Responding to a Higher Calling

            The American Judges Foundation reports that seventy percent of abusive fathers are the winners in custody fights. As children are handed to their molesters, protective mothers must watch helplessly—or respond to a higher calling than a judge’s order.
            Ms. Toni Schott’s oldest daughter was three-and-a-half years old when a caseworker from the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare found that the child’s scarred vagina was the result of sexual abuse. The articulate child told two therapists that her father had done it, but the judge misinterpreted a physician’s testimony and gave the father overnight visitations. A higher court refused to reopen the case to hear the physician’s offer of clarification. Less than two years later, before age three, Toni’s younger daughter contracted vaginal herpes and, like her sister, told of her father’s abuse to a Department of Health and Welfare counselor.
            After a pediatrician discovered large fissures around two-and-a-half-year-old Anne D’Angelo’s son’s rectum, he concluded that the boy had been raped many times. The child pointed to his father as the perpetrator, and a therapist on behalf of the X State Department of Children and Families supported the pediatrician’s conclusion and determined that the boy’s father was raping both him and his older brother. Nevertheless, the judge gave the father joint custody.
            Although Bonita Shain’s three-year old son reported to a Kentucky Child Protective Services’ worker about his father and his father’s friend touching his private parts, the DA did not prosecute. When four years later the boy continued to report sexual abuse, which was substantiated by CPS, and refused to see his father—an alcoholic who had threatened to murder Bonita and other family members and admitted in court to drug dealing—a judge determined that Bonita had alienated her son. Although no evidence was heard to discredit Bonita’s mothering skills, the judge ruled that both her boys be transferred to the father’s sister’s custody, allowing Bonita only three hours a week supervised visits.
            Toni, Anne and Bonita—and countless protective mothers—stand bewildered and livid against a complex legal system that refuses to help their molested children. Instead, against all corroborating evidence of sexual abuse, that system holds the mothers accountable for their children’s reporting, on the rationale that the mothers must have coached their children.
            Experts such as Louisiana attorney Richard Ducote, who has tried such cases in over forty states, say that the culprit is a bogus theory, Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), which is unsupported by any sound research and unrecognized by any medical, academic or psychological organization. Coined by Dr. Richard Gardner, a psychiatrist who believed that “pedophilia is an accepted practice by billions of people” but our society’s response to it is “excessively moralistic and punitive,” PAS successfully places violent, abusive fathers as the victims of women’s presumed vindictiveness. “If someone punches you—or rapes you—you wouldn’t want to be around that person,” says Mr. Ducote. “Yet judges routinely assume that when a child refuses to be with his or her abusive father, it is the mother who must have alienated the child—not the violent father through his abusive ways.”
            Gardner, who committed suicide on May 25, 2003, stated that “there is a certain amount of pedophilia in all of us,” and wrote that in cases of child molestation, “a mother’s hysterics…will contribute to the child’s feeling that a heinous crime has been committed.” The mother “should be helped to understand” that her child possibly “enjoyed immensely the sexual activities.” If she persisted in her insistence to keep the child from his father, Gardner recommended a change of custody to the father. For over twenty years, Gardner was hailed by fathers’ groups and widely accepted as the “guru of child custody evaluation” by many judges. His unauthenticated theory and its derivations are taught in courses geared toward attorneys and judges.
            Toni Schott’s experience of the court’s indifference toward her older daughter taught her not to count on the court for help for her younger child. She hid in Texas under an alias for four and a half years until the FBI arrested her and the girls were returned to their abuser, now living in Pennsylvania. Even though the Idaho court dropped the parental kidnapping charges after reviewing the previously ignored medical testimony, the Pennsylvania judge dismissed the ruling without a further hearing. In spite of the fact that the younger girl’s case had never been heard in court, Toni lost custody of her daughters.

Anne D’Angelo fled with her children to Virginia, where she lived for five years until 1992, when the boys were captured and returned to live with their father. In a subsequent custody hearing—and in spite of the evidence collected before Anne’s hiding—the judge ruled that the father’s sexual abuse of the younger boy was “uncorroborated.”
            When Bonita Shain’s boys, ages four and seven, heard the judge’s verdict that would place them with their aunt, they begged their mother to hide them because their father had threatened to kill them if they told what he had done. In November 2002, Bonita Shain packed her car and left town with her children. 
            In these three cases, the judges applied PAS, ignoring the fact that each case of abuse was discovered or diagnosed and reported by ER physicians or child welfare professionals—not by the mothers. The physical evidence was supported by the each child pointing to his or her father as the abuser.
          Research has shown that children are reluctant to report abuse, often denying it against evidence, as they feel shame and guilt over it—if not outright fear of the abuser 1. Moreover, studies show that in 98.4 percent of the cases where very young children point to their molesters they tell the truth 2. However, in most states family court judges are not required to take certification courses in domestic violence and child abuse, nor are judges held accountable for ignoring or refusing to hear evidence. Instead, favoring the interests of the fathers—the presumed victims of the mothers’ vicious fabrications—over the safety of the children, judges employ the unsupported PAS theory or its derivations. They seek no evidence that indeed a mother has actively alienated her child as they sever this relationship.
          These past few years, across the nation, children have been encouraged to tell a trusted adult about abuse. Child-friendly websites have been established to help abused children. Mandatory reporting laws have been imposed on educational and medical institutions and their employees. Local police officers visit schools to talk to the children and encourage them to seek help from trusted adults.
          Yet, in “Small Justice,” an award-winning documentary by Boston University film professor Garland Waller, Dr. Richard Gardner suggested that a mother’s response to a child’s report of abuse should be, “I don’t believe you. I’m going to beat you for saying that. Don’t ever talk that way about your father.” Dr. Gardner added that mothers who allege sexual abuse of their children should be jailed.
          So much for asking children to report abuse. Those who report it soon learn that no one listens. A therapist at the not-for-profit North Shore Child and Family Guidance Association in Long Island, New York, who asked to remain anonymous, recently said, “I no longer see these kids. We promise them that if they tell, the abuse would stop. Instead, the opposite happens.”
          Child sexual abuse is a criminal matter, which family courts are not equipped to adjudicate. Yet, provided with broad judicial discretion, they stand powerfully protected from scrutiny—or appeal—when failing to apply standard principles of justice and constitutional rights of due process. In January 2003, in her investigative Boston Phoenix article, “Custodians Of Abuse,” Kristen Lombardi describes how, nationwide, three problems plague the system: First, criminal investigation has been replaced by evaluation provided by guardians ad litem (GAL), who are social workers, psychologists or lawyers, but not qualified forensic investigators. In many cases, GALs fail to represent their clients—the children. The GAL assigned to Bonita Shain’s son never met him. In Anne D’Angelo’s case, the GAL never spoke in court. Second, with no juries—and protected by a cloak of secrecy—family courts are bastions of extraordinary power where one person is judge, jury and executioner. Evidence of abuse is suppressed while, as in Toni, Anne and Bonita’s cases, no evidence of the mothers’ presumed role in alienation is sought. Third, bias and traditional stereotyping of women’s roles is heightened in high-conflict custody cases, where judges commonly scrutinize a mother’s parenting practices while viewing a father’s sole act of seeking custody as proof of parental commitment and skills.
          Although an Association of Family Conciliation Courts’ 1990 study shows child sexual abuse allegations are made in less than two percent of contested divorces involving child custody, that figure still represents thousands of molested children. They are protected by mothers like Toni, Anne and Bonita, who find themselves mired in years of expensive litigation in courts that show neither sympathy for them nor compassion for their children. Beyond losing custody, mothers are often stripped of their rights when the costly child support they are slapped with make it impossible for them to also pay the hourly fees of supervised visitation centers. In the process, children’s rights to fair treatment and justice as well as the preservation of the maternal-child bond are being violated.
          Toni’s daughters, now ages nine and ten, are prohibited any contact with their mother, but they also cannot have contact with any member of their maternal family.
          In hiding, Bonita Shain’s children missed holidays and birthdays with everyone they knew back home, while their father led a normal life and “went to ball games,” Bonita says. “This is not surprising since he was not asking for custody; he wanted his sister to have the children as long as they are not with me or my family.” The hope to one day restore her children’s stolen life was shattered in June 2003 when the boys were captured in Indiana and sent to live with their aunt. Fearing jail sentence, Bonita refused to sign extradition papers that would put her in the mercy of the Kentucky judge whose gavel of justice is all too familiar.
          Anne D.'s former husband was a Children's Rights Council official and now sits on a panel to "redesign divorce" in Ms. D's state with a Judge whom, Ms. D. claims, is aware of the rape evidence against Mr. D.. Furthermore, in 2002 he was appointed by that State Governor to a committee to recommend changes in laws regarding the courts' handling of custody cases.
          Says Anne D’Angelo, “I have met several mothers who lost custody to very abusive ex-husbands. Among them are a nurse, an engineer, a teacher, and an attorney. We are well educated and articulate. We are not on welfare. We are not alcoholics or drug users, and we do not have a history of physical or mental illness. We are good mothers.”
            These are good mothers whose only chance to save their children is to defy the court and run for their lives.

# # #

Author Talia Carner's first novel, PUPPET CHILD, paved the way to her launching The Protective Parent Act. Please check www.TaliaCarner.com

The Scandal In Our Own Backyard

 (This article was adapted from a previously published one.)

      
     

o       “There is something bad happening to our children in family courts today that is causing them more harm than drugs, more harm than crime and even more harm than child molestation,” said Judge Watson L. White from Cobb County, Georgia, Superior Court.

       In researching for my book, Puppet Child, I discovered that “something bad” to be the judges, especially when it comes to adjudicating allegations of child sexual abuse.

       In Clarke v. Cowles in California, eight-year-old Loren (not her real name) told her caseworker and later her psychological evaluator, “Daddy licks his fingers before he puts them in my vagina.” The first report was suppressed by the judge, the latter was never presented at the trial. The father was awarded full custody while the mother received supervised visitations on the unproven assumption that she had brainwashed her daughter. Years later, after the girl wrote repeatedly to her caseworker about molestation, a judge refused to hear the evidence because the question of sexual abuse had been decided five years before.

       Loren is only one child out of thousands being handed to their abusers. According to The American Judges Foundation, in 70 percent of cases in which abusive men ask for custody, they succeed in gaining full or joint custody. This national scandal is made possible by the secrecy within the Family Court System and by public disbelief in the scope of the problem. The very system designed to safeguard helpless children has become a national disgrace as injustice has reached epidemic proportions. 

       Whatever you have ever known about democracy becomes irrelevant at the gate to family court. There, one person is judge, jury and executioner. Paradoxically, in most states, a family court judge is the one professional in the courtroom who is not required to be trained in domestic violence and child abuse. As a result, wrapped in their own mix of prejudices, religious beliefs, or misguided assumptions, all too many judges are ignorant about the dynamics of family abuse, ignorant about the nature of child molestation, and ignorant about the ways in which an abuser manipulates the courtroom as the arena where he can hand a woman the final blow by taking her children away.
       Although studies such as the one by the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts Research in Denver—an organization which mothers’ groups claim is biased against women—shows that at least two thirds of sexual abuse allegations made by a child were proven to be substantiated (the one third unsubstantiated are not necessarily false.) Yet a study by the California Protective Parents Association found that 91 percent of fathers identified by their children as sexual predators received full or partial unsupervised custody—while in 54 percent of these same cases the non-abusing mother was placed on supervised visitations.

       How is that possible? Here are some of the more glaring errors the courts perpetuate:

       * Viewing children as property. When the crime of sexual abuse is committed upon a child who lives next door, the perpetrator is subject to harsh jail punishment. The same abuse committed upon one's own child is likely to result in a father getting sole custody. Behind this unfair ruling is the lingering feudal tradition that regards children as the property of their fathers.

       * Mistaking controlling men for loving fathers. Used to getting their way and given to expressions of anger, controlling men fight hard in the court they regard as a boxing ring. Having seen too many men walk away from their children, judges often mistake for love a father’s unwillingness to let go of the child who has become both a sexual object and a weapon against a mother trying to get away from her husband’s control.

      * Favoring the Parental Alienation Syndrome theory. PAS maintains that a child has been brainwashed to give false testimony. Not listed in the American Psychiatric Association manual, PAS is refuted and considered bogus theory by nationally recognized academic and clinical institutions—and by a 1999 Congressional act (VAWA). In fact, the lone advocate who coined the term, Richard Gardner, has also written that “pedophilia is natural.” Nevertheless, increasingly, legions of children are removed from their mothers’ care under the PAS theory.  

     *  Tolerance of child sexual abuse. A Tennessee judge granted visitation rights to Ralph Gonnella two weeks after he had been arrested for taking sexually explicit photographs of his seven-year-old son. In California, Manuel Saavedra, a convicted sex offender who had pleaded guilty to lewd conduct with a child was awarded custody of his two daughters.  All across America, convicted pedophiles—a crime known for its high rate of recidivism —are given access to their children.

*  Refusing to stigmatize a man as a pedophile. A 1996 report by The American Psychological Association states, “women seldom make false reports of child abuse or battering.” Yet in case after case, when a father is found to be sexually abusive, judges suppress evidence. While many judges, many of whom are fathers, do not truly believe that sexual abuse exists, they also do not wish to venture into the criminal arena of pedophilia due to overlapping jurisdiction between civil and criminal courts.

 * Not following the law. In demanding burden of proof of sexual molestation that supercedes the required “preponderance of evidence” and instead seeking the criminal definition of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” judges often demand dates, times or witnesses that are impossible for a child to provide. Interestingly, the same judges demand no proof when speculating that at the roots of the sexual abuse complaint is the mother’s coaching the child.

 * Misogyny. In Virginia, Kathy Wade was told by the judge handing Kathy’s two-year-old daughter to the sexually abusive father, “This is what you get when you don’t have a lawyer.” In Florida, Judge Paul Marko told Marianne Price: "The singles' bars are full of guys… you go and find one.” In Michigan, Judge Gregory Pittman ordered a couple shackled together after the woman complained that her former husband had violated the order of protection. Routinely, American women are denied the right to due process, are subject to ex parte hearings, and are victims of perjury or illegal out-of-state jurisdictions.

Through it all, children are at a disadvantage because they are dependent upon mothers with no or poor legal representation and who are short on financial resources to wage protracted legal battles and appeals. (Professionals in the field report increasing support for men from well-financed fathers’ groups.) Moreover, men, poised and collected and surrounded by a legal team, “look good” in court when compared with frightened, distraught mothers, whom judges often view as hysterical, paranoid and vindictive. Yet all across the nation, behind every case in which a woman’s constitutional rights are being ignored in family court there are children needing protection. Instead, they receive a life sentence without parole.

Public disbelief guards the system from exposure. There are child services, therapists, and legal guardians who commit atrocious mistakes. But ultimately, the untrained judges are the ones responsible for saving the children. While I met compassionate family court judges, the shocking overall picture of injustice indicates that they are in the minority. Until the public grasps the scope of the scandal in our own backyard and holds judges accountable for the grand scale in which children are being removed from the custody of good mothers to be placed with pedophiles, we are facing a national shame of catastrophic proportions. 

###
    

Novelist Talia Carner published her first novel, PUPPET CHILD in 2002, and became an advocate for children caught in the nightmarish legal system. Since then, she's published CHINA DOLL and JERUSALEM MAIDEN. For more resources, please check  www.TaliaCarner.com

My Heart Father

Yitzhak Yoffe & Talia

[Note: Today, St Patrick's Day, is actually the 21st anniversary of my father's passing. As I light the "yortzeit" candle, I share with you our story.]

          My friend blew out the candles on her birthday cake. She was about to blow the ninth, the good luck one for next year, when someone tapped my shoulder and said that my mother was outside. I wanted to see the last candle blown out, because not blowing the good-luck one was bad luck, but I rushed out. My mother must have found a ride to the village outside Tel-Aviv where, since the divorce last year, I lived with a family that wasn't mine.
          It was a warm Saturday morning, one of those winter days when the woolen plaid pants and bright red sweater—my party outfit until I would outgrow all possible alterations—itched. But in winter you wore wool or caught pneumonia.
          In the bright sun, my mother stood next to a black Rover and a hatted man. She wore a flowing new skirt and was laughing, not like before, when my father had made her cry a lot. I hated him because he beat me if I forgot to brush my teeth. It was so much better not to be frightened any more.
          I buried my face in my mother’s skirt. Everything about her smelled like warm flowers.
          Frogs croaked in the scattered puddles and water holes. If we weren't dressed in our Sabbath best my mother would have suggested we chase the frogs or count their babies.
          I lifted my head. The man with the hat looked at me with interest. His smile created twin crescent-shaped creases that reached his gray eyes. He handed me a wooden box and I thanked him politely. My mother was shopping for a new husband, and I wanted him to know that the deal included a good kid.
          His smile widened. He had the largest, kindest eyes.
          "Open it." He pointed to the box.
          It was filled with an assortment of pencils, coloring pens, an eraser and a pencil-sharpener—each tucked in its own little pocket. No one in school owned a collection like this. And it wasn't even my birthday!
          I hated hugging people. I had to pretend to like hugging my birth father, a man I addressed only by his first name. Yet, wrapping my arms around this stranger's waist was easy. I breathed his lemon after-shave mingled with the smell of mothball in his tweed jacket.
          When I pulled away, he continued to examine my face. "I told your mother I must meet you."
          She giggled. "He had me climb up to the attic to bring down the photo albums."
          I no longer wanted to go back to the birthday party. I sat on the car hood and was careful not to swing my legs and chip the paint. I must have been difficult to talk to because in those post-divorce months I stuttered. I also wet my bed and had low grades in school.
          From across the field, the muffled hum of cars and trucks on the Tel-Aviv-Haifa Road reached us. It did not drown the calm, rich voice of this man who addressed me as though I were an adult. We started talking, and it was years before we stopped. He knew a lot of interesting things, like how Coca Cola was concocted by a pharmacist, and how a pearl was created inside an oyster. And I had lots of questions to ask.
***
          How could my mother resist this man's proposal of marriage? This forty-year-old bachelor must have fallen in love with her, but I was certain he wanted me for a daughter. He was a genie who popped into my life to save me.
          It was common knowledge that genies masked themselves as ordinary humans, so it was no surprise that mine was disguised as a Dad. But he was the real thing, I was certain, with baby blue chiffon dress and a magic wand with sparkling stars twittering around its top. It was all a matter of catching my genie at a moment she'd be dropping her guard. So I began spying on my new father during my weekend visits in their new home. I peeked at him in his sleep, spied on him when he got the morning paper, watched him while he sorted his stamp collection, and stood riveted while he clipped his toenails. All I caught was an ordinary man with eyes bathed in love.
          I wanted to come home. Permanently, not wait until the end of the school year.
          "Only four months," my mother said. "By then, your room will be ready."
          After the tenant evacuated the extra bedroom in my new father’s apartment, it was painted in every shade of pastel. The historical Tel-Aviv building was located on a divided, wide boulevard, shaded by huge sycamore trees bent with age and disease and flanked by two thoroughfares in which five bus lines made noise and puffed clouds of gray gas. The place looked cheerless and dark in the unrelenting rain the first time I went to visit. But I didn't care. It was home and that was where I wished to be. Summer was too far away.
          One day after school, instead of taking the bus back to the family that gave me food and shelter, I climbed onto the bus heading in the other direction. I had saved my allowance to pay for the ticket. It did not occur to me to be afraid; I was going to see my new father at his law office.
          Tel-Aviv central station was a ten-block area crammed with shops, warehouses and small factories. The streets teemed with buses, vendors' carts, beggars and shoppers—many people to ask for directions. I began to walk. I did not get lost, and some hours after I had left school, my father's secretary showed me in.
          I fell into his arms. "I want to stay with you," I sobbed.
          He did not scold me. Nor did he tell me that the police had been searching for me. Not until years later did he reveal that he had sat at his desk, staring at the phone, waiting for news of me.
          Instead, he took my hand. "Let's go home. Don't you want to see Mommy?"
          "She'll send me back. Will you talk to her?"
          He nodded. We became one front.
***
          One evening, several months after I had moved in, I hung about in the living room, observing my father on a ladder as he changed light bulbs in the chandelier. It was a chance to peek under the hem of his gabardine pants. Maybe this time I'd see the genie’s ballerina legs.
          I gathered the courage to say the magic word. "May I call you 'Daddy’?” I finally blurted.
          "Of course." From his height, his face lit up with an inner glow. "You're my daughter, aren't you?"
          "Abba." I rolled the word off my tongue. "Daddy." Then I skipped around his ladder, letting this sweet word scatter all around us, like marbles. "Abba. Abba. Abba." A genie could be anything she wanted to be. Even a Daddy.
          We developed little rituals, ours alone. In the mornings we walked together—I to my new school and he to his office. When we parted in the corner closest to school, I kissed him good-bye, hoping other kids would notice. In the evenings, he tucked me in bed and sat down for our "Question Corner." I loved listening to his rich, educated language when he told me how, as a child in Leningrad, his mother had bought him one section of an orange for his birthday. I loved hearing how his two older sisters got rid of their pestering baby brother by kissing him until he escaped. Were there families where people kissed instead of yelled?
          I stopped stuttering and I no longer wet my bed. Even though the city school was more demanding than the rural one I had left, I soon climbed close to the top of my class. My father rarely praised my high grades—he had expected nothing less, and soon, neither did I.
***
          My sister—his first natural child—was born when I was fourteen. He must have been delighted, but by then I was oblivious to my home life. Boys, the telephone, and Elvis Presley vied for my attention. Yet, my father and I continued our "Question Corner" with talks about distant planets or the unique pregnancy of the male seahorse.
          That was the time he showed me his poetry notebooks—two full volumes he had written when he had been young. The poems, in his small, neat handwriting, were beautiful, and he let me keep the notebooks for a while.
          I was sixteen when he tried to adopt me, but my birth father whom I rarely saw, refused to sign the papers.
          "Bureaucracy," my heart father said. "It doesn't matter."
          "It matters to me." Forever I cringe when asked for my maiden name. I lie.
***
          It’s decades later. My sister hands me a piece of paper. Section, lot, aisle, row, and finally, a grave number.
          The marble slab squeezed between thousands of similar impersonal ones, represents the small, unimportant life people live—except when they figure as large as my father had in mine. I am about to place the flowers on the white stone, when I know that this is not the place to mourn him.
          I drive to the prosperous suburb, once a village, where decades ago I left a classmate’s birthday party. The eight-lane highway has long claimed the field where I once sat on the hood of the Rover.
          It is here, in the second lane of the highway, at the spot where my little legs in itchy wool pants tried not to swing while talking to the hatted man with kind, gray eyes, that I raise my arm to spread the flowers. With trucks and cars speeding by, the grave for my memories of my father, for our shared life, lies under the asphalt.
# # #

Author Talia Carner’s latest novel, JERUSALEM MAIDEN— inspired by her grandmother’s untapped artistic genius—is the story of a young woman’s struggle between passion and faith. www.TaliaCarner.com .

Mothers on Trial, by Phyllis Chesler

Mothers on Trial, by Phyllis Chesler
Reviewed by Talia Carner

Not since slavery in the USA were mothers punished by having their children taken away from them. Yet, in family courts all across America, judges and quasi-judicial officers of the court do just that: children who are abused or molested by their fathers are removed from their primary-care good mothers and are placed in the hands of their molesting fathers.

How this scandal can go on for decades with hardly any change, without any public outcry, and without any protest from human rights’ activists is due to the fact that outsiders to the gutter of our family courts’ justice simply refuse to believe it.

In her revised and updated milestone fact-filled book, “Mothers on Trial,” Phyllis Chesler fights to save thousands of children from becoming yet another generation of victims of a court system that betrays them time and again. She points out that while adult women often recount childhood sexual molestation at home by close relatives—and these women’s stories are believed—people tend to disbelieve when actually facing such cases as they happen in real time, right in front of them.

It is a documented fact that when fathers fight for custody, 70% of the time they obtain full or partial custody. People often assume that the reason these men who, in most part, have not been fully involved in their children’s lives—sometimes have been absent for months or even years—now gain custody is because the mothers are unfit. The naked truth is that in most of these cases, the father is emotionally and verbally abusive or outright violent. The mother, often the product of an abusive home, often abused for years in her marriage to the father of her children, now faces battle for which she is woefully unequipped to wage. Distraught, terrified, isolated, alienated in a system that scrutinizes her with the same critical and belittling attitude she’s encountered in her private lives, panicked over the fate of her sexually molested children, she seems “emotional” “unreasonable” and “difficult.” Her refusal to share parenting or give access to a man who sexually molest her children is viewed as her being “rigid” and “uncooperative.”

Furthermore, with limited or no financial resources, she comes to court either unrepresented by an attorney, or by an incompetent lawyer with little interest in the complexity of such a case. Or, as is often the case, she does not have the funds to keep the protracted legal battle a high-conflict custody case requires. Filing fees, transcripts, payments to evaluators and her lawyer’s hourly rate quickly rise to thousands of dollars.

In the 1990s I stumbled upon the phenomenon of protective mothers losing these battles in drove, researched it for a few years, and finally published a novel about one such fictional mother in 2002. (Puppet Child.) Since then, I became an activist, trying to find ways to save thousands of children each year from family court’s “justice.” What amazes me is how little has changed in the over decade in which I’ve witnessed more mothers enter the nightmare of family court, where they are discredited, disenfranchised and disbelieved.

Dr. Chesler has been at it a lot longer. Twenty-five years ago she published “Mothers on Trial,” a book that starts with the history of men’s ownership of their families and the lingering feudal notion of male supremacy as the head of the household. She pointed then—and continues to do so now in this excellent revised edition—that society and court hold men to much lower parenting standards than they do women. Mothers fail at every single check list (Does the divorced mother have sex? Is she overwrought with anxiety? Is she poor?) while men can be cold, disinterested, dysfunctional or even violent and they will be excused. In fact, fathers are given new chances time and again to foster their relationships with their children regardless of their abhorrent personal histories, while mothers’ contact with their children are not only curtailed or cut down to expensive supervised visitations, but all too often are severed completely.

If a father poisons a child’s mind against the mother, it does not enter into the question of his parenting skills. But all too often, a child’s fear of an abusive father is regarded as the mother’s brainwashing the child, rather than the father’s own doing. A judge will then chastise the mother for not encouraging enough the relationship with the father—and actually transfer custody to that abusive father. The notion of the best interest of the child and how much the child stands to suffer from cutting the bond with the primary caretaking mother while shuttling into a new life with a man the child fears, does not enter into the equation.

A chapter on Fathers’ Supremacist Movement, reports that fathers’ rights groups have also gathered steam in recent decades and have organized themselves in ways that mothers have failed to do. Some leaders in fathers’ groups have a recorded history of battering their wives or girlfriends, or are convicted pedophiles. Others may have a legitimate concern about shared parenting, but have been expressing strong misogynistic opinions. Common to both ends of the spectrum is the way fathers have been presenting themselves: as persecuted victims. They have been receiving media attention and courtroom sympathy with bogus theories (foremost is Parental Alienation Syndrome that is used almost exclusively against mothers,) and have been successful in passing legislation, due in part to Federal funding under the uncritical assumption that children need equal contact with both parents. Mothers do not have access to equal Federal funding.

In this revised edition, after editing out six chapters and adding eight more while updating the available research, Dr. Chesler examines closely many such cases of outright injustice that defy anything people know and believe possible in our society.

Phyllis Chesler’s book is a must read for every judge, court evaluation, guardian ad litem, social worker, psychologist and lawyer. But more importantly, it should be read by anyone who cares about human rights or about children, because it is time we raise our collective indignation to stop and reverse the life sentence without parole our courts inflict upon children placed in the hands of their molesters.

(To order the book, please click: Mothers On Trial )
# # #
Author Talia Carner’s novel, JERUSALEM MAIDEN (HarperCollins, June 2011) is the story of a woman’s struggle for individuality and freedom within the confines of her society’s strict religious dictates. http://www.taliacarner.com/