An Epidemic of Judicial Injustice

It is Not Just the Supreme Court; Family Courts are Another Epicenter of Corruption

There is a hidden epidemic rampant in our country.

This epidemic actively contributes to the destruction of children and families, the trauma of which extends through the lifespan.  It adds to the anxiety, depression, and other forms of mental illness plaguing our country, leading to much unnecessary suffering.  And all too often, it is the kind of harm that contributes to acute rises in child suicides and to a growing culture of violence and trauma.  It is pervasive enough to affect our democracy.

Much of the outside world has not even heard about it, as it occurs under the veil of Family Court secrecy.

In the United States, one in five children are physically abused, one in four sexually abused, and a larger number psychologically abused.  These are underestimates, as child abuse is grossly underreported.

But even when allegations of abuse come to light, Family Courts disbelieve them 95 percent of the time.  The rate of false allegations is 0.1 to 2 percent, depending on the study.  This means that 93 to 94.9 percent of the time the Courts are sending the children to the wrong parent.

This is not just ignorance and incompetence.  Family Courts have become the epicenter of judicial corruption and an emblem of how structures no longer work when profit becomes the main motive.  Children are a commodity, and selling them, often to their injury and death, is extremely lucrative.

Victims of the system are not permitted to reveal the judicial abuses they have endured, even to family members.  This is because Family Courts have the exceptional power to blanket “seal” their records.

Therefore I, a forensic psychiatrist who have testified in close to a hundred court cases around the country, with nearly two decades of teaching at Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School, was unaware of this epidemic until it struck my family personally. 

One quickly learns why: in Family Court, due process is denied and human rights no longer apply, but all is hidden through “gag orders” and isolation.  The violence of offenders not only goes unpunished but is rewarded, and the innocent parent is railroaded into losing not only the children she (or sometimes he) raised, the house, and her assets—but into paying any level of child support the abuser (almost always the richer party) demands. An inability to pay often lands her in bankruptcy or in jail.

Defying all decency, Family Courts are thus deliberately sending abused children to their tormentors, rapists, and murderers, while barring the nurturing, caring parent from contact.  Given that more than five children per day die from abuse in America, the number directly attributable to Family Courts amounts to a massacre.  And for every child who dies, there are hundreds of children undergoing torture.

Scholars have accumulated a mountain of evidence, but reform efforts will not succeed unless the 50-plus-billion-dollar for-profit industry is exposed—and the public applies pressure.

To illustrate this, I will describe how my own sister’s divorce has morphed into the greatest calamity that could befall a family: sudden, permanent separation of small children from their loving mother, as if they were dead to each other, alongside a court-appointed “guardian ad litem” who constantly inculcates in them that their mother has abandoned them and no longer loves them.

The previously absentee, abusive father—a corporate lawyer and a disciple of Alan Dershowitz—was manageable before the divorce, but once he weaponized Family Court, everything reversed.  The children were court-mandated to visit him, overriding a restraining order against him for slamming his 7-year-old son’s head against a window, and soon he, who on another occasion almost killed his infant daughter, now has sole custody of both.

The mother has not seen or heard from her children for almost two years, and since learning last year that one of her children missed almost one-half of school and suffered an orthopedic injury that was neglected for months, she has been barred from accessing school and medical records.

Domestic violence offenders can thus play out their fantasy in Family Court: to turn the tables on their victims to make them the perpetrators, and to call their healthy counterparts “mentally ill.”

The Family Court has a playbook for this: to draw upon their choice “experts” to declare the innocent parent “mentally unfit.”  In my sister’s case, nine world-renowned psychiatrists and doctorate psychologists evaluated her, but even their unanimous consensus on her “excellent mental health” and her “exceptional talent in parenting” did not matter.  The Court relied on a single unqualified, non-fully-licensed “associate counselor’s” report stating that her speech was “tangential” to deny her even one minute with her children for almost two years (the abuser, on the other hand, could be a pedophile and is still often favored!).

Since learning about this incredible crisis, I have exclusively taken on Family Court cases for my forensic work.  Each situation is as horrific as the next, and my sister’s case turns out to be one of the more benign!  A recent film, “Take Care of Maya,” reveals the judicial system’s callous disinterest in protecting parent-child bonds, in apparent collusion with big-money interests, which is amplified a thousand times in the Family Courts.

The scale and scope of the problem constitutes a public health emergency.  Anyone who cares about protecting children, about human rights, and about preserving a viable democracy, should care about reforming the Family Courts.

Family Court violence is endemic in all fifty U.S. states, and one can see the dysfunction of a nation forming in the microcosm of Family Courts.  Violence is rewarded, while dissidents and whistleblowers are arrested and imprisoned by secret “court orders.”  “Evaluators”, who may not be easily employable anywhere else are awarded with tens, if not hundreds, of thousand dollars for generating false reports that brand caring parents “mentally ill” (even those who do not have a doctorate charge five to twenty times as much as I!).  Our children, and hence our future, are the ones to pay, as they become society’s next generation of abusers and/or fawners of those who would abuse them.