AFCC — The Family Court Network

Family Court is an industry built to expand the personal profit of legal and mental health practitioners. The Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (AFCC) is the foremost industry trade association. AFCC terms itself a network. It relies on its affiliations to supplant adherence to fact and law and implant mandated legal and mental services. Government fatherhood funding and legislation acts as a conduit for AFCC to take-over state and local family courts.[i] It’s power and stranglehold on family law amassed during the past half-century.

AFCC associates conduct research, author books and academic papers. AFCC associates consult with policy-makers to write family court’s legal protocols that obliterate parents right to present evidence and challenge false allegations, the tenet of due process, for the purpose of elevating custody awards to fathers regardless of behavior and quality of caregiving. “… courts have turned away from the “cause” of divorce breakup and “custody evaluations that emphasized the identification of parenting abilities and assessment of primary parent-child relationships.”[ii]

AFCC members profess they maintain an ability to solve issues of family dissolution by asserting their services onto the litigation process. AFCC replaces judicial adjudication with therapeutic jurisprudence. Custody determinations are passed off to a slew of fee-for-service appointees by way of legally binding judicial orders. AFCC professes practitioners have the ability to “educate” parents to resolve disputes. Labeled the “velvet revolution” AFCC replaced law-oriented, judicial adjudication with mandatory family court services designed to prevent or mitigate divorce-related risks.[iii]

Because AFCC members do not consider the cause of conflict or the cause of the breakup — the legal argument made by either party and their reasons for petitioning for custody — AFCC members coined the term “high conflict” for litigants unwilling to resolve custody disputes. A parent who enters family court with evidence the other parent perpetrated child sexual abuse, is physically violent, uses threats, bullying and harassment to keep family members subservient, or has no history of accomplishing even minimal child care duties, will not be given a hearing and determination based on those factors. In place of the Rule of Law a court employee will order the family pay for one or more of the “services” advanced by AFCC. Evidentiary process is taken off-the-record, unfavorable facts are hidden. Instead, appointees invent facts to favor an oppressive, dominating parent. When purposeful harm is being relegated to “conflict” the harmed must stay silent or be punished.

“The challenges posed by high-conflict families were front-and-center issues for most courts, and AFCC members led the way in developing new processes and techniques for working with these challenging families.”

AFCC has strong roots in the ideology of the father’s rights movement — men who organized to preserve their financial and personal dominance in circumstances of family disintegration. AFCC has strong affiliations with religious patriarchs, staunch believers in hierarchal, god-ordained male authority over women and children. AFCC has been the vehicle for whitewashing and normalization of father’s rights goals and litigation tactics.

Father’s Rights Movement and their Subgroup: Religious Patriarchs

The father’s rights movement focuses more on father’s “rights” rather than actual care of children. Men organized to take-back authority they believed they were losing from the rise of feminism and custody decisions that favored primary caregiving mothers. Conservative religious groups supported the patriarchy-heavy father’s rights agenda.[iv] Australian Dr. Michael Flood publishes academically about fathers’ rights — an introductory article explains the infiltration of Australia’s legal system by fathers’ rights motives.[v] The United States offers not one academic specializing in fathers’ rights ideology and its impact on family court process and outcomes.

AFCC’s founder Meyer Elkin was an integral advisor to the umbrella father’s rights group Children’s Rights Council (CRC). Joan Kelly, an instrumental researcher also advised CRC.[vi]

Fathers’ rights endorse laws requiring automatic judicial shared custody orders. The access awarded gives maltreating males the means to torment mothers and children. The maltreatment displayed is not limited to physical abuse against mother — it is expansive. Maltreatment as defined by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) includes psychological abuse, sexual abuse and neglect. According to the CDC “safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments are essential to prevent early adversity, including child abuse and neglect, and to assure that all children reach their full potential.”[vii] AFCC markets methods of parent communication such as notebooks, web programs, and other judicially-ordered intrusions.[viii] Shared parenting orders are often a first-step for abusers to gain sole control in post-decree custody switches.

Fathers’ rights promote psychological labeling of mothers as a winning litigation tactic.[ix] Fathers’ rights are the instigators in the advancement and normalization of the legally and scientifically disqualified “Parental Alienation Syndrome.” Fathers’ rights use the psychological theory of Family Systems or Dynamics which is the belief that the behavior of each family member is a reaction to the acts of the other family members — an idea grounded in patriarchy, victim-blaming, and discounting of maltreatment.

These three concepts — alienation, family dynamics, and joint custody orders — work in conjunction to form an alliance that is highly detrimental to maltreated mothers and children. Yet, these three concepts form the basis of court services promulgated by AFCC and judicially mandated to litigating parties.

This author, Doreen Ludwig, is in the early stages of documenting the intersection of male supremacists, father’s rights, AFCC, fatherhood legislation and funding, and domestic violence ideas as imparted in the 1990–1993 issues of CRC’s father’s rights newsletter. Introductory articles are available on my linkedin account; more will be posted as completed.[x]

A vast compilation of articles disputing fathers’ rights ideology is posted at http://www.florida-family-lawyers.com/site-index/site-index-frame.html#soulhttp://www.florida-family-lawyers.com/contents.html

AFCC and PAS

PAS and its many euphemisms are common topics at AFCC conferences. The 55th Conference included workshops to treat the “disrupted parent” “favored parent” “alienated parent” “parental hatred” “personality disordered parent” “resist/refuse cases” “trauma and strained parent-child relationships” and “gatekeeping.” Alienator is just one label put into protective, primary caregiving mothers.

Two religious’ patriarchy-oriented researchers were fundamental to standardizing alienation theories that currently exist to justify giving custody to maltreating males.

“The [May 2001] New Orleans conference theme, Alienation, Access, and Attachment, provided the opportunity for members of the Northern California Task Force on the Alienated Child, led by Dr. Janet Johnston and Dr. Joan Kelly, to share their reformulation of Richard Gardner’s controversial parental alienation syndrome. The work of the task force was then published in what would become a landmark special issue of Family Court Review.”[xi] This issue is not disclosed to the public for review because AFCC operates in a hidden forum. For that reason, I must rely on a publicly disclosed refutation to assess the validity of the reformulation.

The special issue containing Johnston and Kelly’s reformulation has formed the basis for AFCC’s treatment of domestic violence.[xii] As associate editor of Family Court Review from 2004–2010, Johnston had direct entre to circulate her theories. AFCC operators then spread the same-but-different PAS theories through numerous vehicles such as conferences, trainings, and written protocols.[xiii]

George Washington University Professor Joan Meier receives grants through her non-profit DVLeap to author articles refuting PAS theories. In 2009 Meier analyzed Johnston and Kelly’ reformulated PAS. Meier’s disagreement with Johnston and Kelly’s reformulation is extensive. “In Johnston and Kelly (2004a), along with Drozd and Olesen (discussed in Meier, in press), are among the leading credible researchers spearheading this trend [towards replacement of PAS with “alienation].”[xiv] In a comedy of omission which is common to laundered research, Meier cites “Family Court Review” as the publication of Johnston and Kelly’s revamped theory, yet Meier fails to indicate that AFCC is the sole arbiter of what and to whom the theory is disseminated.

In a long exhortation on the failings of Johnston and Kelly’s theory Meier states “like PAS proponents, Johnston and her collaborators assert the counterintuitive position that a mother’s ‘‘warm, involved’’ parenting can powerfully fuel alienation in a child.” The simple truth is: family court has evolved to break the bond between mother and child so that a new attachment can be formed between father and child. The health of the attachment is irrelevant. Patriarchy sees single mothers as threatening to the natural order so family court practitioners exist to foster dad’s authority. PAS and its euphemisms are merely a disparagement of mothering and her nurturing — a relationship many AFCC practitioners are intent on breaking. Johnston and Kelly’s PAS reformulation provided a theoretical foundation for numerous court employees and appointed practitioners to stand on.

AFCC Writes Federal Fatherhood Guidebooks

Jessica Pearson is named as Chief Research Associate on AFCC incorporation documents. Pearson is the primary author of federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE), Access/Visitation Guidebooks “Promising Practices” and “Strategic Planning Guide” that inform states on fatherhood grant program implementation and orchestration. Pearson is a frequent presenter at CRC conferences.[xv] In the early 1990s Pearson worked with the Department of Health and Human Services to inform father’s rights members of the potential to design access/visitation programs.[xvi]

Pearson and OCSE staff Debra Pontisso conducted an AFCC workshop on fatherhood custody. Pontisso is one of several staff who tally jurisdictional profiles in which practitioners report increases in custody that do not focus on child sexual abuse, battering, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, anger.[xvii]

Pearson remains a primary fatherhood grant recipient incorporating domestic violence safety procedures and fatherhood program review.

As need and awareness arises, AFCC members morph and infiltrate safeguards, always holding true to father’s rights ideology disguised in the latest manifestation.

AFCC Publishes Trade Articles

Since its inception, AFCC has established itself through its trade publication first called “California Conciliation Courts Quarterly”, then “Conciliation Courts Review,” and currently “Family Court Review.” It is important to know the various incarnations since footnotes in subsequent documents, many used as court protocols, cite the publication and not its producer: the trade association. Articles about therapeutic jurisprudence meant to garner profits for AFCC members are made to look like they came from a legitimate, unbiased source.

AFCC operatives launder research and theories initiated through fathers’ rights academics. When one assertion is challenged, the posit becomes reborn under a different academic’s name — it is given new life. PAS is only one case in point.

Articles in Family Court Review are never held out for public discussion. They are disseminated to members only. Yet they market a government service — legal determinations of child custody.

AFCC Conferences

A second, equally hidden, method of dissemination of therapeutic jurisprudence — or profit-motivated intrusion in contested custody — occurs at AFCC conferences. AFCC conducts several local, chapter-sponsored conferences yearly, a national custody-focused yearly conference, and an international conference. Topics and presenters are worrisome and provide the links to document nefarious strategies and connections amongst family court industry operators. Workshops are kept out of the public eye but those with an expertise in the questionable inner-workings of the system would conclude conferences are not selling integrity but distortions of judicial process.

For instance, I will reiterate a few workshop topics from AFCC’s 2018 13th Symposium on Child Custody entitled “Guidelines and Standards and Rules, Oh My!”

A pre-conference, all-day institute was given by VAWA-grantee BWJP staff, reformulated-PAS advocate Stienvold, and a Washington state judge called “Child Custody Evaluations in Cases Involving Intimate Partner Violence.” This institute was sponsored by the National Council on Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ). This is one example of the “collaboration” from varying family court special interests.

“What the Competent Use of Psychological Testing Can Contribute to Parenting Plan Evaluations” encourages the use of tests (MMPI-2, MMPI-2-RF, PAI, Rorschach with R-PAS) not designed for use in cases where domestic violence and PTSD skew results.

“To Stop a Woozle: A Meta-Analysis of Shared Versus Primary Parenting” Alienation and shared parenting are common themes at AFCC conferences. Given the synopsis it is difficult to determine which side workshop presenters will take in the dispute between domestic violence advocates (not recommended) and father’s rights (ideal). “Each year numerous state legislatures face proposals for equal parenting time presumptions. These proposals often cite recent research reviews and “woozle” or misrepresent the research on shared parenting as support for their cause. A comprehensive analysis of empirical studies on the characteristics of children in shared versus primary parenting families will be presented along with examples of common “woozling” techniques that best interest of the child proponents must identify and rebut.”

“Court-Mandated Small Group Classes for High Conflict Parents” given by a retired Massachusetts judge who now works in private practice, shows the level of intrusion and fee-payment being judicially ordered to litigating parents. Mothers who have suffered at the hands of a domineering husband are being forced to attend nine 3-hour sessions with their abuser to learn that they must behave. “There is a robust body of research detailing the negative developmental, emotional, behavioral, and academic effects of high conflict between parents and children. This workshop presents a psycho-educational program for high conflict parents consisting of 27 hours of class time (nine three-hour evening sessions), mandatory attendance of both parents together at all nine sessions taught by a gender mixed and interdisciplinary two-person team of facilitators. The presentation will include sample homework assignments, videos, and class outlines.”

AFCC conferences are where the networking occurs, where the scheme is hatched. Where insiders share often nefarious means of profiting from family dissolution by ignoring harm and the need for safety, stability and nurturing. A full accounting of conference topics and presenters should be undertaken — listing names and their affiliations. Many cross-overs will stand out. As this author becomes more familiar with those behind the scheme, more pops out.

AFCC Influences Legal Training

An association between AFCC and Hofstra School of Law Center for Children, Families and the Law designed a legal training program that trains family lawyers in “many issues and practices that traditional family law courses rarely touch upon. These include the appropriate — and inappropriate — uses of dispute resolution processes, new case management techniques in the family courts, the key roles played by professionals from other disciplines in the court system, and current research on such issues as the effects of conflict and loss of parental contact on children.”[xviii] “Yet the materials from which most family law professors teach contain nary a word on most of these topics or on the skills necessary for effective family law practice.”

The fact that AFCC is training future legal professionals in the replacement of the Rule of Law with therapeutic jurisprudence should concern anyone who believes in due process.

AFCC Writes and Disseminates Family Court Protocols

Established in 2011, AFCC’s website is a transportation hub for download of protocols written by AFCC members. Many efforts are funded with government fatherhood grants. “AFCC plays a leadership role and collaborates with leading organizations on major reform initiatives and training in family law and domestic relations practice and policy. Through the AFCC Center for Excellence in Family Court Practice, AFCC places an ongoing emphasis on issues including case management, domestic violence, family law education and the integration of research into practice and policy. AFCC partners include the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, Hofstra Law School Center for Children, Families and the Law, Battered Women’s Justice Project, Werner Institute for Negotiation and Conflict Resolution, University of Baltimore School of Law Center for Children, Families and the Courts, Loyola University Chicago School of Law’s Civitas ChildLaw Center, Resolution Systems Institute and Marquette University Law School Dispute Resolution Program.” [xix]

A huge industry has replaced judicial adjudication. Administrative documents outline internal processes meant to foster contact between dads and children even when there is a record of harm. Court appointees make unmonitored profits, not by treating and resolving disputes, but by selecting and targeting the most egregious abusers and their victims, acting under the pretense of an ability to referee parent’s childcare decision-making.

In conclusion

AFCC is a scourge that infiltrated family court in the United States and internationally. A thorough analysis of AFCC conference brochures with attention paid to names of presenters and topics should be undertaken. Conferences sell litigation tactics, disgraced theories and what could only be termed racketeering endeavors. All developed to hide a nefarious supremacy movement that keeps money and control in the hands of dads to the exclusion of the best interests of the children.

Author Biography

Doreen Ludwig was a full-time, primary caregiving mother who in the process of leaving an abusive man encountered numerous fathers’ rights practitioners and judicial employees in the state of Pennsylvania. Well-documented ethical violations, denials of due process, and intentional fraud were excused by numerous higher courts. Doreen wrote her personal story and initial program research in her first book “Motherless America: Confronting Welfare’s Fatherhood Custody Program” published in Sept. 2015.

A website supports Doreen’s research www.MACCAbuse.org

A second book, “Trumpian Abuse: Government &Family Systems that Prop-Up the Male Regime” relies on government and industry documents to show that family court intentionally ignores child maltreatment and awards unfit men custody.

Doreen receives no grant or private funds. Over ten years of document reading and interpretation makes Doreen Ludwig an expert decoder of AFCC industry malfeasance disguised as mediation and parent education.

[i] Salem, Sandler, Wolchik, “Taking Stock of Parent Education in the Family Courts: Envisioning a Public Health Model,” “Program growth was also promoted by the U.S. Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement, which provided modest financial support for parent education programs through its Access/Visitation Grant Program, a program designed to support services that facilitate noncustodial parents’ access to their children” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3638966/

[ii] Salem, Kulak, Deutsch, “Triaging Family Court Services: The Connecticut Judicial Branch’s Family Civil Intake Screen” 2007, page 4 [this is the internal court domestic violence protocol — it defines which appointee services to mandate based on Janet Johnston’s views on conflict.] http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1140&context=plr

[iii] Salem, Sandler, Wolchik, “Taking Stock of Parent Education in the Family Courts: Envisioning a Public Health Model,” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3638966/

[iv] Flood, M. G. (2012). ‘Separated fathers and the ‘Fathers’ Rights’ Movement’, Journal of Family Studies, 18 (2–3), 231–241.

[v] Flood, Michael. (2010). “Fathers rights” and the defense of paternal authority in Australia. http://doi.org/10.1177/1077801209360918 ; https://zenodo.org/record/890044#.XVlvynspCK8

[vi] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/practitioners-apply-foundation-fatherhood-family-court-doreen-ludwig/

[vii] https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/childabuseandneglect/essentials.html

[viii] https://www.afccnet.org/Resource-Center/Resources-for-Professionals

[ix] https://farzadlaw.com/divorce-in-california/how-to-get-custody-as-a-father Author Note: Extreme advice, retrieved in 2016, was taken off-line. Author maintains a copy in her files.

[x] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-supremacy-became-de-rigueur-family-court-doreen-ludwig/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/supremacists-created-funded-fatherhood-marriage-promotion-ludwig/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/practitioners-apply-foundation-fatherhood-family-court-doreen-ludwig/

[xi] https://www.afccnet.org/About/History

[xii] Kelly, J.B., & Johnston, J.R. (2001). The alienated child: A reformulation of Parental Alienation Syndrome. Family Court Review, 39(3), 249–266.

[xiii] An example is Arnold Shienvold, a mental health practitioner in the State of Pennsylvania, who participates in numerous state and federal fatherhood and domestic violence protocol initiatives, offered a training on “Attachment, Alienation and Access (Custody)” at a 2009 AFCC conference.[xiii] Currently, Shienvold is a chief AFCC domestic violence (which he terms “intimate partner violence” — a clue to the downplaying of violence perpetrated as a means of domination and control and the common fathers’ rights practice of equalizing perpetration amongst the sexes) “expert” giving two workshops at AFCC conferences.

[xiv] Meier, Joan S.(2009)’A Historical Perspective on Parental Alienation Syndrome and Parental Alienation’, Journal of Child Custody,6:3,232–257 ; http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15379410903084681

[xv]http://www.maccabuse.org/documents/pdfs/hhs%20state%20plans%20for%20using%20funds%20for%20courts.pdf; http://www.maccabuse.org/documents/pdfs/Child_Access_and_Visitation_05-04.pdf

[xvi] http://www.maccabuse.org/documents/pdfs/crc-nccr-levynewsletter.pdf

[xvii]http://www.maccabuse.org/documents/pdfs/AV%20guidance%20memo%20(thru%202015)%20pg%204.pdf

[xviii] https://flerproject.org/?q=node/1

[xix] https://www.afccnet.org/Resource-Center/Center-for-Excellence-in-Family-Court-Practice