Will United Nations Tell the Truth about U.S. Custody Litigation?

Input for SR VAWG’s report on violence against women and children in custody cases

This is my submission to inform the Special Rapporteur on the true nexus of domestic violence and custody litigation, administrative processes, alienation-theory and practices, legislative mandates, and systematic denial of human rights to mothers and their minor children, as it occurs within the United States of America (U.S.). Because U.S. structures purposely punish and dictate rules of engagement for mothers with minor children.

The U.N.’s Special Rapporteur’s request for submission predicts a final report that endorses an ideological viewpoint favorable to U.S. domestic violence (DV) stakeholders. U.S. stakeholder financial interests lie in framing the issue as judicial and practitioner ignorance or bias. In truth, outcomes are legislatively and administratively mandated. This paper discloses a 2016 (prior to Donald Trump Presidency) documentation coverup conducted by stakeholder Joan Meier, Professor of Law, George Washington University. The truth known to Meier and her cohorts is:

U.S. family courts are incentivized to minimize adult and child maltreatment, ignore quality and history of primary caregiving, disparage the maternal/child bond, and instead, enforce a paternal/child bond. Custody determinations and child maltreatment are privatized and profit-driven. Due Process is non-existent because evidence is kept off-the-record and/or manufactured by practitioners.

DISCRMINAORY STATUS LAWS

Welfare Reform legislation, passed in 1996, elevated fatherhood regardless of quality or history of caregiving. Legislation gave money to a range of programs that boost dad’s custody. My articles “Government Social Services Programs Bash Mothers” and “Here Hides Clinton’s Pedophile Network” reveal the wide-range of money available to non-profits, family courts and research networks that operate fatherhood social services.

The Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) Fatherhood Access/Visitation (AV) incentive grant entrenched father’s rights (FR) services (practices). The trade association AFCC (Association of Family & Conciliation Courts) operates program development and review, embedded practices rooted in alienation theory and practice, detailed in my third book “AFCC net: People, Policy, Practices that Intrude in Child Custody Determinations.”

The taint of fatherhood AV was documented in my first book, “Motherless America: Confronting Welfare’s Fatherhood Custody Program.” A follow-up book “Trumpian Abuse: Government & Family Systems that Prop-Up the Male Regime” documents institutionalized fatherhood structure and DV collaboration. “Modus Operandi,” chapter 3, (posted on my linkedin page), excerpts OCSE documents that outline the framework (concealed by Prof. Meier, Dr. Rosen and OCSE fatherhood director Michael Hayes).

Jessica Pearson, a frequent presenter at FR conferences and AFCC affiliate, was contracted to author OCSE playbooks Promising Practices (2001), and Strategic Planning Guide (2006). FR co-authored reporting instructions, “State Child Access Program Survey Guidance,” mandate increasing custody while not focusing on drug and alcohol abuse, anger, domestic violence, battering and “general” concerns such as child sexual abuse. Case statistics are published yearly in Jurisdictional Profiles. To summarize: OCSE mandates appointees increase custody while disregarding maltreatment. Numbers and method are compiled (110,000 in 2013). Stakeholder Meier orchestrated a coverup of crucial data in order to preserve and expand her personal influence over narrative and resources.

Modus Operandi examines two AFCC publications that prove services are structured around alienation theory and treatment. Triage Intake Screen and Taking Stock of Parent Education in the Family Courts: Envisioning a Public Health Model lists service models that view safety concerns and detrimental parenting as obstacles and difficult parenting, or “conflict.”

PARENTAL ALIENATION

Fatherhood gave FRs and AFCC means to embed Parental Alienation concepts. AFCC net journeys the transformation and institutionalization of alienation theory and practice. A seminal AFCC article Johnson/Kelley reformulated alienation theory uses a Family Systems/Dynamic approach to justify custody orders and services created to change perception instead of behavior. A recent seminal article claims alienation is intimate partner violence. Refusal to coparent is psychological abuse. Precursors include: being a primary parent, contesting custody, filing for a protective order, alleging child maltreatment and/or unfit parenting. In the U.S. alienation and its derivatives are applied selectively, label and treatment must be purchased. Abused mothers who lose custody due to legal manipulations, are not “alienated” even when children are isolated and reprogrammed in father’s home.

Welfare Reform Forces Psychological Reprogramming of Children divulges vast interconnections between stakeholders and alienation-centric services. Citations Reveal Alternative Practices — Psychological Torture extensively examines research and practices behind APA’s custody evaluation protocol. Protocols are the bedrock of the system.

RESEARCH/DATA

FRs, fatherhood and AFCC created research and practices that gird U.S. case management processes. AFCC textbooks, cited in APA guidelines, disclose practices. “Divorce and Family Mediation” contains theory and practices. Personal situations, maltreatment, ordinary problems, and minor imperfections are turned into obstacles that need high-priced, long-term intervention. Each of 24 chapters, authored by a prominent purveyor, espouse rationale, and application of mediation-centric models of practice. Methods are taught at colleges and universities. AFCC conferences disburse continuing education credits. Affiliations and citations legitimize theories, reconstituted research, and practices prevalent in U.S. family court.

Parenting Plan Evaluations: Applied Research for the Family Court chapters outline research and practices created by preeminent father’s rights researchers. Authored by FR practitioners, chapter 1 Social Science Evidence and the Law concludes research is unbeholden to Rules of Law and Evidence.

Community programs with DV components interact with universities to generate research and impact custody outcomes. A small sample:

• Dads for Life and Supporting Fathers Involvement generate mother disparaging research cited in APA Parenting Coordinator Guidelines.
• University of Florida’s fatherhood/marriage/domestic violence class typifies the intermingling of interests.
• Yale University’s Fathers for Change uses children to reform violent, drug abusing Dads. Professors then generate favorable, NIH-published research.
• The Father’s Support Center, Washington University, Brown School Social Work creates research, influences federal policy, and provides custody legal services to men. The School of Law teaches AFCC mediation, law professors, AFCC members, receive court appointments; Psychology and Psychiatric Centers conduct treatment and evaluation; Brown School holds continuing education in AFCC mediation and treatment practices.

U.S. ACF’s Office of Policy and Planning does not independently administer or review fatherhood programs. Instead AFCC’s Jessica Pearson’s Fatherhood Research Practice Network (FRPN) receives grants to review fatherhood programs.

REVICTIMIZATION

Revictimization of maltreated women and children takes numerous forms: systematic and domestic violence (DV).

Systematic Disenfranchisement

Women lose financial stability because support is tied to custody litigation. Filing for support initiates a custody action. Payments decrease as custody increases. When primary custody is switched, mothers are ordered to pay dad. Litigation and court ordered services costs are exorbitant.

Women lose psychological stability because they are blamed, threatened, and punished. Women become depressed, destitute, and mentally deranged by continuous abuse conducted in the family court forum.

Mothers psychologically labeled by evaluators are unemployable.

Women are marginalized by their social peers and family who blame them for events.

Mothers who do not speak in a manner that advantages DV stakeholders are silenced and disparaged. Victims are not permitted to speak of father’s rights, fatherhood funding, corruption, malfeasance, due process violations, and unethical practitioners. Victims are required to recite a narrative consistent with the Special Rapporteur’s request for submission. This results in gaslit mothers.

I personally was revictimized by DV stakeholders at the local, state, and national level. Local DV group, Berks Women in Crisis, protected an unethical FR evaluator. State group PCADV, collaborated with FRs and AFCC members to author “Changing the Culture of Custody in Pennsylvania” a Strategic Planning Guide. National stakeholders Joan Meier and Dr. Rosen covered up my research in 2016. Henceforth Meier took an astonishing $501,791 grant to promote a study written by Dr. Rosen, that refutes one of Warshak’s ten alienation fallacies.

Domestic Violence Revictimization

The U.S. legislates a DV structure that perpetuates the continued maltreatment of women and children. A hierarchy of organizations and their staff command billions of dollars that rarely improve lives of actual victims. Funds do not assist victims and minor children who leave maltreating men. Aid is near to non-existent within domestic violence agencies, victim assistance groups, or legal aid societies. Mothers who leave jurisdictions can be criminally charged with kidnapping.

DV shelters exist as 30-day respite facilities with high recidivism. Shelter staff habitually inform abused women with children that they must leave the abuser or face Child Protection investigations and/or “failure to protect” criminalization. Mothers and journalists report that leaving prompts litigation that awards sole custody to their abuser.

DV legislative initiatives are enjoyed by men. Males use false allegations to obtain Protection orders and sole custody (data is not recorded.) Males use “emergency” custody motions to eliminate primary caregiving mothers. Males use UCCJA to “forum shop” and find judges favorable to fathers. FRs have innumerable lawyers, advocacy groups, and internet sites selling litigation tactics.

Child maltreatment is not a function of domestic violence funding. Greenbook Initiative grants (2001–2006), given to improve response to co-occurrence (child maltreatment and DV), implanted FR policies into DV services and denied women’s right to self-sufficiency. This egregious failure is confirmed by St. Louis, Missouri’s implementation review of goal attainment.

“(h) Develop a direct service component to assist domestic violence victims in securing services that will lead to self-sufficiency, such as housing, transportation, employment, and child care, which will give victims of domestic violence the option of leaving a perpetrator upon whom they may have been economically reliant.

This objective had not been addressed during the evaluation period.”

U.S. DV money funds numerous programs that force women to stay, co-parent or lose custody.

• Engaging Men;
• Fathering After Violence;
• Safe and Together;
• Safety Plans contain extreme, unnecessary requirements for women to retain contact;
• Restorative Justice permits perpetrators to bargain down criminal charges. Victims are forced into counseling sessions and written agreements with their abuser.

U.S. DV Safe Haven’s grant funded judicial training in alienation. Contracted in 2001, the Clearinghouse on Supervised Visitation Institute for Family Violence Studies School of Social Work Florida State University provided technical assistance to Supervised Visitation grantees. Director Karen Oehme, and Lynne Rosenthal (President Obama DV Liaison), authored a judicial training manual that requires supervised visit staff to have proficient knowledge of alienation. The bibliography contains numerous articles that classify failure to coparent (alienation) a form of child maltreatment. The parental alienation syndrome: What is it and what data support it? Child Maltreatment, Faller, K. C.,1998. Oehme connects to Supervised Visit Network (SVN), an FR created organization boasting over 800 member centers.

TYPES OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

In 2009 the U.S. Office of Violence Against Women (OVW) funded the Child Custody Differentiation Project, because “the family court system is failing to adequately protect the safety and wellbeing of children — and their battered and battering parents — in child custody cases where domestic violence is alleged.” Instead of appraising the U.S. Congress, grant recipient BWJP (Battered Women’s Justice Project) and its partner Praxis International, assembled a “blue ribbon team of representatives from NCJFCJ (National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges) and AFCC, as well as scholars and expert practitioners from across the country.” Stakeholders collaborated to maintain hierarchal status quo. The grant report itself was found not on OVW’s website, but in a menagerie of materials compiled by government services consulting firm Young Williams. Pages 5–10 list due process violations inherent to AV family court services. BWJP, AFCC and NCJFCJ hide known, systematic due process violations from government oversight. Litigants are also kept in-the-dark. The compilation includes articles written by AFCC affiliates, disparate DV screens; and promotes a court-connected fatherhood program. Mothering and concern for child maltreatment and its cure: safety, stability and nurturing, is omitted.

DIFFERENTIATION JUDICIAL TRAINING

APA custody evaluation guidelines cite Drozd, Austin’s judicial training paper. “Intimate partner violence and child custody evaluation, part 1: Theoretical framework, forensic model, and assessment issues” based on Janet Johnson’s DV classification system. Differentiation claims DV is either “coercive control” or “situational couples violence” (mutual, bi-lateral). Divorce is situational couples violence.

CONCLUSION

This submission proves disregarding maltreatment, psychologically labeling mothers, and switching custody are institutionalized by U.S., with funding and cooperation of DV stakeholders. The system is so corrupted mothers have no recourse.

My children have been denied their mother since August 2006. Eastern District, U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals opine lawyers may egregiously lie and mental health appointees have judicial immunity, taught at Villanova Law School.

Will the U.N. address real human rights denial?