A self-censored chronicle of family court dramas, lived by parents who lost all or some visitation with or custody of a child or children based on perjury and/or other false courtroom evidence
In a world where absent fathers have become somewhat of a norm. Debrah Lewis provides viewers with some very insightful comments into why fathers might be absent throughout the life of their children. In this talk she outlines the role of the father in the childbirth process and the shortcomings of a system that does not offer fathers with opportunities to be fully engaged parents from birth to adulthood. We ask fathers to be involved in the life of their child, but deny them the right to be at the starting line, the birth. This talk asks to rethink the role of masculinity in the childbirth experience.
Debrah Lewis is the first Vice President of the International Confederation of Midwives from the Caribbean. After receiving an MSc in Nurse-Midwifery from Columbia University in 1986, she worked in New York as a public and private practice midwife and also volunteered in Africa. Lewis' leadership led to the formation of the Caribbean Regional Midwifery Association and the Trinidad and TobagoAssociation of Midwives. She is passionate about strengthening the network of midwives in the Caribbean and ultimately, the world.
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)
Emery makes many good suggestions in his article called............ “How Divorced Parents Lost Their Rights” and has a good grasp on the process from a psychology perspective. We are, of course constitutional scholars and would like to offer a perspective that hopefully integrates and supports most but not all of what Emery says.
For instance Emery suggests that courts do not involve themselves with parenting disagreements between married parents because judges would make things a mess. They would of course but that is NOT the legal reason that they stay out of it. The legal reason is that people have the right to make decisions free from government interference. These rights are called privacy rights. Parents have privacy rights to make decisions for their children and the State may not interfere unless the state can show a clear and present danger to the child from these decisions.
Why do family law courts treat married and divorced parents differently? Many people do not realize that parental rights do not depend on marriage and in fact cannot depend on marital status in any way. A hundred years ago this wasn’t so and our family law codes have not caught up with this concept. Up until the early 1970s some states still had bastardy laws on their books that tied the rights of parents and children to the marital status of the child’s parents. In a series of landmark decisions, the US Supreme Court stated very clearly that states may not create second-class parents or second-class children based on nothing more than the marital status of the child’s parents.
Family law has not caught up to this idea because of religious and cultural preconditioning. In other words our society builds into us a series of biases and prejudices against single and divorced parents that is so deep most people don’t even realize it is driving their behavior. Most people believe that it is completely legitimate to invade the privacy of single/divorced parents even where they believe that the privacy of married parents must be preserved. Constitutionally, this is a completely bankrupt idea. Unfortunately, judges, attorneys, and mental health professionals are almost universally so caught up in these biases they refuse to acknowledge their professional training and simply default to bigoted behaviors without even realizing that is what they are doing. (It’s easy to fall into following statistics to guide decisions. Individuals can choose to follow these as their guide. It is not how the law should be deciding individual rights.)
- See more at: http://www.fixfamilycourts.com/how-divorced-parents-and-children-lose-their-rights/#sthash.LeijUpEd.dpuf
When this Amendment is passed parents will not have to reference countless Supreme Court opinions, they will only have to say I have 28th Amendment rights to be a parent and no Divorce Court can ever deprive me of those rights so long as I am a fit parent.This book is intended to be a tool for citizen activists who want change to the system but who may struggle with all of the technical arguments. Now all you have to do to support change is hand this book to your politician of choice and say, “I want this, make it happen.””
Children and parents who have undergone forced separation from each other in the absence of abuse, including cases of parental alienation, are highly subject to post-traumaticstress, and reunification efforts in these cases should proceed carefully and with sensitivity. Alienated children seem to have a secret wish for someone to call their bluff, compelling them to reconnect with the parent they claim to hate; despite strongly held positions of alignment, alienated children want nothing more than to be given the permission and freedom to loveand be loved by both parents (Baker, 2010). Yet the influence of the alienating parent is too strong to withstand, and children’s fear that the alienating parent may fall apart or withdraw his or her love holds them back. Research has shown that many alienated children can transform quickly from refusing or staunchly resisting the rejected parent to being able to show and receive love from that parent, followed by an equally swift shift back to the alienated position when back in the orbit of the alienating parent (Fidler and Bala, 2010). Thus while children’s stated wishes regarding parental residence and contact in contested custody afterdivorce should be considered, they should not be determinative in cases of parental alienation.
Reunification efforts subsequent to prolonged absence should be undertaken with service providers with specialized expertise in parental alienation reunification. A number of models of intervention have been developed, the best-known being Warshak’s (2010) Family Bridges Program, an educative and experiential program focused on multiple goals: allowing the child to have a healthy relationship with both parents, removing the child from the parental conflict, and encouraging child autonomy, multiple perspective-taking, and critical thinking. Sullivan’s Overcoming Barriers Family Camp (Sullivan et al, 2010), which combines psycho-educational and clinical intervention within an environment of milieu therapy, is aimed toward the development of an agreement regarding the sharing of parenting time, and a written aftercare plan. Friedlander and Walters’ (2010) Multimodal Family Intervention provides differential interventions for situations of parental alignment, alienation, enmeshment and estrangement. All of these programs emphasize the clinical significance of children coming to regard their parents as equally valued and important in their lives, while at the same time helping enmeshed children relinquish their protective role toward their alienating parents.
In reunification programs, alienated parents will benefit from guidelines with respect to their efforts to provide a safe, comfortable, open and inviting atmosphere for their children. Ellis (2005) outlines five strategies for alienated parents: (1) erode children’s negative image by providing incongruent information; (2) refrain from actions that put the child in the middle of conflict; (3) consider ways to mollify the anger and hurt of the alienating parent; (4) look for ways to dismantle the coalition between the child and alienating parent and convert enemies to allies; and (5) never give up on reunification efforts. As much as possible, Warshak (2010) recommends, alienated parents should try to expose their children to people who regard them, as parents, with honor and respect, to let children see that their negative opinion, and the opinion of the alienating parent, is not shared by the rest of the world. This type of experience will leave a stronger impression than anything the alienated parent can say on his or her own behalf, according to Warshak.
As Baker (2010) writes, alienated parents acutely feel the hostility and rejection of their children. These children seem cruel, heartless, and devaluing of their parents. Yet it is important to realize that from the child’s perspective, it is the targeted parent who has rejected them; they have been led to believe that the parent whom they are rejecting does not love them, is unsafe, and has abandoned them. Thus, the primary response of the alienated parent must always be one of loving compassion, emotional availability, and absolute safety. Patience and hope, unconditional love, being there for the child, is the best response that alienated parents can provide their children, even in the face of the sad truth that this may not be enough to bring back the child.
With alienating parents, it is important to emphasize that as responsible parenting involves respecting the other parent’s role in the child’s life, any form of denigration of a former partner and co-parent is harmful to children. Children’s connections to each parent must be fully respected, to ensure their well being, as children instinctively know, at the core of their being, that they are half their mother and half their father. This is easier said than done, as alienating parents are themselves emotionally fragile, with a prodigious sense of entitlement and need to control (Richardson, 2006), and thus pose significant clinical challenges. Yet poisoned minds and instilled hatred toward a parent is a very serious form of abuse of children. When children grow up in an atmosphere of parental alienation, their primary role model is a maladaptive, dysfunctional parent. It is for this reason that many divorce specialists (e.g., Fidler and Bala, 2010) recommend custody reversal in such cases, or at least a period of separation between a child and an alienating parent during the reunification process with an alienated parent. I have come to believe, however, that the means of combating alienation should not themselves be alienating, and that a non-punitive approach is most effective, with co-parenting being the primary goal. Thus engaging and involving the alienating parent in reunification programs, whenever possible, is critical (Sullivan et al, 2010).
Thank you to the members and supporters of Parental Alienation Awareness Organization USANorth Texas Chapter who made valuable contributions to the article, both with personal stories and expert advice.
Abuses can originate from virtually every part of the legal system. Litigants, attorneys, law enforcement andjudiciary can abuse the system, sometimes accidentally but more often intentionally. Legal abuse can also besystemic, such as when the principles, processes, and consequences of law itself encourage and enable individuals to legally harm others.
Abusive litigants in civil cases are most often classified as vexatious litigation, frivolous litigation, or both. Avexatious litigant seeks to harass or subdue an adversary. A frivolous litigant starts or carries on actions that have little or no merit and are very unlikely to be won. Litigants of this sort are often unable to find representationwilling to accommodate them and thus must represent themselves in propria persona.
There can often be considerable overlap between these two types of abuse. One case in point is the strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP), which is a lawsuit intended to censor, intimidate and silence critics by fear, intimidation and burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition. Such actions are self-evidently vexatious, but are typically frivolous as well in that the plaintiff does not expect, or even intend, to win.
Litigants can abuse the system in criminal ways as well. Some of the forms of criminal legal system abuse arejury tampering, the practice of directing enticements or threats to jurors in order to influence their deliberations, and falsification of evidence, which refers to any of a variety of ways evidence is improperly manipulated. One particular case of falsifying evidence is the frameup, a chiefly American term for the manufacture or manipulation of evidence for the purpose of indicating the guilt of an innocent party.
Lawyers, paralegals and other professionals involved in legal advocacy can abuse the system in a number of ways. In some cases, representation may well-intended but nonetheless incompetent. In others, lawyers engage in misconduct in an effort to gain unfair advantage for their clients or in pursuit of some self-interest.
Although the primary consequence of unaddressed legal-system abuse for victims is injustice, abuses of the legal system inflict harm in many other ways. Civil litigation and criminal defense of the innocent imposepsychological stress, often severe, upon the parties involved. Often such stress will affect physical health as well. When the system is abused and justice is denied as a result, stress and its effects can be exacerbated enormously. Karin P. Huffer, M.S., M.F.T. hypothesized the condition Legal Abuse Syndrome (LAS) as a form ofpost traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) caused by ethical violation, legal abuse, betrayal, abuse of power, abuse of authority, lack of accountability and fraud.
Chronic and high-profile legal abuse have societal effects as well, including distrust of the law, law enforcement and the legal system, rationalization of small crimes by ordinarily honest citizens, and psychological stress.
In the summer of 1999, when I was utterly confused why I was in trouble with CPS, it occurred to me to search the internet to see if other people were having similar problems with Oregon CPS.
That is how I found Will and Pamela Gaston's "A Voice for Children" website. They had been heavily involved in court cases for several years. I was absolutely SHOCKED at how lawless the Oregon courts were and the absolutely corrupt, insane decisions Gastons were getting. Obviously the Constitution did not apply, nor did any actual laws either. CPS had a free hand to do whatever they wanted to. The courts would contrive any shitty "decision" necessary to defend the Status Quo and keep the agencies operating at their full, evil capacity. Everybody working in the system has a "get out of jail free" card. Right or wrong has nothing to do with it.
Watching how Pamela presented her cases to GET THE TRUTH ON THE RECORD was an extremely useful learning curve to me.
Along the line, it occurred to a bunch of us that we did not merely have a problem in our particular state- it was a nation-wide problem.
Not since the overthrow of the Weimar Republic have the leaders of a major democracy used their offices and the mass media to disseminate invective against millions of their own citizens. In fact it was Adolph Hitler who urged that “the state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people” and who explained, in the words of Rabbi Daniel Lapin, that “as long as government is perceived as working for the benefit of children, the people happily will endure almost any curtailment of liberty.” Using children to tug on our heartstrings may be not only a weakness of the sentimental. It also may be a ploy by those cynical and unscrupulous enough to exploit children for their own purposes. This is likely to be remembered as one of the most diabolical perversions of governmental power in our history, a time when we allowed children to be used and abused by fast-talking government officials and paid for it with our families, our social order and our constitutional rights.-- STEPHEN BASKERVILLE (in about 2000)
We only support organizations who show an understanding that children need both parents, and that either parent is equally capable of the choice to perpetrate hate or declare peace.
The International Access and Visitation Centers conference was held in Toronto in April of 2013 The PAAO was there and spoke to most of the 200 or so practitioners. Of course all were familiar with alienation and it's results. Everyone was not only gratified to see PAAO at the event, they all also acknowledged that PA is either a form of Domestic Violence or on the continuum of Domestic Violence behaviors.
In a world where absent fathers have become somewhat of a norm. Debrah Lewis provides viewers with some very insightful comments into why fathers might be absent throughout the life of their children. In this talk she outlines the role of the father in the childbirth process and the shortcomings of a system that does not offer fathers with opportunities to be fully engaged parents from birth to adulthood. We ask fathers to be involved in the life of their child, but deny them the right to be at the starting line, the birth. This talk asks to rethink the role of masculinity in the childbirth experience. 
