mothers losing custody to abusers

But new research shows fathers are favored over mothers in child custody battles, even when … But … Many wonder why victims of family violence choose to remain in abusive relationships. Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. That’s an important and disturbing question. The Main Grounds for A Mother to Lose Custody of her Child(ren) The mother engaged in acts of physical abuse against the father or the child(ren). Where should she go when the system put in place to help her is helping her abuser instead and profiting from it? However in non-abuse cases, the data held that alienation had a more gender-neutral impact. I reported abuse of my son. Currently, they are too protected and they know it. The research incorporated published court opinions available online between 2005 and 2014, and used those judgments to create a data set of 4,388 custody (child contact) cases. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. This denial of even indirect contact to either parent (with no criminal conviction for sex abuse) is wicked and wrong. I know his father abused him and I doubt this has stopped. Can Joan Meier truly be unaware that this is simply sample bias? child custody outcomes in cases involving parental alienation and abuse allegations: what do the data show?”, By Joan S. Meier, Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law 42:1, 92-105 (2020). Children need both parents when possible .Any parent that has NOT been charged with or convicted of a serious offence against children should never be refused contact (supervised if considered necessary by doctors or police). Victims of abuse may be silenced by their religious communities who fear the negative attention or legal repercussions the scandal of abuse would cause if it were discovered that a member of their organization committed the abuse. Enter your email address to follow K. S. Bowers and receive updates, release information, and more. When the genders were reversed, and fathers started out with the children, mothers took custody from fathers only 28% of the time. Consider the first part of that conclusion, “The findings confirm that mothers’ claims of abuse, especially child physical or sexual abuse, increase their risk of losing custody”. You will all be familiar with its like (and citation of Elizabeth Sheehy and Linda Neilson is all you need register to have it accurately pigeon-holed). Some proportion of these the court of appeal will conclude to be false. If the outcome of the appeal is to change the children’s residency, in 85% of cases it can only go from mother to father. The first ever national study has confirmed that mothers who make complaints of child abuse against a father in court are more likely to lose contact rights with their children. Call the National Domestic Violence Hotline or visit their, If you’re planning to divorce your abuser, educate yourself on the. ( Log Out /  By contrast, fathers lost custody … The blame for this failure to uphold academic standards lies not only with the author but also with the peer reviewer(s), and the journal itself. Despite being a male unable to see his child, I think there is truth in this. My son and I never spent a day apart in three years. Courts generally respond to a parent's substance abuse either during a child custody hearing or when complaints about suspected substance abuse—and its impact on the children—are reported either to the court that issued the child custody order or to the state (through the Department of Child Protective Services). Hi Amanda, I’m afraid I no longer have it. It is eminently clear from the rest of the paper that “dangerous parents” means fathers. What is in contention is how the data may be interpreted. May I please have the doi to the “similar research in Canada”. Why would these women leave when the courts will take their children and hand them to the abuser who oftentimes, through his control and manipulation of the other parent, retains financial stability and appears to be emotionally stable while the battered woman is left crying, pleading, and making allegations against him which those around her perceive as delusions. When women seek to leave an abusive relationship, many times it’s not just their abuser they’re fighting. I doubt many people think so, but apparently Meier is one who does. To pull the argument apart most cogently the best place to start is this revealing quote, (A) “Mothers and fathers fared equally in several circumstances: First, when a parent’s claim of alienation was credited (across abuse and non-abuse cases) mothers and fathers lost custody at identical rates (71%). The first ever national study has confirmed that mothers who make complaints of child abuse against a father in court are more likely to lose contact rights with their children. But where the court of appeal has failed to find these abuse allegations to be convincing, is it not reasonable to expect this to count against the false accuser? Mothers are no more important than fathers to their children. And of course those are in turn a tiny percentage (about 3%) of all cases. Social work is THE ‘blame and shame’ culture. I believe the percentage is slightly lower in the USA – perhaps 85%. What is wicked in both cases is that in the absence of a criminal conviction either parent can be and often is jailed for sending a birthday card or waving to the children in breach of the no contact order. Angry, scared and confused parents who say courts are awarding full or partial custody of their children to the abusive other parent. Economic abuse is an often overlooked part of domestic violence tactics so that mothers seeking to leave their abusers often lose income and family resources. Children are being forced by family courts to remain in abusive homes, a violation of their human rights. Whilst it’s always tempting to extrapolate what happens in the USA over to the UK, this is not research which is of any help to parents in the UK, other than to encourage fathers to believe that it is worth making such claims about PA and abuse in UK FC also. When the genders were reversed, mothers took custody from fathers only 28% of the time (19/67).”. A poor abused mother who plucks up the courage to mention in court the abuse she has suffered at the hands of her male partner, only to find that her children are taken off her as punishment for her temerity. Whether we like it or not, sometimes things do come down to gender bias, much in the same way as they do for race, religion and ethnicity. As in their pilot study, Meier and her research team found that only 1 out of every 51 cases in which a mother reported child sexual abuse by the father was believed, when the father claimed parental alienation. In FOURTY YEARS nothing has changed for the better in FC despite the 1989 Children’s Act. So, simply due to sample bias we can anticipate as obvious what the paper does in any case reveal…, “We found that mothers losing custody were over-represented in the appeals”, Well, bloody obviously! Learn how your comment data is processed. So the logic of this beggars belief, the child placed in care, care that was used against her mother. Child abuse or sexual abuse is the number one reason that a mother can lose custody of her child. You have a duty to protect your child. A very true and balanced assessment, I think. To Meier, the data provides a window into what she considers a parallel to the #MeToo movement. A very high percentage of battered mothers lose custody of their children to their abuser, and an increasing number of battered mothers are not seeking the help they need. Unfortunately, many judges, attorneys, and mental health professionals do not understand the overlap of … (If an American reader has a better figure I’d be obliged). The US study was produced by Professor Joan Meier, a nationally recognised expert in the US on domestic violence, and Sean Dickson, and is the second piece of research they have published on this topic. Of the 4,338 cases in the total dataset, at least 52% involved allegations of abuse, almost all being allegations by mothers against fathers. Let me unpick the paper a little so you can see how propaganda gold is spun out of factual straw. Necessarily, then, virtually all allegations of abuse which the court does not believe will be allegations by mothers against fathers. In child custody cases involving allegations of child abuse or domestic violence, the common misperception is that the mother is favored over the father. What about civil court? REPORTS BY PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS IV. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Kimberly Bowers with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Moreover, Meier’s quote, above, indicates that this is not gendered: both mothers and fathers as resident parents guilty of alienating run the same risk of having the children moved to the other parent. Men are placed in positions of authority over their families and it is the right and responsibility of the husband to discipline his family. We need to ensure that any SW found to be committing perjury is tried in a criminal court, and then maybe they’d actually tell the truth without partisan bias. Mothers are losing custody of their children to their abusers even in cases where family violence is documented with hospital records, convictions, and restraining orders. From this point on I shall simply assume the data that Meier quotes is valid (as I have no way of checking it). The domestic violence manuals state that if there is a personal protection order in the case, the father is not allowed to have unsupervised visitations, let alone custody. It’s a fatal flaw for any study and one that caused Prof. Bala to call her work “extremely skewed.”. @YuriJoakimidis. That’s 1.8% of the cases. The possible reasons for this are, (a) the courts are biased against mothers, or (b) the courts are broadly accurate in their assessments but a larger percentage of alienation claims by mothers than by fathers are false within Meier’s skewed dataset. What does that tell you in the context of child custody cases? What I am most interested in, is my own lived experience of domestic violence, child abuse and parental alienation. Start with this quote referring to the source of Meier’s data (published court opinions), “the majority of the opinions analyzed were appellate decisions.”. If you as the father allow physical abuse to continue and do not act, you may be committing child neglect. So I was shut out of my daughter’s life, not by the High Court who recommended contact, but by Oxford Family Court. The conversation here is very much about when mothers allege abuse. And we need a CPS prepared to take cases forward when police officers investigating any such allegations believe the child is telling the truth. Social services are a par excellence example of power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The familial and relational stability of the child is ultimately the health of the nation. Should all those mothers lose custody? A further review of Joan Meier’s treatise that works through the misrepresentation of data and exposing bogus academic research driven by doctrinaire dogma. The custody reversals in (B), i.e., 44% or 28%, are less than in (A), i.e., 71%, because the latter is conditional upon the alienation claim being believed. How does quote (B) differ from quote (A), above? It raises awareness of how effective it might possible be for a man to make these claims in the UK. I was one who climbed buildings and stood with other fathers outside ‘Jurassic Judges’ and certain MPs houses in protest, and have seen prejudice swing from one gender to another. How then did they become noncustodial? Incredibly, mothers also risk losing custody if they accuse fathers of beating or sexually abusing them or their children — even or especially if these allegations are supported by experts (Chesler, 2011). Well, the better-informed ones, actually. The core of Meier’s and Cahn’s claims is that fathers use false claims of parental alienation to wrest custody from mothers. I hope it has for my son’s sake. If so, what does that relationship look like?” -Eric Holder, Attorney General of the United States of America, to the National Summit on the Intersection of Domestic Violence and Child Maltreatment, June 2009. Another recent study in Canada made strikingly similar findings. Thousands of Mothers Lose Their Children to Abusive Fathers Representing only women in divorce and custody cases, Diane and Charlie began my education with one grisly case. The wording of the above quote (and throughout the paper) invites us to interpret these associations thus: if a poor abused mother has the nerve to allege that her ex-partner is abusive, she is likely to be punished for it by removal of her children. Cahn’s article is entitled “Why Women Lose Custody,” but Meier’s dubious claims aren’t the reason. If so, good, let’s move forward to impartial professionalism. Not ones who allow themselves to be groomed, and not ones who work to their departmental or managerial agendas. Who is likely to be the appellant in such cases? You know, the experiential experience. “The study, written by professor of clinical law Joan S. Meier, shows that mothers who report abuse — particularly child abuse — are losing child custody at staggering rates. “MeMe. And in regard to any originating in the USA, anything that happens in the USA can stay in the USA as far as I am concerned. If you start from a gender-biased perspective you will inevitably reach a gender-biased conclusion. These allegations are likely to have played a part in the decision to place the child with the mother (in 85% of cases). … List readers may be interested in this review of the Joan Meier study by family law commentator Robert Franklin. 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