Family Court

The seemingly forensic approach to gathering large amounts of information for child custody assessments by specialist professionals gives the perception the analysis and recommendations are done in a scientifically grounded process. Nothing could be further from the truth as the whole analysis process lacks any scientific rigour whatsoever as eloquently explained by Dr Craig Childress. The limited data that has been made available by the Courts supports what Dr Childress is saying. For example, Leading Women for Shared Parenting managed to get access to all the child custody decisions by courts in North Dakota for January 2011 to mid June of 2017 and tally and analyse the data. Leading Women For Shared Parenting determined that, 'Despite North Dakota having a a largely homogeneous population, the custody determinations between Counties varied significantly. The variances remained not only between Counties separated by great distance, but also between Counties which border one another. They also found that each Judge had their own preferences which was evidenced by their pattern of determinations.

Forcing a child to choose between parents is one of the most psychologically horrific things that can be done to a child as evidenced in the real life story told by Frank Abagnale in a Google Talk whose story was later made into the movie, 'Catch me If You Can'.

So many people supportive of the existing Family Court system say we should listen to the 'voice of the child' (VOTC) which shows a naivety of human behaviour. This video link is a discussion (at 56 minutes and onwards) by two adults (Dawn Mc Carty & Alyse Price-Tobler) who were alienated as children and one of them is now a Clinical Psycotherapist. They are joined in the discussion by Anthropologist Christine Giancarlo. They all explain how due to pressure a child will just say what the parent they are living with will want them to say.

Family Law is complex so you should not expect that brief brochures will be able to fully explain the range of complex situations that Courts face. For example, some Family Court brochures in Australia mention that saying negative things about the other parent to the child is the wrong thing to do yet they award sole custody to Alienators. See

FamCA1251 [2009] FamCA 501 [2012]

Some of the published Family Court cases remove children from the care of Alienators however many of these are within the first couple of years of divorce.

The indications are that the Family Court in Australia is now taking more action against Parental Alienation, however given that most decisions are not published it is hard to evaluate recent progress.

In custody cases that drag on for several years Australian Courts inevitably award sole custody to Alienators (as advised by one retired Court professional to the author of this website).

Many commentators advise us that Family Courts are not gender biased however given that most Family Court cases never get published this is a claim that cannot be verified. Statements by some lawyers and Judges confirm that there is some gender bias (see https://youtu.be/bTnT8ozaf6g 6 minutes). Representatives of the peak legal body in Australia the Law Council of Australia, expressed a clear an unequivocal gender bias at an Australian Government hearing into the issue of Family Violence on 30 May 2017. Despite the gender bias against fathers there are nonetheless many good mothers who are victims of this process. There is no evidence widely published to suggest that the numbers of children impacted is not split approximately 50/50 between girls and boys.

Family Courts are a haven for Alienators with many procedures developed for litigants to use in good faith that are often used by Alienators mala-fides to cut a child from having contact with the Targeted Parent. The classic ones are false allegations that the Targeted Parent has or will physically or sexually assault their child. The Court's concern for the potential risk to the physical safety of a child outweigh's its concern for the known psychological harm of Alienating a child from one parent and entire side of one family.

The policies espoused in the Domestic Violence Benchbook are intended by the Australian Government to strongly influence judicial officers in Australia.

The policies in the Domestic Violence Benchbook and Family Court legislation and practice are heavily influenced by the feminist movement. Their emotively charged campaigns strongly influence government with the highly misleading projection that all men are violent. This misguided concern by the public and politicians about the violence of fathers over mothers charges Family Courts with the mission to wipe a child out of the life of a parent on the basis of protecting a child's safety as soon as one parent alleges violence on the part of the other parent. In many cases no evidence other than an allegation is needed to do this. Most of the public and policy makers are not inclined to look at the official data which shows that more mothers than fathers kill, abuse and neglect their children than fathers. This gender attack by feminists is the major driver of Government policies that encourage Parental Alienation.

The Fathers Rights movement's has a positive approach to campaigning against government policies that foster Parental Alienation by highlighting the positives of shared parenting. So far this approach has done little to slow the momentum of wave after wave of more parentally alienating government policies which are driven to protect the safety of children based on a false premise cultured by the feminist movement. Very little of the statistics concerning the mother/father split for parents who kill, abuse and neglect their children is given any coverage by the feminist controlled mainstream media in Australia. One of the few in recent times was published by News.com.au, 'Why aren't we talking about abusive mums'. Data published by the Australian Government, Australian Institute of Criminology which report more mothers than fathers kill their children is not well known. Studies such as done by Brown and Tyson which found that 66 % more children are killed by their mothers/step fathers than killed by their fathers/step mothers are almost unknown even amongst the Fathers Rights movement.

Family Courts have developed a reputation for taking a long time arriving at decisions and being very expensive.

One Judge's approach to Parental Alienation in the United States.

Psychologist Richard Warshak has written about Ten parental alienation fallacies that compromise decisions in court and in therapy. Dr Warshak's article is backed up by references to research, is peer reviewed and was published in the journal, Professional Psychology Research and Practice by the American Psychological Association.

'The article identifies ten prevalent and strongly held assumptions and myths about parental alienation found in reports by therapists, custody evaluators, and child representatives (such as guardians ad litem), in case law, and in professional articles. These false beliefs lead therapists and lawyers to give bad advice to their clients, evaluators to give inadequate recommendations to courts, and judges to reach injudicious decisions.'

'This article examines 10 mistaken assumptions: (a) children never unreasonably reject the parent with whom they spend the most time, (b) children never unreasonably reject mothers, (c) each parent contributes equally to a child’s alienation, (d) alienation is a child’s transient, short-lived response to the parents’ separation, (e) rejecting a parent is a short-term healthy coping mechanism, (f) young children living with an alienating parent need no intervention, (g) alienated adolescents’ stated preferences should dominate custody decisions, (h) children who appear to function well outside the family need no intervention, (i) severely alienated children are best treated with traditional therapy techniques while living primarily with their favored parent, and (j) separating children from an alienating parent is traumatic. Reliance on false beliefs compromises investigations and undermines adequate consideration of alternative explanations for the causes of a child’s alienation. Most critical, fallacies about parental alienation shortchange children and parents by supporting outcomes that fail to provide effective relief to those who experience this problem.'

Dr Warshak wrote a comprehensive review in 2017 titled 'Stemming the Tide of Misinformation:International Consensus on Shared Parenting and Overnighting' about shared parenting research and literature. This study among other things referred to the need for custody decisions in Court to consider evidence that: “sheds light on the dynamics of the conflict, the contributions of each party to it, and the quality of parenting.”(page 29) This journal article has been peer reviewed by 110 of Dr Warshak's esteemed colleagues and far surpasses any other journal article about joint and sole custody considerations for the courts.

The American Bar Association have authored an extensive publication titled: A Judges Guide Making Child-Centred Decisions In custody Cases.

Family Courts in western countries such as Australia have to date been unable to resist the pressure to allow themselves to be used as an instruments by Parental Alienators to inflict abuse on their former partners and spouses with the children as collateral damage. A good example of this is the known fact that the psychological damage of emotional abuse such as parental alienation can do similar and sometimes worse damage to children than the psychological damage caused by sexual abuse of children. So if courts truly had the welfare of children at heart they would not participate in the alienation by cutting the children off from a loving parent from an untested allegation if there were any indications of Parental Alienation. The Court's practice probably mirrors societies response to this issue in general. For example it has been known by the Australian government that the aboriginal community in the Northern Territory has for a very long time been suffering from high death rates from family violence. However it took media reports of sexual abuse in these communities for the Australian government to intervene in what became known as the, Northern Territory National Emergency Response and send in the army.