More on the Problems Within the Family Court System

Family courts across our nation (and even around the globe) are violating fundamental basic human rights. Innocent children (Thomas Valva, Kyra Franchetti, and countless others) have died as a result when judges ignore the evidence and documented histories of abuse and violence and wrench children from their loving, safe homes, sending them to live with the abusive parent. In extreme cases, children are dying at the hands of their abusers. In other cases, children are suffering severe psychological, emotional, and/or physical abuse that may lead to life long struggles with self-destructive behavior, drug abuse, low self-esteem, suicidal ideation, PTSD, criminality, and more when they are denied access to one parent, especially their primary caregiver. We aim to reform the family court system, so that no parent will ever have to fear losing custody of her children if she reports abuse and no child will ever be tragically torn from his or her loving safe home. A domestic abuse survivor should not have to suffer retaliatory legal abuse by her ex partner, using their child as a pawn, for calling 911 to save her and/or her child's life. Family courts are enabling continued abuse of fit parents and children on a large scale, and we MUST stop it.

The family court apparatus is a multi-billion dollar industry, which has exploited innocent children for monetary gain (through the ordering and expansion of costly unnecessary “services”), rendering families broke, in debt, helpless, and at the mercy of diabolical court players and affiliates. The family court system, which is surprisingly still archaic and patriarchal, lacks essential domestic abuse training and disproportionately favors men over women, allowing abusers to weaponize the court system, often using the children as pawns, to further abuse their ex-partner, who is often pathologized and punished for speaking out about the abuse and trauma. Nationally, domestic violence survivors do not fare well in high-conflict custody battles. In a 2019 study conducted by George Washington University Law school professor Joan S. Meier, women who report abuse are at increased risk of losing their child. “More often than not, women who report abuse in family court are not believed and the disbelief is far greater when they report child abuse,” Meier said. Meier’s study, funded by the National Institute of Justice, found that mothers, who report child abuse, lose custody of their children to their abusers 30 to 50 percent of the time. Custody litigation can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and has depleted many families of the necessary resources to fight and protect the best interests of their children. High conflict custody cases further exacerbated by family court abuses and civil rights violations make finding competent legal counsel with expertise in this area that much more expensive and challenging.

Often court appointed 18b attorneys representing qualifying low-income mothers lack the time, resources, and fortitude to effectively defend a meritorious case, especially when it may entail challenging the bureaucracy and its unfair practices. These attorneys are underpaid and overwhelmed with cases, and since they are beholden to the court for case assignments, ruffling too many feathers would not bode well for garnering future work opportunities. Most agencies offering free legal services to low income and qualifying individuals also lack the resources not just to serve every person who is in need, but also to combat a very complex and layered system, which too often prioritizes monetary gain over justice and capitalizes on the vulnerability of protective mothers in favor of litigious abusive ex-partners. Additionally, many mothers do not qualify under the New York State indigency law for free legal representation in NY Family and Supreme Courts yet still cannot afford to hire a private attorney. Our organization fills this gap by serving parents who are unable to receive services elsewhere. Our comprehensive legal services include orders of protection, custody of minor children, and defense against false accusations by abusive fathers.

The stress of navigating a very dysfunctional family court system corrupted by special interests stacked against the protective fit parent and the safety and well-being of her child is traumatizing, especially when that mother has just escaped an abusive partner and is now faced with the fear and possibility of losing her child to her abusive ex, as efforts she makes to protect her child are more often than not characterized by family court players as “parental alienation” or “disruptive” to the abusive parent’s relationship with the child. The more fearful and distressed the mother appears, the more likely she will be pathologized as “paranoid” or “delusional”, and any concerns she may raise will be demeaned and dismissed as part of a “manufactured smear campaign” against her ex. Counseling and other therapeutic and supportive services are essential to helping these women validate their experiences, cope, heal, and maintain their emotional and psychological strength while combating a parent's worst nightmare. At Mommy’s Heart, we embrace an integrative, multi-pronged approach to healing and have recruited the help of volunteer holistic therapists and life coaches as well as licensed mental health professionals to provide emotional support to our parents and children in need.