Family Court Crisis; Our Children at Risk

www.CenterForJudicialExcellence.org

http://blip.tv/file/1199654/

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Nancy Lee Grahn (Alexis/GH) Testifies About Personal Ordeal

By Michele Dargan | Monday, April 27, 2009, 10:46 PM

An interesting press release arrived today that I thought I’d share with you.

When I saw Nancy Lee Grahn’s name in the headline, it immediately got my attention.

And as I read on, it became even more interesting.

As a soap fan, I have - for years - enjoyed Nancy Lee Grahn’s portrayal of the strong, smart, ever-so-efficient attorney Alexis Davis.

But I had no idea that she was involved in a court battle regarding her child.

According to this release, Grahn is testifying Tuesday at the California Assembly Judiciary Committee Hearing on behalf of Bill AB 612. If passed, the bill would outlaw the use of Parental Alienation Syndrome to gain custody of children in divorce situations.

The syndrome describes behavior where one parent turns a child against the other by convincing the child the parent has treated him or her badly, even when they have not. Many call it “junk science” and are trying to get it banned from being used to gain custody in divorce cases.

Below is the press release which describes Grahn’s participation in these hearings and her support for this bill.

T.V. Star Nancy Lee Grahn to Join Dozens of Family Court Victims to Urge Passage of Assemblyman Jim Beall’s AB 612

What: Pre-Hearing Press Conference

Who: Daytime TV Celebrity Nancy Lee Grahn & dozens of family court victims & court reform advocates

When: 8:30AM on Tuesday, April 28 - Press Conference; 9:00AM Hearing in Room 4202

Where: State Capitol- Room 444

Acclaimed television star Nancy Lee Grahn will address reporters tomorrow about her personal family court ordeal before she testifies on behalf of AB 612 at the California Assembly Judiciary Committee Hearing. Grahn will join dozens of parents and children to speak about the ravages of Parental Alienation Syndrome, or PAS, on their lives, and the desperate need for family court reform.

Like thousands of parents in California’s family courts, Grahn was falsely accused of alienating her child against her father, yet she eventually prevailed in her protecting her child. AB 612 would outlaw the use of this unscientific theory that is typically responsible for placing more than 58,000 children per year in the U.S. into dangerous homes with parents the children have identified as their molesters and abusers (Leadership Council on Child Abuse & Interpersonal Violence). Beall’s bill is just one of a handful of measures addressing the need for family court reform in California this year.

PAS is a controversial, unscientific theory that does not meet legal evidentiary standards, yet it is commonly used in family courts everywhere. PAS and related alienation theories are not accepted or endorsed by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, American Psychological Association, American Prosecutors Research Institute, National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse, and nearly all credible researchers on the subject.

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Newark protesters rally against family court system for alleged bias against battered women

by Paul Brubaker/The Star-Ledger

Monday April 27, 2009, 6:55 PM

More than 50 people rallied in Newark for reform in the family court system with chants, protest signs and speeches alleging there is a national crisis of judges awarding child custody to violent, even sexually abusive, fathers.

But Essex County's top judge defended the local family courts as a meticulously careful system that acts in the best interests of children, even if it means terminating someone's parental rights.

Ed Murray/The Star-LedgerA husband and wife sit in front of a Newark family court judge in 2003. Protesters today demonstrated in front of the Wilentz Justice Complex against judges awarding child custody to violent and/or sexually abusive fathers.

In front of the Wilentz Justice Complex on Washington Street, which houses Essex County's family courts, speakers targeted the system as being biased against battered women and holding archaic attitudes that domestic violence and sexual abuse were private problems.

"A mother's basic instinct is to protect her children. She should not be punished for it," said Maretta Short of East Orange, president of the state's chapter of the National Organization for Women.

"In the last 30 years, every institution in this society has changed its views toward domestic violence," said Evan Stark, a professor at Rutgers University's School of Public Affairs and Administration. "Only in the family court do the obsolete beliefs that were discredited everywhere else in society still prevail."

Stark said part of the problem is that state laws require judges to detail their decisions for not awarding child custody to an abusive parent. The result is that judges avoid the issue by not admitting evidence of domestic abuse into the hearings, Stark said.

Later, Superior Court Assignment Judge Patricia Costello disputed Stark's assessment of family court judges.

"They don't punt on the tough issues to avoid tough decisions," Costello said. "They make tough decisions. When the parents can't decide who raises the children, the judge makes the call."

All judges are bound by the rules of evidence and their rulings must be based on careful consideration and backed by detailed documentation, the judge said. All the while, the family court judge must remain dispassionate during proceedings that are often highly emotional, she added.

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/18-8

Published on Saturday, April 18, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Denormalizing the Signs of Impending Disaster

by Michael Schwalbe

Warning signs can go unheeded because we normalize them. According to some analysts, this is what happened in the case of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. On January 28, 1986, less than two minutes after taking off, the shuttle's solid rocket boosters exploded, killing all seven astronauts aboard.
In her book The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA, sociologist Diane Vaughan asks why NASA managers decided to launch the shuttle, despite warnings from engineers that the mission should be delayed because of potential problems with the solid rocket boosters in the below-normal January cold.

Vaughan's answer points to what was normal in the social world of NASA at that time: minor compromises in design and performance; equipment that deviated slightly from specifications; and pushing ahead with flight schedules, despite engineers' worries over seemingly small technical anomalies.

According to Vaughan, the recommendation to delay the flight was ignored because having problems and anomalies on the shuttle were taken-for-granted aspects of NASA culture. So was the tendency for engineers to worry. Against this backdrop, Vaughan says, signals of danger appeared mixed, weak, and routine, and thus were not taken seriously enough.

So far this year, eight mass shootings have resulted in nearly 60 deaths. As at NASA in the case of the Challenger, there have been ample warning signs. But because these signs are so commonplace in our culture, we have either ignored or failed to see them.

After each shooting, the question has been asked, Why do people do this sort of thing? The experts typically consulted are psychologists, who cite depression, social isolation, anger, and shame as causes. The most often mentioned contextual factor is the easy availability of guns.

But to ask, Why do people do this sort of thing?, is already to ignore the obvious pattern. It is not people of all kinds who kill because they are depressed, isolated, despairing, angry, or feeling shame. The shooters are all men. So the question we should be asking is, Why do men do this sort of thing?

One reason this question is seldom asked is that violence and manhood in U.S. culture are thoroughly normalized. As anti-violence educator Jackson Katz documents in his film "Tough Guise," over the past twenty years violence has come to be the defining feature of manhood in America. Violence and masculinity have become nearly synonymous.

This is not to say that all men are violent, or even that all men go around pretending to be Rambo just beneath the surface. Of course not. Yet all men are judged by a cultural standard that says a real man -- one who deserves all the privileges of being a member of the dominant gender group -- should have a capacity for violence and a willingness to use it when necessary.

The same cultural standard says that real men are able to exert control over the environment, over others, and over themselves. To be a victim of external forces is thus nearly the opposite of what it means to be a man in U.S. culture. It is hard to feel put upon, demeaned, or controlled by others, and still feel worthy of respect as a man.

The great contradiction, however, is that in a capitalist society most men don't have much power. A relative handful of men control vast economic resources, make laws, control the police, and command armies. These men can indeed make decisions, backed by force, that deny most other men and nearly all women control over their own lives.

On the one hand, then, real men are expected to be able to exert control; on the other hand, they lack the resources -- wealth, status, institutional authority -- to do so. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that some men try to compensate for their lack of power by displaying a capacity for violence, or a lack of fear of other men's violence.

Most of the time, most men are not overtly violent. But when a man tries to exert control and then rages against people and circumstances that frustrate these efforts, we are not necessarily alarmed. We are not alarmed because he is doing what we expect men to do.

Fortunately, such frustration does not usually lead to mass killing. Yet this is simply the logical extreme to which violent masculinity leads. When the burden of shame for failing to meet the cultural standards of manhood becomes unbearable, and a man feels there is nothing left to lose, mass killing may be a perverse attempt to restore, with irreversible finality, a sense of control.

As at NASA, the warning signs today are abundant. But they are mixed, weak, and routine.

Not all men are violent. Nor are men who occasionally commit acts of violence always violent; they can often be kind and gentle, too. And because it is possible to point to rare instances when women are violent, we can be misled into thinking there is nothing special about men that should compel our attention.

But the most serious problem is that we normalize the relationship between manhood and violence, and thus we take for granted what should be clear warnings about the potential for violence that our society instills in every man. When men learn to stake their self-worth on having power and being in control, and yet live under conditions that frustrate and humiliate them, we should not be surprised when explosions occur.

It may be strangely comforting to see the problem of mass shootings as a psychological one. If the problem stems from psychopathology, then we don't have to look critically at our culture of manhood or at how our society concentrates power in a few hands. Certainly, men suffering from depression and excessive anger may benefit from support and therapy. But therapy will never solve our collective violence problem.

If we understand the problem in cultural terms, we can see that the dangers go beyond being the victim of a "random" shooting. The logic of violent masculinity puts the whole planet at risk. By this logic, the natural world has no value in itself, but exists mainly to provide resources for expanding one's power. By the same logic, which is also the logic of U.S. imperialism, it is better to destroy the world than to fail to dominate it.

What we need is a cultural shift away from defining manhood and nationhood in terms of a capacity to dominate. We need to reject the worship of power and of "commanders-in-chief," and instead make democracy the primary value by which we judge our social institutions. The warning signs are all around, writ small in every mass shooting and writ large in every war. Our survival depends on denormalizing these signs and heeding them soon.

Michael Schwalbe is a professor of sociology at North Carolina State University.  He can be reached at MLSchwalbe@nc.rr.com.   

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Step-Mom Charged In Death of Toddler

The mother of two year old Daytona Robertson had 50/50 Custody and filed motion to protect Daytona because someone was abusing her!

 There was no evidence to indicate the mother was abusing Daytona, but  Judge Tony Powell terminated Daytona's time with her mother and placed her solely with her dad and step-mom.

   Daytona died in dad's home a couple weeks later due to new abuse. 

The one thing that the Judges here care about more than the children, is covering for their error even though Kansas Statutes have provisions for Custody changes if the children are suffering due to a Judge's Custody error.

After Tony Powell made his Custody Ruling and placed Daytona solely in dad's home and Daytona was killed a couple weeks later in dad's home, the Wichita Eagle then came out with a story quoting Judge Tony Powell as saying

“...that he did not believe he made a custody error and other Judge's told him that they would have done the same.  That needs to change and I have no intention of being a coward or going away unless they illegally put me in jail again.  Yes I can show it was illegal. “

How can any person or God be so blind as to claim they did not make a custody error when there was no evidence against the mother and then the little girl ends up dead.

In a late 2008 hearing Judge Powell was informed my children's mother has been reported to SRS for the fifth time by the WPD and Mandated Reporters at two or three different schools (what rightly concerned parent would not point this out to a Professional like Judge Powell that is supposed to be concerned about children?!).

The children's mother also got fired from Kinder-Care after being warned about her behaviors around other people's children!

Then Judge Powell stated in Court that these people (all these Mandated Reporters) might simply be people that dislike the children's mother, and the Court fabricated a reason to cut the children off from me because

when  “ the Court is wrong, it pushes in the direction of a greater wrong!”

Crime Scene KC

- 11:50am

Practically everybody knew 2-year-old Daytona Robertson was being abused -- but nobody was able to stop the Wichita toddler from being beaten to death in ...
blogs.kansascity.com/crime_scene/2008/04/why-did-daytona.html - Similar pages -

 

NewsRadio 1330 KNSS - Daytona Robertson May Be Child Abuse Victim

Feb 29, 2008 ... Randy Landen says two-year-old Daytona Robertson was taken to Wesley Medical Center a week ago, and doctors discovered she had suffered ...
www.knssradio.com/Daytona-Robertson-May-Be-Abuse-Victim/1744372 - Similar pages -

Circumstances Around Daycare Death Known - Hot List - CafeMom

Mar 30, 2008 ... 27 year-old Katie Cornejo-Robertson is accused of killing 2 year-old Daytona Robertson. Robertson died Wednesday, days after being treated ...
www.cafemom.com/hotlist/current_events/2438/Circumstances_Around_Daycare_Death_Known?panel=comments&next... - 43k - Cached - Similar pages -

Daytona Joe-Lei Robertson Video by tommy - MySpace Video

 

 

The Kansas CW | Jurors Hear from Doctor Who Performed Daytona ...

Jurors in the Katie Cornejo murder trial heard from the coroner who examined Daytona Robertson's body. Dr. Deborah Johnson is showing the court several ...
www.kansascw.com/Global/story.asp?S=10195437 - 28 minutes ago - Similar pages -

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