Family Courts as Centers of Industrial Genocide

Bandy X. Lee
7 min readMar 27, 2024

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An Industrial Genocide against Protective Parents and Their Children Begins with Physical and Mental Elements

It will at first seem excessive to claim that the killing fields of Family Courts warrant a designation of genocide, but the mere assumption that “It can’t happen here!” should not deter an accurate description. This is an elaboration of an earlier article, and I will argue later that what is occurring through the Family Courts is not just genocide but the specific type of industrial genocide.

There are many barriers to seeing the stark reality of the Family Courts, and the first is the name: “Family Court” is self-exonerating. It defies public imagination that an entity called a “Court” would be breaking the law, much less be a criminal enterprise acting in fact as an “alternative court” for “reversing victim and offender,” by essentially eliminating the innocent party and therefore the evidence. Most would find it inconceivable that an institution bestowed with public trust to protect families would abuse that trust to carry out the most hideous crimes against those it is charged with protecting.

Yet, the inconceivable levels of brutality in the Family Courts actually protect their ability to commit even more brutal acts — since, if anyone were to blow the whistle on what is actually happening, few would believe it. And, like most genocides, entire structures exist simply to hide the systematic human rights violations.

However, to define genocide, one need only examine the criteria in greater detail. Here, I will review the physical element and the mental element, as required for the designation, according to the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Then, in Part 2, I will explain how Family Court genocide is a special instance of industrial genocide.

Physical Element

For guilt to be established, there must first be a physical element, which needs to fulfill only one of the following: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing members of the group serious bodily or mental harm; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life “calculated to bring about its … destruction”; (d) preventing births within the group; and (e) forcibly transferring children from one group to another.

In relation to Family Courts:

a) Killing members of the group. This action applies, since deaths are certain under given conditions, such as in the removal of a permanent restraining order intended to protect against a violent ex-spouse, or in sending children to their known abusers, while totally negating abuse as a matter that needs investigation. Almost three American women die per day by the hands of their intimate partners, most frequently following separation, and at least one child is killed every six days in relation to Family Court. By refusing to protect women and children from abuse, often stripping their own means of resistance through court orders that send back runaways and incarcerate adults who try to protect, Family Courts are powerful participants in the killings.

b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. This criterion applies, as above, with an estimate of 58,000 to 361,000 children being sent to their abusers per year in the U.S. In effect, they are being sent to their torture. And for every child murder, there is an even greater number of suicides and hundreds of serious injuries, a large portion of which will be lifelong. The same principle holds for protective mothers, whose often serious, if not lethal, Family Court-caused health harms are increasingly being documented.

c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. This action applies, since, in addition to seizing children from innocent mothers (and occasionally innocent fathers), physical assets are expropriated, child support extorted, alimony withheld, and legal fees demanded, while “debtors’ prisons” are reinstituted, exceptions to bankruptcy protections made, and professional careers ruined. Protective parents are devastated financially, physically, and emotionally, so that they cannot fight back against unjust rulings, which also ruins their reputation and societal standing. Reports of children thriving with protective parents but deteriorating with abusive ones are aggressively suppressed, as Family Court-sanctioned abuse irreparably harms children, whose lives are beset by psychological and physical debilitation and a life expectancy that is reduced by decades.

d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. This result may be an unintended consequence. Preventing births entirely is not within the interest of Family Courts, which rely on having children to send to their destruction for their profit. However, new births may fall dramatically, as the trauma of Family Court-exacerbated abuse may render victims incapable of forming families again, or considering having more children.

e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. This action is the foremost goal of this well-organized genocide. From “alienation” accusations to “reunification” camps, and from judge to “expert” custody evaluator, are all in alignment for the forcible transfer of children from protective parents to abusive ones, or from nurturance to exploitation, for a very lucrative (death) industry, estimated at 50 to 175 billion dollars a year in the U.S. alone.

In this manner, not just one but all criteria of the physical element of genocide are fulfilled.

Mental Element

To satisfy the mental element, there needs to be an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a [targeted] group, as such.” According to the United Nations (UN):

The intent is the most difficult element to determine. To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a … group. Cultural destruction does not suffice, nor does an intention to simply disperse a group. It is this special intent, or dolus specialis, that makes the crime of genocide so unique. In addition, case law has associated intent with the existence of a State or organizational plan or policy, even if the definition of genocide in international law does not include that element.

First, intent is difficult to establish through direct evidence in genocide, since few perpetrators would be willing to admit in explicit statements, either written or spoken, their intentions to destroy especially innocent women and children. Family Courts, especially, have the unique authority to generate their own narrative, to cover up their violence through extreme secrecy and control, and to hide behind “the law.” Within the courtroom, intent may be inferred from actions that belie the “official” narrative: severe shunning of high-quality evidence; aggressive fabrication of false “evidence”; strict control of investigations; engagement of “experts” only from their pool of known imposters; denial of due process; outright felony crimes; and extreme indifference to the suffering, mental and physical decline, and even death of the targeted groups.

Culpable acts are systematically directed against targeted individuals — singled out as “alienators” — who live through a personal holocaust that does not end with mere character assassination, cultural effacement, or simple dismissal; commonly, the means of all meaningful survival are removed through seizure of assets, financial penalties, imprisonment, and deliberate obliteration of social or professional standing. Isolated from others like them because of “court seals” and “gag orders,” their experience is one of the greatest calamities conceivable, involving the loss of one’s children to often slow, calculated, malevolent torture and “soul murder” — which rather make immediate murder seem merciful. These repetitive experiences stand in stark contrast to the experience of other litigants who are not so targeted.

The unique quality of genocide is the special intent, or dolus specialis, of total eradication. This intent develops in stages, as delineated in detail through close examination across many dozens of cases of cynical corruption. These unlawful acts condoned in the Family Courts nurture brutality in individual violent abusers by bestowing on them impunity — and a perpetrator’s pathology is such that it continues to escalate until one achieves total annihilation. Many bring a “scorched earth” approach to begin with, but being encouraged and enabled as never before elsewhere, especially by a “court of law,” tempts them to go to the maximum: the obliteration of the lives, or at the very least the personhood, of their victims. This does not only happen with violent perpetrators who have already entered Family Court. Family Court, by offering “alternative justice,” where violent perpetrators become “victims” and can turn victims into “perpetrators”, serve as a compelling recruitment device for the most violent individuals society produces, who discover that they need only to apply for custody to access an easy path to exoneration and perpetuation of their plan to destroy all those they have a vendetta against, which for abusive personalities are those who have come in closest contact with them. Motives are increased especially when there is not just avoidance of prosecution but financial, reputational, and cultural rewards for doing so. Three out of four of women who are murdered by violent partners are killed after they leave them. These are the very pool of men from which Family Courts “harness” their lethality.

The presence of a State or organizational plan or policy can be seen in the Family Court “playbook”. A consistent, repetitious pattern can establish intent, which other organizations have identified as: “​Tactics Used to Switch Custody to Fathers and Conceal Abuse.” Among the noted patterns are: isolation of children from their mother, causing traumatic bonding with the father; “reunification” of children with fathers who have been convicted of violence; keeping protective mothers from their children for lengthy periods without contact or on costly supervised visits; the appointment of “therapists” to brainwash children into accepting the abuse; the facilitation of abusive fathers’ alienation or estrangement of children from their protective mothers; the use of gag orders and sealing of records to cover up paternal abuse and judicial bias; and threats against protective mothers with jail or loss of custody to extort silence and compliance, to mention just a few. For those who frequent the Family Courts, the extreme divergence in expectations from ordinary civil society; the immediate degradation, dehumanization, and persecution of the targeted group; and the remarkable consistency and efficiency across jurisdictions and even regions of the world make immediately clear that this is highly-organized crime, not coincidence.

In this manner, the detailed and general aspects of the mental element of genocide are fulfilled.

(In Part 2, we will discuss how Family Courts meet the criterion for industrial genocide.)

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Bandy X. Lee

Forensic psychiatrist, violence expert, president of the World Mental Health Coalition (worldmhc.org), and New York Times bestselling author.