FORUM: Parental rights and wrongs

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After another tragedy of children being killed by their father in the context of high-conflict custody litigation, court professionals, fathers-rights' leaders and others have been engaging in excuses including: inadequate evidentiary standards, or insufficient evidence or biases against mothers, to avoid blaming the courts.

As the founder of the National Alliance for Family Court Justice (NAFCJ), the oldest grass-roots national group of protective mothers (since 1993) with a data bank of more than 1,500 intake callers, I know of many mothers with mishandled cases worse than that of Silver Spring's Amy Castillo, except for the lethal ending. Her estranged husband is held in the drowning deaths of their three children in a Baltimore hotel.

Many mothers not only lost all custody rights but all visitation rights. Judges and court professionals routinely disregard and proactively work against mothers who make abuse complaints against fathers. Even the mother's own attorney will tell her to keep her mouth shut because nobody want to hear about abuse.

Omitted from the debate are important factors:

(1) Widespread use in custody litigation of the discredited pro-incest/anti-mother Parental Alienation Syndrome (P.A.S.), a custody evaluation methodology that purports to identify manipulation by one parent against the other parent.

(2) Steering to judges who are cross-affiliated to fathers' rights leaders, facilitated by a secretive judicial group.

(3) Organized case-rigging to ensure abuse complaints by mothers are discredited.

(4) Use of federal HHS-ACF (Health And Human Services Department — Administration For Children And Families — Access-Visitation) program funds, intended for parental counseling and resolving disputes but instead diverted to pay for pro-father custody evaluations.

Knowledge of this pattern has come from sources such as fathers' rights literature, feedback from whistleblowers, documents mistakenly placed in court files, and threatening remarks by fathers demanding the mother agree to their litigation terms: (e.g., You better agree to joint custody, because the judge is on my side and will never rule in your favor).

Judges handling these pro-father rigged cases leave a trail of evidence — such as refusing to hear witnesses against the father as being prejudicial, then ruling against the mother on false grounds that she lied about the abuse because she had no witnesses to support her complaint while ignoring the fact the judge refused to listen to the witness or read submitted medical documents.