The Nation’s Family Court Crisis

PLEASE READ—Ending this Danger to Our Future Depends on Your Interest!

A few days ago, I gave a presentation before a group of Harvard forensic psychiatrists on the situation of the Family Courts.  My co-presenters were two brave mother-survivors, Tina Swithin and Nataly Anderson.  An earlier version of their presentations can be found here.

Below was my introduction:

I devoted much of my career to public health approaches to violence prevention.  I have especially consulted with the World Health Organization since its launch of its landmark World Report on Violence and Health in 2002, co-authored recommendations for intimate partner violence prevention in 2004, and assisted in the creation of a chapter on “Violence against Children” with United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2007.  I have been advising global governments on violence prevention programming since 2011.  Yet, nothing prepared me for the shock of the Family Courts, to which I was introduced not through my two decades as an expert witness for the courts, but through personal exposure.  And I would say that the benignly named “Family Courts” are one of the most hidden but most dangerous public health threats on U.S. soil right now.  They rival the prisons I have studied and worked to reform in having become “monster factories.”  They are contributing to our nation’s inability to remain a democracy.  Let me explain what I mean.

Extreme secrecy through “court seals” and virtually unlimited discretion—which means unlimited power—have essentially allowed Family Courts to, under legal auspices, literally kidnap children, place them with their abusers, and restrain their primary caregivers, and any others who could protect them, from access to them for years if not decades at a time.  Over the last two years, I have been involved in approximately two dozen so-called “custody battles,” which are really domestic violence cases.  In my experience so far, 100 percent of abused children have gone to the sole custody of their predators: a six-year-old who had her father put a gun to her head and a knife to her vagina has gone to her tormentor, a five-year-old rape victim to her rapist, a four-year-old returning with marks of daily battery to his batterer, an infant with venereal disease to his sodomizer, and a child who witnessed his loving parent’s murder given to the murderer’s family, so that the murderer can still have access.  To hide the abuse, the primary caregiving parent, overwhelmingly the mother, regularly loses contact with her children altogether.

According to Dr. Joyanna Silberg, an extremely conservative estimate shows that approximately 60,000 children are court-ordered to unsupervised custody of their abusers every year.  This happens because, even though false reports of abuse are as rare as 0.1 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Human Health Services, Family Courts disbelieve abuse allegations a vast majority of the time.  The Center for Judicial Excellence recently testified before the U.S. Congress, noting that a child is murdered every six days because of Family Court rulings.  For every murder, there are many more suicides, and for every death, there are hundreds of serious injuries requiring medical attention.

In other words, in the name of “the best interests of the child,” Family Courts are doing the greatest harm to children and the parent who cares most about them—who is usually (but not always) the mother.  These methods have spread across all fifty U.S. states and are being exported abroad.  A United Nations special rapporteur recently wrote a report for the Human Rights Council, stating that “the failure to address intimate partner violence and violence against children in custody rights and visitation decisions is a form of [human rights violation] that could amount to torture.”  Prof. Jane Spinak of Columbia Law School recently published End of Family Court, outlining how “the great idea” of exceptional procedures in Family Court has resulted in extraordinary harm and can only be fixed by the abolition of a system that has been unaccountable for 120 years.  A rare study of maternal deaths by Dr. Elizabeth Dalgarno has helped expose a Family Court “scandal” in the United Kingdom.

Since I am relatively new in my research into the Family Courts, I have asked two remarkable mothers to recount their personal experiences to the group, and they have graciously agreed to do so.

*Tina Swithin from California, and then Nataly Anderson from the U.K., both gave tragic and stirring accounts of how Family Court removed their children from their care to force them into isolation with their and their children’s abusers.  Years later, Ms. Swithin has her children back only because her ex-husband exposed them to a man who sexually molested thirty children and would be sentenced to 240 years in prison.  Ms. Anderson is not so lucky, and this will be her seventh Christmas without her twin sons, from whom she was separated when they were just two-and-a-half years old.

The public needs to be aware of the horrific victimization that is happening as the “regular” practice of Family Courts.  What lies behind the iron wall of secrecy is even darker.  I used to call the criminal justice system “the criminal injustice system,” and now, I call family courts “family annihilation courts”—at best.  At worst, Family Courts are organized crime cartels: they are this country’s main child-trafficking operation, a major source of child pornography, and a 60 billion-dollar industry that colludes with pedophilic rings along both Coasts.  They even partially explain the popularity of QAnon theories. Family Courts are not beholden to any law (unlike any other court) but receive the protection and immunity of the Law, which makes them more dangerous than criminal gangs.  The immense human rights violations that occur through them are able to go on because no one in the outside world imagines that “Family Courts” could be engaged in the destruction of families, and those who are caught in these “Courts” are quickly destroyed, so that no one will believe them.  Just as with the Holocaust, as long as a nation is disinterested in the most vulnerable members of society, tens of thousands of children per year will continue to be sentenced to lifelong torture if not death—as they are sent to their rape, battery, and murder.

*This topic astounded my colleagues at Harvard, since most well-credentialed psychiatrists are never exposed to Family Court (which usually draws from its own pool of poorly-qualified “experts”). There will soon be a dramatic exposé of this issue through a documentary, a television series, and my upcoming book, The Dangerous Case of Family Courts.