YES, THERE IS A CRISIS IN FAMILY COURTS

Glenn Sacks and Fathers & Families are crowing about defeating the Center of Judicial Excellence’s attempt to have junk science thrown out of the courtroom. Women get screwed frequently in family courts nationwide….guys do too. And when an injustice happens, it can often be traced back to some unethical, biased psychologist or pseudo-psychologist such as Janelle Burrillof Sacramento, California, whose ABE Board Certification was recently revoked. Removing immunity that these Court-POS’s enjoy now would make cases more just and more fair for everyone, mothers and fathers. I don’t know why Fathers & Families wouldn’t want that.

But instead, they use this to garner funds from fathers hurting from court battles (excerpt from F&F’s mailing today):

The defeat of AB 612 is a victory for the family court reform movement and for children everywhere. Victories cost money, as does our deep, professional involvement inside the political system—please support our successful work by making a tax-deductible contribution by clicking here.

This is the second time in two months that Fathers & Families has been instrumental in defeating a Center for Judicial Excellence bill—in June, we helped kill AB 2475, which was also related to Parental Alienation. To learn more, see F & F Helps Defeat Radical Bill from Opponents of Recognizing Parental Alienation.

Whereas Fathers and Families’ family court reform bills have been moving swiftly through the California legislature, the Center for Judicial Excellence is now 0-2 in the 2009-2010 legislative session.

The CJE claims that there’s a “crisis” in family courts, and that courts are handing over custody of children to physically and sexually abusive fathers. They promote reforms which will make it easier to deny parents shared custody or visitation rights based on unsubstantiated abuse claims. As we’ve noted before, there is no empirical basis supporting this claim. The vast majority of the cases that groups like the CJE put forward as alleged examples of this “crisis” of abusive fathers winning child custody are being badly misrepresented–to learn more, click here.

I can tell you there are many mothers that lose their children to abusive fathers.  I hear from them all the time.

I am a double dipper here. My father, who used to frequently abuse my mother in front of my siblings and myself, and sometimes the neighbors, gained custody of us kids.  Once Dad got tired of taking care of us, not even a year later, we ended up all split apart, in a series of foster homes and group homes, trying to keep us out of reach of our mother.  He was successful for years.  I can attest to the fact that it destroyed our childhoods.  Now my own children are in this situation.

I’ll be getting out a list of these California legislators that insist junk science (such as William Bernet’s so-called “Parental Alienation Disorder” that will become a financial boom for the family law industry if incorporated into the DSM-V) be used in the courts, and that unethical, biased psychologists are protected.  These people need to be run out of office.

Denying that mothers are being faced with this in court is wrong, and is probably related to the increased murder-suicide rate currently predominantly from fathers as seen here and here.  The madness has got to stop before we lose a whole generation of children to violence.