Numerous reports have identified bias against women and corruption in family courts across the country. In bizarre and illegal rulings, family court judges ignore or deliberately suppress evidence of male perpetrated family violence and child molest. Fathers who are batterers and sex offenders are routinely granted visitation and custody, while mothers and children trying to escape abuse are punished through financial sanctions, loss of custody, supervised visitation, jail and institutionalization. [1]
Very occasionally, men reporting abuse of their children have also been targeted for retaliation through family court. [2] However, the systematic mishandling of domestic violence and child molest cases as “custody disputes” is based in a financial corruption scheme that calls for diverting grant program funding through “high conflict” cases, in the guise of promoting “fatherhood” and “shared parenting” post-divorce. [3]
Rather than assisting men become responsible parents, “Responsible Fatherhood”, “Access to Visitation Enforcement” (supervised visitation for noncustodial parents), “Child Support Enforcement” and similar federal programs perpetuate abuse of women and children through the legal system. [4] Abusive men striving to maintain control over their victims are provided an array of benefits, not only to get custody and get out of paying child support, but to terrorize the mothers of their children and society in general. [5] Government programs are not producing responsible fathers, but motherless children, in order to advance the agenda of the so-called “fathers’ rights” movement.
“Fathers’ rights” as a political agenda, has nothing to do with actual parenting rights or responsibilities. Fathers’ rights organizations are misogynist anarchy and militia groups that define fatherhood in terms of male ownership of children in male-headed households. In order to maintain control over “families”, fathers’ groups promote violence, advocating the use of “domestic discipline”. [6] Their membership is comprised of virulent men “fighting feminism” and affirmative action, establishing “patriarchy under God” and even trying to repeal the 19th Amendment. [7]
There are women affiliated with fatherhood groups, primarily second wives who support their husbands in denying ex-wives and biological mothers the right to parent their own children. Identifying themselves as “independent feminists”, they also join sociopathic men in fighting obscenity laws and identifying sex and access to pornography as primary fathers’ “rights”. [8]
Fathers’ rights groups have devised strategies that normalize deviant male behavior, while pathologizing normal motherhood. When mothers report domestic violence or child sexual abuse, their complaints are dismissed as a matter of “radical feminists” making malicious and false allegations to turn children against fathers. “False allegations” is the primary tactic used to provide assistance with litigation against women trying to maintain custody of their children in divorces from abusive men. [9]
Criminalizing mothers’ attempts to protect their children, legalizing corporal punishment and normalizing father-child sex, are all necessary in order to legitimize court rulings granting pedophiles, batterers and other abusive men visitation rights and custody of children. In family court, this is accomplished through the “Parental Alienation Syndrome” (PAS) legal strategy. [10]
PAS is a fabricated mental disorder, originally coined by Dr. Richard Gardner as a legal defense of child molesters. PAS calls for covering up evidence of abuse by shifting blame to mothers. PAS was crafted into the means for any man to get custody — no matter how violent or unfit — through the “umbrella” fathers’ rights organization, the Children’s Rights Council (CRC, formerly called National Council for Children’s Rights). [11] CRC is cross-affiliated with the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (AFCC). [12]
While CRC claims to promote “shared parenting” and AFCC represents itself as “an association of family, court and community professionals” dedicated to the “constructive resolution of family disputes”, these groups conceal their role in a perverse fathers’ rights pedophile “ring” operating through family court. Richard Gardner is only one of numerous “experts” connected to CRC/AFCC, who not only promote pedophilia, but seek to destroy children’s relationships with their mothers in the name of fatherhood. [13]
Steering cases to AFCC court allies, CRC (and other fathers’ group) members get their cases “fixed” using PAS methodology. CRC devised custody switching programs are used to procure federal Access to Visitation Enforcement Program grants for supervised visitation and “Child Access Transfer Centers”. [14] Through these centers, evidence of sexual (and physical) abuse is suppressed and mothers are prevented from having normal contact with their children. Mothers are forced to stop complaining about “sharing” the children, or to give up their children altogether, losing all parental rights.
AFCC was originally established in California as the means to enact Conciliation Court Law (CA Family Codes 1800-1852), an obscure set of codes used to prevent divorce in counties where the court itself deems it necessary to “promote the public welfare by preserving, promoting, and protecting family life and the institution of matrimony”. [15] While the Conciliation Court identifies children’s rights to “both parents”, it is used only to assist fathers take custody away from mothers and/or to otherwise gain inappropriate or illegal “access” to children.
Enacting Conciliation Court Law gives the family court jurisdiction over domestic violence cases, in violation of appropriate family codes and “child’s best interests” laws. For example, in California, while Family Code §3044 establishes a presumption that sole or joint custody for a parent convicted of domestic violence is not in the best interests of children, Conciliation Court codes are used not only to assist abusive men get custody, but to help them avoid criminal prosecution. [16] Because blame is shifted to mothers by concealing evidence of paternal crimes against women and children, in the Conciliation Court, victims of abuse (not perpetrators) get convicted in accordance with PAS “threat therapy”. [17]
PAS court-ordered threats include jail terms for mothers and institutionalization of children to convince them that the abuse never occurred, but their mothers are crazy. [18] PAS threats have been linked to the death of at least one child. When forced to “choose” between visiting his violent father in a positive frame of mind, or having his mother jailed for his refusal, Nathan Grieco chose suicide instead. [19]
The Conciliation Court uses PAS methodology to give abusive men the legal upper hand. However, “shared parenting” has become the rallying cry of the fathers’ rights movement, primarily because joint custody also means no child support obligations. When AFCC affiliates assist fathers get custody and get out of paying child support, they instigate frivolous litigation for their own financial gain. They take kickbacks and other improper payments to rig the outcomes of the cases.
Judicial slush funds, such as the “hearts and flowers” fund exposed in Los Angeles Superior Court, are established using fees charged for child custody “training” seminars. [20] Because Conciliation Court codes specify how funding is dispersed to the court itself, huge sums of money are diverted out of federal and state block grants by AFCC affiliates, in the guise of “amicable settlement of domestic and family controversies”. [15] (See Codes 1800-1852).
The National Fatherhood Initiative (NFI) was founded in 1994, to “lead a society-wide movement to confront the problem of father absence”, i.e., to embed the fathers’ rights agenda into government policies and programs. [21] In 1995, former President Clinton issued executive orders that directed federal agencies to review and “modify” all family programs and initiatives serving primarily mothers and children, to include fathers and “strengthen their involvement” with children. [22]
President George W. Bush, has appointed NFI founding officials to high level positions in the present Administration; Wade Horn is Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services and Don Eberly is in the White House Office of Faith Based Initiatives. Under the control of these and other fathers’ rights allies — especially former OCSE Commissioner David Gray Ross (a frequent presenter for CRC) — the federal Department of Health and Human Services Office of Child Support Enforcement has been turned into a men’s custody agency. While publicly touted as “responsible fatherhood programs” official federal documents say the purpose of their programs is to provide noncustodial fathers with free attorneys to litigate for custody. [4]
AFCC affiliated experts who have established federal “model custody” programs using PAS methodology, include Joan Kelly, a founding official of CRC, and Judith Wallerstein of the Center for the Family in Transition. Richard Gardner originally based his PAS theory on Wallerstein’s and Kelly’s research. [23]
Joan Kelly sets up family court services programs and trains judges and “special masters” (mediators with quasi-judicial authority), using Access to Visitation grant funding. She is also connected — primarily through CRC — to Michael Lamb, of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Kelly and Lamb promote materials developed by Richard Gardner (and other pedophiliac experts), in conferences and seminars regarding “parenting time” and “alienation”. [8]
Judith Wallerstein, is an advisor to NFI. According to CA NOW’s “Family Court Report 2002″, in 1986, Wallerstein provided testimony — along with David Levy of CRC — to the House committee on Children, Youth and Families. regarding the “problems of single female parent families”. [24]
Members of Wallerstein’s Center for the Family in Transition and Kelly’s Northern CA Mediation Center, have “reformulated” PAS as “alienated children”, possibly to distance themselves from Richard Gardner. However, in addition to being connected to some of the most egregious local (Marin County, CA) PAS cases, as the “Northern CA Task Force on the Alienated Child”, their group promotes PAS custody switching methods and “threat therapy” at AFCC conferences around the country and the world. [25]
Wallerstein, Horn, Eberly and others connected to NFI, CRC and AFCC have expanded the Conciliation Court agenda to include not only divorce prevention, but marriage promotion. By merging conciliation court and fathers’ rights agendas with a “faith based” marriage “movement”, they call for even more federal programs promoting “two-parent” families, through “marriage initiatives” funded by TANF/Welfare grants. [26]
In the guise of reducing poverty and promoting child welfare, women are forced to stay married and mothers are punished for seeking divorces. In the guise of amicable custody resolution, federal programs enforce the systematic abuse of women and children. The pretense is that government programs produce responsible fathers and healthy families. The reality is that federally funded misogyny and pedophile protection programs are lining the pockets of corrupted court officials and appointees.
For further information, visit the website of the National Alliance for Family Court Justice at nafcj.org/'>http://nafcj.org/#_Favorite_Links”>nafcj.org/.
Cindy Ross
California Director
National Alliance for Family Court Justice
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