It’s time to say the obvious truth straight up. No pretty ribbons, no proving how “reasonable” I am by sugar-coating the harsh reality of what’s actually happening.
Here it is: The family court system across the continent has become the moral equivalent of a slave trade. Mothers and children have no rights at all; the Constitution is thrown out the window. Millions of dollars are being made by professionals off of denying domestic violence, sexual abuse of children, and physical abuse of children and siding with the perpetrator instead. Loving mothers are having their children torn away from them when they haven’t even been accused of anything; or where the only accusation is that they’ve tried to protect their children from an abusive father—exactly what the child needs the mother to do—and therefore are declared guilty of “parental alienation.”
Consider this: The court is ruling that even fathers who are confirmed to have beaten the mother or are confirmed to have molested the children should continue to have a relationship with their children as if these things hadn’t happened. But a mother who won’t shut up about abuse? That’s a reason to cut her off from her children in the court’s eyes. Ignorance, I’m sorry to say, is not the problem. The problem is horrible mother-hating attitudes, combined with greed and more greed. And this means, unfortunately, that trainings for judges and other court personnel are not the answer. I can say this from experience because I’ve trained family court judges and evaluators in a dozen states with no noticeable uptake. You can train ignorance, but you can’t train hateful outlooks or the hunger for money and power.
Things are just getting worse. Judges are imposing gag orders on mothers, forbidding them to discuss their custody evaluators reports with anyone other than their own lawyer. So much for free speech; she’s violating the court order if she asks someone whether they actually said what the evaluator claims they said! (I had the experience of seeing a custody evaluation that I wasn’t supposed to have access to—I got it illegally—and found that the evaluator quoted me as saying the exact opposite of what I had actually said about a key question. And this is not an unusual experience: mothers are constantly reporting to me that their evaluators have deliberately lied about what the woman said.)
Speaking of which, evaluators are forbidding women to record their own meetings with the evaluator! What excuse could there possibly be for this? Obviously, because they want to be able to make up for what she supposedly said. And judges are siding with the evaluators who have this policy.
There's lots more. Judges are forbidding women to take their children to qualified sexual abuse evaluators. They’re putting women on supervised visitation for believing their children’s disclosures. (In one case I investigated, the judge stated, on the record, that the mother’s insistence on believing her child was why he was cutting her off from her kids.) Judges are requiring women and children to go off to week-long “reunification camps,” where the children spend a lot of time with their father while the mother is kept away from them and the whole family is indoctrinated to ignore the abuse and blame the mother.
I've done detailed interviews with mothers about all of the above experiences. None of this is rumour.
I'm afraid passing better laws won’t help much either, because family court judges consider themselves above the law so they ignore it. (Except when they want to blame their bad actions on the law – then suddenly they claim that the law leaves them no choice.)
So what’s the solution? We’re going to have to take to the streets, building a movement for freedom for mothers and children with huge numbers of mothers and their allies. We have to loudly and publicly blow the cover off of what this corrupt, greedy, and mother-hating system is doing. #MothersOnTheRise
Source : https:/
/lundybancroft.com/16138-2/
Justice photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
No Silence photo by Michelle Ding on Unsplash
System change photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
Lundy’s new book once again takes on domestic abuse, but this time it’s a novel. A young journalist seeks to expose the victim-blaming and corruption in the family courts, and stumbles into some dangerous surprises. In Custody is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.
