Family courts have a crucial role in ensuring the safety and well-being of families, particularly those experiencing domestic violence. However, numerous systemic failures and hidden truths in these courts have recently come under scrutiny. This episode with Joan Meier, a distinguished lawyer and clinical law professor, aims to shed light on these significant issues.
Joan Meier has dedicated her career to rectifying injustices in civil cases, from contentious custody battles to protection orders. She has notably founded and worked with DV Leap, an organization instrumental in providing an essential lifeline to survivors of domestic violence. Despite their commendable efforts, considerable gaps in the legal system persist, emphasizing the urgent call for more resources to aid victims.
One significant issue discussed in this episode is the impact of domestic violence on child custody cases. Our conversation is fueled by insights from an extensive study on the denial of family violence in court. Family law sends mixed messages, with a high occurrence of abuse in child custody cases and a formidable struggle faced by victims in court. It's alarming how family courts handle abuse allegations, often dismissing or undermining them.
We also delve into the controversial subject of parental alienation. This theory, often misused to discredit mothers who allege abuse by their ex-partners, contributes to the gender bias present in family courts. The gender bias is not only reflected in the treatment of mothers expressing concerns about their children's safety but also in the significant emphasis on fathering, which can lead to harmful outcomes in custody cases.
The episode concludes with a passionate advocacy for better representation for children in family court, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging their voices., urging for improved training of court personnel, debunking alienation claims, and a more active role for appellate courts in protecting children from dangerous situations. This episode also underscores the urgent need for systemic change in the family court system, highlighting that the fight against domestic violence extends far beyond the household's walls.
The information discussed in this episode is a sobering reminder of the struggles faced by survivors of domestic violence in the family court system. It underlines the urgent need for changes to better protect and serve those who are most vulnerable. As Joan Meier aptly points out, there's a pressing need for systemic change in family courts, and we must continue to push for this to protect survivors and their children. The fight for justice continues, and we hope this conversation will inspire action and bring about much-needed reform in the family court system.
Family courts have a crucial role in ensuring the safety and well-being of families, particularly those experiencing domestic violence. However, numerous systemic failures and hidden truths in these courts have recently come under scrutiny. This episode with Joan Meier, a distinguished lawyer and clinical law professor, aims to shed light on these significant issues.
Joan Meier has dedicated her career to rectifying injustices in civil cases, from contentious custody battles to protection orders. She has notably founded and worked with DV Leap, an organization instrumental in providing an essential lifeline to survivors of domestic violence. Despite their commendable efforts, considerable gaps in the legal system persist, emphasizing the urgent call for more resources to aid victims.
One significant issue discussed in this episode is the impact of domestic violence on child custody cases. Our conversation is fueled by insights from an extensive study on the denial of family violence in court. Family law sends mixed messages, with a high occurrence of abuse in child custody cases and a formidable struggle faced by victims in court. It's alarming how family courts handle abuse allegations, often dismissing or undermining them.
We also delve into the controversial subject of parental alienation. This theory, often misused to discredit mothers who allege abuse by their ex-partners, contributes to the gender bias present in family courts. The gender bias is not only reflected in the treatment of mothers expressing concerns about their children's safety but also in the significant emphasis on fathering, which can lead to harmful outcomes in custody cases.
The episode concludes with a passionate advocacy for better representation for children in family court, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging their voices., urging for improved training of court personnel, debunking alienation claims, and a more active role for appellate courts in protecting children from dangerous situations. This episode also underscores the urgent need for systemic change in the family court system, highlighting that the fight against domestic violence extends far beyond the household's walls.
The information discussed in this episode is a sobering reminder of the struggles faced by survivors of domestic violence in the family court system. It underlines the urgent need for changes to better protect and serve those who are most vulnerable. As Joan Meier aptly points out, there's a pressing need for systemic change in family courts, and we must continue to push for this to protect survivors and their children. The fight for justice continues, and we hope this conversation will inspire action and bring about much-needed reform in the family court system.
The subject matter of this podcast will address difficult topics multiple forms of violence and identity based discrimination and harassment. We acknowledge that this content may be difficult and have listed specific content warnings in each episode description to help create a positive, safe experience for all listeners.
Speaker 2:In this country, 31 million crimes 31 million crimes are reported every year. That is one every second. Out of that, every 24 minutes there is a murder. Every five minutes there is a rape. Every two to five minutes there is a sexual assault. Every nine seconds in this country, a woman is assaulted by someone who told her that he loved her, by someone who told her it was her fault, by someone who tries to tell the rest of us it's none of our business and I am proud to stand here today with each of you to call that perpetrator a liar.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the podcast on crimes against women. I'm Maria McMullen. In any given year, november and December shape up to be the busiest months for family time, where family members near and far typically come together for fellowship. Unfortunately, these months are also the months that hold the highest numbers of family violence, when holiday stress, financial exertion and other societal factors seem to exacerbate abuse and violence in relationships and threaten already fragile familial intersections. Moreover, family courts, a system that theoretically is designed to keep families safe, has been found to have many gaps in their infrastructure, with a significant amount of evidence revealing that family courts can be complicit in placing vulnerable family members in additional danger. In November, dr Bandy Lee, a psychiatrist and sought after expert witness, visited with us to talk about how mental health and the criminalization of victims within the family court system is exploited by abusers. Today we meet with Joan Meyer, a lawyer and clinical law professor, for a legalistic perspective within a policy framework about how family violence can continue to prevail when family courts continue to fail victims and survivors of abuse.
Speaker 1:Joan Meyer is a professor of clinical law and director of the National Family Violence Law Center at the George Washington University Law School. Professor Meyer has been a clinical law professor for 29 years at GW Law, where she founded three pioneering and nationally recognized interdisciplinary domestic violence clinical programs. She has published widely on domestic violence, custody clinical teaching, criminal procedure and various Supreme Court decisions. Her major study, child Custody outcomes and cases involving parental alienation and abuse allegations, funded by the National Institute of Justice, was completed in 2019. In 2003, professor Meyer founded the Domestic Violence Legal Empowerment and Appeals Project, also known as DV Leap, a nonprofit that provides pro bono appeals and domestic violence cases.
Speaker 1:Professor Meyer stepped down from DV Leap in August 2019. However, while there, she represented domestic violence organizations and survivors of domestic violence and state court appeals all over the country and in Washington DC, with cases that involve custody and child protection, enforcement of civil protection orders, criminal prosecution of batterers and other issues. Professor Meyer, welcome to the podcast. Thank you Glad to be here. So you founded an organization called DV Leap. Tell us about that organization and what is DV Leap stand for?
Speaker 3:It stands for Domestic Violence Legal Empowerment and Appeals Project. I founded it in 2003 and it was an organization designed to focus on appellate work on behalf of survivors of abuse, both direct appeals representing individuals, and sometimes amicus briefs or friend of the court briefs, representing the whole community.
Speaker 1:So how was that really beneficial and helpful to survivors of domestic violence?
Speaker 3:Well, when we opened our doors, the appeals started pouring in. Many, many women are having a lot of difficulty in court and losing at trials and so many of them contacted us for help to take appeals to try to redress and correct what happened at trial. And we, dv Leap has been the only national nonprofit in the country that does pro bono appeals for survivors of domestic violence. That does them across the country. There are some localized groups that are doing it now, but we're the only ones that do it nationally.
Speaker 1:So when you say appeals, are we talking about women who are incarcerated, or what are we talking about with appeals?
Speaker 3:No, we're mostly talking about civil cases where women are either fighting to keep their children safe in custody, litigation with the father, or getting denied protection orders that they should be receiving, or being sued for defamation of the abuse. There are a lot of different kinds of litigation that happened on the civil side to women. Occasionally we got involved in a criminal case, particularly when there were important rights at stake procedural rights at stake for purposes of criminal prosecution. Most of our Supreme Court work was around cases like that, yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean I asked these questions kind of as devil's advocate because I work for Genesis Women's Shelter and Support and we have a legal justice center and so I know that there's always a waiting list for women who are victims of domestic violence that need civil legal representation, preferably pro bono, no cost, because they do not have the financial means to obtain legal counsel and retain legal counsel. So I can imagine that people were kind of beating a path to your door. Did you anticipate that kind of response to DV leap?
Speaker 3:Somewhat, yes. What I didn't anticipate was how many of those cases were going to be child custody related. Before I found a DV leap, I was hoping not to have to do a lot of custody, because it's the most painful kinds of cases, and I was hoping they would be cases like protection order cases or, as I said, supporting the prosecution in cases where procedural issues, constitutional issues were at stake, or Hague abduction, child abduction cases where women are fleeing abuse. But what we found was that the vast majority was custody, and that's what kind of catapulted me into this area.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I know in the work that I do Genesis and the Conference on Crimes Against Women we find the same things and it kind of begs the question of how the law around or laws around family violence are helpful or not to the safety and survival of domestic violence victims and their families and specifically within child custody cases.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, that's a very big question. So the laws are not bad is what I would say. It's the interpretation and application of the laws that are very problematic. In particular, protection order laws are really quite good and they are doing a lot of good, but not in every case and there are judges who are very reluctant to believe women about abuse and are very eager to protect men. And in those cases or when there's a weak case on the woman's side, those cases don't always come out well. But by and large I'd say we've done well legally on the protection order side.
Speaker 3:On the custody side, the laws are OK but they're kind of sending mixed messages, that is to say they're they're sending both the message that domestic violence is relevant to custody and that we shouldn't be rewarding abusers, and they're sending the message that shared parenting and in some cases 5050 or something close to that is a priority, that the children should never be restricted in the parenting of their two parents when the two parents split up, and that's kind of a nice idealistic principle. But it just doesn't work in cases where there's been abuse and unfortunately the courts don't really recognize how frequently the cases that come to their door are abuse related because so many cases settle the cases where the parents are reasonable settle. The cases where one parent is very unsafe and not reasonable cannot settle because the safe parent cannot accommodate a dangerous parents demands.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it just doesn't work if both parents are not on the same page, and that's true whether you're married or separated or divorced. I mean, if you are not following the same playbook, then and when it's abusive, that makes it even worse. But if you're not following the same playbook, you're just not going to have the results according to that ideal that both parents need to be involved in the child's life.
Speaker 3:Yes, that's certainly true that even in non-abuse cases, that if the two parents are at loggerheads and have completely different ideas about what the children need, that's a big problem for children too. Of course, I specialize only in the cases where there's an abuse issue. That's what I was referring to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. Now. You've done a lot of research and publishing as well on this topic, and I talked to a lot of people. We've been podcasting now for five seasons for this show, and then we have another show called Genesis the podcast as well where we talk about family court and all the repercussions thereof, and it seems like lately, everyone is talking about family court when they come on the show, even if that's not the topic of their show. So we keep coming back to it and back to it, and so I think that we're onto something here. There are a lot of changes that need to be made, and you published in 2022 a study called Denial of Family Violence in Court and Empirical Analysis and Path Forward for Family Law. So Path Forward really perked up my ears, because I'd love to hear about a path forward for family law. Can you share with some of the overarching themes of this article and what you hoped would result from it?
Speaker 3:Yes, and that, too, is a big question. Let me just start by saying that the study, the empirical study that's referred to in this journal, was first published in 2020 in a peer reviewed journal that is based in Europe, and it was a symposium issue on a whole bunch of countries studies of what's happening with parental alienation in their custody cases, and they all found the same thing, which is that which I'll get into in a second, which is that that theory is doing a lot of damage and that women are alleging abuse are doing very poorly in custody court. So it was originally published in this peer reviewed journal. In this article two years later, the Georgetown Law Journal, I added to the data that had been previously published and published a bunch of other findings that we hadn't gotten into. The first one, which was a small article, and I added a bunch of case narratives to show readers how this looks. Real cases described, real cases that I had handled, and I added a qualitative analysis discussing what the problems were, what leads to these outcomes and what some solutions might be. And then I added another layer, which was taking on a challenge to the academy, to the academics and scholars in the family law field, because it became very clear, and has been for some years, that the academics in family law had no idea what was going wrong in family court and they were contributing to the problem unwittingly.
Speaker 3:So the article basically provides an overview of the data that we found in a prior five year federally funded study, and what we looked at in that study was we were able to collect data from electronically published opinions by courts and what we were able to see is what the courts are reporting was alleged in their cases and then what the courts decided and found factually and legally in their cases, and we were able to analyze over 2000 cases, that we were able to get a complete census of all the cases that were electronically published during a 10 year period that we then spent five years analyzing. So that was the data. It was the first time ever that anyone had looked at outcomes in any courts really empirically in that way, let alone in family courts. So no one had that data previously and the purpose of collecting it was to try to see whether what we were hearing anecdotally at DV leap, for instance you know all these desperate mothers whether that was an accurate reflection of reality nationwide or we were just getting the worst cases, and so the data turned out to really confirm what we were hearing, not only from people who came to DV leap, but also online and social media. There were more and more and more mothers groups posting outrageous stories about what happened in their cases, and there was all this organizing going on at the grassroots level, and the data sadly confirmed that these are real trends that are absolutely going on around the country.
Speaker 3:So what we looked at specifically was who alleged abuse, what kind of abuse they alleged, breaking it down between adult partner violence and different types of child abuse, and then we looked at whether the courts believed or accepted and credited the abuse alleged, particularly when mothers were alleging it.
Speaker 3:And then we looked at whether courts, what courts did on the question of custody and we limited that piece of it specifically to cases where mothers started with physical care of the children and we looked at how often they lost that and ended up with the fathers having physical care of the children by court order. And so the data, as I say, really confirmed what we were hearing. We found specifically, or generally specifically, that less than half the time our mother's abuse allegations accepted by courts across the board all kinds and we found that less than a third of the time our mother's child abuse allegations accepted by courts, and when it comes to child sexual abuse allegations, only 15% of the time were they accepted by courts. And then we found, and then we looked at, parental alienation, which is a theory that we haven't discussed yet, and how that impacted cases as well.
Speaker 1:So did. You were able to identify the basis for why those acceptance rates were so low.
Speaker 3:So the study didn't inquire why. The study was really just counting what our courts doing. That was. The whole purpose of it was to prove and find out what they're doing, because there was no consensus at that point that courts were as bad as everyone telling us they were, and we wanted the data to show what was really happening when women alleged abuse. So that's all it did, and because of the why the Georgetown article begins to discuss that and many people have addressed you know there have been a lot of domestic violence scholars who have been discussing this and addressing it, and there are a lot of scholars have addressed misogyny, which is part of the picture, or the stereotyping, which is the stereotype that women, ex wives, are vengeful and that they're throwing mud, their muds, flinging at their ex husbands, or they're doing it for an unfair advantage in custody or a financial advantage or just because they're hateful and hate their exes.
Speaker 3:That's one theory. Another theory is ignorance. A lot of courts don't really understand abuse and so it's very easy to disbelieve it because a lot about it is counterintuitive and the courts think they can judge based on just looking how people testify, looking at how people come across on a stand. But the research and what we know is that actually courts are terrible. Judges are terrible judges of who's telling the truth. They're no better than the person on the street. That's what the research shows. They think they are trained to believe that they are the judges of credibility, so a lot of biases and ignorance play into their mistaken interpretation of what they're seeing on the stand.
Speaker 3:And the third thing and the fourth thing that I talk about in more depth are parental alienation, which is a theory that I can explain you know more clinically if you want me to, but the gist of it is that it treats abuse allegations as likely, just a strategy, and it puts kind of a lot of science jargon around that notion that abuse allegations are probably false and just a strategy, and it convinces judges that there's a scientific basis for not believing these allegations. And it's a theory that has been incredibly effective and taken incredible hold in courts, family courts, and there's an entire large segment of the psychology profession the forensic psychologists who work in family courts, who believe it and tout it and train on it and write scholarship on it, and so there's an entire kind of industry, from scholars down to lawyers, down to litigants, who are pushing this theory and judges believe it because it's presented to them by people that are supposed to be neutral and educated and science based. So that theory is one of the things we were specifically trying to look at and how it's playing out in these cases. And then my fourth answer to why it's happening in family court and I discussed this in this article is basically psychological denial, structural denial, which doesn't just mean I'm going to choose not to believe this, but it refers to the human need to believe horrendous things and it discusses the phenomenon of denial that we saw around the Holocaust, for instance, how long it took for countries to believe what was going on, even neighbors of concentration camps to believe what was going on.
Speaker 3:There was just a very strong need to not believe it. And that kind of denial, which has been well studied and well documented, I think is part of what's at play in family courts, because I don't think all the judges who are rejecting women's claims are doing it because they hate women and children or are biased. I think many of them can't bear to believe that some of the most horrific allegations are true, especially sexual abuse, and don't have any basis for believing it's true because they're being trained that it's most likely not true by the alienation experts.
Speaker 1:This is very complex.
Speaker 3:It is.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I do want to come back and talk about parental alienation a little bit more, but before we do that, you have another publication from 2019 where there are a lot of statistics. The National Family Violence Law Center Infographic that you and other researchers published has statistics that are listed in your child custody outcomes in cases involving parental alienation and abuse allegations. So let's talk about that infographic and tell us about the data that's within it.
Speaker 3:Sure, so it's the same study, it's just a more accessible summary of some of the findings, the infographic and we broke it down. Oh, we started with what we call major outcomes and then we broke it down a little bit. So the major outcomes that we list here are that, overall, courts only believe mothers abuse claims and this is integrating all different kinds of child and adult abuse claims 39% of the time, which I think nobody knows. I think there's a very widespread myth that women go to court and just drop an abuse claim and then they walk out with custody and that they could not be further from the truth. And then we list that courts reject that. We found that courts reject mothers abuse claims far more often when alienation parental alienation is cross-claimed by the accused father. And then we also note that in the 14 cases that we identified where courts concluded both that a father was abusive and this includes both partner abuse and physical child abuse where the courts concluded both that a father was abusive and a mother was also alienating, 43% or six of those cases, the mother's lost custody to the abusive father. So in six of those cases the court concluded that the alienation was worse than the abuse. And I will say by way of you know, accuracy and honesty, some of that child abuse was not like the worst kind and you could kind of understand why courts didn't give it as much weight as they might have.
Speaker 3:The alienation findings are very troubling in all of these cases, however, because and I'll get into that when we come back to that but the bottom line being that most of the time it's the women, the mothers, pushing for protection and pushing the abuse claims is treated as alienation, which is, you know, there's no basis for that.
Speaker 3:So the other things we discuss on the infographic are just sort of breaking down the skepticism about accusations of abuse by fathers and how much alienation increases that skepticism. I can go into the specifics if you want, but one of the things I will pull out is that, specifically, we only found one case out of 51 where a mother alleged child sexual abuse and the father responded with alienation claim. Only in one of those cases was the mother believed so, and that's 2%, and that's could not be further from what objective outside research has found. Outside research that has looked specifically at the question of how credible mothers child sexual abuse claims are in the custody context has found that 50 to 75% of the time those are likely valid, and even where they're not sure that they're valid, less than 14% have been found to be considered intentionally false. So the idea that 98% of mothers are lying about child sexual abuse or mistaken is wildly out of sync with what objective research indicates.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would say. So what exactly does a mother have to prove when she alleges abuse against a child's father?
Speaker 3:Well, you know there's no single answer to that. All she has to do is present enough evidence for court to believe her, and you know, starting with her own testimony about why she believes that the father is not safe for the child. Unfortunately, mother's testimony is often discounted as just not credible per se, especially when they're alleging abuse and especially, of course, when fathers deny it.
Speaker 1:But you know, is it enough for me to allege abuse and him to deny it, for it to be dismissed?
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, absolutely. Because he denies it yeah, pretty much, and because the court chooses not to believe you over him.
Speaker 1:So it almost doesn't sound like a court proceeding.
Speaker 3:It sounds like a you know, well, court proceedings are very much based on the witnesses and believing one witness over another, and believing testimony or not believing testimony.
Speaker 1:So if a mom alleges abuse and she has witnesses to it, like these five people saw him hit the child five different times. That would be sufficient.
Speaker 3:That would be sufficient in theory for the court to say he hit the child. But then the court will have to consider how bad was that hit? How much did it matter? How bad is the mother as a parent? How good is he as a parent otherwise? And they'll weigh all that stuff and mix it around and come out with a conclusion that may not be that the mother keeps custody. So let's turn the tables.
Speaker 1:If he alleges she's abusive, and both to him and to the children, how does that? And she denies it. What are the outcomes there?
Speaker 3:So I don't have the data on that, although I really want to go back to the data and look at what we found. We did not find that many cases of fathers alleging mothers were abusive, but there are definitely, you know, a group of those. The main thing we looked at so far was that alienation works as a defense for fathers accused of abuse, but not for mothers accused of abuse. I can't tell you how often courts believe fathers when they allege a mother is abusive. I don't have that answer yet. I think it's probably lower than how often they believe mothers accusing a father. Most family abuse is committed by men against women, but that doesn't mean all of it is, and so, by and large, what we found is that fathers don't have to prove very much to prove alienation. They mainly just have to say it, especially if they bring an expert witness in to confirm it. I can't answer that question about fathers alleging abuse. Yeah, it's okay, they haven't looked at them in depth enough and counted them up enough.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's okay, I understand that. So let's talk about the custody evaluator in these cases.
Speaker 3:There are two different, neutral professional roles. One is a custody evaluator, which is usually a psychologist, and one another one is the guardian ad litem. They are different roles and the both of them we have found statistically and anecdotally, both of them tend not to help mothers who are alleged to abuse. They tend to hurt them. What we found just to clarify custody evaluator's job is usually to come in. The court usually points them, but sometimes one party hires one and their job is supposedly to come in and look at all the evidence and to discern from a psychological standpoint what's in the best interests of the children in terms of custody. The guardian ad litem's job is supposed to be to advocate for the best interests of the child. Some states allow them to advocate what the child wants, what the child wishes in terms of custody, but that's kind of the minority of states that allow for that.
Speaker 3:And in both cases where both types of professionals are supposedly assessing the best interests, what we find is that the shared parenting, parental alienation, perspective and lack of understanding and sensitivity and appreciation of abuse tends to rule. So what we found in the study was that both of those professionals were associated with even greater gender bias in outcomes than cases without them. In other words, they basically doubled. My recollection is that basically, when you had a GAL or an evaluator and there's some variation in the actual numbers, but they roughly doubled the bad outcomes for mothers alleging abuse and what we were able to do was to compare that to cases where fathers were alleging abuse and they had no impact on bad outcomes for fathers. So what that means is that they really reinforced gender bias in the courts To the extent that mothers alleging abuse are doing worse than fathers and fathers alleging abuse. These appointments of these neutral professionals exacerbated that significantly.
Speaker 1:That's very troubling.
Speaker 3:It is, and particularly when you talk about how poorly courts are going, and most people who are not familiar with the field will say well, don't they appoint advocates for the children? Why don't you just use advocates for the children? And the horrifying thing is to have to say, unfortunately, they're not really helping the children. In many cases they're really hurting the children, these supposed advocates for the children. And so it's a sign of how pervasive and how strong the ideology well, the combined ideology that children need two parents, that women lie or overexaggerate about abuse, and or the minimizing and denying of abuse, as well as the over emphasis on what is called alienation, which tends to basically be merely a mother who doesn't want to subject the children to an unhealthy parent.
Speaker 1:So, from what I understand, often in these custody cases the children's opinions or voice are not even heard or taken. They're not even listened to.
Speaker 3:That is a real problem as well, and that's something my center is also working on with some other wonderful leading attorneys in the field. Yes, so what we find is that in many cases there are no GALs who are supposed to advocate for the child even, and so nobody's really taking the child's view seriously. There's a very strong belief in the alienation field, which pretty much dominates the evaluator world, and there's a very strong belief that you can't trust what children say, particularly when they're saying they're afraid of fathers and don't want to see fathers. There's a belief that they're being brainwashed and pushed into that or misled into that by their mothers, which comes from nowhere. But it comes from the alienation theory, which comes from nowhere basically. So you've got this whole belief system of not believing mothers and then also not believing children when they say fathers are scary or hostile or mean or not safe. And then there's the problem that guardians, ad light on, are mostly not required to advocate what the child wants advocated, so the child is silenced. In that way you got a GAL up there saying here's what the child needs and they may or may not say, and here's what the child wants. They're supposed to share it, whether or not. They agree with it. They don't always. They often distort it.
Speaker 3:And then, finally, we have a handful of states including your, interestingly that allow the appointment of what's called Minors Council, or you can call it a GAL, whose job is to advocate what the child wants and wishes. But even in those cases, even with those appointments, some of those and some of those are wonderful professionals who really do advocate correctly for the child's wishes, which are appropriate and based on abuse exposure. But some of those Minors Council or the equivalent, in all cases they're allowed to substitute their judgment when they think the child is not wishing for something that's good for them. For instance and there are cases like that where a child says they want to be with an abusive father because they've been coerced and coached to say that and they're going to say it because it protects their skin If a GAL or a Minors Council can discern that that's what's going on, it is their job to say to the court this child saying this I don't trust it. And here's why this is the evidence that they're being coerced. I think it's not healthy for the child to be given into this parent's custody because they are dangerous and are coercing this view of the child.
Speaker 3:So there's this exception for substituting judgment, which makes sense in some cases, but unfortunately it gets used wrongly, often by even professionals who are appointed to advocate for the child's own wishes. So they often will substitute their judgment when they think there's alienation, which means they basically don't believe the child or the mother's allegations of abuse, and so there is no. There's right now very little good advocacy for children in family court. I'd like to say one more thing about that though, yeah, which is that there's a wonderful program in North Carolina, which is the Department of North Carolina Legal Services, and it's run by a wonderful attorney named Suzanne Chester, and, with the help of a major donor whose focus and commitment in terms of her charitable support is to enhance children's voices in court, I am helping Suzanne and the donor and other professionals to design a pilot project that's going to be placed in a series of different states to sort of train them on the North Carolina model for advocating for children, representing children in these cases, because they do it right and they know how to assess abuse as well as not get taken in by an alienation claim unless there's real evidence of serious alienation, and so we're hoping to do pilot projects of this model and get a few other states trying it out, and we're hoping to measure the impact it has and show that it actually creates greater efficiency, less return to court, less extensive ongoing fighting, less expensive litigation.
Speaker 3:When you listen to the child, you can actually resolve cases more directly and simply, etc. Etc. So, especially if you're the right people listening to the child. So that model I have some serious hopes for. If we can get it disseminated, get the pilots up and running and gather the data and hopefully it will show what we hope it will show, which is that it works and it works well for all concerned, all those who really have the best interest of children at heart, and then maybe we can start pushing for that as the national standard.
Speaker 1:I think that sounds amazing. Are you going to bring it to Texas?
Speaker 3:We have discussed Texas a little bit. I'm not sure we're going to bring it to Texas as the pilot, I don't think it's going to be one of the pilot locations, but if the pilots work out, we hope to bring it everywhere.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, keep us posted on that. I'd love to hear more about it. Going back to the phrase parental alienation, let's dig into that a little bit more, because we've talked a lot about it now and it seems to be at the core of some of these problems within the family court system.
Speaker 3:Yes, so something called the parental alienation syndrome was originally invented by a MD psychiatrist named Richard Gardner he was an adjunct at Columbia which he parlayed into a lot more credibility than perhaps he deserved, and he invented this theory that when mothers come to court and are claiming child sexual abuse by the father, they're only doing it to drive a wedge or alienate the children from the father and the father from the children. And he based it on his own experiences and observations, which were obviously completely biased. And he wrote all these books about it which you know I've had the misfortune to have to read, and a lot of it is. You know it is just a bunch of psycho babble and labeling of women and why they would say this stuff falsely. Some incredible things he said were things like women get titillated by imagining this and that's why they say it. And then, of course, he also invoked the biblical claim how sharper than a surface tooth is a scorned woman, that that concept, etc. Etc. So, and yet it caught on fairly well in court. But because he called it a syndrome, it got discredited fairly quickly because you, there was no scientific basis for it and a lot of credible professionals came out and said not a syndrome, not a syndrome and that it kind of went away.
Speaker 3:But it morphed very quickly into something called parental alienation, without the syndrome, without the syndrome word, which isn't all that different it became. It is more complex in the sense that the researchers and scholars who write about it always acknowledged that there are different reasons that children may become resistant or reluctant to see a parent, and they always acknowledge there could be legitimate reasons. Problem with the theory is that they acknowledge it in print but when they get to court or when their cohorts get to court they never acknowledge it. They may even acknowledge that there was domestic violence, but then they turn and say this mother is alienating. They never link the issues at all and they never link the past history of abuse to how this father is actually parenting. Now they bend over backwards to protect and enhance the father's rights in custody court. So parental alienation has become kind of the go to defense for men accused of abuse because it sounds scientific. There's a huge literature behind it, there's a huge cottage industry of so-called experts in the forensic psych world who they can bring to court, who sound like they know what they're talking about, they sound objective, they sound scientific and they train judges on it all the time, and so it's just become this sort of glide path to deny abuse.
Speaker 3:And almost all of my scholarships since I started focusing on custody, which is sadly long ago all of my scholarship is trying to debunk Not that there's no such thing as one parent undermining the other, but debunk the use of this theory to deny abuse. All of my scholarship has been doing that. They have never in print rebutted my analyses on that point. What has happened in print among the scholarship and there's a war of the scholars on these issues is that they constantly demonize and make me out to be an extremist who says there's no such thing.
Speaker 3:What I say actually, and what many of us say, is that the parents that are most likely to undermine the other parent from the children are abusers, batterers, men who have a history of abusing a mother. This has long been a tool of abusers, of male abusers against their adult victim is to drive the children against them and drive a wedge between them and discredit them on it. It's always been part of the pattern that we talk about. It's even on the power and control wheel, which is the original icon. I was just going to say that, yes, using the children against the mother in any number of ways, including filing for custody, is on there and I can't remember the specific pie slice that describes discrediting her as a mother, but it's on there and we've always said that and, of course, never cared about it. All of a sudden they started caring about the undermining of the other parent when it was a theory that could be used against women, alleging abuse against fathers. So our position has always been that it exists, but it exists in a larger context of abuse and battering and coercive control and it is wrong to say it stands on its own as a thing that women do by alleging abuse. There's absolutely no basis for that.
Speaker 3:So actually, in the last couple of months, we have finally a small group of us in the States and in the UK have put out a paper, a blog post, inventing a new term for what we call child and maternal sabotage, which we want to make it clear that it's what men do to women who are their adult victims of abuse, and it's what they do after separation. They sabotage the maternal child relationship and there have been so many women who have been so grateful for that terminology because they understood that parental alienation was a theory being used against mothers safe mothers but they also knew that they were being alienated from their children by their ex-husbands and they wanted something that captures that legitimately. So we're working to educate the field about that and we'll see where it goes. I don't think the alienation field and the alienation industry is going to adopt it because they are so determined to use alienation against mothers. They really believe it's something mothers do a lot. They really seem to believe that abuse claims are indicative of alienation and they probably don't see any need or reason to distinguish based on gender. So it's an uphill battle.
Speaker 3:But we finally decided that instead of just attacking the misuse of the term parental alienation, we needed to come up with our own term that captures the real alienation that's going on by abusers and tell us what that term is. Again, it's called child and maternal sabotage, cams, and the point is to get at abusers' desire to sabotage mothers and we like the word sabotage, especially because that's really what's going on is sabotage specifically. Alienation is kind of a vague, complicated, airy-fairy word that can mean any number of things, but sabotage is like deliberate, intentional. It's not like oh gosh, I'm so sorry, I neglected to bring the child for the visitation. I was so busy I got caught up. That's unintentional. This is intentional and that's what it should be. Parental alienation is a term that's so easily misused. It's even misused against women for supposedly unconscious alienation. It's ridiculous.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean that. That's a great way to summarize what's really going on here, from the abusive parent and overarching all of this is a gender bias.
Speaker 3:Right. There's two levels on which to talk about gender bias. One of them is experiential and, experientially, what so many of us see, as well as many, many mothers see, is the way courts are demeaning and disrespectful to mothers who alleged abuse, mothers who are traumatized, mothers who are upset and break down when the father is given free access and they know their children are unsafe. You know, there's just a lot of humiliation, demeaning and rejection of women who have emotions around something completely understandable and appropriate which is harm to their children, the loss of their children, and there's definitely a strong thumb on the scale in family court for fathers because, as I explain in my Georgetown article, there's such a strong commitment to getting fathers re-involved in families. There's a sense of fathers being somehow, you know, not getting the chance to father and not being sufficiently involved in children's lives, and there's a sense that children need their fathers as much as they need their mothers, all of which I think is perfectly valid and reasonable if they're good fathers or even decent fathers, but it tends to be applied to all fathers, including really horrible fathers, really destructive fathers and dangerous fathers, and all of that is a form of gender bias, because there's this enormous emphasis on fathering, which nobody seems to understand, is gender bias. They're not looking at the two parents equally. They're looking at fathers as particularly important because they're trying, they think, to compensate for what they think is a court bias on behalf of mothers when it comes to custody. So one of the battles we've been fighting in this field for decades is the belief that mothers have an unfair advantage in custody cases. That, by the way, is the other reason I did my study. My empirical study is to prove for once and for all that moms are not walking away with custody, at least of all when they're alleging abuse. So anyway, um, there is a bias for fathers and against mothers in various forms, but especially against mothers who report abuse. And I argue in my article that that's because courts want to protect fathers and fathers' rights and abuse claims make it hard to do that. So there's a real resistance to women in that way. So that's kind of analytic and anecdotal and theoretical.
Speaker 3:Then there's the empirical question about gender bias, and that's a little harder to quantify. How do you measure it when every case is different and the facts are different and the mothers and fathers are different? But what we did in our empirical study was. We specifically looked at a few things like does alienation claim, do alienation claims play out in a gender equal way? Because a lot of the alienation field says it's not just used against women, it's in a manner of alienators too, which we agree with.
Speaker 3:And, um, you know, we mothers allege it too and it's really important, you know, to not deny it in all directions. So we look at how it plays out in court and what we found was that alienation as I think I mentioned a minute ago from the um infographic that alienation defenses are associated with gender bias. In this way, we found that when fathers cross claim, alienation, courts are four times more likely to disbelieve mothers. Allegations of child abuse, specifically, it didn't have that much impact on partner abuse, but when mothers are accused of alienation, oh, and also when mothers are accused of alienation, they have twice the odds of losing custody compared to fathers accused of alienation. The other thing we found is that when fathers accuse mothers of abuse and mothers respond with alienation which is a perfect mirror of the what we call the bigger problem, which is mothers electing abuse and being called alienators nothing happens. The alienation claim against a father alleging a mother's abusive does very little for the allegedly abusive mother.
Speaker 1:So the odds are stacked against her.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, they are, and very few people understand that. I think that our courts are so biased in some subtle ways and some not so subtle ways, and I think the courts don't intend to be biased and they just accept ways of looking at the world which are implicitly biased. Like we need to get more fathers involved. Like most fathers are good fathers even if they're in court fighting over custody. Like women lie about abuse or get hysterical over, hysterical about things that aren't such a big deal. Like women can coach and mislead and brainwash children to believe something bad happened when it didn't, etc. Etc.
Speaker 1:So is the answer more education about implicit bias and how to correct that.
Speaker 3:I think you know there's not one, one answer that answers, and one of the reasons I believe it is well, yeah, one of the reasons is that I did a presentation for the DC Superior Court some years ago. They were doing a court conference, an all court wide conference on bias in the courts and our panel was accepted and our panel was on gender bias in custody and abuse litigation. So, specifically, what we're talking about today, and one of the things I did in there was we developed a couple of vignettes that were very clean and simple. They got at some some of the reasons we find courts not believing women, especially about even partner abuse, domestic violence, and we set up these vignettes and we asked the judges to go into small groups and discuss whether they believe the mother who's saying there's been a history of abuse, even though she never reported it anywhere, and she's in custody now and she's saying it. And they discussed why they didn't believe it because she never reported it anywhere. And then we had the discussion with the whole room and with the leaders, with the data and the knowledge to explain why women don't report abuse and it doesn't mean it didn't happen if they read it now, when he's fighting for custody of the children.
Speaker 3:And the other thing we did in these small groups was we said to them what are your beliefs? Okay, I believe that women who haven't reported it are probably lying when they get to custody court about it and talk about it. And then I asked them where did your beliefs come from? And they were like hmm, just kind of common sense.
Speaker 3:And so we were able to show them that they are coming in with preexisting biases that are not based on reality, and that, I think, opened up their understanding of implicit bias that they have beliefs that seem logical to them but they are actually a form of bias because they're not accurate. So I believe that there are a lot of ways to train on implicit bias, and that was a kind of sophisticated one because it was specifically about abuse and all of that, but we should be doing a lot more of that. Around gender, I think there's been a lot of attention to implicit bias on race, which is great and necessary, and we need to do the same thing on gender, because I actually think implicit gender bias is far more acceptable in the world than implicit racial bias.
Speaker 1:It is the culture that we live in at least in America.
Speaker 3:Yeah, very much. Oh, in most countries, I'm sorry to say yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I don't want to call out all the countries, but I know here in the States. That's the way that it is.
Speaker 3:I have colleagues all over the world and they're all experiencing the same thing in family court. So yeah.
Speaker 3:So I think implicit bias is very important. A study was done at one time by a leading expert named Dan Saunders from University of Michigan and he also looked at custody evaluators specifically and he said in a study but I never saw him follow up on this that he was able to prove that they have patriarchal worldviews and he broke that down into particular beliefs and he was able to sort of analyze their beliefs and show that and I'm like, well then, why aren't we screening for that? Like, if you can define it simply with these questions, why aren't we screening for that? So I think there are a lot of ways to get at this and not we haven't done a lot that we could be doing on that.
Speaker 3:Of course, there's a lot of other things that need to be done, such as, you know, these judges who are operating from myths and denying abuse, where there is a lot of evidence.
Speaker 3:In many of these cases there's a lot of evidence that's being ignored. Appeal courts have to take that seriously in reverse, and we have a lot of trouble getting appeal courts to reverse judges, even if they ignore all kinds of obvious evidence, because there's kind of a legal principle that the trial judge gets deferred to on their view of the facts, but there's a limit to that, and if they're ignoring all the evidence and they're going with something that's barely even evidence to deny it, they should be being reversed, and courts of appeal are refusing to do that. We also need to limit way parental alienation is used, and my article talks about that, and it also talks about the need to provide some pathways for what courts can and should do when they're not sure about abuse, which is a lot of the time, because right now not sure is being treated as didn't happen, and that is really dangerous.
Speaker 1:Yeah, indeed. Now, before I let you go, what are a couple or three recommendations you can give to family law practitioners today that they could use right now to improve outcomes for women who are victims of domestic violence and their children?
Speaker 3:So by practitioners do you mean lawyers, or you mean all the court personnel?
Speaker 1:Let's go with all the court personnel.
Speaker 3:So one recommendation strong recommendation is that everybody judges, gals, evaluators and lawyers should all be getting specific training on custody and abuse, not just DV 101, or even child abuse 101, but how those issues intersect with custody litigation. They need to understand what it looks like for an abuser when an abuser is in custody court, how they operate. They need to understand what it looks like when a victim is in custody court. They need to understand children's the complicatedness of what children say at one minute and another minute and recantation and all of those things. And they need to understand the motivations for abusers using custody court, which is, you know, well understood in the abuse field but not in the family court field. They need to understand coercive control, specifically because custody litigation is a form and version of coercive control and courts never assume that. They assume that if a father's in there fighting for custody, it's because he's a good father who wants to parent his children. So understanding all those things is really important. Lawyers need to understand how to work with experts to debunk alienation claims that are invalid and to prove abuse claims that are valid on behalf of their clients and the children, and to be able to challenge the literature that these alienation experts are constantly citing, which doesn't really prove much of anything, but nobody's there to show that. So lawyers need to get a lot more sophisticated about the literature and the research and how to challenge the alienation literature and research, specifically for judges. And then, as I said, appellate courts have got to get serious about protecting children from these terrible miscarriages of justice. There's, you know, the Center for Judicial Excellence has logged over 100 cases where children were murdered by abusers after courts refused to take seriously that they were in danger with that parent. Most of the parents were fathers, not all of them. And those are a tip of the iceberg, because those are the only ones where we have the information about what the court knew and when it knew it. But that's enough children, that's enough dead children for us to start doing something different, in my view. So appellate courts they have a role to play and DV Leap, which I'm no longer with but is still operative and active, stands ready to, you know. Try to make that difference happen at the appellate level. Yeah, you know.
Speaker 3:And then and then my article also recommends some legal changes, legislative changes in the laws that govern custody. Oh, my colleague Danielle is going to kill me if I don't mention Caden's law. So Caden's law is a provision of the Violence Against Women Act which a handful of us my colleague Danielle Pollock and I and a few other people managed to get thanks to a representative, fitzpatrick from Pennsylvania. Thanks, we're able to get it rolled into the Violence Against Women Act in 2022. It is a set of provisions that we're asking state to roll into their custody law and if they do roll this into their custody law, they can get federal funding to fund trainings of the sort I just described for all of their personnel.
Speaker 3:The neutral personnel in particular, and Danielle in the center, are working very hard to get Caden's law, the terms of Caden's law, adopted at the state level all over the country. It's been a challenge, but it's slowly starting to catch on and you know the folks that work in the status quo that really like the alienation theory and want to be able to keep using it, are very upset. You know they're expressing upset, not just opposition, about Caden's law, which does not outlaw alienation at all. All it says is that you can't send kids to these reunification programs that are predicated on denying abuse. Well, we don't even say that you can't send them to these programs that are overnight. You can't remove them from loving and safe parents.
Speaker 3:To force them to be with a parent they're scared of and can't stand for, you know, overnight you can't break the bond with the parent they trust in a reunification camp unless it's been proven to be safe and effective, and none of them have been.
Speaker 1:Exactly. In fact, some of those camps have been abolished in California.
Speaker 3:I've not abolished. I'm afraid they should be, but they're not.
Speaker 1:I thought they were outlawed in California.
Speaker 3:Well, they were outlawed, but they're not abolished. They've been outlawed in California for many years and everyone ignored that provision. So they still use them. Oh yeah, they've been using them all along. But Piki's law was just which is? This California version of Caden's law was just adopted this year and it sort of puts a point on that prohibition. It says and we mean it, so we'll see what happens from now on about that.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I think we have our next step. So Piki's, is it Piki's law?
Speaker 3:I think it's Piki's law P-I-Q-U-I.
Speaker 1:Okay, so Piki's law, caden's law and implicit bias.
Speaker 3:Caden's law is the federal name, and then a lot of states are adopting different dead children or abused children's names on their laws.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we have a lot of work to do and a lot of follow up to do. I appreciate all of the insights you shared with us today and thank you for being on the show. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, stay safe. Registration for the 2024 Conference on Crimes Against Women is now available. The 2024 conference will be held in Dallas, texas, at the Sheraton Dallas May 20th through the 23rd. Visit our website at conferencecaworg to learn more and register today, and follow us on social media at nationalccaw for updates about the conference, featured events, presenters and more.