NFVLC Endeavors to Change This.
NFVLC Endeavors to Change This.
Mapping and Transforming Courts’ Responses to At-Risk Children
Experts in the field of family violence know that the best predictor of future violence is past violence. Experts in intimate partner violence know that many partner-abusers direct their rage at the children when their partner is no longer available, post-separation. Nonetheless, family courts nationwide regularly treat past domestic violence as irrelevant to future risks to children, sometimes with disastrous results.
A growing body of research describes custody courts across the country (and globe) refusing to take reports of abuse and dangerousness by one parent seriously and treating the parent who seeks to protect their children as lying or pathological. Some courts lack expertise in family abuse, are misled by scientific-sounding labels and tend to focus on the rights of parents at the expense of the protection of children. In many cases, court orders are unwittingly removing children from a loving parent to give them to other parent who is subjecting them to ongoing abuse, and sometimes filicide.
Child: "I don’t want to be around my daddy when he’s mad."
Custody Evaluator: "Frankly, this child is afraid of Mr. H."
There was little doubt why the boys were afraid of their father. He had slapped and choked their mother in front of them, viciously sexually assaulted her while they were downstairs, hit his sons, and extensively humiliated his four-year-old son with autism in front of guests at a Christmas party because the boy had wet his pants. Yet, the trial court concluded that the boys were afraid of him because of their mother’s supposedly “alienating” conduct, not his violence and abuse.
Based in part on a conversation he had had with an expert in “parental alienation” at a conference, the judge accused the mother of creating a “revisionist history” about the father’s conduct with the children, found that any harm suffered by the boys was merely “collateral damage” from the wife-abuse, and concluded that their fear of their father was the product of her “conscious” or “unconscious” statements to the children. Accordingly, the court ruled that as soon as the father was released from prison (where he was serving six years for his felony sexual assault of the mother), he should have access to his children, without regard to either their feelings or his attitude. (This decision was reversed on appeal).
This story – without the appellate reversal - is emblematic of the sorts of rulings widely issued by family courts around the country, and indeed, the globe. However, this case was atypical in that the father was in prison, providing the boys with six safe and worry-free years. Most cases of this sort result in orders for immediate contact, or even primary custody, with the parent that children fear. While the majority of family abusers are men, a similar court dynamic has been seen in cases where children report their fear of and psychological abuse by a mother.
Numerous scholars, experts, and survivors have reported and surveyed family courts’ refusals to credit abuse claims by mothers against fathers, and prioritization of fathers’ rights over children’s safety (Conner 2009; Stark et al 2019). The Center’s Study provides empirical data reinforcing these reports of courts’ use of parental alienation to effectuate this denial and these unsafe orders.