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

This post holds a section from my Front Page* September, 2019, I’ve called:

Families In Transition due to Parental Kidnapping |An archaeological dig on who quotes whom (Canadian CRC, Nancy Faulkner, Dorothy Huntington, ‘Parental Alienation’): [LGH Frontpage Subsection #3 Sept. 4, 2019, Published Sept. 19]. (short-link ends “-aWh,” as off-ramped, under 4,000 words written, probably between January and December 2018; with lead-in, about twice that). Some of my lead-in comments were made earlier, some are made just before (I expect) publishing September 19, 2019.

*That section is far down on the front page (see nearby image):

After publishing this, I found the related page which may have more substantial drill-down on the topic.  Both should be read together (or in sequence!).  I now have added that link to the front page also.  The Page (which I posted to alert readers to also, making now three different links on the overlapping topics) is called:

Title: If Parental Kidnapping (Domestic or International) is ALWAYS Child Abuse, Where do the UN CRC and the Hague Convention fit in? (D. Huntington then ℅ AFCC-related* The (Judith Wallerstein) Center for the Family In Transition, M.W. Agopian, N. Faulkner (1999), Merle H. Weiner (2000, Fordham) (moved here Jan. 18, 2018, from my then-new home page…, published as a page Sept. 19, 2019, and a new post, Sept. 20) PAGE short-link (now published) ends “PsBXH-8q5″)

Subtitle:  Do these international agreements effectively help OBSTRUCT attempted international escape from DV, while domestically in the USA, both AFCC-driven family court policy and post-PRWORA (1996), in fact, at least since “Moynihan” (1965)  federal social policy also obstruct such escape?

“LGH|FCM Jan 2018 One Post, One Page (Section3 offramp Sept. 2019)…| D Huntington, N Faulkner, AFCC 54th, Canadian CRC etc ~~Screen Shot 2019-Sept. “

Besides the “archeological dig” I’ve added to the top half reference to yet another “family court crisis” media posting; it came up in the context of information I did not have, timely, at the time this happened to my family line.

It comes up year after year while others are not writing about the: operations, practices, and particularly not (accurately) about the history of the family courts themselves (or, their blueprints and builders)….It’s extremely frustrating over time to see the level of comprehension and reporting has barely edged forward.   But otherwise it’s basically on-topic with the post title.

This post shows drill-downs, but was written in more than one installment, is informal, and some paragraphs repeat content.  Until it gets to the text originally off-ramped, it may not flow smoothly. It’s not designed as any “heavyweight” post, but I think some of the links are worth considering.

This time, that’s OK (for purposes here). It’s not my best writing, but it’s information I decided to re-post as a re-minder to do drill-downs, ‘question authority,’ question standard explanations, and just ask more questions: to pay more attention to seemingly minor details, presentation formats, and from this perspective, re-consider the overall landscape. We should exercise every right and opportunity to ask “on what basis”? and then critically examine any stated basis.  It’s especially important to ask this to oneself when reading, as well as aloud and (with discretion) to others.

I’m just making a few points in hindsight, in case it may help others, and to say, I can relate to how it felt to be reading that laws exist to protect against child abduction, essays have been written about how harmful it is, and then the courts ignore it, ignore domestic violence, risk and more; and you’re there in the state of “what-the-_____??!!”  and “why?”

And in this re-traumatized // indignant or outraged state, and in the fight of your life, others looking collected, organized, and with websites to match the come-on, offer suggestions why the family court professionals just don’t “get” this and why you should, with them, push for more oversight, trainings, and to hire specially qualified consultants about domestic violence IN the family courts (etc.) to make ’em better….

And tell your story (anonymously or with actual name attached) to the local investigative news reporter wanting to make a name for him or herself and/or the related media.  Or send them in to the advocacy group who will then present the case on your behalf to Congress or state legislatures for better laws (when the existing ones aren’t even enforced), etc. — and pitch it to media also, making sure they are building brand awareness and personal name recognition as if genuinely concerned about the murdered and abducted children.

Your cooperation, post-traumatization or mid-trauma and mid “the fight of your life” will help better publicize the nonprofit organizations and their professionals NOT themselves running this gauntlet who, they promise, will try and help you and are doing this out of altruism.

MEDIA / TELLING YOUR STORY: I have been reading now for about ten years in many different states, and often done drill-downs on the articles themselves (i.e., the cases or counties/states referenced, the nonprofits quoted, etc.). , and with it (unless it’s already well-known:  NBC, ABC, etc.) who owns the media platform.

People re-tweeting, repeating, or talking about the articles published rarely (if ever, that I can see) get around to looking for the financials or any corporate history of who owns that media and sometimes are working for them.   I still remember many (such follow-up look-ups) I’ve done: they are always interesting, they also shed light on what angle that platform is coming from, and who runs it, and they build awareness of how media is funded, and restructured from time to time.  With practice, it gets easier to sense from the presentation (for example:  how HARD is it to locate actual ownership), but that never substitutes for actually finding out, whether it’s a large one, or a lesser known platform (with, let’s remember, often one media group may own several platforms).

That comment is NOT meant as a criticism of front-line workers in battered person’s shelters or police stations; it is, however meant as a criticism of the overall system.  People who volunteer to work for any nonprofit ought to research its background and funding streams too, start understanding the value of looking for (USA, again) that Form 990, and screening it just like any other employer. There is a controlled, coordinated system here which is guaranteed to fail because of what it incorporates and fails to tell clients about in the first place!

The “breaking investigative series” may handle different individual cases or sometimes a different court-connected program — but they NEVER get down to the operational infrastructures — nor is that kind of journalism designed to do so.  That’s something we, the public, ought to be familiar with to start with:  (i.e., along the lines of “We work and pay taxes:  Where do they go? Show me the systems!! — not just the “outputs.”  We already see the outputs!).   

And we ought to know by now that someone or some entity owns MOST media, that ownership is bought and sold over time, merged, spun off, sold off, etc, and that typically mainstream media represents forces already in power, and the trend is to larger and larger mergers.  Expecting that media, much as I too read and appreciate what it does report, (for different reasons), to now suddenly start telling the truth about the family court operations without strings attached, in my opinion, isn’t too realistic.

The knowledge I needed at the time wasn’t that something’s really off (that was obvious in the circumstances), that un-repentant batterers do not, generally, make good full-time parents, or that granting sole legal and physical custody to a man (specifically) and his girlfriend or new wife who have just demonstrated utter disrespect for existing court orders — chronically — and figured out ways to get around them — do not make good caretakers either, or why.

The awareness I needed then, was of how the family courts are constructed and operate, that comforting information with which we may personally resonate or agree (“YES!  Stealing Kids affects them!”) is in effect a hope, warm blanket (regardless of how true, not a “shield” of any sort), and as to California, fails to show where other parts of the family code (like the “conciliation” section), EASILY counteract parts of the Family Code talking about domestic violence — and don’t kid ourselves that the domestic violence specialization lawyers over the decades just don’t know this (!) — disable, and make ineffective criminal laws (several kinds of them),

…as also do many administrative court practices, as well as now officially national, federal (and echoed at state and county levels) policy (gender-based, i.e., promoting marriage/fatherhood under public welfare and child abuse prevention (!))

It also would’ve been good to learn much earlier about the racketeering-facilitator organization with membership and activists entrenched throughout the top state court ruling body (in California, i.e. the Judicial Council), administrative sector, which collectively apparently feels that somehow it was better for children to be stewarded by abusers than non-abusive parents, and deems family or individual financial independence by way of court protection, enforced, something “counter-indicated,”  possibly as not good for THEIR business model …

And to know that this entity actually has a name and must file tax returns, whether or not it and its chapters do so, and doesn’t particularly care to restrict is power and influence to just one country, although its members are often functioning in and funded within this country for their main jobs as civil servants — or taking court-referral business streams (etc.).  California NOW had even posted on this back in 2002, with some help from others, and that information was buried.

The role of the HHS grants had been brought up (and again, posted on the California NOW website) as of 2005, and again, buried when it came to “family court reform” groups, although not all lone bloggers (I was not the only one).  Most of “lone bloggers” were handled through usual group dynamics, as much as possible.

That SMALL, non-representative organization plays its part in a larger network of organizations with access to public authority and resources, segment by segment and some over-lapping.

Post Contents include information on or from:

A nonprofit, “Canadian Children’s Rights Council” (“CRC”) on post on Parental Kidnapping (Nancy Faulkner,Ph.D.) quoting, from top of the piece, first, Patricia Hoff from the ABA Center on Children and the Law (1990s), and Dorothy Huntington(1980s), and in the context of parental abduction, parental alienation.

I just noticed that right after the Introduction comes the “Risk” section which gets right into quoting what I now know (but did not then when this happened in our family line) as AFCC professionals, including several quotes cited “(Rand, 197_).  This was probably Randy or Deidre Rand (though I do not know) of reunification programming fame (sic) — but brings up that this post while it credits the authors, the context of presentation, is long enough to have inspired a table of contents (with links to each section) near the top — but lacks any bibliography.  So for those short references which typically would be checked out via a bibliography, in this case — “too bad!”

Also, <>the “Canadian CRC” being a Canadian nonprofit, it doesn’t refer to the USA 1996 Welfare Reform policies and procedures in the USA, <>nor does it reference the AFCC by name, although there is an Ontario chapter and have  been AFCC members working in the field in Canada for many years, and <>while its over-arching theme is the UN CRC, in quoting “Americans” (authors writing from within the USA) doesn’t reference or acknowledge that the USA stands in different relationship treaty relationship to that United Nations CRC than some other countries.

…Not exactly topics I was thinking of about the time my kids were stolen on a court-ordered overnight visitation and contact abruptly cut off, with no visible correction in sight (and, effectively, this was never corrected until both turned adult, and have since, essentially, remained, one more than the other, estranged while I’ve continued, on my end, to struggle to correct course in several areas of life, safely.

My interest more recently (2018, compiling the new Front Page) was in who was Dorothy Huntington and her connection, per that article, to two other nonprofits which have come across my radar.  As well as who was Nancy Faulkner, and why was one quoting the other.

One of those nonprofits is mentioned here.  The other (not shown here — it’s been off-ramped separately… as I’m recalling), listed her as among the original creators of the parent education class out of San Francisco called “Kid’s Turn.” (<~~The apostrophe as I just placed it matches the business name as listed, not their (former) nonprofit’s stationery which shows it in the more normal “Kids’ Turn”…)

This section on my home page came directly (or I was inspired to write) from an earlier “key post” among the “Ten Key Posts” (See sidebar widget near the top),  Sept. 22, 2012 Another POV on the Center for Families in Transition (and its funders). (short-link ends “-190”).  Huntington was cited as working on a project for them at some point..and may have been staff or on board of directors.

The research (“drill-down”) was done earlier on the current status of the curriculum as of 2018, which was an interesting development in the same curriculum I’d blogged (with intense focus) 2011-2012, as a model of how several elements and types of people involved in the family courts and state government (i.e., judicial council level, handling access and visitation grants to the states) operate.

That curriculum (Kid’s Turn) was and probably still is in play as are some of the nonprofits it mentions.  Similar (look-alike, clones, but differently named) curricula exist throughout the United States.  This one featured having been taken to the UK many years ago.  The topic of how to handle parental abduction is definitely “still in play” internationally and  within the family courts.

Also (briefly on this post), one guy quoting Faulkner was later nabbed by the US DOJ for fraud in promising distressed parents to get their kids back.  I post the images, but here’s a link (in quotes only because it’s quoting this blog, further below):

I also found Faulkner (same article) quoted on a site labeled “ICareFoundation” (which wasn’t a foundation) (apparently a 2012 post) by Peter Thomas Senese, who got arrested and sentenced to three years in prison (!) for preying on parents with abducted children, falsely claiming he had a foundation, and charging parents thousands of dollars to get their children back.

The article (original link to the Canadian Children’s Rights Council is still good):  Parental Abduction is Child Abuse, 1999 by Nancy Faulkner. I have an annotated image from it below.

Besides the specific person and organization details this post contains, I also talk principles.  Without both, I’d probably not need to preserve it or re-publish as I plan to under part of the Home Page re-structuring (“massive edit”) process Sept. 2019… I also talk about how I, as a mother (not father) who had experienced this (i.e., having children ripped out of a household overnight by the other parent) and having found this writing, somehow thought it might be taken into account or considered relevant in our case.

I’d also noticed (years later) that at least one of the authors quoted was working in the same geographic area (San Francisco Bay Area, California) and for existing nonprofits well known in the family court field — not that I knew them well at the time of that event in my family’s life.

I realize this post title is almost longer than its contents, but while still working on my home page, didn’t want to lose prior work.  I marked some additions for flow or clarification by this font-color.

I remember having read “Nancy Faulkner” long ago on how parental kidnapping (sic) was bad for kids, when my ex-batterer and his new (mistress — like us, at the time, middle-aged; UNlike us, that I’m aware of, she was on her third husband or potential (she hoped) husband, who’d at the time not yet finished divorcing me) engaged in “pre-emptive kidnapping and removal from school” on false accusations that somehow I, their (single because of domestic violence by him) mother had just quit work (false) that they were not in school (false) and was a kidnapping risk (ridiculous, and without foundation or any proof, on all points).

That I was a kidnapping risk it seems was used initially to persuade the law enforcement there only for visitation exchange at their station** — to facilitate this (!) and then dump the case back into the family law system — unless I would, perhaps because there was “parental conflict” (i.e., on whether or not to obey existing court orders, apparently) CPS should be called in.

I used to think this impact of kidnapping (especially as by a documented batterer in arrears on child support and who’d just moved — out of a studio which wouldn’t support two adolescent girls’ privacy — without notifying the court — or me, and when questioned and I’d asked he be ordered to tell where he now lived before that kidnapping, and had already alerted the courts to his prior threats to kidnap, he simply refused) as “bad for kids” might matter and be taken into account in a California family courthouse, court, court-room or by SOMEONE in authority.  

Wrong….

This was before I had more experience researching who was who in the field, or assessing nonprofits by their age, size, and position on certain networks (as well as source of their funding, and how some professionals seem to keep a nonprofit name in their back pocket for the sake of, it seems, having an official-sounding name to sound and call themselves (individually) founder, or executive director of while getting quoted in the media, or testifying in some individual court case as an expert)…

So, and as women in my situation sometimes do, on reading about the harm that parental kidnapping does to children and why, agreeing with it, knowing my own situation, I still had no answer why suddenly in family court, this ‘did not apply.’  It was a shock to realize later that in part “why” involved federal social policy towards fathers dating back to the 1960s, still embedded in policy in the 1990s, and even more so in the 2000s).

I remember the name “Dorothy Huntington” as quoted by Nancy Faulkner, PhD, which name had stuck in my attention because Faulkner was describing something I had just experienced, as had our (then adolescent) children, and everyone immediately associated with us — the overnight shock of custody transfer based on original child-stealing event (clearly staged) and NEVER corrected.

It’s hard to do effective, deep and broad drill-downs while you are (a) in shock and (b) mobilizing energy, ANY available researches and © fighting for your and others’ lives in various local systems:  law enforcement (reporting the event), family courts (where the case was driven, i.e., “dumped”), potential sources (I still thought, at the time, MAYbe…) of help from advocacy organizations, child support offices, our children’s schools (which they’d just been enrolled in and been ripped out of within the same month)

Revisiting this information many years later, naturally, more things surfaced.  I used some of the “Wayback Machine” (Archive.org) to locate some of this.  I think you’ll find it interesting and hope its oddness may inspire you to look this type of information up regularly, when dealing with experts, spokespersons, or organizations speaking about the family courts, marriage and fatherhood, child development, and of course domestic violence or other crimes..

When a person is being frequently quoted, get some of the background.  Most people not working in academia or for government will cite an organization; this may be a nonprofit, or may be run by a nonprofit.  It can and should be looked up where possible, nonprofit or not.  (One just tends to have their tax returns available more often).

BELOW HERE:  As previously written, sometime in 2018.

One of my older (9/2012) sticky posts is a “drill-down” on several versions (registered entities under the name) of the same center/entity. That post is a long read which has undergone several updates in other years.

In it I talk both about the use of “Families in Transition” as jargon (applied to divorcing families and other situations, i.e., families who became homeless and are moving back into housing) and about the rotation of registered entities by that name, not just in California.

I also, for the “suppose I’m right here” (in nearby image) defined my “supposition” simply, in large letters inside two thick-bordered, prominent boxes on the post. It’s numbered: Suppose I’m right that (1) and (2) are …. (1), (2) & (added later) (3). Those are broadly summarized based on years of detailed readings and I believe a broad sample of cross-sector data.

You might want to glance at that supposition before getting into this post (the page-down or scroll function will be necessary to get past text on the various updates) as its an underlying foundation of this post and reflects my observations over time).  There are many corollaries IF that supposition is even close to true — although I think it’s right-on.  That post link and title:

LGH Sept2012 post Another POV on the Center for Family in Transition (excerpt)

(I recommend not getting [too] lost in its details [of the Front Page, is the context], as I have plenty more here, January 2018, with illustrations, and over time, have gotten gradually better at the show-and-tell.

Not to mention several of the databases those linked to have changed since also).

There have been, however, several entities within California by similar names apparently somehow connected to the key personnel involved in this Center for the Family in Transition (from which Dorothy Huntington in the 1980s worked on a Child Abduction project) — with different EIN#s, charitable filings, and etc. Some are called the “Judith Wallerstein Center for the Family in Transition,” at least one other has since then changed its name and another dissolved itself, with the major contribution (of about $25,000) going to the Association for Family and Conciliation Courts, per the paperwork on file and uploaded at the California Office of Attorney General.  That’s hardly surprising given who was running it.

The image above, again, just a screenshot of my earlier post, comments on the circulating sets of organizations that (it seems) originally concocted, appropriated, and continually publish and reference this jargon (and, over time, other specific terms), and do so while organized to disseminate trainings, treatments, or prevention programming for whatever the declared problems are — such as revised family structures.

The problem here is centralized control organized privately, and internationally, for “R&D” application domestically, cross-jurisdiction, and forced upon the public with the public paying at least three times (that is, in at least three ways and points in time//LGH Sept. 8, 2019).

#1.  supporting public institutions; #2.  tax-exemption is a privilege, but the public NOT operating, for the most part, tax-exempt, through government continually funds tax-exempt partners (contractors grantees, consultants, etc.) and #3.  We are then charged ‘fees for services’ with the fees often going to private contractors with the courts (as in “Kids’ Turn: A Safe & Sound Curriculum,” shown above – parent education).

#4. Sometimes those service inflict further financial harm by violating basic human nature to raise and protect one’s own offspring, to move if necessary to work in geographies and schedules best for preserving the rewards of work and work/life (parenting) balance, and through this, even the ability to plan for more than the immediate situation, for ANY future, not having control of the variables introduced through policies that can rapidly disrupt or destroy ANY family.

Now I see more recently that the term “Transitioning Families” (simply a new tweak of the same, OLD idea —  “Families in Transition” — as applied to (a specific) referring one (now dissolved) LLC (business/company) running “reunification camps” is being popularized through conferencing.  

And (I looked) it was trademarked about a decade before the business formed up as a California LLC, briefly.  (That specific name appears on an image below also, among sponsors of recent AFCC conference. I don’t deal much with it here because I already have in at least two recent posts on the topic. Look for the word “reunification” or “Transitioning Families” under January, 2018 Archive, if you’re reading this after they’re not longer displayed in “most recent posts” section on the right sidebar).

The above recently-unearthed information** squarely connects the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts personnel and with effective obstacles (beyond that put, domestically, by the family law system itself!) placed in front of women with children who really do need to flee domestic, and as it pertains to international conventions or treaties.

**(from above, I’d said “Creating this new page has taken about two weeks, and unearthed more background information on an organization I historically paid attention to and have been recently blogging. “)

This individual Dorothy S. Huntington was quoted in a later (1999) article by Nancy Faulkner, PhD, on the same topic, — while Faulkner was testifying before the UN Commission on the Rights of the Child in special session, I believe, to deal with this topic. [That area is not my focus; I’m still mastering some of the terms, and the timeline of specific laws, here, and conventions/treaties internationally, although writing this blog it’s impossible not to become aware they exist].

One place this Nancy Faulkner article citing, near the beginning, prominently to Huntington is now posted is on a Canadian “CRC” page which looks like this.  Please notice that the framework is “Parental Alienation is Child Abuse” and the website describes itself as dedicated to the enforcement on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Canadian Website on Children’s Rights quoting Faulkner Testimony (underneath “Parental Alienation is Child Abuse” and showing where the article was first delivered

[[Sept. 8, 2019 comment]] As true as these things may be about child-stealing, and as much as they may resonate, they still do not explain why it seems to apply only in certain directions when children are stolen.. as a formerly custodial mother with the family background of domestic violence, there was, apparently no profit (??) to be made in simply letting the family be — and for the law enforcement involved (locally) to simply enforce that court order.  Instead, an attempt to get them into the CPS system based on a disagreement (in that case, whether or not the court order IN THEIR HANDS should be respected…) was made, and my appeals to district attorneys in two neighboring counties fell on deaf ears.  What I’m saying here:  Some things being true generally (GENERALLY, child-stealing is BAD) doesn’t mean they’re relevant or the most relevant issue in the family court systems. and parent gender does seem to matter, policy-wise.]]

Excerpt from Faulkner article as posted at Canadian CRC website. Click image to enlarge).Notice she quotes Huntington, and later references to other AFCC leadership (Johnston, Wallerstein) in this context.  “Dr. Linda Girdner” (unknown to me, until I looked further) was director of the ABA Center on Children and the Law, but has also published alongside some of the AFCC professionals; there seems to be some alignment. Notice the title is “Dr.” not “…Esq.

Canadian Website on Children’s Rights, About Us” page with left sidebar links). I suggest also clicking on some of their UN Convention links to the left, while noticing that “Fatherless” is a key theme…

Who else is quoting Nancy Faulkner, and the scarcity of information on her, including PhD in WHAT, is a whole separate story.

I learned through continued searching and some help from the WayBack Machine (Internetarchive.org) that an organization “SOC-UM” (Safeguarding Our Children-United Mothers) was formed ca. 1994? by Deborah Mahoney, a (single) mother in Tracy California who was shocked to find her Lawrence-Livermore-Lab engineering neighbor had been arrested for molesting children, including her 12-year old son; with others involved in “NAMBLA.” [Some of this information only shows up in “WayBack Machine,” i.e., earlier versions of posts no longer here.  The drill-down is complicated and requires patience, and the websites are not professionally put together, though the story is compelling.

If you can’t wait until I post on this and want some links before then, submit a comment…

But I will say that Faulkner’s over-riding concern seems to have been preventing not just child abuse, but particularly child sexual abuse, “Pandora’s box.” On the surface, she would not seem a good match for the many “fathers’ rights” organization prone to referencing her famous 1999 piece.]

How she [Deborah Mahoney of SOC-UM] met Nancy Faulkner, whose “C.V.” only as of 1993 I did find (it was not traditionally, or academically formatted, yet it did say, PhD in Developmental Psychology from Indiana State University), I don’t know.  SOC-UM doesn’t appear to have become a California entity (business or nonprofit) despite calling itself one.  Likewise, the organization P.A.R.E.N.T., referenced with Faulkner’s paper, I have yet to find (=/= it can’t be found, but how odd that a paper so well circulated — particularly among fathers’ rights groups on the net — doesn’t better define it or lay down a few clues — like what the acronym stands for, or, in fact, anything).

Nancy Faulkner, in turn, writing in 1999 quotes an earlier Dorothy Huntington who wrote in the early 1980s.

(Source url shown on image). See footnotes.

I only found about the Faulkner/Mahoney connection and ‘SOC-UM” from an (expired, but then I searched the newer version) url in a footnote from an ABA article also referencing the 1999 Faulkner piece.  Amazing how a single article, if quoted enough, will outlast other information about its author on-line. I also found it odd that an ABA article would use a consumer mental health marketplace url to reference Faulkner.  (See nearby image).

~ ~ ~ | | | ~ ~ ~

I also found Faulkner (same article) quoted on a site labeled “ICareFoundation” (which wasn’t a foundation) (apparently a 2012 post) by Peter Thomas Senese, who got arrested and sentenced to three years in prison (!) for preying on parents with abducted children, falsely claiming he had a foundation, and charging parents thousands of dollars to get their children back.

It didn’t take long to perceive (broken links and lack of geography helped) that ICareFoundation probably was no legitimate foundation (I run a series of standard checks in looking for this, not to mention the series of broken links), but only searching the individual’s name came up with this 2017 release by the USDOJ (link in this paragraph) that the guy had been caught.   The prosecution was in Southern District New York.  And he was citing to Nancy Faulkner in 2012.  See next images {{Enlarged for this off-ramp..//LGH Sept. 8, 2019}}

(USDOJ Press 2017 Press Release found here or click (both) images to enlarge.

(see previous image for link, click this one to enlarge for comments).

Strange….I’ll try and post the “Faulkner and who quotes her” information separately; it does have its own lessons on what types of details to pay attention to FIRST when reading an organization claiming to be a nonprofit, and soliciting donations because of it. It’s a very interesting situation, because her background doesn’t seem to have much to do with the parental alienation promoters, and particularly when someone with such a sketchy academic background, and in the name of a scarcely-there organization, actually two of them, ends up testifying in front of an international UN Convention in 1999.

[[THESE COMMENTS APPLIED WHEN MY WRITING HERE WAS STILL ON THE BLOG’s NEW FRONT PAGE, i.e., in 2018, but the link below (also left there as a “footprint” is published and still good.  In fact I think it’s on my right, top sidebar still…/LGH Sept. 8, 2019]]

Additionally, I’ve already moved most of my other discussion on Parental Abducting and the Hague / UN (international) conventions context to a subsidiary page** (making this a “parent page,” the second one from this post so far), but I’ve summarized it here with an image and some points of reference under a “Personal Relevance” section because  parental child-stealing event, after separation from abuse through legal intervention and in the context of a family law case, has had so much to do with why I eventually felt it necessary to produce this blog, and to continue year after year posting information that lawyers, experts, advocates, and others, for the most part, simply refuse to, although it’s obvious they reasonably know.

Although one can see in hindsight, most were aware of it, something I’ve seen in feminist legal circles, not just in the family court reform coalitions which formed up later.  ** That subsidiary page is:

#These people, organizations and the organization’s websites historically and now, simply chose not to broadcast or publicize the information as in any way relevant to ongoing problems within the family law system, which they sought to adjust, reform, and improve through publications, trainings, training up new generations of lawyers in how to think about the problem and what would best help solve it (i.e. DIScouraging critical thinking) while collectively controlling as much of that field as possible.

Part of my own family history included a child-stealing event on a court-ordered overnight visitation many years ago, involving two children I had lived with and raised since they were born.  The basis for this having turned from a felony crime (which it is in California) to a financial boon for my in-arrears ex-batterer even though he immediately sought to completely eliminate my contact, visitation, and eventually, even phone calls to our minor children without any court order doing so (i.e., no protective order, no termination of parental rights — there was no basis for doing so).  I was falsely labeled an abduction risk, a ludicrous charge, thus a local family court system (organized in a metro area of nine counties including San Francisco) effectively altered the consequences of crime from penalty and dis-incentivizing, to reward, and encouraging it.

But that pales in comparison to what type of financial boon it is for “ancillary services” that can be court-ordered to help parents get along better.

So, as mentioned above, I have an “offspring” or subsidiary page to discuss the local coordinated network situation as it intersects with my personal case (now about a dozen years post-child-stealing event), but this section introduces it:

PERSONAL RELEVANCE / MY SITUATION (as to the unprosecuted Child-Stealing event subsequently steered back to family law venue)

I was the “left-behind,” not the abducting parent —  we exist; we are not always making headlines (less so the older any child is) but courts tracking runaway kids after they are ordered out of their mothers’ lives still are, and reunification programs for them are being actively promoted by AFCC membership, as I have posted recently.  I remember reading the Faulkner article at the time and (apparently, mistakenly) believing it might be considered relevant and helpful to this case in the subsequent family court hearings, to something I’d just witnessed involving my own children.  At the time, however, I was not aware and awake to the organizations and federal grants behind the innate conflicts between the family law system and the criminal (penal code) law.

Compounding my sense of distress, alarm, and fear at the time, itself a shock delivered during a time of escalating harassments and even HIS (not my!) threats to kidnap, was a sense of confusion and betrayal witnessing the conflict between public declared positions on domestic violence by prominent anti-DV groups and professionals in this area with the courts, law enforcement, and involved family court professionals’ experience of it post-child-stealing event by ex-batterer…and the refusal of prior interested DV nonprofits to lift a finger, or explain why they wouldn’t.

…especially as this had occurred in the politically progressive San Francisco Bay Area, home to a major player in the Violence Against Women Act passage (Futures without Violence, current name), and to one of the early “Family Justice Centers” also featuring its protective function, and an area long home to well-known domestic violence experts such as UCBerkeley “Lecturer in Domestic Violence Law/Director of [DV] Practicum” Nancy K.D. Lemon <==CV) who, literally, helped write the early DV curriculum, casebooks  — and, notably, existing (California) penal code criminalizing child-stealing by one parent EXCEPT with provisions for if that parent had been a victim of domestic violence. (I found the law after the event, not before…)…

What I’m saying above is somehow, the concept of “progressives” having women’s interests in place still held some water in my thinking, especially having come out of a battering relationship in the framework of traditional religious, patriarchal, and as such, “conservative” gender-based values, not that this was my personal background religiously or as shown in prior work or education (i.e. college).

C.V. for Nancy KD Lemon from law.berkeley.edu

**** Ms. Lemon passed the California Bar in 1980 (UCBerkeley Boalt Hall), as you can see, has been employed at UCBerkeley in this field since 1988; has a BA from UCSanta Cruz in Women’s Studies (a major she helped create) and helped create the nation’s first domestic violence law curriculum, while also working with a battered women’s groups, and over time, many well-known organizations in the field (Family Violence Education Fund, now Futures without Violence; California Partnership to End Domestic Violence, the Family Violence Law Center (before it was incorporated into the Alameda County Family Justice Center ca. 2005); Battered Women’s Justice Project (before it “came out” ca. Sept. 2011 or 2013, as its own entity, spun off from Duluth, MN’s “Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs” formed in 1980); Lemon has been published alongside Joan Zorza** (of DVLeap), Legal Momentum, and many others.  Including the NCJFCJ, which is both a membership (focused on juvenile and family court judges) and a charitable organization formed (per main org’s tax returns) in 1975 in Nevada. See that link to CV near image or above (same link) with attention to years, organizations, and co-authors or editors.

(**I was probably thinking of Joan Meier; used to get them confused.//LGH Sept. 8, 2019. See next few paragraphs and links):

Moving Tribute to My Wife (July 24, 2013 (per the url), “Richard Zorza’s Access to Justice Blog,” the post is by Richard Zorza quoting a tribute is by Barbara Hart, “a legend in her own right.”), as she was in the process of retiring.

I hadn’t realized and am sorry to hear he has since died, age 69, from cancer.  He said he’d continue blogging “from hell.” Others disagreed:  Here’s a different kind of tribute for Richard Zorza, April 27, 2019.  On Lawsitesblog.com, ‘In Memoriam: Richard Zorza, Impassioned Advocate and Blogger on A2J and Legal Tech”

April 27, 2019, on Lawsitesblog.com, “In Memoriam: Richard Zorza, Impassioned Advocate and Blogger on A2J and Legal Tech” by Bob Ambroji. (Zorza’s SRLN — Self Represented Litigation Network [“SLRN.org”], also well-known; he was husband to Joan Zorza, DV advocate / Attorney and a stepfather to (presumably her) son. [For my post, “Families In Transition Due to Parental Kidnapping” (s-link ending “-aWh”) LGH FrontPage off-ramp, Sept., 2019)

…A prolific writer, it was only natural that, when he was diagnosed with cancer several years ago, he started the Richard Zorza’s Health Updates Blog to keep his friends updated on his medical situation. His last post there, on March 31, was poignantly titled, Maybe Moving Towards the End, I Fear.Two weeks later, his wife Joan Zorza and stepson Arloc Sherman posted news of his death. He wanted everyone to know, they wrote, that he was profoundly thankful to everyone for the support given to him and for the support given to “the many individuals who lack access to justice in a number of ways.”Richard was a Harvard Law School graduate who devoted his career to public service work. Early in his career, he was a public defender and legal services attorney. In 2005, he was the driving force behind the founding of the Self-Represented Litigation Network, an organization devoted to ensuring due process and equal protection for self-represented litigants.

I’ve been on SLRN.org, after another mother had forwarded it to me.  I found it very informative, but not enough on, again, these “in the gap” reporting issues.   FYI, the above article says his blogs will only be on-line through the end of 2019.

BACK TO MY 2018 WRITING:

Few women in the situations these laws address are privileged with such a steady platform and work life from which to speak about it — but still, that doesn’t excuse speaking FOR us without telling the whole, known truth about the field — all relevant parts of it.

Then (meanwhile) within the family court circles, we continue hear about limited resources, the need to outsource more services, the need to turn the digital (it comes up in this page if you’re still unaware), and, it seems endlessly, what to do about “difficult” (high-conflict) parents — what more programs can be ordered?

In practice, this goes beyond, speaking figuratively, “ambulance-chasing” (or, for general concept, NOT specific application, see Ambulance-Chasing Attorneys exposed for illegally soliticing clients, 8/24/2016 from WXYZ Detroit/ABC7 News) to, metaphorically staging the accidents, complaining about them, then soliciting more services (tax burden) or reduction of existing services, to handle the custody catastrophes, while, in solicitations for more programming, blaming it on the both drivers (parents) in a given “accident,” then, separately, ruling at times as if only one was the real cause.

[[ENDS ABRUPTLY BECAUSE IT WAS ONLY A PORTION OF MY (LGH’s) FRONT PAGE…]]

Also of-interest (but not directly related to post content):  New To This Blog | Want My Position Summary or a Review? These Ten Key Posts From 2012-2017 should help. (Very Short PAGE, Publ. Jan. 27, 2018). Shortlink ends “-8tE”, under 1,500 words.

To get back there (FYI internal links here always jump to the top of any post or page; I’m not composing yet in “block format” where they might make internal jumps, as in Wikipedia or some websites) just type in “familycourtmatters.org” (<~~or click there.)