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

A Substantial Background Check and History on Certain Problems, Programs, Persons, Organizations and Policies (Republished from this blog’s Jan. 2018 Front Page) about 15,000 words by the time I add tags.Short-link is:  https://wp.me/psBXH-9ld (middle character is lower-case “L”).

Introducing the moved section takes up about the first quarter of the post.  Where the previous section begins below it is marked, like this (yes, it starts with a referral to another post).  To further complicate it, I’m putting it in quotes (It is a quote — from lower on this post):

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Below this line is “as-is” transfer of section from Front Page to a new post for better visibility on the blog. //LGH Dec. 11, 2018

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(1) About my most recent post (@Jan. 2018), a recent and

ongoing theme:

Jumping through Hoops and Chasing One’s Tail, that is, if Conceptual Clarity on “CACs” ~>And Navigating The Money Mazes Set up By Them~> is the Goal. (This Example: Calico Center (San Leandro, CA) payees).  (Shortlink ending “-8ln” with the middle digit a lower-case “L” as in “l.”) Published 1/8/2018, about 12,600 words.

The post deals extensively with the founders and/or curriculum designers of “Kids’ Turn,” (and in a few cases, their husbands who seem to have been influential, i.e., Jeanne Ames was married to famous mediator Sam Kagel; Herma Hill Kay, while not a curriculum designer was influential in getting no-fault divorce passed** and (having just recently died in 2017) is well-known in UCBerkeley law and was (2016) on the board of Berkeley’s nonprofit “FVAP” (Family Violence Appeals Project), and married to a psychiatrist, Carroll Brodsky)…

A co-author of the California Family Law Act of 1969, Kay also served as a co-reporter on the state commission that drafted the nation’s first no-fault divorce statute. She later co-authored the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act, which has become the standard for no-fault divorce nationwide.

“It was never undertaken to achieve equality between men and women,” Kay said during a 2008 interview. “It was undertaken to try to get the blackmail out of divorce and I think it has accomplished that…. Marriage is no longer the only career open to women.”

…of a curriculum whose model went “underground” (sometime after some of us were “outing” it’s deep connections to state judiciary and nationwide distribution as mandated parent education) by way of merging into the well-networked CAPC (Child Abuse Prevention) networks, the SF one.  Which I also blogged; then found that the SFCAPC had changed its name (again) to “Safe & Sound” while still running the same curriculum, as did also other out-of-state entities; sometimes for steep fees, sometimes begging money (in my opinion) inappropriately to be able to force poor separated or separating parents through the programs too. Some of that information remains (closer to the bottom) on my “Front Page” (just type the blog name with no additions to get there)…. That’s why THIS section starts with the reference to another post, as you can see up front if you click on it (here’s an image of the top of that post):

This screenprint is from the top of another post and included because of the short summary (below the 2nd link) which relates to this one (Imaged for 12/11/2018 LGH post, “A Substantial Background Check and History on Certain Problems, Programs…“)

Also in this post (as originally blogged and on the Front Page of FamilyCourtMatters.org) is both older and newer references to the issue of (international) child-stealing as well as some of the (also international) associations and sponsors of US-based “Association of Family and Conciliation Courts.”

Those are a short preview.  What I’m saying next comes from December, not January, 2018, perspective.

Do you REALLY comprehend how the concept of preventing child abuse has been connected linguistically and policywise to “increase father-involvement” and spawned all kinds of clearinghouses, psychoeducational curricula (for both kids and parents) and of course, nonprofits to promote them?  Do you understand that the eventual goal is combining both child WELFARE courts (handling criminal behavior) with FAMILY Courts (handling all divorce and custody issues) under one roof and organized control?

I’m learning that in the UK the straight “divorce and custody” courts are considered PRIVATE, while the PUBLIC ones deal more with abuse and other safety issues.  Naturally abuse and safety issues don’t neatly confine themselves to just one venue — but my point is, one set of courts was private, the other public.  Both countries have had legislation (1980s, 1990s, 2000s) impacting how they can and must handle certain aspects of one or the other.  A big difference exists, however between the US and the UK (“Brit”) relationship to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child — and that’s obviously going to affect how international parental kidnapping is dealt with.

In my drill-down (about a year ago) I was surprised to learn that an author I’d quoted thinking (mistakenly) that the extreme wrong of parental abduction, or “child-stealing” (not synonymous, but similar concepts) this author spoke out against, was intended to address when children were abducted from mothers OR fathers.  On reviewing this years later paying MUCH more attention to context (footnotes, where it was published, etc.) having more experience from years  blogging here, I noticed that this author Nancy Faulkner was quoting a Dorothy S. Huntington, Ph.D., who, it says, was working for a nonprofit in Corte Madera, California, I’d already looked into — and found significantly lacking as to (honesty of registrations).  And, of course closely connected to AFCC personnel.  It’s below, but here’s the Footnote and a few paragraphs above it (the year is 1984):

From PARENTAL KIDNAPPING: A NEW FORM OF CHILD ABUSE (1984, and quoted again below) by Dorothy Huntington, Ph.D.

Are there certain family constellations or background patterns more highly associated with child stealing? Are there certain signs which could be recognized as warnings?

How about when one parent threatens to do it, having financial motive, and then does it?  That was our situation…Somehow, the courts still “couldn’t” figure out which one of us was the real abduction threat even after his pre-emptive (supposedly) abduction happened, effectively curtailing child support obligations permanently for him.

BACK to the courts, another round in them, and BYE-BYE my stable work life while trying to regain contact with two children I’d just arranged personal and work life around.  After managing to escape a dangerous, degrading, and life-eroding battering “relationship” (marriage), barely… and mistakenly thinking would be allowed to “get away with it,” that is, be free from other forms of ongoing abuse, intimidation, and destructive behaviors applied through other means.

I remember (OH so long ago) thinking or hoping, for a few sessions only, that the family courts would agree that committing documented felony behavior — the actions fit the documentation of criminal acts — was wrong and a character indicator, and that my history of NOT breaking family court orders, mattered and was a character indicator.  To be honest, I think my own children had figured this out years earlier…. at least they figured out the court-appointed mediator’s interest in knowing which parent to blame…

A final goal of the project is the formulation of information for the education of judges, attorneys, and court personnel specifically directed to their complex concerns, such as information on circumstances in which child custody might be granted to the “snatcher”; what sorts of visitation and under what circumstances visitation ought to be permitted after a child is  returned, and in what types of situations child kidnapping is likely to occur:family vioLence, extended and bitter litigation, cross-national marriages, cases where restrictive visitation rightshave been imposed, etc.

Child stealing is an issue that fits well in the context of The Center for the Family in Transition, which is a non-profit clinical and research center founded in 1980 to help families with children cope resourcefully with the problems and possibilities that are part of family transitions, such-as divorce and remarriage. The aims of the Center are to ameliorate distress and significantly reduce the psychological toll of divorce on families, with special emphasis on the children; to evaluate the efficacy of brief preventive services for these families; to generate new knowledge about families in the process of change; to catalyze needed supports for these families; to act as an advocate locally and on state and national levels for programs that support families during times of stressful change; and to join in the education and training of personnel who work with families in transition.

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FOOT NOTES
1 Dr. Huntington is Director of Research and Evaluation, Center for the Family in Transition, Corte Madera, California, and is Project Director of the Child Stealing Project. This work is supported by the James Irvine Foundation and the Morris Stulsaft Foundation.

The Center for the Family in Transition also made onto my list of Top Ten Key Themes for this blog.  (See sidebar widget “New To This Blog?” or similar list on the Front Page, to access).. Not because of its great programming, however…

It turns out Dorothy Huntington was one of the curriculum designers of “Kids’ Turn.”

My blog’s Front Page mentions a few recent re-namings and re-framings of a nonprofit established mid-1980s in San Francisco (copied in San Diego in the mid-1990s) and featured early on in this blog under it’s then name, “Kids’ Turn.”

It shows (there, not here) how the related program was first merged into (submerged UNDER) the “SFCAPC” (San Francisco Child Abuse Prevention Council) which is itself related to certain networked organizations nationwide (see below) — but by 2017 had again been renamed as “Safe & Sound.”  I say that to explain why some of the current posts were reviewing the “CAPC” situation as connected to an “umbrella” nonprofit

That’s another reason I don’t think H.Con.Res72 with its “safety focus” is a fair assessment of or solutions to the problems with family court, with a strong tendency towards behaviors more associated with racketeering (i.e., “move the money fast, hide operations, especially after being outed for conflicts of interest.”). The phrase has already been co-opted by the same organizations those pushing “Safety in Family Courts” haven’t been reporting all along… One tends to wonder whose side some of these are really on, “one” here being primarily me..

Tracking the changes is getting old.  So, in some ways, am I…  Are there not more individuals self-motivated enough to take notes on the SYSTEMS and MEANS by which cashflow is generated, the quality (i.e., poor quality) of available inter-related databases for following them (ever tried to compile data from tax returns and turn it into a functional chart without software to read/ extract/ massage it into appropriate data fields?  Can such individuals not find each other and collaborate to get that data out in graph form with links to sources, versus journalistic “problem-focused” reporting spread out in owned mainstream media?

Right now, it looks like human frailty and time constraints are the only avenues.  While we know that technology is capable of amazing feats when channeled and managed for purposes worthy deemed enough to get the financial backing…. like running RCTs on the poor (I’m thinking of J-Pal et al. at MIT).  What other options exist for this situation?

This post is a “publish-first, polish/label-later” project. Some of the names may be more familiar than others for non-professionals (i.e., you’re not a family lawyer, custody evaluator, psychologist and are perhaps a newer member, if a member of AFCC). Among them are some no longer with us, but whose writing seem to have continuing influence; others just may not be that “famous” in the field, although it seems they are influential:  Dorothy S. Huntington, Ph.D.; Nancy Faulkner, Carroll M. Brodsky, MD, Psychiatrist (husband of Herma Kay Hill — who helped usher in era of no-fault divorce); John B. Sikorski (UCSF Psychiatrist), Michael Agopian.

Others, I hope are more familiar: but realize they might not be:  Jeanne T. Ames (her husband Sam Kagel), Clare Barnes, Isolini Ricci, several AFCC stalwarts show up  in part because in looking up one thing, I look at the footnotes.  AFCC members are constantly quoting and referencing each other.

My point of entry on the most detailed drill-down below was who designed the Kids’ Turn curriculum and, it seems, the AFCC 54th Annual Conference in Boston, 2017 and its sponsors, including the Suzie S. Thorn Foundation which is closely associated with Kids’ Turn (and housed it for many years).
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