Read more Here: A Cancer Spreading in the Custody Court System
Edited to The Kansas case Claudine Dombrowski read full article here:
By Barry Goldstein
The concept of Custody-Visitation Scandal Cases was developed because of the frequency of extreme results in custody cases in which children are endangered, safe, protective mothers are denied any meaningful relationship with their children
The Battered Mothers Custody Conference was started in response to what we believed were too many of these tragic cases to be viewed as exceptions.
In most cases mothers are pathologized or demonized in order to create the appearance of a justification for the extreme actions taken. To illustrate the problem, I want to look at four of these extreme cases because they represent the kinds of mistakes the court system routinely makes and will continue to make until it changes practices that were developed at a time when no research was available and have proven to be detrimental to the children the courts are
2. In a well known Kansas case that I have discussed with Claudine Dombrowski the protective mother, the father has numerous convictions for domestic violence and other crimes and a poor relationship with the daughter. Despite this, the court gave custody to the father and imposed ever greater restrictions on the mother's access to the daughter.
The mother has been active in exposing the broken court system and the court has wasted large amounts of time and money seeking to remove information from the Internet and silence the mother's concerns.
The court has retaliated against the mother with reductions in visitation and a variety of sanctions.
Instead we see the kind of retaliation and punitive measures harmful to children that was used in the Kansas cases. Read more here:
This contributes to the widespread inability of custody courts to recognize domestic violence and in turn led to the mistakes in these four cases and other cases endangering over 58,000 children every year.
As with many mistaken decisions, the mother has been pathologized by the unqualified professionals involved in the case. Since they "know" the mother's allegations are false and she continues to believe them, she must be "delusional" and therefore unfit for anything but supervised visitation. If she were delusional, it would stand to reason that this would present a problem in the rest of her life.
These professionals have never stopped to consider how she can be successful professionally, academically and in all other phases of her life. Perhaps the DSM should include a new condition "delusional in the custody courts." www.WhoresoftheCourt.com
Given the clear conflict of interest (they are seeking to remove materials that criticize the court), at the very least they would need convincing evidence that the mother's beliefs would create a long-term harm to the child.
Similarly, the removal of the mother from the child's life, although she is the primary attachment figure creates a serious risk of harm to the child that the court has failed to address.
Until the court can cite evidence or research to support its assumptions, the extreme actions present at least an appearance of impropriety.
Ironically in the Kansas case of Claudine Dombrowski the courts put a high priority on placing the children with the parent it viewed as most likely to promote a relationship with the other parent, but when the abusive fathers sought to deny the children a meaningful relationship with the parent the children most need (the primary attachment figure), the same priority of keeping both parents in the children's lives was no longer paramount. This is a common mistake in the custody courts and is one example of the widespread gender bias faced by mothers.
I believe it is outrageous that the custody courts have not made children's safety the first priority.
In the Kansas cases the courts seem to have unlimited time and resources to investigate the "danger" the children might hear their mothers' concern for their safety and well being.
In the absence of such safety issues it is virtually always wrong for courts to take the extreme action of barring unsupervised visitation. This is certainly true when it is done in the context of mothers trying to protect their children from fathers they believe are unsafe. The research establishes that because of the outdated and discredited practices court professionals routinely use, a large majority of findings denying the mothers' allegations are mistaken.
In other words the harm to the children of these visitation restrictions is almost always greater than the harm the court thinks it is avoiding.
This was explained by
"Otherwise as shown in many parts of this book, courts often make mistakes that place the lives and safety of protective mothers and their children in jeopardy. In this context, it is important for courts that rule against alleged victims of DV to be open to the possibility that they made a mistake. Courts should be reluctant to take punitive or retaliatory actions against mothers who continue to believe their partners abused them."
The courts in Kansas could have saved the children a lot of harm (and still can) by following this advice based on the most up-to-date research available.
The elephant in the room is the issue of corruption. Every time courts make decisions that appear to have no relationship to the evidence presented and make orders that cannot possibly benefit the children involved, they create the appearance of corruption.
When courts seek to silence protective mothers and retaliate for criticism of the court or their abuser, they are promoting the belief that only corruption could explain these extreme and harmful decisions.
There are cases decided by corruption.
More commonly mental health professionals and some attorneys Guardian Ad Litems’ (Jill Dykes, Rene Netherton) have adopted beliefs and practices that favor abusers because that is where the money is.
Today there is a cancer on the custody court system. Some children are dying and others have their lives ruined by unjustified and extreme decisions. Rita Smith, Executive Director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence wrote in her Afterward to our new book that once the book is published anyone who continues to use the old practices must be understood to be committing malpractice.
The four cases discussed in this article were originally decided based upon the old discredited practices. It is too late to save the children in California and Maryland. (entire article here:)
We can still help the children in New Jersey and Kansas by taking a fresh look at the cases based on the up-to-date research now available. I hope they will treat the research as a gift and not an attack and use it to remove the cancer on the court system. In doing so the court system can support my view that the mistaken decisions are not based on corruption.
Barry Goldstein is a nationally recognized domestic violence expert, speaker, writer and consultant. He is the co-editor with Mo Therese Hannah of DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, ABUSE and CHILD CUSTODY.
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