that when she first called he thought she was going to claim that her son was sexually abused AND HE WAS FULLY PREPARED NOT TO BELIEVE IT. In other words, no matter how strong the evidence, if this evaluator was appointed (and he handled most custody cases in Westchester), a mother had virtually no chance of convincing him about her allegations of abuse and the judges were almost certain to follow his recommendation. While few evaluators would express their disbelief of all sexual abuse allegations so openly, his views are all too typical. This gives even good judges little chance to get sexual abuse cases right.

Sexual abuse is extremely difficult to prove especially with young children. Many professionals expect physical proof, but many forms of sexual abuse do not leave physical evidence and any evidence is often destroyed by the time the child reports the abuse. We often see valid claims of abuse dismissed for reasons that are not probative such as the failure of prosecutors or child protective to bring charges, the reluctance of children to discuss the abuse particularly with someone with whom they have not developed a trusting relationship with and unqualified professionals often take a child’s matter of fact demeanor as if it disproves the allegations. Most prosecutors know that victims often recant valid allegations of abuse for many good reasons, but custody court professionals routinely use this as absolute proof the mother pressured the child to make a false allegation.

When a mother or child makes allegations of sexual abuse the most likely circumstance is that the allegation is true. The next most likely is that the allegation is based upon behavior that made the child act out in ways that suggested sexual abuse but were actually boundary violations. Other common causes are good faith complaints that turn out not to be true or situations where there is not sufficient evidence to determine the validity of the allegations. The least likely cause is deliberate false allegations by mothers, but inadequately trained court professionals frequently jump to this conclusion which often results in the kind of extreme and mistaken decisions discussed in this article.

In one New Jersey case, DYFS and the court completely mishandled both the domestic violence and sexual abuse issues. DYFS has now adopted best practices for potential domestic violence cases by making consultation with domestic violence advocates a standard response. This has been shown to give them the best chance to recognize domestic violence and make arrangements that work best for children. This case started before they adopted best practices and so never consulted with a domestic violence advocate even though the case is ongoing. They failed to recognize the father’s history of domestic violence. After the father was given custody and the mother limited to supervised visitation, an unqualified therapist inadvertently discovered the father had broken into his previous girl friend’s apartment after they separated and she had to obtain a restraining order. The unqualified therapist forced the mother to have joint counseling with her abuser and ignored his discovery because he did not understand its significance. DYFS later hired a psychologist who was familiar with current scientific research and was the only professional hired by them to cite research to support her recommendations. She immediately understood his history of domestic violence, together with other evidence the unqualified professionals failed to understand the significance of, confirmed the mother’s allegations of domestic violence and should have resulted in a reversal of the mistaken living arrangements.

DYFS sought to limit the mother to supervised visitation after all their unqualified professionals decided she had made deliberately false allegations. The evidence included the decision by DYFS and the prosecutor not to bring charges. As discussed earlier, the difficulty in proving sexual abuse means the failure to press charges does not establish the allegations were false and in the case of the prosecutor the inability to prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt certainly does not mean the charges were false. DYFS interviewed the child without developing a trusting relationship and when she didn’t immediately repeat her allegations or with other professionals was reluctant to speak about them they concluded the allegations were deliberately false. Reports from the child’s therapist with whom she had a trusting relationship showed that the child reported the abuse but was reluctant to speak about it and used a matter of fact tone. The unqualified professionals immediately assumed that either the allegations were true or deliberately false so when they discredited the allegations proceeded as if the mother deliberately made false allegations.

The psychologist later hired by DYFS reviewed the records and recognized that the facts used by DYFS to discredit the allegations were not probative and cited research to support her findings. Again DYFS and the court ignored the findings of the one professional, who was both neutral and familiar with current scientific research. In reality, this was a very young girl who did not know the significance of whatever was done to her. Something her father and grandmother did made her uncomfortable and she told the person she most trusted, her mother. It was difficult for her to tell others although she did tell her therapist and a few other professionals. She was uncomfortable speaking about it. The evidence does not definitively establish if she was sexually abused or if her boundaries were violated. These are the two possibilities supported by the evidence that the professionals should have focused on, but instead they focused on false allegations just as the Justice Department study says is done by professionals with inadequate training. The result is that the child is forced to live with a dangerous abuser and denied a normal relationship with her primary attachment figure who is a safe, protective mother. In other words the court created one of these extreme decisions because it relied on unqualified professionals and failed to look to current scientific research to inform its decision.

In a Dutchess County case, the mother did everything right and the actions she complained about were admitted and still she was found to have made false sexual abuse allegations to gain an advantage in the litigation. The mother met with the school nurse who told the mother about incidents in which her child acted out in a sexualized way. The nurse advised the mother to seek therapy for her son. She took the child to the family services center that is regularly used by the courts and police as the nurse suggested. They selected the therapist to treat her son. The mother was concerned that the father would scratch the children all over their almost naked bodies, but not on their privates. They reacted in an inappropriately excited way and begged their mother to do this to them. The therapist believed this constituted sexual abuse and called child protective. The mother begged her not to because she was afraid of the reaction by her abuser. During couples counseling, the therapist for the mother and father also concluded the father’s actions were sexually abusive. The father admitted what he did and promised not to do it anymore. CPS also confirmed what the father did, but did not consider this to constitute sexual abuse and so unfounded the case. In the custody decision the judge treated the allegations as if they were deliberately false and punished the mother even though the acts she complained of were confirmed and two neutral therapists believed the actions were harmful to the children. The abuser won custody and the mother, who had been the primary attachment figure, was limited to supervised visitation. When good judges use bad practices to create these extreme decisions, it is easier for bad judges to get away with the extreme decisions even when there is no basis because his decisions are not that different from the mistakes by good judges.

Extreme Decisions Usually Have Underlying Facts Wrong

When the mother is safe, decisions that give custody to the alleged abuser and limit her to supervised visitation are virtually always wrong because the harm of denying the children a normal relationship with their primary attachment figure is greater than any benefit the court believes it is providing. These wrong decisions can only be obtained through the use of deeply flawed practices so it is not surprising that courts often also made substantial mistakes in their factual findings.

Often the key to understanding the case has to do with the domestic violence allegations, but unfortunately, although most professionals now have some minimum amount of domestic violence training, they have never learned how to recognize domestic violence or the importance of consulting with a domestic violence expert who understands the dynamics of domestic violence and is familiar with current scientific research.

Judge Mike Brigner wrote that when he trains judges and other court professionals about domestic violence, the most common question he receives is what to do about women who are lying. When he asks what they mean they cite behaviors like returning to her abuser, seeking a restraining order and not following-up and the failure to have police or medical records. All of these are common behaviors of battered women for safety and other reasons particularly if she is still living with him, but court professionals repeatedly treat these actions as if they prove her allegations are false. Another common mistake is for a professional to observe the children interact with their father and when they don’t show fear, the professionals assume it means the father could not be abusive. The children understand that he would not hurt them in front of witnesses, particularly someone he is trying to impress. When court professionals believe these common behaviors disprove domestic violence allegations, they give the judge very little chance of recognizing valid allegations of abuse.

Another common mistake is to look only at physical abuse in considering the mother’s allegations. Domestic violence are tactics abusers use to maintain what they believe is their right to control their partners and make the major decisions in the relationship. Most domestic violence is neither physical nor criminal. Lawyers should present the pattern of the father’s controlling and coercive behaviors and judges should be looking for this pattern. This would include not only physical abuse, but verbal, emotional and psychological abuse. It would include economic abuse and control, litigation abuse designed to bankrupt or otherwise harm his victim, isolating behaviors, monitoring behaviors, threats as well as evidence that shows the father’s motivation for seeking custody. In cases in which the mother did most of the child care during the relationship, the court should consider why the father is suddenly seeking custody and why is he willing to harm the children he claims to love by removing their primary attachment figure. The father may not know the exact harm demonstrated by the research but should have a general sense that children are harmed when denied their primary attachment figure.

The Department of Justice study found that court professionals pay far too much attention to the anger or emotion a mother displays in court in comparison to its significance in determining how good a mother she is. Similarly over forty states have had court-sponsored gender bias committees that have found substantial bias against women and particularly against mothers involved in custody disputes. One of the common forms of bias is to blame a mother for the actions of her abuser. This is exactly what a court does when it blames the mother for her emotion or anger caused by the father’s history of abuse and use of abusive litigation tactics instead of blaming him for intimidating and coercive behaviors that caused her reaction. Gender bias is often difficult to recognize because it is not done deliberately or consciously and some court professionals become extremely defensive when this issue is raised. A good remedy is to frequently consider how you would have reacted to the same situation if the genders were reversed.

We often hear judges complain about how difficult it is to decide a he-said she-said case. Usually this is because much of the evidence that would have helped the judge see the pattern was missed because the court professionals did not know what to look for. In one case the father admitted telling his wife that he brought her here from Russia so she had no right to leave. He said she would never get away from him. This father, in effect told the judge his motivation for seeking custody, but the judge failed to use this evidence because he did not understand its significance. Most cases will not have such obvious evidence, but smart professionals can figure out the motivation from the history and context.

Consequences of Extreme Decisions

Abusers understand that the best way to hurt mothers is to hurt their children. This is why so many abusive fathers who had little involvement with the children during the relationship suddenly seek custody when the mother seeks to leave her abuser. Court professionals often miss recognizing the fathers’ motivation because they have repeatedly heard that contested custody are high conflict cases when most are actually domestic violence cases. The worst part of this work is hearing about the unspeakable pain suffered by mothers and children when courts send children to live with dangerous abusers and take safe, protective mothers out of their children’s lives. It is extremely frustrating because these mistakes cause so much harm, but could be prevented if the courts would apply current scientific research.

If there was a scientific basis for these decisions, an evaluator could tell the court how his recommendations have worked out for the children in earlier cases. There is no such research and the closest we have are the Courageous Kids. These are young adults who have aged out of custody orders forcing them to live with abusive fathers and denying them a normal relationship with their mothers. These kids have a moral authority that none of the rest of us has because the decisions were supposed to be made for their benefit. The decisions gave control to the fathers who had tremendous power and resources to silence the children. This means the many Courageous Kids who have spoken out, often in great pain in order to help other children from suffering the same fate, represent a small percentage of spectacularly mistaken decisions. They describe tremendous pain and suffering during childhood and many problems that last into their adult lives. In many ways they are the lucky ones because other children in this situation commit suicide, destroy their lives with drugs and other harmful behaviors or otherwise never reach their potential.

As discussed earlier these decisions lead to a higher crime rate in addition to the increase in domestic violence homicide. A large majority of our prison population witnessed domestic violence or suffered direct abuse. The extreme decisions discussed in this article increase this unfortunate population. These mistakes also have a profound negative impact on society. The increased crime requires substantial expenditures in the criminal justice system as well as property losses and injuries. These mistakes also substantially increase health expenses that raise insurance rates and taxes when the government pays health costs. At the same time, by destroying or limiting the potential of these children, and others, it reduces economic output thus reducing tax revenue.

As someone who practiced law for thirty years, I am particularly concerned about the harm these cases do to the reputation of the courts and the legal system. I repeatedly hear statements that the custody court system is corrupt. This is based on so many cases in which the disparity of the evidence and the outcome makes it look like only corruption could have caused such improper decisions. The extreme decisions that cannot possibly benefit the children further support the corruption conclusion.

While there are instances of corruption such as the Garson case in Brooklyn, I believe the research supports a different explanation. It appears the courts adopted flawed practices at a time when no research was available and have continued these outdated and discredited practices despite the current scientific research available. The use of myths, stereotypes, bias and misinformation are widespread in the custody courts. The use of mental health professionals as if they were the experts in domestic violence contributes both to mistaken decisions and widespread misinformation. Many judges have been unwilling to take a close look to scrutinize evaluators’ recommendations or to discredit evaluators who are unfamiliar with current scientific research. The problem is exasperated by a cottage industry of lawyers and mental health professionals who have figured out that fathers tend to have control of most of the resources in contested custody so the best way to make a lot of money is to support theories and approaches that help abusers. We frequently see courts treat evaluators and GALs who are biased in favor of fathers as if they were “neutrals.” These mistakes create an appearance of corruption that is extremely harmful to the reputation of the legal system.

Judges are supposed to be open to new information, willing to correct mistakes and to change their minds based on new evidence. I was particularly impressed with Judge Thomas Hornsby who wrote a chapter in DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, ABUSE and CHILD CUSTODY in which he said that in his nineteenth year on the bench he learned the right way to handle certain types of restraining orders. It takes the kind of ethics and courage we expect from judges to admit past mistakes like that. Too often we hear judges refusing to listen to a domestic violence expert based on statements that the judge has been on the bench for many years and doesn’t need this assistance. And then they send the children to live with an abuser. It is important for good judges to set an example and reverse decisions that research establishes are harmful to children.

Conclusion

When you made a decision giving custody to the alleged abuser and limiting the mother to supervised or no visitation, you thought you were doing something to benefit the children. In some cases you thought the father was the parent most likely to promote the relationship between the children and other parent.

In most of these cases once the father gains control he actually interferes with the mother’s relationship in ways that you would severely punish if done by the mother. Repeatedly abusive fathers use their control to undermine the mother’s relationship because that was his purpose in seeking custody in the first place. The subsequent interference in the mother’s relationship, including asking the court to limit her contact is a change of circumstance giving the court new information not available when the decision was made. The research now available that demonstrates the frequency of abusers destroying mothers’ relationships with their children is also a change of circumstance the court was unaware of when it made the decision. Domestic violence is very much about context and one of the common mistakes in custody court is to look at each incident and each issue separately thus preventing court professionals from recognizing the pattern of abuse. Judges sometimes make the mistake of treating a finding denying abuse allegations as settling the issue so that it can never look at the issue again or at least not the prior evidence. Best practices would be to look at the new information, such as the father using his control to harm the children’s relationship with the mother in the context of his history of controlling and coercive behavior so that even if the court failed to recognize his pattern of abuse earlier, the new circumstances, taken together with the prior evidence can be sufficient to confirm the abuse allegations if only the judge can be open to acknowledging the prior conclusion was wrong.

Even if the court continues to believe the mother’s abuse allegations were false and even deliberately so, current scientific research does not support limiting the children to supervised or no visitation with their primary attachment figure. The harm of losing a normal relationship with their mother under these circumstances is far more harmful than the risk she might make some negative statements. This research, by itself constitutes a change of circumstance requiring at least normal visitation for the mother. We have too often seen judges refuse to correct their decision for fear of looking bad by admitting an error. I ask you not to take the risk of a child suffering depression, low self-esteem or God forbid commit suicide. That would be a judicial error we cannot tolerate.

Barry Goldstein is a nationally recognized domestic violence expert, speaker, writer and consultant. He is the co-editor with Mo Therese Hannah of DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, ABUSE and CHILD CUSTODY. Barry can be reached by email at their web site www.Domesticviolenceabuseandchildcustody.com