I  look at the brochures in the family courts, child support, and social service offices when I am in some of them.  Sometimes I make a special detour into the wonderful

“Family Court Services”

of my local courthouse, to find out whether the concept of domestic violence has disappeared from general use.  FYI, it has.  And where it shows up, it’s no longer called “violence” but “abuse” (that’s more PC).

However the word “Violence” attracts a lot of federal funding.  I know where a good deal of this goes — both now, and formerly (see this blog!).

A new “twist” on the Expert Conference-Talks is to “collaborate.”  While these groups (who are paid to run conferences, and set up websites — and institute after institute — after all, a guy (and a whole lot of white, conservative middle aged males are typically included) has to make a living, right? — want to hear the flavor of the month (which JUST HAPPENS to match federal grants programs with the same flavor names), the one voice they don’t want to hear is mine, or women like me.

For one, we don’t complete our sentences, and our websites (well, mine at least) aren’t as “tight” and colorful.  For another, some of us are just dang pissed off.

And some people put this flyer in the San Diego Family Courts.

Take a look!

San Diego Family Court Protests (Fall, 2009)

In late October 2009, one or more people distributed a large quantity of flyers inside the San Diego family law courts.

Reportedly they were stuffed in books, free magazines, and other literature in the courthouses.

The flyers protest the use of expensive professionals in child custody cases, in particular section 730 psychological evaluators.

Criticisms are also directed at minor’s counsel attorneys, exchange and visitation monitors, and consulting psychologists.

While this criticism is appropriate, it seems these people are unaware of federal policy recommending this, via Access Visitation funding…(search term on my blog, or search “required outcome”)

You can see a scanned PDF of the flyer.

The text of the protest flyer has also been posted on Courthouse Forum, one of the sites hosting discussions about the scandal. Some other web sites with related public discussions are:

• Custody Evaluator’s Credentials Questioned In Lawsuit (10 News main site)
• Custody Evaluator’s Credentials Questioned In Lawsuit (10 News blog site)
• Parents Say They Are Drained Of Money By Court Professionals

Some of the discussions mention the courts sealing the Tadros v. Doyne case after it started to be discussed publicly. Perhaps the courts want to “protect privacy” or maybe simply cover up allegations of their misconduct. Whatever the case may be, you can read the text from this quote in case the link or discussion thread becomes unavailable:

DOYNE case leads to the accreditation of a CAT, as I recall.  However, the whole issue is turning courts into psychological dispensaries to the public, under duress.   The HHS department is set up along the lines of a prominent psychologist, Wade Horn, and with help from such heavyweights as David Blankenhorn (who receives/d grants to write “The Future of Marriage”) and so forth.  It’s not just at the courts level, or at the individual practitioners level.

Here’s the flyer (and see original link for more information on this):

PARENTS BEWARE! PRIVATE CHILD CUSTODY EVALUATIONS

 ALSO CALLED “730 EVALUATIONS”

“AND THE CHILDREN GO TO………THE HIGHEST BIDDER”
 

Judges regularly order parents into Private Child Custody Evaluations and appoint a specific evaluator. Yet no one in the Court, including the Judge, verifies the education, credentials, training, or competence of the appointees. The Court deems itself “not responsible” for private sector practitioners, yet they make orders that force you to sign a contract and pay for what could only be called a “disservice” to your children. The evaluator then coerces you to sign a service agreement, medical releases, and other documents, when no legally binding contract existed prior to your signature being received. If the Court is allowed to make this kind of order, why is your signature required?

 But you will do this. You will do this because your lawyer (who probably told you it was a good idea and suggested an evaluator), the Judge, and the evaluator themselves will deem you “uncooperative” and imply that you will lose all custody of your children if you don’t.

 Parents, WE, AS CITIZENS OF THIS COUNTRY, have no right under the U.S. or California Constitutions to raise or even have contact with our own children.

FALSE, I say.  First of all, the Declaration of Independence talks about “inalienable rights” meaning — that the government is NOT our master, but our servant.

How this relationship was changed around through the tax system (which affects grants, which affect the courts and nearly every other aspect of life) is the topic of future posts.  I’m not a Constitutional expert.  But we know that family courts basically PER SE violate due process. 

Those in the business of the “Justice Factory” know this and will exploit your fear of losing your child to serve themselves and feed the mill.

Yes they do.  NOW, the question is, what can we do about this?  At this point (many years after our case entered, and still has stalled, in the family law system) is that we must boycott it entirely, one way or another.  It’s a large net, and trawling for fish. 

Either that, or continue to enter this slot-machine venue.  Keep pumping in quarters, but the house generally wins.

Regardless of these facts, the Judge will enter any report an appointee generates into your Court file under California Evidence Code §730, without verifying that the evaluator followed the legal procedures and/or complied with the orders they issued in your case. Once released to the court, you have no independent access the report you paid for.If you are ordered into a 730 Evaluation, your only chance at 50/50 custody is if:a) You are paying the “right” Family Law Attorney ($250+/hr.), and;b) You agree to pay for ½ the evaluation, in advance of the report….….which has no set limit as to how long it can take or how much the evaluator charges hourly. Evaluations can cost as much as $30,000 and you may be required to participate in more than one!!! As well, you may be “farmed out” to their partner marketed colleagues for “therapy”, “mediation”, “parenting coordination”, “supervised visitation”, “coaching” and a few other “services” these same people provide.THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A “COURT APPROVED” PRIVATE EVALUATOR – DESPITE WHAT YOU MAY HAVE BEEN TOLD* Please download PKT-036 at the link provided belowHOW THIS COULD HAVE HAPPENED?In 1992, the Federal Government enacted The Child Support Recovery Act. The States were at risk of having welfare funding cut. In response, California dismissed “Argos Minimum Child Support Standards Act of 1984”, in favor of “The California Child Support Guideline” (Family Code §§4050-4076). Child support was thereafter based on “time-share” rather than meeting the minimum needs of the child.

Non-custodial parents, previously disinterested in custody but ordered to pay child support or face criminal charges, flooded the Court seeking custody. Resources exhausted, the Court, in its infinite business sense, created measures allowing the “out-sourcing” of services at the parents’ expense.

Whoever this author is, the narration is PARTIALLY true.  The focus should not be only on those noncustodial parents (although there’s an element of truth in this).  The Child Support System is recruiting.  From there, grants administered BY OCSE are used to help tweak the system and the litigation, as described herein.  It’s NOT just a natural flooding from deadbeat Dads (or Moms) who don’t want to pay.

It’s recruiting.

For my witness, en route here today, I saw AGAIN, full-scale, HUGE posters at the main commuter train line (I have now seen them at at least 3 stations), you see them coming, going, while ON the platform waiting for an arriving train, and I saw another TWO today, HUGE, each of them at least (I’d say) 10 feet long by about 2 feet tall, and pasted at an angle behind a long bench where people could be waiting either for a taxi, a bus, or someone to get their car, inside the station.  They read, and I quote:

DO YOU PAY OR RECEIVE CHILD SUPPORT? 

DON’T WAIT TIL YOU NEED HELP!

OPEN A CHILD SUPPORT CASE!

TURBOCOURT.COM  (and an 866, plus a logo, for the county’s child support agency).

The photo (I didn’t get a close look from the one across the platform) has a variety of kids (multicultural) together, and below it, one of two (white) kids in front of a suburban home.  This billboard was pasted in a VERY wealthy neighborhood.  Another one had a picture of what looks like a man’s wallet. 

There was no picture of any women, or child, needing child support…

I have another question:  why does it say do you PAY or RECEIVE (in that order) versus RECEIVE or PAY?  Answer:  It’s aiming at noncustodial parents.

Grants to States for Access and Visitation Programs (93.597)

Obligations

(Formula Grants) FY 08 $10,000,000; FY 09 est $10,000,000; FY 10 est $12,000,000

Program

93.597 Grants to States for Access and Visitation Programs

Federal Agency

Agency: Department of Health and Human Services
Office: Administration for Children and Families

Authorization

Social Security Act, Title IV, Part D, Section 469B, Public Law 104-193.

Program Number

93.597

Last Known Status

Active

Objectives

To enable States to create programs which support and facilitate access and visitation by non-custodial parents with their children.

{{NOTE:  this does not work for mothers after custody-switch, that I’m aware of .  And I know lots of mothers who lost their kids to that switch..}}

 Activities may include mediation, counseling, education, development of parenting plans, visitation enforcement and development of guidelines for visitation and alternative custody arrangements.

Types of Assistance

Project Grants

=========

Back to the SAN DIEGO FLYER text……

The Court enticed private practitioners by calling them “expert witnesses”, such that their “work product” was immune to lawsuit, under Evidence Code §730.

With HMO’s and PPO’s limiting payments to doctors for mental heath services that were not “medically necessary”, psychologists who formerly refused to be involved in the Court system, suddenly saw a “cash cow”. The public was now required to pay their full hourly rates for an indeterminate length of time, in hopes of continued, meaningful contact with their children.

 Such practitioners in the Golden State should be well-heeled, as the Terminator is now threatening to entirely Terminate CalWorks, and reduce mental health services (as paid for by federal grants) and in general, things that might help keep children and their families off the streets. 

To this day the Court takes no responsibility to ensure that the credentials, training and education of the 730 Evaluators they appoint meet the legal standards. Lorna Alksne, Supervising Judge of the Family Court, recently told Channel 10 News that it is the responsibility of the parents to verify credentials of an appointed evaluator.** In other words, they “scapegoat” their incompetence, corruption, and deliberate ignorance on you, at the cost of your home, your retirement, your children’s savings and college funds and most important, your child’s psychological, emotional, physical and spiritual wellbeing… 

NAMES 

“730’s”: Stephen Doyne, John C. Parker IV, William Dess, David Green, Lori Love, Russell Gold, Steven Sparta, Robert Simon, Yanon Volcani, Breffni Barrett, Neil Ribner, Linda Altes;Marketed Partners: Hannah’s House, Family Connections, Monika Konia, Penny Angel-Levy, William Eddy, Terrence Chucas, Dave Schulman, Margot Lewis….and more too numerous to list here.LINKS

 That’s all the time I have to flesh out that post. 

My Recommendation:

If your noncustodial parent is willing to cough it up for child support without any agency involvement, live with it or do without (for more, see Randijames.com).  If he (or the occasional she) is NOT willing to, then still maybe do without, because sooner or later such a person is going to find some unethical sorts to get his way, and we know where they live & thrive.

If you still don’t “get” this, check out this 1981 organization:

I am a Noncustodial mother who lost her children illegally coming up on 4 years ago because of California’s Failure to Enforce its own laws. 

Readers. . . . . I am blowing off steam here, and the paragraphs may not be in order.  All things considered, I’m doing it OK, and society should be glad that — unlike the man I left years ago — I blow off steam with my fingers on a keyboard and not with my finger’s on someone else’s neck (etc.) as I experienced before finally filing for a domestic violence order with kickout.

NOTE:  The prior post on Evan Stark, I do not agree totally with his perspective (after a re-read).  He is not addressing the primary issues, but simply reframing them.  In looking at the Glenn Sacks link to “Evan Stark,” I found no mention (at first look) of his name on the Glenn Sacks site.  Today’s post is in (irate) response to the hypocrisy of the blog about child abduction, on this site.

I don’t know whether I’ll be too coherent (below), but I do know that I’ll say my piece, particularly as it’s not being heard in the courtroom, or other places.

To expect mothers who can’t see their kids and who have been stuck in the court system for years to act “rationally” approaching this holiday — well, don’t expect too much of this. 

I actually think that these holidays — MOST of them — and “awareness” months (or days) should just be boycotted.  It gives the general public ADHD while simply providing more business for Hallmark, and psychotherapists who handle whichever distraught parent doesn’t get to see his or her offspring.

I[ll try again (better) another time.

Readers also might be aware that I have no regular internet access, and have to put up first drafts on short timespans these days.

I personally am emotionally, physically, spiritually and mentally exhausted from another attempt to do something through the family law system.  On the bright side, going there didn’t provoke PTSD like it normally does…

MOTHER’s DAY:

As I approach yet another Mothers’ Day weekend, realizing I am not going to likely see either of my children, and fully 10 years after separating from an abusive husband, who never spent a night in jail, even though the abuse lasted almost 10 years, and was at a felony level, causing serious injury as defined by law, and for which zero (0.00) compensation was ever received, I am coming up on over a year since I have seen my younger daughter by face, or heard her voice. 

The last time I considered fleeing this area for my OWN safety (even though like many women I’ve lost everything to these systems, which endorse & reward criminal behavior, let alone simple sloth, while promising to do something remedy and relieve it) the other thing I’ve lost is my respect for authority in general.  I am honest in court and have enough self-restraint not to commit crimes, and realize that this means in this culture, I will not be allowed to contact, or transmit these sane values to my own offspring.

How a woman handles this, I don’t know.  We have choices — dissociate, and not care?  Or care, and take the law into our own hands (which will likely just result in jail time or a total identity change meaning our lives just got cut in half, and whatever the first half was spent working towards, GOES), or we are continue to hurt and work, but forever changed.  The meaning of language changes.  The alienation towards major institutions — ALL of them — changes.  Speaking for myself, my desire to participate or even support any community which allows the widescale trafficking in children, and women, while loudly protesting it’s AGAINST this — is gone.

My case:

Prior to the last time I saw my daughter (2009), it was almost two years without visual contact.  The seven years prior to that, the father had generous weekly visitation, alternating holidays (and I gave him more) and two weeks in the summer. 

The moment they were put in his care, I didn’t see either daughter on a single major holiday except one of them once, the first year nor did I get any summer vacation.  Within a year, the visitation was hammered down to one phone call a week, which I didn’t get consistently then, and do not get AT ALL now.  I requested in court that the children be required to call me, which was granted verbally, but didn’t make it into the court order (which the father was allowed to write).  So, the emotional abuse of not getting through continues to this date.

During this first, critical year of separation from my children (right about as they hit puberty), I was able to talk myself into two local conferences by expert organizations in the field of domestic violence and child abuse.  NOTE:  I didn’t receive notice, mailing, and was not able to AFFORD attendance, but managed to get in anyhow. 

During this first, critical year of separation, women continued — in the same city — to be stabbed, shot, in one case as I recall, burned, and in general drop like flies while trying to leave an abuser.  I ran into a triple homicide (police cars, TV cameras) one Thanksgiving evening, causing severe PTSD.  This also turned out to be family related.  The court, failing to answer my repeated requests it state a REASON for the custody switch, also failed to acknowledge that outside the courtroom I was being intimidated as well.

Instead, they assigned another court personnel (who draws a salary, I’m sure) who MUST have walked by at least one of these domestic violence murders, high-profile, en route to my courtroom telling me to go fly a kite.

I sought to ascertain the scope or practice from this children’s attorney, and (she) couldn’t give me one.  I communicated to her when my own daughter (who’d already been abducted) sent me a troubling email about another Amber Alert of a girl her age, and was ignored.  I faxed that the father had stalked me (and credible witness of this was in the court file) in response to my attempts to see my daughters, per the court order.  I received, in return, a scathing long-distance psychological analysis by a woman whose initials after her name read “Esq.” and not “L.C.S.W.,” although if they had, she’d still be more professional to at least MEET with me once, or show some evidence that the court file had been at least read through once.

My court order says I am to see the children on Mother’s Day and their father on Father’s Day.  That hasn’t happened in approximately four years.  The court orders are unenforceable. 

After my kids were stolen on an overnight visitation based on FALSE claims that I was an abduction risk, and several other facts not proved in any court, and because law enforcement simply refused to honor the existing physical custody order, I foolishly believed a Family Law Judge would have some interest in the facts of the case, and once those facts were compared with the law, would return my children both to this household and their schools.

At the time of the abduction, the father was thousands of $$ behind in child support, which was set at a VERY minimal level.  The child support order itself was the first time this man was actually forced to support his own children without financially pimping me, i.e., I worked, took abuse, had my credit stolen, and lived in fear and half in and half out of a car (when a car was actually available) until finally, my life (then at risk) was spared by a CIVIL restraining order.  I knew nothing about criminal ones, although they would’ve been more appropriate.

Two days ago, I cooled my heels for a morning in front of a judge who had been in the DA’s office during the years I was getting slapped around my own home, and during the year that my children were stolen. 

I later looked up who he was (and the intermingling of family connections in this area).   I found out (and may write him, as our case isn’t going anywhere, and if it does, any court orders issued won’t be enforced before both kids turn 18) that by the time he got his first bachelor’s, I was getting ready to get my second.  I am beginning to tire of the “attitude” taken towards family court litigants once they get in there.

Without a second thought, my matter was dropped and I was sent back to the self-help desk which had not helped me to start with, because I’d been unable to SAFELY serve this man. 

FYI, Financial Devastation typically follows entry into the family law case.  I couldn’t afford service, was not allowed to serve by mail, and I no longer have associates willing to go there.  I sure as hell am not going anywhere near the father, who lives in another city, and particularly not without a vehicle (the original abduction resulted in lost work and — predictably over time — lost vehicle). 

Thereafter, the same date as I sat in court a half day to receive 10 seconds of judge’s time, the father (who had been at least by PHONE informed of this case, and requested to come drop his divorce action, since he was stalking me and had in writing his intent to reclaim me — against my will – as his wife (having abandoned our children with his former mistress) continued to make phone calls, and waste more of my time. 

This process is utterly exhausting, and NOT possible to work around.

I cannot speak for all marriages, obviously, but in ours the difference in education was significant (I have two college degrees to his none) and the intent from the start of this marriage, rather than for us both to be elevated by working together, was to put me down lower than he already was.  It began, continued, and has continued like a total bulldozer, whirlwind, and I am thankful that at least all of us are still alive — all though there is one daughter I’ve had no contact with for a very long time.

As we head into ANOTHER “Mother’s Day” weekend, probably a few more Moms and/or children will die, in punishment for confronting Dad about something, and Fathers & Families, ignoring this, will continue to advocate to further bury us alive financially, legally, and emotionally because — long ago and legally  — SOME of us second-class-female-gender-Moms said ENOUGH! and said it with court orders.

Japan had it right folks — they understand that women are better mothers.  Men are too often in the habit of importing women for the purposes of babymaking (I’m not saying this is the current case) and then when the mother says NO, they have an issue.

I think God had this one right too — for nine months, generally, we bond with growing life inside our bodies.  Once we give birth — or sometimes before — the battle is on for “whose kids are they” in our current environment. 

Glenn Sacks, your Sack is full of hot air, and whatever God you worship, if there’s a just one around, He will sooner or later set it straight, I hope.  I long ago ceased hoping for balance in the courts OR from law enforcement, as they are so inbred it’s nearly impossible to tell the difference.  If any parent is so foolish as to think that this is where you go for anything other than to get fleeced, you deserve it. 

The practice to get unwilling participants INTO the family law system against their will, and from there into mediation, which is by way of saying “Outcome Based Litigation” (i.e., no due process), is consolidating a restraining order with a divorce order.  She wants restraint, he files for divorce, and voila — she loses her kids, and ends up paying him.  Or else. 

Now, people in the U.S. want to threaten the nation of Japan like it was a recalcitrant child.  Let’s remember in what country Hiroshima is, and in what country American Citizens with Japanese blood in their veins were rounded up and incarcerated several decades ago.  Decades later, this is discussed on public television stations, but at the time, it was another matter.

Right now, we are rounding up noncustodial mothers who said NO! to their husbands, and when the law didn’t protect them, they took it upon themselves to protect their own kids.  The SPIN that we are all lying (based on our female gender), and that somehow the odds need to be evened towards fathers is the same mentality that said Japanese Americans are  a risk to our nation, and need to lose THEIR homes, businesses, and in some cases, childhoods til it gets figured out.  Racial profiling, Gender profiling — what’s the diff? 

MANY women fail to realize how deeply the OCSE (Child Support System) is involved in the fatherhood movement.  Glenn here is at least honest enough to say it up front.  Here’s the quote, from the site:

Fathers & Families has an ambitious legislative agenda and has helped pass family court reform legislation in over two dozen states. Below are updates on Fathers & Families’ current legislative projects. To learn more about our legislative and other achievements, click here.

California

Child Custody Reform Bill AB 2416 Passes Assembly by Unanimous Consent, Moves to Senate

F & F Introduces 5th CA. Family Court Reform Bill—SB 1188 

F & F Helps Amend CA. SB 1266 to Include Both Mothers and Fathers

F & F Introduces 4 Family Court Reform Bills into California Legislature

F & F serves on Department of Child Support Services Programs Workgroup, the only advocacy group included {{Note:  the only link not to be a hyperlink, here…}

The last time I ran into a mother who’d been deprived of her children and was stuck in the family law court was this MORNING.  For 14 years, she’s been involved in this.

WHO is stupid enough to think that this is going to help a child or adult, to keep the litigation going for so long?

That is, other than those whose livelihood is IN the courts….

They are recruiting fathers from child support office, and from prisons, to get free legal help to reduce arrears.  “Poor Fathers…”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Liz Richards ~ http://www.nafcj.net ~ out of Anandale Virginia has documented this and has been blogging the connections for over 15 years.  I took the time to research her statements, and have found them to be accurate.  The paths are clear, if you delete the “spin” and simply look at the federal funding, and see how far-thinking were some of the corporations that positioned themselves to keep “researching” the problems” (without ever solving them or, that I can tell, saving a single life) on the public taxpayer dole.

I started this site to continue posting links and some studies to follow that money trail for those who choose to.

The more I read, the more radical I became.  In the meantime, I quit churches, on the basis that enough is enough of USING women, and SILENCE on domestic violence.  I tell women to avoid the child support trap — and beware its gifts.  If you get there by receiving cash aid after support, you have just signed over your rights to advocate YOURSELF on child support.

I also say, forget it on restraining orders and (a) leave and (b) take a self-defense class, and take it SERIOUSLY.  A restraining order is just going to piss off your ex, and Glenn Sacks & Company, and fact is, they right now have more powerful access to media and government than you do.  If you doubt me, look at the makeup of the U.S. Congress. 

Do you think that the VAWA and Statewide Coalitions and other groups are going to help you?  Victims of Crime compensation?  For lost income, lost teeth, medical reimbursement for counseling and so forth?  If you are such a Mom who was so helped, please add your comment (and identifying information, if safe to do so) HERE.  I wasn’t. 

So here it is on Child Abduction. Hypocrites!   Listen to an employed businessman, apparently (it’s a *.com site, right?) with postings by a lawyer, and Fathers & Family advocating in the Child Support Agency (like it wasn’t already heavily biased towards minimizing child support for fathers, and switching custody when the come into the offices for help), piping up for a pity party that it’s too easy to get a restraining order, and that child abduction prevention orders are not being inforced…

If I could spit on screen, I would.  Women who DO comply with court orders are going to lose in this venue.  Men who don’t will be rewarded.

FL Passes Law Against Parental Child Abduction – Or Does It?

May 7th, 2010 by Robert Franklin, Esq.

This article tells us that the Florida Legislature has recently passed, with no ‘nay’ votes, a bill entitled the “Child Abduction Prevention Act.” (Capitol Soup, 4/22/10). The governor is expected to sign it. Here’s a link to the amended bill. It’s a pretty serious bill. The legislators look like they’re intent on preventing parental child abduction out of Florida to another state or to a foreign country.

{{Well, that’s less business for Florida, right?}}

So they’ve given judges the power to issue orders prohibiting a parent leaving the jurisdiction, requiring parents who seem to pose a risk of abduction to post bonds, requiring them to turn over children’s passports, notifying U.S. passport authorities of the order against the parent, refusing permission to travel to any country that’s not a signatory to the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of Child Abduction, and more.

Of course the judge has to hold a hearing and receive evidence that suggests that one parent may be about to flee the jurisdiction.

Not in my state (same general wording in the bill) they don’t.  All that was needed was for law enforcement officers to threaten to call in CPS if I didn’t cede my children to the father, whose residence at this time was unidentified, who had a habitual pattern of repeatedly violating all court orders, which this station knew of, and when these law enforcement officers had in front of them a court order NOT 24 HOURS OLD — DENYING him his request for immediate ex parte total removal of my daughters on the basis that I (and not he) was the abduction risk. 

When I requested that if these officers were GOING to allow my ex to actually commit felony child-stealing (which I later learned was the description) they would — right now — issue a report that he was at a minimum violating my sole physical custody order.  They mocked me and refused, and taunted me that they would issue this — many weeks later. 

This provoked a crisis requiring us to go to mediation.  I was in shock and trauma over this, UTTERLY devastated that this could happen.  The same mediator that ignored (totally) the original domestic violence order was my only option, or fail to get to court because no other mediator was available.  He was required — by rules of court — to provide me an intake form.  He skipped it this time, no intake form was provided.  Each of the two prior times I had (truthfully) related the former violence and the current situations. It’d been several years, and the form had been updated to include, as a “check mark” “CHILD-STEALING.”

LOOK:  Is it a felony or is it a check mark on a mediator’s intake form? 

Either way, I received no intake form and was asked by this jerk how was my “relationship” with my kids.  I repeated, several times, my children are MIA, they have been stolen by their father, and I do not know where they are.  He then, doltish, asked me if they were in school.  I repeated, they are not in the school I just enrolled them in, they are truant, and I DO NOT KNOW WHERE THEY ARE AND CANNOT REACH THEM BY PHONE.  THEIR FATHER AND GIRLFRIEND HAVE TAKEN AND CONCEALED THEM. 

We go to court.  The theft provokes a hearing.  The hearing provokes BUSINESS for a family lawyer, obviously, as the mother, I’m going to hire someone to get my kids back.  That’s how it works, folks….

At the hearing, the mediator, ignoring the felony child-stealing, ignoring (which is on the record) that I actually qualified, if I myself had done this, as a domestic violence victim, having had a prior restraining order, and ignoring that for three weeks these children for the first time in their lives had no contact with their mother (something that had never been done to their father).  He produces a report — which I obviously wasn’t given before the hearing, nor was my attorney — containing lies and material factual error, and ignoring the crime.    My attorney, quick on his feet, requests the court to provide the LEGAL and FACTUAL basis for switching custody, which it is required to do by law.

The judge complains about this request (that she comply with custody laws in our state) and, complaining, sets the matter for a short trial to find out what happened (although what happened is already obvious).  The father, now with control, proceeds to violate even more court orders than before, and in essence, this is about the last time I see my children, even though they live not too far away.  When I protest and try to seek enforcement of the drastically reduced court order (less visitation than he had even immediately after being thrown out of our home), I am personally threatened by stalking, plus continued arguing, by the father of our daughters.  Whose employment, at this time, is (while I’m at it) under the table. 

The same child support agency that stalled — for a few years, when I sought its help — acted quickly — within a month — to terminate all current arrears, and continued (for 12 months) to deliberately stall and fail to file a seek work order on my recalcitrant mate, meaning, I went quickly into poverty, as did the children (they ended up receiving NO child support, as I lost my profession over this, and their father was already failing to work at his in order to punish me for seeking standards, and leaving him….). 

Thereafter, in the family law venue, per the law, the judge is require

That evidence includes not having secure ties to the community, not having financial interests in the community, obtaining passports, selling a residence, etc. And no one pretends that the law will prevent all child abductions by parents.

The Sean Goldman kidnapping is a good example.

There, the mother said she was taking the boy to visit her relatives in Brazil and never returned. Nothing in the Florida bill would have prevented that from happening, even if Goldman had lived in that state. Still, there are things legislation can accomplish and things it can’t, and, reading the bill, it’s clear that the lawmakers are trying to put teeth into the new law. They’re doing what they can to prevent parents from depriving their exes of contact via abduction. Until, that is, they get to subsection 7 (b) on page nine. At that point, the elected representatives of the People carve out an exception through which one could fly a 747 en route to Japan. Although you can guess what it is, here’s the language:

This section, including the requirement to post a bond or other security, does not apply to a parent who, in a proceeding to order or modify a parenting plan or time-sharing schedule, is determined by the court to be a victim of an act of domestic violence or provides the court with reasonable cause to believe that he or she is about to become the victim of an act of domestic violence, as defined in s. 741.28.

An injunction for protection against domestic violence issued pursuant to s. 741.30 for a parent as the petitioner which is in effect at the time of the court proceeding shall be one means of demonstrating sufficient evidence that the parent is a victim of domestic violence or is about to become the victim of an act of domestic violence, as defined in s. 741.28, and shall exempt the parent from this section, including the requirement to post a bond or other security. So if a parent has “reasonable cause” to believe that “he or she” is about to become a victim of DV, “he or she” can abduct the kids to any location desired, including any non-Hague Convention country. Once there, as we’ve seen in Paul Toland and Christopher Savoie’s cases, the kids might as well be on the dark side of the moon for all the contact dad will have with them. Significantly, all a litigant needs to show to a judge is that an injunction has issued against DV. Recall that I recently posted a piece on the process for getting a TRO in Florida. The “how to” website I linked to pronounced getting a TRO “easy,” and that looked to me like an accurate description. Just toddle down to the courthouse, ask the clerk to give you a form, fill it out, have it notarized and Presto!, there’s your TRO. No muss, no fuss, no evidence, no judge and no troublesome opposing party. We know that a domestic violence TRO need neither allege nor prove that any form of actual violence has ever occurred. If the person requesting the order fears that it will, the TRO will issue. That’s true of an injunction against DV too; fear of DV is sufficient. So what we have is this: any parent who wants to abscond with the kids can do so based on his/her ability to convince a judge of their belief that DV may occur. Given that the vast majoriy of DV TROs are issued to women, and that judges almost invariably “err on the side of caution” it’s beginning to look like Florida moms at least will have little to worry about from the “Child Abduction Prevention Act.” Thanks to Barbara for the heads-up.

THINKING makes me happy, and this is what I am thinking about after hearing that another Ph.D. has got my story right, in:

Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life

as posted by “ANGELFURY” on:

“Battered Mothers-A Human Rights Issue ”

which was obtained, I gather, from “theLizLibrary” which many of us are familiar with.

THIS bit is MY Commentary:

I expect the tongue-in-cheek aspect may not come through in print; assume it’s there….

Women are “always” being interpreted by men, and the ubiquitous assumption that, because we are women, or because we are in the family law system, or because we actually reported violence, sought restraining orders, or want to report that our children are being hurt or compromised in one way or another — we just cannot get our own stories straight, did not mean what we said, and need someone with a Ph.D. to interpret it for us into psycho-social-jargon that strips the genuine emotion (and identifiable detail) out of it. For example:

What kind of rational reasoning would say, in defiance of all known biology, that a full-grown woman came out of a man’s side after the Lord put him under, and that while she waited (presumably fully conscious and capable of speech) after he regained consciousness, and seeing as he had already named all the animals, she waited until he came to himself, after which he figured out a name for Her (and not vice versa), i.e., “WOE-Man.”

Her primary sin, from what I can tell in reviewing Genesis, was (1) listening to someone outside her husband (i.e., seeking a 2nd opinon) and (2) combining the act of speaking and thinking independently.

Atheists like to mock those who believe this account, but look at the same brilliant logic when it comes to childbirth:

Well, today, there’s Caesarians and hysterectomies and the concept that childbirth is a horrible and unnatural experience better endured while unconscious and with the aid of a scalpel and without the aid of, say, gravity! Guess which gender thought THAT process up! And how long did it take to figure out that the doctors ought to wash their hands between patients– somewhere in the early 1900s? ???

The brilliance of it is the sheer irrationality of it. The only way it can be grasped is by faith, either thesis.

Now let’s talk about women who have given birth to children, which you have to admit takes SOME persistence in life, come into the courtroom. And suddenly, we are supposed to turn speechless again, and unable to say what we mean:

“HELLO, I’m an adult, and this is what EX (with the Y chromosome) did on mm/dd/yy in violation of court order ##-#####. This action, from what I understand of the Penal Code, was indeed a felony, that action, a misdemeanor, that a clearly intentional violation of an existing court order, and the last time we were in court, THESE rules of court and in THAT manner, my right to due process was violated, resulting in THIS waste of our time.

“Let’s remember, Your Honor, that you are on a payroll and I, in this courtroom, am not.

(And so forth)….

That woman has a bad attitude, and needs to be put in her non-expert, non-Ph.D’d place (even if she has a Ph.D.), WE know she has an ulterior motive….

What about, for once, some restraints, judges (etc.) on your treatment of ME in this courtroom? You know how friggin’ long it took me to figure out where those rules of court were that were violated the last time we were in court? You know what my billable $$/hour is, that I spent looking that up, which could’ve been spent “parenting” or, say, working? ??

I’m getting a crash court in the United States Government, broken law by broken law, and civil rights violation by civil rights violation. By the time I hit retirement age, I will have probably qualified to pass my state Bar, but obviously unless I actually DO that, what I say will not be taken seriously, because of my gender, or because we are in the family law venue…

Just because I’m in this courtroom seeking those laws, or your rules of court, to be enforced, or because one of those prior court orders was just flat-out ignored, doesn’t mean I don’t mean what I’m saying, or have some nasty hidden motive for reporting what I have seen and experienced to those who say they care about these issues. Speak for yourself!

Or someone whose livelihood depends on an ongoing stream of adults and children unable to speak for themselves, in other words, those hired by the courts to reframe our truths into ITS perspective.

Add to this, people who want access to the “fruit of our wombs”, have a perspective that differs from, say, those who own the wombs.

Add to this, the second partners of the divorcing or separating partners want to just “get on” with THEIR relationship too, let’s accept, and as such, to totally discredit (or eliminate) the former partner — of the same gender — is in some senses, understandable biologically. That is, if we are all to reduce our behavior to worse, from what I can tell, then a pack of dogs, who eventually figure out a pecking order unless there is a hominid around who’s breeding canines to fight in order to place bets on which dog will kill the other first… Men who do that to dogs suffer worse penalties and social shunning than men who do the similar thing to women and children.

And a dog is NOT a man’s best friend. ….. Although they can be very friendly and fulfil many other roles in life.

To add to this, people who apparently believe that the social sciences hold the answer to life’s problems, and that just some more funding will really help the experts to collaborate until they all agree . . . . . and that if only enough experts agree (and have access to the use of force to elicit “agreement” from their subject matter), that this foolish plague of religion and human fallibility can be wiped clean from the earth.

The experts are likely to totally agree when, either one club totally dominates all the other clubs (i.e., professional memberships). We already tried that with “religion,” and the wars, last I looked, still continue……

ANYHOW, so when someone male with a Ph.D. or who is published seems to “get” what “coercive control” IS, my mind is curious, say, who IS that dude?

Well, for one he’s a dude who has a business, and has published some books:

He’s a Dude that Glenn Sacks is blogging:

Evan Stark – GlennSacks.com

Faculty/Staff Detail

Evan Stark, PhD, MA, MSW

Professor

Chair, Department of Urban Health Administration

Primary Affil: Rutgers University-School of Public Affairs & Administration, Professor and MPH Program Director
SPH Department: Urban Health Administration
Units: N/A
Campus: Newark
Building: Hill Hall
Room: 722
Phone: 973.353.5093
Fax: 973.353.5907
Email: eds203@juno.com

Degrees/Certifications:

PhD, 1984, State University of New York
MA, 1967, University of Wisconsin
MSW, 1991, Fordham University

Global Public Health Experience:

No

Research Interests:

Health Management; Organizational Development; Violence and Health Policy

OK, here’s what he wrote. Seeing as we are approaching Mother’s Day, how appropriate to let a man say it for us….

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

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

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

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

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

More comments on-line here by the author, Dr. Stark.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Origins of the Coercive Control Model

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coercive Control

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

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

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

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

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

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

Control: Invisible in Plain Sight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<#>

Evan Stark

Eds203@juno.com

The idea I guess being to give us more interesting headlines, and fewer deaths…Less real drama…

You have to get the Beauty of this — it’s the simplicity.  Should this come to pass, I predict that no one is going to get married from henceforth. …. for any reason whatsoever.  So maybe it’s a healthy “jolt to the system…” in that regard.

This is California, 2010, where there’s war over whether or not marriage requires differences in (sexual) anatomy, or not . . . . .

And we all know that war is good for SOMEONE’s business.   If  you wish to email this “joker” to find out whether he’s in earnest, the address, handwritten on the image, says “Please direct all correspondence to John@badmouth.net.”

California 2010 Marriage Protection Act

This takes the Healthy Marriage Responsible Fatherhood idea to a WHOLE new level — once in, no way out unless the marriage is declared null or void.

Guess what phrase I was looking up when I ran across this . . . . . . .

Section 7.6 is added to Article I of the California Constitution: 

No party to any marriage shall be restored to the state of unmarried person during the lifetime of the other person unless the marriage is void or voidable as set forth under Part 2 of Division 6 under the Family Code.

This may be (just joking) why, you can find under this logo and at this California Attorney General’s site:

10-0001  [PDF 16937 kb / 160 pg] Title and Summary Issued on March 03, 2010  [PDF 71 kb / 1 pg] REWRITES THE ENTIRE STATE CONSTITUTION. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.

The logo on the main page states,

“With Liberty and Justice under law.”

It just forgot to say “for whom” and “by whom.”

We’re All Part Black, Even You White America
By: Crystal P. Smith (Add to your loop)
Fri, 10/09/2009 – 00:00

Michelle Obama is part white, just like most Black Americans.First lady Michelle Obama’s genealogy has been traced back to a slave girl and an unidentified white male, who is her great-great-great-grandfather.

Several scholars hope these findings will bring to light what many of us already knew, but what the mainstream doesn’t like to acknowledge — most African Americans are the products of interracial rape that occurred during slavery. The sex couldn’t be consensual, because the slave was property and had no rights. According to research by geneticist Mark Shriver at Morehouse College, 58 percent of African Americans possess at least 12.5 percent European ancestry or the equivalent of Michelle Obama’s one great-grandparent. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has said most of that lineage can be traced back to a white male who impregnated a black female, most likely a slave.

All of this highlights what even a lot of adults don’t know: laws created during slavery in order to keep slavery alive continue to affect the social order. They were made to benefit white men, making sure they had overwhelming access to everything and could create wealth. Interestingly enough, white men today are still at the very top of the social order. The “changing of the rules” we see happening today with President Obama isn’t different from the strategies used during slavery when someone or something jeopardized that control.

For instance, interracial marriages and unions were legal in the colonies until 1691, and it only became illegal when white women began marrying free black men. According to research conducted by my uncle, Wake Forest professor Dr. Anthony Parent for his book, Foul Means, many free Black men chose to marry white women because they didn’t have to pay for them like they did to marry Black female slaves. But white men didn’t want to compete with black men for white women, so interracial marriages were made illegal.

Laws were also made to ensure the product of a white man and his Black slave remained a slave, after a mulatto, Elizabeth Kay, sued and won her freedom in 1655 due to her white paternity. By 1662, it became law that “children were bound or free only according to the condition of the mother.” This law gave white men further incentive to rape their slaves; now they could breed slaves instead of buying them.

I trust readers are starting to see why I’m posting this under a family law blog.  Shared parenting, even if the woman has to dash out to save her life, or theirs.  Give me your kids! 

So, while it’s interesting most Black Americans have European lineage, it’s even more striking that large numbers of white Americans have to have Black relatives. Not to mention the number of mulattos who were light enough to pass and integrate themselves into the white world, like the late New York Times critic Anatole Broyard. How many more “white” people like that have been lurking around in our midst?

In his book, Parent also explores relationships between white women and Black female slaves and the many white women accused of killing their slaves over miniscule issues. Plantations populated with mulatto children were physical evidence of their husband’s sexual exploits. What woman wouldn’t be jealous and angry over that? Anybody ever seen Alex Haley’s Queen?

I often wonder how much of what happened then affects our lives now. I know tensions between Black and white women still exist and many Black women aren’t comfortable with Black men dating white women. Black women were, from the beginning, meant to be used by their masters and their relationships with Black men were destroyed or discouraged. Today, the Black family is broken once again and Black women still are largely excluded from the mainstream’s definition of beauty.

Things wouldn’t be so hard for us to understand if we learned the real history of our American past. But many details are purposely excluded from schools and the dialogue because revealing them would threaten the entire social structure. Yes, we have a Black president but he’s only one man who broke through. And just like laws were changed back then to preserve control, people like Congressman Joe Wilson, Glenn Beck and others who have a lot to lose, are working hard to make sure President Obama is a one-term wonder and things stay just as they are.

Now that we have all been informed of the European heritage that exists in the White House, let’s finally discuss the stain Black blood and slavery left behind long ago.

Crystal P. Smith is senior editor and writer at TheLoop21.com, where she focuses on pop culture, gender, social issues and race. She also writes the Inside the Loop blog.

She is talking about a different issue, but THE issue is the power structure. 

This is true in the family law system also. It’s those in power’s answer to women leaving abusive relationships.  PERIOD.  That’s what it’s about, as far as I have been able to tell. There was a window of time, apparently, we were let out.  That time has passed, and is passing, and now we are being shoved back in through this system, designed  — and the primary (a primary) organization affecting it even says this — to change the “old” criminal language of the law to “newer” (but — I say, NOT “better”) ways of the courts being used to “reconcile” marriages. 

That’s an insult.  If I want to divorce, or need to — a huge step — let me divorce, without extortion or threats, OK?  I’m not a CHILD!  But women are continually treated this way.

And there’s nothing better for drama than pitting women against each other.  Guess who’s back, laughing their ways to the bank on that one?

Another article here (I have 3 minutes left, yet) talks about it’s not black/white, it’s the rich-poor divide.  I find this to be true.  Poverty, and Wealth, are MADE, and to address family law, we are going to somewhere have to take a much harder look at our social system. 

http://theloop21.com/news/class-replaces-race-urban-centers

http://www.ustreas.gov/education/fact-sheets/taxes/ustax.shtml

And to do that, we have to look at our TAX system, which has its own, separate history.

This was  ‘find” under googling “Origins of Family Law system in the United States” which should also be checked out. 

Computer is slow today, but my take on the topics below is that the US is becoming more centralized, and less fragmented.  But — for the red, bold (mine) at the end, I think we need to look at this.  It’s an ATTITUDE thing, from top-down…  WIth religious conservatives in the ruling party….

This review reads “2004” and I think he has mis-read the United STates.  We are rapidly becoming centralized, and as such, that’s socialized. 

Let’s see if I can get one more “paste” in there with a different paradigm — that of  a “reconstruction” period, which I think applies to the gains in women’s rights, and the kick-back of them, in the last quarter of the 20th century..  From TheLoop21…

FAMILY LAW IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: A HISTORY

by Stephen Cretney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 911pp. Cloth: $115.00. £75.00 ISBN: 0-19-826899-8.

 Reviewed by Lawrence M. Friedman, Law School, Stanford University

This is a hefty piece of work, in every sense of the word.  The text runs to 775 pages, followed by over 35 pages of biographical notes, identifying the main players in the story.  The book, as the title tells us, gives an account-and an extremely comprehensive one-of the way family law developed in England in the 20th century.  The book also deals in some detail, as it must, with what came before (mostly in the 19th century).  In general, the first part of the book covers marriage and divorce, property arrangements after the death or divorce of a spouse, and the legal rights of unmarried couples (this somewhat sketchily).  Then come several chapters concerned with the legal status of children-legitimacy and illegitimacy, adoption, termination of parental rights in cases of abuse and neglect, and so on.  The book is quite long and very detailed; but it is well written, has a nice flow, and is full of interesting observations.  It does a quite admirable job of handling an intricate and complex subject.  The author is a former solicitor and a distinguished family law scholar.  One cannot fail to be impressed with his command of the subject.  There is nothing in the United States, on 20th century family law, that even approaches the scope of this book.      

Cretney’s book is very lawyerly.   Of course, family law is one of those fields in which you simply cannot avoid talking about nonlawyerly things-things that are happening in the outside world, economic changes, political changes, the sexual revolution, and so on.  Professor Cretney does speak of such matters; but frankly, not in any great depth or detail.  The book focuses heavily on the legal history of family law, rather than on the socio-legal history of the subject.  In this regard, the book, I imagine, would not be to the taste of most readers of this review (nor to my own taste, quite frankly).  But I feel it would a bit churlish to stress this point too much.  The reader will find, scattered throughout this vast text, many places where Cretney discusses or points out aspects of the politics or social meaning of family law-for example, how the rhythm of elections, and the rise and fall of parties, affected various bills and proposals in Parliament; or the impact of two world wars on divorce rates and the demand for divorce; or how a shocking crime against a foster child impacted child welfare laws.  In general, we have to be grateful to Professor Cretney for his enormous achievement.  He has given us a thorough and definitive account of the case-law and legislation.  The narrative is valuable in itself; and the book can also serve as a very useful reference book and as a key to the literature and the sources. 

Legal systems are by nature parochial.  They are jurisdictional, and they lose all their power at the national borders.  Family law is of course no exception.  The American reader will surely be struck by similarities and differences in family law on the two sides of the Atlantic.  The similarities are, to begin with, quite obvious.   English law has gone from tough divorce to easy divorce, has enacted laws permitting the adoption of children, eliminated the legal disabilities of illegitimate children, and so on.  There are other sorts of eerie parallels-for example, the moral panic over child abuse in the 1980s, complete with allegations of terrifying and satanic “organised ritual abuse” (p.721).   In general, English law echoes developments in American law, and also, one might add, developments in other western countries.  Each of these countries seems to have gone down the same road, though each at its own pace.

The trans-Atlantic differences are also striking.  I used the word “echoes” in the last paragraph on purpose.   In many instances, an American reader will find the Brits astonishingly slow.  A case in point is adoption.  In the United States, a crucial date is 1851; in that year, Massachusetts enacted a general adoption law-a law which, basically, gave adopted children a status in the family which was much the same as the status of “natural” children, and set up a judicial procedure for the adoption of children.  In the next few years, most other states followed with their own versions.  The corresponding English statute was passed in 1926, seventy-five years after Massachusetts!  Before that time, there was no mechanism at all for legally adopting a child in England.  A law that gave mothers rights of guardianship of children equal to fathers was enacted in 1973-another date that American readers will consider surprisingly late.  In fact, these readers will be startled, time and time again, by the deep-dyed conservatism of English family law, at least until quite recently.  Here is a country which seemed to embrace a welfare state philosophy so much earlier, and so much more thoroughly, than the United States, and yet, in many matters of family law, was (by American standards) extremely slow and halting, and even retrograde.    

But perhaps the structure of English government-perhaps reflecting deep differences in society as well-explains both features of English law.  There is, to begin with, the difference between a federal system and a centralized government.  Family law in the United States is a state matter.  Washington in the past had almost nothing to do with marriage and divorce, child custody, adoption, and the like.  Power is decentralized in the United States; and this is more than a matter of structure, it is also a matter of culture. 

Structure, however, does matter.  It affects the distribution of power.  The United States is fragmented, decentralized.  This means that in towns, cities, and even states, a small-town lawyer, a successful Chevrolet dealer, a politically active dentist, even a master plumber, can be a person of political consequence.   American power-holders at the local level are often economically conservative.  They have no taste for anything that smacks of socialism to them.  

They tend to find the poor despicable, and noblesse oblige plays no part in their psychic makeup.  But they do have some money, and a stake in society.  They own a house, a business, a piece of land.  Their stake in society predisposes them to want the right to form and reform family units, and they want these units to be legitimate, and to carry with them property and inheritance rights.  This has created a large, powerful class that exerted pressure on family law-pressure for formal recognition of adoption, and, more and more, for easier divorce laws.  

Of course, especially in the case of divorce, there were strong forces on the other side, but the tangled history of American family law shows that the clergy, and the conservative “family values” people, had a desperate fight on their hands, and ultimately a losing one.

The British case could not be more different.  Social conservatism had much more power in British society-in the houses of Parliament, in the administration, in the upper clergy, and in the highest circles of the civil service.  There were, as in the United States, crusaders for reform, at all times.  But they had to contend with powerful forces at the very heart of the polity.  The main characters, who walk through the pages of Cretney’s book, are for the most part members of Parliament (including the House of Lords very definitely), the higher civil service, bishops and archbishops, the Lord Chancellor’s office, and the judges of the high courts.  Proposals for reform get turned over to an endless parade of Royal Commissions, with extremely elite memberships-the Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes of 1912, for example, headed by Lord Gorell, and the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce of 1956, headed by Lord Morton of Henryton.    The Commissions issued reports, sometimes suggesting moderate reforms, sometimes not. 

{{In our time, we do “task forces.”  Does this shed some light on my recent post “Points of View” Moderate, versus Urgent??}}

These reports, along with White Papers from the government, and (after 1964) the work of the Law Commission, provide the basic documents, and the source materials for bills proposed and enacted in Parliament.  All of this activity was, of course, centered in London, and took place at the very apex of the national government.  The reports reflected, only at some very considerable difference, the needs and wants of ordinary people.  They did, however, have to take into account the opinions of members of the House of Lords (and not just Law Lords), the opinion of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and so on, often opinions in favor of doing nothing, or making only the most modest changes, and often reflecting a profound distrust of the mass of the public, at least when it came to marriage and divorce and sex. 

The same top-down forces which permitted or even fostered the rise of the welfare state, with its emphasis on help for the poor and the humble, were extremely reluctant to interfere with “traditional family values.”  At least this was the situation until the last two or so decades, when the dam broke, and the sexual revolution among other factors swept away so much of what was left of the inherited family law system.

I learned a lot from this book, with its richness of detail, and its illuminating and meticulous exposition of the complex maneuvering in Parliament and in the administration, which went into the making of family law.  For those concerned with the sociology of English law it will, of course, be a useful source-book-with regard to family law, and to the operation of the British government in law-making matters in general.  For those of us in the United States who are interested in family law as a cultural and political phenomenon, it will be equally valuable.  It provides a basis of comparison, a control group, as it were, which sheds oblique light on our own system, how it grew, and its multiple twists and turns over time.       

*********************************************************************
Copyright 2004 by the author, Lawrence M. Friedman.

This article was forwarded to me.  I’m pasting it for a few reasons —

• I thought readers might appreciate a post which actually has consistent style and complete sentences throughout, which lots of mine don’t.
• Another “take” on the Batterer v. Institution relationship.  I think we need to de-fang the batterer (although I accept they sometimes kill) as to the influence on institutions.  This is NOT a one-way street, my research (based on others’ road signs) has indicated. . . .  The institutions or those who work in them, ALSO recruit men (and sometimes women) actively for their programs; I’m speaking of the U.S., but the organization influential in this practice, is international.

Men have been recruited, actively, through child support systems, in prisons, and elsewhere.  I ran across an information sheet in a law library which had overtly father-hood friendly (and acknowledged this) links on its “information” sheet at the kiosk.  This is a general informational sheet on various topics.  Program services are promoted in Family Court Facilitator’s offices, such as one I found recently in my area — the brochure was talking about “Parents Forever” but the Logo was of a figure in pants (indicating, male) and two children, one female, and one male.  No mother.  The sponsoring organization was AFCC, and there was no mention — whatsoever — about domestic violence.  It was a condescending tone, and at the end discouraged readers from picking up the yellow pages — better to consult one of our professionals (clearly implied). 

So, t hey are being recruited.  The dynamic of the situation is, the batterer or abuser parent now has an audience, and is more likely to perform with rapt attention of hearers.

These hearers have a responsibilty too — they are enablers. 

But I don’t think the issue is about institutions not understanding these types of people.  I think it the issue is ALL types of people (including those not even in the court system) failing to understand the INSTITUTIONS. 

I bet the writer of this article would enjoy sanctuaryweb.com, as it also talks about the larger social attitudes that perpetuate abuse.

The Fine Art of Institutional Grooming

 

from a (new) blog, “Australian Shared Parenting.”

 

 

(That logo goes with a different post on the same blog; I couldn’t copy the banner.)..

 

BELOW HERE IS QUOTE unless in {{…….}}’s…

 

Institutional Grooming Defined and Explained

A lot of people will have heard of the term “grooming”, but most will think of the term only as it is used in the context of child sexual abuse. What many people do not consider, is that grooming is an art that is practiced by most perpetrators of any kind of abuse, and, I believe, particularly by perpetrators of family violence.

It is not only a perpetrator’s victims that are groomed (which would be considered emotional abuse), but the victims’ family and friends, the perpetrator’s own family and friends, and even public servants and medical professionals (in which case it is purposeful manipulation). The grooming of doctors, nurses, mental health carers, family support workers and other public servants is called “Institutional Grooming” and the perpetrator does it for the purpose of self-preservation.

The targets of Institutional Groomers may include their victim’s General Practitioner, psychiatrist, psychologist, child health nurse, pediatrician, carers at a Family Day Care Facility, school teachers, counselors or therapists. The public servants targeted may be social workers, case workers, investigative officers or police officers employed by government departments such as the Department For Child Protection, the Police’s Family Protection Unit and the Department for Community Development. When done with enough finesse to be successful, institutional grooming ensures that any complaints alleged about the perpetrator are either disregarded outright, doubted and therefore not investigated thoroughly, or if acted upon, subsequently dismissed in a court of law.

Why would a perpetrator go to such lengths to manipulate people other than their victims? Because when their victims, the victims’ family and friends, and the public service networks intended to support their victims are groomed successfully, the investment of all that hard work does not go to waste – the victims are then still available to continue to abuse.

Some Thought Provoking Insights into a Victim’s Reality

The scary thing about successful institutional grooming is that it substantially increases the harm done to the victims, not only because the abuse they face continues for longer, but because they lose their trust and faith in the world around them, in their family and friends, in the professional people who are meant to protect them, and most tragically, in themselves.

The things that are said and done to hurt and manipulate a victim only occur behind closed doors, and it can be very hard to remember exactly what was said or done, where, in which order and at what time, when your world feels like it is caving in. An abuser will jump on this uncertainty to highlight a victim’s supposed insanity or make them seem dishonest, and to shift the focus away from his/her own appalling behavior.

Once a victim’s memories of the abuse, the words said, things done and feelings felt during that abuse, have been twisted and distorted to deny, justify or excuse that abuse, one can understand why the victim begins to feel unsure about what really happened. Combine this with the common symptoms of complete and partial memory blocking and/or memory substitution in victims suffering from even mild cases of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and one can see how it can all combine to compound a victim’s confusion and distress, and deter them from objecting or trying to report it the next time it happens. One can also see how these factors can pervert the course of Justice.

Grooming by Perpetrators of Family Violence and Child Abuse

 

In the context of family violence, institutional grooming is done to discredit the non- perpetrating parent (who is often also a victim), and the effects of successful institutional grooming in these circumstances are almost always tragic. In best case scenarios, it can ensure debilitating emotional trauma and devastating long term consequences as the perpetrator is free to continue their abuse of both the child(ren) and the abused parent. In worst case scenarios, the results can be overwhelming, and may include horrific physical abuse, soul destroying sexual abuse or even premature death of the victim(s). The death of such victim(s) may be due to suicide, manslaughter, murder-suicide or violent murder. The most prevalent and obvious consequence however, is once again perversion of the course of Justice, and the undeniable failure of the Legal System’s purpose.

 

Damned If You Do & Damned If You Don’t

For clarification, consider this generalized example: If a mother seeks help with protecting her children in a situation where emotional and physical abuse of both herself and her children has already occurred, and/or where there has been inappropriate sexual talk and behavior in front of her children (that may or may not be sexual grooming), and the children have displayed signs that indicate possible sexual abuse (that may or may not have happened, and may or may not happen in the future), but where the perpetrator is skilled at the art of institutional grooming, that mother will often then be subjected to accusations of parental alienation and of perpetuating feelings of fear in her children. Instead of being taken seriously, she finds herself having to defend her actions and her parenting skills, and sometimes may even find herself being the one accused of abusing her children.

If she seeks legal advice, she is advised not to make an application to the Family Court because it is likely that any application will result in 50/50 shared care of the kids. Further more, she is informed that under current Family Law, if she makes any allegations of abuse that cannot be proven, she risks being found guilty of parental alienation and quite possibly faces losing her children to the perpetrator in the likely event that interim orders would award him full residency, and allow her only a couple of hours of supervised contact per fortnight, while her children are sent to live with their alleged abuser. She may also be required to pay the legal costs for both parties.

On the other hand, if she does not do anything about seeking help from the authorities, either because she has circumstantial evidence but no substantiated proof, and no other witnesses to testify on her behalf (her own testimony would be considered hearsay, and therefore discounted), or perhaps because she has been doubted and/or counter-accused before, then at some point in the future she may find herself being found guilty of neglecting her duty of care to her children, and face the prospect of losing her kids to foster care.

What Justice?

While I have no doubt that there are indeed parents out there who do not put the best interests of their children first, and who are in fact guilty of alienating their children against the other parent and perhaps even of fabricating false allegations of abuse, whether for revenge or some other reason, surely they must be the minority? Wouldn’t the majority of parents want to put their kids first?

Further more, I ask this question: What about the mother who, in spite of her own abuse, subjugation and degradation, somehow finds the strength to trust her own intuition, and manages to intervene before her children become the victims of more serious physical abuse or devastating sexual abuse. Instead of being supported and respected for the strength she has shown in the face of her adversity, she is instead victimized, subdued and humiliated to an even greater extent. Where is the justice for mothers such as she? Instead she becomes a victim of the system, and so do her children. What happened to breaking the Cycle of Abuse?

A Society-Sized Cycle?

Has anybody even stopped to think that perhaps the term “cycle of abuse” now describes a far greater cycle of perpetual dysfunction than simply the personal relationships between perpetrators and their victims, a cycle that in fact occurs and continues on a much larger scale – one that encompasses modern society as a whole? I mean, who is more likely to be a liar? A victim or their perpetrator?

Obviously there are exceptions to every rule, but in most cases, what would a victim get out of being a liar? Any parent who has suffered as a victim of family violence, then chosen to speak out against their family’s abuser, and then been consistent in their commitment to the ongoing and endless process of attending appointments with social workers, lawyers, medical professionals, psychologists, counselors, art therapy and group therapy sessions (for both themselves and their children), would agree that the financial costs, physical energy requirements, mental strain and emotional drain of post traumatic abuse times could simply not be worth it.

Proactive parents who choose to engage in such an involved process, due to their genuine desire to heal their family’s wounds, to protect their children from further harm, and to ensure a positive, healthy change in their life circumstances, will have often maintained such efforts for months before the matter is brought before the court, and they will have to maintain their efforts for many months or even years after the court makes final orders, even if orders are reasonably suitable.

In stark contrast, perpetrators who engage in such therapy will almost always only do so after being questioned about allegations of abuse, or in the weeks and days leading up to a court hearing. They only do so to preserve their false reputations, and their energetic last minute efforts will seldom last more than a few weeks past the need to be seen as the “poor victim” of a “vengeful” or “jealous” partner, rather than be exposed as the selfish, unrepentant perpetrators of abuse that they are.

Morality and Proactive Logic versus Passive Ignorance

I think that the Family Law Courts and some government departments are missing the whole point of what is in the best interests of the child. I am not saying that a perpetrator should be guilty until proven innocent, or punished without sufficient proof, but what is wrong with protecting our kids BEFORE they become victims? Why should the only evidence taken seriously enough to warrant supervised contact be substantiated proof of past abuse? Surely prevention is better than a cure?

They cannot say that the cost of supervised contact would be too great if they compare it to the long term costs of abuse to our society, considering how many victims of child abuse go on to have life long psychological problems, alcohol and other substance abuse issues, often grow up to become abusers themselves, or in some cases resort to suicide.

Considerations of a Responsible Government

The purpose of Family Law should be the protection of our children, who are not yet capable of making their own choices, rather than any irrationally perceived justice for those adults who have chosen not to take responsibility for the destructive effects of their abusive behavior, or the unjust persecution of those adults who are trying to shoulder responsibility for both their own and the abusive parents actions, by trying to fight a losing battle that must be fought if they are to honor the duty of care they have to their children.

It is essential that any reforms implemented as a result of the review of the 2006 Family Law Amendments (and any future changes) ensure there are no violations of the first and foremost Rights of our Children – their right to be protected from harm, and to live with out fear, in the warm, safe embrace of unconditional love.

Surely the Government can see the necessity of making well informed decisions regarding the specifics of any changes. Hopefully those responsible for making these decisions will question the effectiveness of a Justice System that only takes into account substantiated proof (scientific fact?) when making judgments that are guided by Laws which have been based on inductively reasoned generalizations drawn from the observation of limited numbers of specific instances (philosophical opinion?). Even the existence of the many heated debates over Australian Shared Parenting Laws highlights the fact that those generalizations were a misrepresentation of the prevailing truth.

The Laws that govern the Family Court System need to be decided by using deductive reasoning to draw valid, logical conclusions from the overwhelmingly substantial amount of relevant empirical evidence available, and most people would agree that those facts can be easily found in the historically prevalent and devastating long term effects observed in children who have witnessed and/or experienced any kind of abuse.

{{yes, if quizzed, most people WOULD agree if you asked them this, possibly or probably.  But suppose you told the same people that the institutions that their wages help support (by taxes) have some seriously criminal minds not as the occasional bad apple, but as the visionary (but amoral) designers of those institutions?  …  I can’t speak for Australia (maybe you guys have more sense; I have some indications your education system might be better…) but I do know that concepts are being exported from the U.S. to other countries as to the family law system.  Not all our exports are good ones..}}

{{I would rather take a cautious approach to society, now that I KNOW more than I used to, then be forced to continualy “trust” people or entities I know have been so untrustworthy that those who go through their gates end up dead.  Or emotionally, financially, and otherwise destroyed…}}

The proven reliability of empirical knowledge obtained by making specific, logical and valid deductions based on vast numbers of instances that demonstrate very clear and consistent long term trends is surely what is required to ensure that the changes made to Family Laws are effective. It is essential that once amended, Family Laws consistently achieve their purpose of effectively guiding judgments in those cases where in there is a need to protect children from a risk of probable future abuse but where most often there is no proof other than circumstantial evidence, victim testimony and professional opinion based on hearsay. It is the only viable path to follow if we are to build a Family Law System in which Justice will actually serve in the best interests of the child.

Once all that is achieved, time will confirm the truth and future generations will prosper from the positive, healthy, and wide spread evolution of our society. Their enlightenment will ensure that the wondrous gift of human morality will finally manifest in every aspect of society, propelling mankind into the peaceful bliss of a Golden Age filled with warmth, love and Light!

{{Emphases mine:  My friend, that is a lovely (& utopian) vision.  If not a religious one.  While I realize society doesn’t change without visionaries, the U.S. model, at least initially, was based on the more cautious evaluation of human nature, and the intentional DILUTION of power among various branches of government, so no tyranny would result.  Right now, that has been essentially reversed, and through the medium of the courts not in small part. 

After 10 years of abuse, basically, and 10 years attempting to get free from it, I have readjusted my philosophy from changing society to changing MY situation, individually, and seeing who else I can help.  I blog, sowing & throwing out ideas, but not fully developing them, in case others may wish to follow up. 

I think we have to acknowledge that, religion or no religion, a good deal of our population IS religious, and that no religion, per se, is likely to change its opinion on the role of women unless women in it cease to provide their free services for that religion, and the men.  The losses they would experience, in doing this, would possibly parallel those of parents losing kids through the court.  I don’t think it’s about to happen, and my PERSONAL solution to this dilemma is to add talking back to churches (and boycotting them) to the general mix.  Religious belief is personal, and is immune to being changed, and these ARE indeed a subculture.  Their BEING a subculture (many sects & mainstream groups also) is part of their identity, and that’s not about to go away just because laws exist.  Who will enforce them? 

When it comes to the difference between a law abiding citizen without means of self-defence (or who will be harshly punished for defending self and/or children), and a non-law-abiding citizen with weapons (guns, knives, and free access to the person being attacked) with a chip on (his) shoulder, which one do you think is going to win out?

Expecting us to be helped by these institutions, I am beginning to accept, is asking for a police state.  Is that what we want? 

I learned recently that many of the Founding Fathers were not the Calvinists (with the dark, and pessimistic view of human nature) but in fact fairly more liberal theologically, and trusting reason and rationality more — BUT with a healthy dose of, let’s LIMIT tyranny. 

The challenge that they failed to face, til much later (if we have indeed faced it yet…) is to acknowledge that, while they believed that “all men were endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights”  some categories of people (ethnicity and gender) were, well, you know, not really fully human.

Women were the last to get the vote.  What does that tell you?  There was feminism, and there was a backlash to feminism.  What does THAT tell you? 

The laws protecting women from domestic violence date to at earliest (that I can see) around the 1970s, and 1980s.  Many of the INSTITUTIONS that are primary in the courts now, had their origin, not in clear public view, but close to government circles (i.e., at the highest levels) and as a far-reaching business model, at the latest in the late 1980s.  The Violence Against Women Act did not pass til 1994, but the National Fatherhood Initiative was RIGHT there, (also in 1994).  We have to look at those institutions, AND the concept that institutions are going to help us.

The batterer doesn’t “fool” the courts.  The courts willingly listen to the batterers.  They are (I speak from my experience and what I have been able to research) WHERE batterers go to hide, when a crminal prosecution would NOT hide them.  For more, see JUSTICEWOMEN.org also.

Nevertheless, I like this blog, and it’s going on my blogroll.  You make peopel think!

The same struggle is still going on, and I suppose I have an other post on it, from a different source.

Posted by Audrey at 3:32 AM  

Labels: best interests of the child, Child Abuse, cycle of abuse, domestic violence, entrenched conflict, institutional grooming, protecting our kids, supervised contact

Artigos Relacionados:

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• Child Abuse: Does Australia Really Take it Seriously?
• The Family Court Could Save Lives
• ~ The Fine Art of Institutional Grooming ~
• Professor Challenges courts behavior on child abuse

When people are trying to force a paradigm down your throat, please regurgitate and activate the conceptual skills.

I was struck by the “14 points to slavery” I found in a recent re-read of an older book called “None Dare Call It Conspiracy.”

Point #7 is:

“Compulsory psychological treatment for nongovernment wokers or public school children.”

Another, #3,

Detention of individuals without judicial process.

Another, #14,

“Any attempt to make a new major law by executive decree (that is, actually put into effect, not merely authorized as by existing executive orders).”

I think we are starting to look at the structure behind the family courts, and had better start thinking in larger terms than men vs. women (as legitimate as these issues still are), but in federal co-opting of roles that were intentially diluted and dispersed in our Constitution (USA).

I think some of the people BEST qualified to tell us how to resist going into slavery are some of those who have gotten out of it.

Domestic violence is a FORM of this, as is child abuse.  And yet everyone is doing the talking for the victims, and their voices are silenced as those on the grants dole do the talking.  This has to stop.

Just thinking aloud, more to come.