Let's Get Honest! Absolutely Uncommon Analysis of Family & Conciliation Courts' Operations, Practices, & History

My regular email is definitely blocked from commenting. This gets old — but here’s the content:

Only 40+ comments?  That seems unnaturally low. It has taken me this WEEK to even be able to access the comments fields; my device  has been going bonkers; I contacted the head of this forum about it (and was given the brush-off), and believe that I’m probably not the only person around experiencing sudden and strange “technical problems” while trying to participate in this discussion.    We know who we network with; this is a live issue for both mothers and fathers.  This is a  one-shot at commenting; it it doesn’t go through, back to work and back to blogging separately.

Hi.  I’m one of those California parents (mother) that allegedly didn’t go get information on the AFCC, or connect the dots. My children have now aged out, one has been well rewarded for staying alienated, the other pulled something like an Alanna Krause, only as a young adult, and has recently made contact from a safer state, literally; she had to sacrifice college. I am left to still fight the people who did this, and to, literally if necessary, dis-assemble any system which dared to do this to my children (and my work life) and is doing it to so many.

In about the past 10-12 years of this, the prominent leaders of prominent nonprofits who are all concerned about children, or stopping violence against women, or about custody going to batterers, or about (yada, yada) have proved almost immune to conversations like this exact one here. Better people than I have attempted to get through to them. I finally deduced that the “deaf, dumb, and blind” aspect comes from these groups wanting to be seen as caring about kids — but not relinquish their status in life (social position), or (if the shoe fits) nonprofit salary, plus travel perks for the conference circuit. While I can’t stop them, one thing I CAN do is post the tax returns of some of these groups, and show how they are doing this on the public dole, or through whose private funding. An entirely different viewpoint on the field of “fix the courts.”

I am both disappointed and angry with these groups, but had to face the fact that I (not they) was the one who didn’t figure out that, when business is business — it’s the business aspect we should be looking at. Nonprofits cease to exist if the problems they were formed to address are actually solved. Hence the natural tendency is to silence the most direct solutions, and come up with creatively stupid ones to prolong it. Of course, not with their own personal money — or kids — at risk.
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Because what we study is multi-state, I’ve somehow spent a lot of time involved in Connecticut-based cases, and organizations.

It’s interesting and illuminating to just look at the nonprofits doing business with the courts…. (and make sure they’re legit)..

For example, when you see a Children’s Law Center (notice affiliations of the Executive Director) http://www.clcct.org/ed it often may have a connection to the AFCC and/or the Colorado-based NACC which helps put more GALs in kids’ lives, and oversee the trainings, of course.  Then just look ’em up.  The Children’s Law Center I see registered in Connecticut in 1993 as a nonprofit.
OK, so it has a tax return, right?  EIN#06-1381700.  I can look this up and at a glance see that while many parents are losing housing, income, children — this nonprofit designed to help poor people is steadily increasing its assets, and revenue.  Looking at a tax return tells us where it comes from:  Contrib & grants, Program Service Rev (services provided for pay — sometimes maybe government funded), investment income (who has that any more, individually?), and a substantial category “other.”).  Then, as a nonprofit, they get to spend this on:  Salaries and Expenses.  ($594K on legal services attorney/caseworker, almost no details given). Officers: “List available on request” — Why wouldn’t they just include the llist? However, the Exec Director gets $86K, not bad..

This particular organization started when a little girl was shot and killed by her father DURING A SUPERVISED VISITATION in 1993! The decision was not made to question whether supervised visitation should’ve been taking place in that case, but rather to add an attorney for the child (especially a concept from “NACC”).

_______________http://svnworldwide.org/board.asp (<~<~<~<~< == unrelated, but good to know about)

Maybe the real story is, how this information was sidelined and covered  up by a coalition of nonprofits whose market niche was distressed mothers, and who had product to sell (plus a little financial backing, something the Moms of course didn’t have).

Or how so-called fathers’ rights organizations and so-called women’s (anti-DV) organizations collaborated to go along with the concept of Supervised Visitation and BOTH get on the federal dole to demonstrate, propagate, evaluate, and groom both Moms and Dads about why it’s a good idea (when actually, it’s just another tool in the toolbox to threaten or extort either parent). I found two DOJ/OIG audits of about 25% improper billings ($4 million out of $16 million) recently. Wonder how many more? Who ever bothers to check, even?

https://familycourtmatters.wordpress.com/look-up-a-nonprofit-impromptu-how-to-checkpoints/
How many people pay attention to the conference circuits of important nonprofits?  I do, that’s when I found out Connecticut-AFCC just registered in time for their own conference, and found out the author here was on their tail already, or that might not have happened.   Unbelievable, but definitely typical.

I see we now have a lot of people knowledgeable about some of this — however, a decade ago in Los Angeles, we also did.  The key is organization and what next.  You can’t organize around comments fields in MSM articles.

The people who set up these systems organize themself with up-front (or expenses written off) trade associations 501(c)3s or the bar association model, 501(c)6s, etc. — get funding (foundations, government, private, or all three), market materials, and promote new concepts.  Family courts themselves at one time were just a concept.  Right now, it’s been “unified family courts” and “therapeutic jurisprudence” for a very long time — see UBaltimore Law School.  The nonprofits are almost never only within a state, and if parents keep their thinking to “my state” (court, judge, etc.), we’re screwed (cases in point).

AFCC is not the only nonprofit involved — but the key is, the nonprofit often has public employees, will be inter-state or international and the members are often on (or form) separate nonprofits.  Maybe a dozen acronyms in all — but the concept seems to be — the efforts are coordinated (expenses written off) at the conferences, the conference materials are also sold (AFCC did this from the earliest days, see 1983 etc. newsletters), and from positions of authority in each state, changes are lobbied for and eventually put into practice either by procedure rules, sitting on a task force, or simply writing the legislation.  They are naturally heirarchical and accept a unified voice for more clout when pushing a new concept, and then when publishing it, often may not mention, it was an AFCC (or NACC) idea.

For the HHS federal angle  as well, concise summary over at Ms. Stevenson’s HuffPost blog.  When it comes to supervised visitation, both DOJ and HHS fund, not to mention fund followup evaluations of the programs, not to mention audits of the same. We shouldn’t forget that angle.

I really enjoy looking at tax returns, corporate filings, charitable filings (in more than one state) who’s on the board, and whose turn it is to next make up a new profession, and then get it legislated state by state.  It IS an art form, and something to be hold in action.  Unbelievable, especially when the federal grants from DOJ and HHS get into the mix.  Then I blog this (over 540 posts).  The pattern is very clear, not too hard to comprehend, and really, a brilliant business plan, at the public’s expense.

Everyone’s got a story — many of them horror stories — the system is designed to create “stories” and conflict, then present itself as solving “high-conflict” situations in “high-conflict” courts.  This is called distraction.  When I come into a “telll the story” arena, and fact-check who’s talking, you can see the knee-jerk reaction of other commenters is that it’s a fatherhood plant, you’re disloyal — the followers immediately go confrontatioal on behalf of the gurus, even in evidence of having been lied to, or of having outside information censored.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/conference-shines-light-on-plight-of-battered-mothers-seeking-custody/2013/05/10/8a2830fc-b8f1-11e2-92f3-f291801936b8_allComments.html?ctab=all_&amp;  This conference for years has obscured and derailed conversation, and withheld skillsets (and the mindset to get the skills) from parents, and for personal self-promotion.  I wonder how many kids were hurt as a result, when the same energies could’ve been put into doing what Anne Stevenson, here, did.

https://familycourtmatters.wordpress.com/parenting-coordination-invented-promoted-only-slightly-demoted-may-2013-recap/
(excerpt):  AFCC takes credit for “spearheading” entire areas of practice in family law, as an organization. Here’s from a “Call for Proposals” (deadline now passed) for the May, 2013 (that’s THIS month) Los Angeles Conference, called “Global Voices, Expanding Choices: Riding the Wave of the Future.” (i.e., allegedly 2013 represents 50 years of AFCC, now they’re planning the next 50….)…

Let “parent coordination promotion” be a lesson, and next time round, parents and other taxpayers across the land ought to pay better attention to whether or not the local presiding judges, state supreme court justices, domestic relations committees, Governors’ Task Forces, etc. — are, or are not being driven by an Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (and their friends) agenda.
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Another way I believe that some funding can be tracked is to examine the Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports (CAFR) for each jurisdiction.  The public has to be educated how the money in government works, pay attention to it, and if necessary, learn some new vocabulary, develop a few habits.   We are far, far, behind the game (mainstream media plays a role), but economically — the money squandered year after year does accumulate and make it an unfair game, particularly when judges are involved.

It seems obvious that the initial “slush fund” ca. 1962? in Los Angeles (pre-dates nofault divorce) became what is called “AFCC” — however that’s somewhat of a fiction given the incorporation history — even though the group consistently dates itself to 1963, the corporate history says otherwise.

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