The Untold Barbarity and Brutality of the Family Courts
A Health Professional’s Introduction
When forensic mental health experts first enter the court system, we are warned that it is a “different universe” with its “own way of doing things.” Indeed, when I was medical faculty teaching at a law school for seventeen years, I spoke to law students of how law school is an “acculturation process,” just as medical school was for me. This, in part, helps professional training and the adoption of habits and ways of processing that facilitate our becoming specialists in our respective fields. However, who could prepare any civilized, unsuspecting person — professional or not — for the organized crime that is hidden in the Family “Courts”? I actually call Family Courts “anti-courts” because they are the very antithesis of a court of law, but that is only the beginning. Through total secrecy, unlimited judicial “discretion”, poor-quality judges, and grotesque racketeering, these entities have become the epicenter of unspeakable human depravity, barbaric injustices, and brutality against the most vulnerable members of our society. Children, instead of being protected, are the first to be preyed upon, tortured, battered, raped, and murdered (see the statistics of one thousand children who have been murdered). And loving parents, instead of being supported, are stripped of their children, their possessions, their profession, and their dignity, if not their lives (many die through suicide, heart attack, cancer, and other Family Court-caused illnesses, if not murder). Buttressed by tightly-guarded cronyism, judges and court officers can create their own alternative reality by redefining abuse as “good”, empathy as “bad”, and the courtroom their playground for sadistic cruelties. Health professionals do not have this choice; being data-driven, they must witness the untold human suffering from in and out of court. Yet, there is nothing one can do, since court officials are the ultimate arbiters of “truth”, no matter how untethered to reality or the law (as are Family Courts). Below is an essay I invited upon a therapist contacting me, stating: “I’ve been shocked and horrified as a trauma therapist, by the behavior of Family Court toward my clients. I just thought it was misogyny and lack of training, [but supervising a social worker Family Court victim,] I think it may be a bigger problem than we thought….” Here is her expanded essay:
Family Court Perpetuates Coercive Control Abuse
By Pamela Rogers
I first noticed there was a problem in Family Court when I worked in community mental health, running a Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) group. I got referrals from Family Court, and at first, I saw it as positive, thinking in good faith that they were sending traumatized Domestic Violence survivors to DBT because it helped those symptoms, as well as borderline personality disorder. Many of these clients had no choice but to comply, whether it worked for their jobs or for their psychological state or not. The process just imposed undue stress on them and almost none of them met criteria for Borderline Personality, so it wasn’t necessary they attend. That’s when I realized the problem. These women weren’t being referred to our service for their own good, but for their perpetrators, so that they could be labeled with a problematic personality disorder and be made responsible for the trauma they endured. Their stories told in individual sessions revealed their pain at being separated from their children by the court and that they had considered suicide over the loss. I assumed, at first, there was more to their stories, something to justify it, such as substance abuse, anything, but I never really identified much in nearly all cases.
Around that time, I had an individual therapy case who had shared custody with a man who had been observed to be abusive toward her child. This woman was not only unable to report suspected abuse or risk her custody but was prevented from having her daughter examined by a doctor around suspected sexual abuse by a guardian ad litem appointed by the court who had a relationship with the father. This same guardian ad litem failed to hold the father accountable for using a breathalyzer when her daughter was with him, as ordered by the court, as well as using a sealed document of her taking her daughter to a doctor out of concern over her frequent UTI’s against her after taking away her right to take medical and educational decisions. They effectively shut down her will to fight for her daughter’s safety.
Later, in private practice, I heard even more heinous stories, first the pattern of coercive control, of isolation and terrifying abuse, sometimes while pregnant, followed by use of the court system to continue the pattern of intimidation and emotional abuse around co-parenting. My clients would be discouraged by attorneys from bringing up their domestic violence issues at all, to avoid being penalized by the court. Family court would only allow them shared custody if they could prove they could effectively co-parent with their abuser, often being forced into co-parenting counseling together. They would then be penalized for their dissociative or reactive symptoms in that highly inappropriate setting. Co-parenting and family therapists were often chosen by their abuser and were therefore sympathetic to only their side and inappropriate and grossly unqualified for counseling in a domestic violence situation. They were generally not open to my input in the situation, my clients being presented as unstable borderline personalities, and they were not. It is my experience that clients that do meet criteria for BPD, when in treatment, are appropriate parents, but vulnerable to the stresses of domestic violence and community violence perpetuated against them by Family Court.
Additionally, I began to see patterns of what I now understand to be predatory alienation perpetrated by my clients’ abusers, who at the same time accused their victims of “alienating” parental affection by telling their abuse stories. That is classic “accuse the other of that which you are guilty” — the gaslighting common in coercive control abuse. “Parental alienation” is misunderstood by the court system since it was hijacked by abusers to prevent their victims from telling their stories, right from the beginning. This is why attorneys discourage clients from bringing up domestic violence and even from suing for child support when they have a dangerous ex. It seems these dangerous personalities will easily manipulate the Family Court system to get custody, even primary custody, to avoid child support, or even get support from their victims.
“Parental alienation” involves the exaggeration of parental mistakes that under normal circumstances would not impact parental attachment but would be used by abusers to continue the pattern of abuse. If it doesn’t involve serious violence or terrifying behavior, I know as a trauma therapist, it wouldn’t impair that attachment without the pattern of alienating behavior, which can literally flip the attachment from the safe parent to the abusive one, in a pattern like Stockholm syndrome. Children remain attached to even grossly abusive parents as they are hard wired for attachment as a survival strategy. If children have impaired attachment toward parents with whom they have previously had healthy attachment, this pattern of alienation should be investigated by the courts.
Clients don’t recover from trauma if they can’t tell their stories, so they must be able to tell the trauma story, and the children who observed the trauma must hear it to avoid the dissociative symptoms common in these dysfunctional family systems. There is a way to tell the stories without alienating parental affection, if there is evidence the offending parent is mending their ways. If not, they have no business having custody of the children regardless. I have advocated for the rights of fathers, but not at the expense of victims of domestic violence. Both parents are important in the lives of the children, but only if they are not actively abusing their children, and actual predatory alienation is child abuse. Family Court needs to be educated on what that pattern really involves to avoid participating in the pattern of coercive control abuse after divorce.
