How much harder is it for immigrants or foreign-born victims? (Note in passing how statistically weak is the 28% figure, resulting as it does from just 19 cases out of an original dataset of 4,338). What about civil court? Dig out all the roots of discrimination, blame and shame from SW culture. 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. https://nationalparentsorganization.org/blog/24534-now-it-s-forbes-promoting-joan-meier-s-shoddy-work, Now It’s Forbes Promoting Joan Meier’s Shoddy Work. Mothers Losing Custody To Abusive Fathers Mothers are leaving an abusive relationship and the abusive father are gaining custody of the children. Unfortunately, many judges, attorneys, and mental health professionals do not understand the overlap of … There is nothing within the paper to support this conclusion. Leaving requires careful strategy, and the danger level increases during this time as most victims are more likely to be killed while attempting to end the relationship or just after leaving. But new research shows fathers are favored over mothers in child custody battles, even when … Nothing odd here. The UK and the US family courts are very similar in a lot of ways, and this research while not carried out in the UK, highlights the same problem we have here. I have not seen him since. This faithfully reflects the tenor of the paper itself. Abusers often limit their victim’s access to money, transportation, and a supportive network of family and friends, making leaving seem impossible. @YuriJoakimidis. I doubt many people think so, but apparently Meier is one who does. Military Service. Nowhere did she attempt to differentiate between, say, a push or shove and a beating that put the victim in the hospital. This is another issue over which the peer reviewer(s) failed badly. Pingback: Mothers Who Allege Abuse More Likely To Lose Custody of Their Children – Researching Reform | cathy fox blog on child abuse. It can take a lot of effort, unwrapping statistics, before it stands revealed in its true colours. Some mothers reached a mutual decision with an ex-partner. Since alienation involves psychological trauma to the child, and the courts are mandated to make the child’s welfare paramount, if the court believes this is happening it is hardly surprising that the result is frequently a court ruling for change of residency. This is the further skew in the data sample which renders Meier’s findings unsurprising. There is not some pervasive confirmatory biased mind set or scheme among Family Court Judges to wrest custody away from fit mothers who allege abuse in child custody cases. What woman reading this will not be hopping mad? What we need reporting is the research on what is actually happening in UK courts – THAT could be used in a court case. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! A great deal. If you as the father allow physical abuse to continue and do not act, you may be committing child neglect.  No child should be separated from a good mother nor should they have their rights taken from them while others profit from their abuse. The research also found that this risk doubled when a father made a counter-claim of parental alienation, leading the researchers to conclude that ‘alienation trumps abuse’.”. 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”. However in non-abuse cases, the data held that alienation had a more gender-neutral impact. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. 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. Of the 4,338 cases in the total dataset, at least 52% involved allegations of abuse, almost all being allegations by mothers against fathers. Not ones who allow themselves to be groomed, and not ones who work to their departmental or managerial agendas. When the genders were reversed, mothers took custody from fathers only 28% of the time (19/67).”. We need social workers who are fit for purpose. The difference lies in whether the court believes the claim of alienation. Even when the father’s abuse was proven in court, mothers who had alleged that abuse still lost custody in 13 % of the cases; By contrast, fathers lost custody only 4% of the time when a mother’s abuse was proved in court; Overall, fathers were much more likely than mothers to win contact disputes when claiming alienation. Many thanks to Kelly Williamson, who tweeted the new research. These allegations are likely to have played a part in the decision to place the child with the mother (in 85% of cases). For example, if one parent sexually or physically abuses a child, while the other parent stands by and does nothing, the child may be removed from the parents’ home. A very true and balanced assessment, I think. What’s wrong with them? Until that gets changed, children will continue to be victims because victimisation by agents of the state is the hardest possible victimisation to end. When women seek to leave an abusive relationship, many times it’s not just their abuser they’re fighting. Family courts have made it easy for batterers to abuse their families, and in this manner the abuse is legal. Parental Alienation, which is a form of psychological or mental child abuse, is not some magical potion concocted by defense attorneys and experts to convince Judges they must reduce or remove a mother’s parenting time. While it’s always important to appreciate the military for their service to the country, … The US Family Courts and State Legislatures have always been far in advance of the UK’s Jurassic judges in acknowledging the value of shared parenting and are clearly ensuring that the best interests of the children are protected. Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. 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. The research here is gender-biased. Mother’s Day is two weeks away, but for many women in the United States, around 58,000 or more a year, there’s nothing happy about this day at all. It shows the extent of the inherent stupidity of all those running the system, judges, social workers, Cafcass, and expert witnesses. the leftover comments on relevance and academic integrity, to borrow your words, are insular “white noise.”, I agree COMPLETELY about body cameras on SWs. So, the data derives predominantly from appeal courts. 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. And, if the victim is married with children, her abuser will nearly always petition for sole custody, and he’ll win 70% of the time. ( Log Out /  It’s devastating and wrong and should not be allowed to happen. I hope it has for my son’s sake. 2, Winter 1999-2000, J. M. Bowermaster. This ‘research’ and the hopelessly amateurish reporting of it are only worthy of someone who already has an answer. Or maybe not. Mothers who report sexual abuse nearly always lose custody. To Meier, the data provides a window into what she considers a parallel to the #MeToo movement. May I please have the doi to the “similar research in Canada”. Clearly, in this case, the reviewer(s) failed in their duty. A standard requirement is to confirm that “the conclusions follow from the arguments of the text”. The site Researching Reform summarised the paper’s findings thus, “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. Professor Meier’s allegations and position on this topic has been answered by Harman and Lorandos, 2020. This research on US courts would be of no use to me in defending against such allegations in a UK FC. In 2004, a federal court ruled that New York's Administration of Children's Services was wrongfully taking children from mothers who were victim of domestic abuse, claiming that any harm their children suffered was "neglectful" and a "failure to protect." In the cases she studied, it’s entirely possible that judges’ decisions were completely sound and well-founded. “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. Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. The reality is that the family courts used to be heavily biased in favour of mothers who reported sexual abuse of their children by the father.These fathers not only lost custody but were denied all future contact with their own children.This unfairness roused a movement called “fathers for justice to climb on roof of important buildings and to pickett the home addresses of judges ! 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. Social work is THE ‘blame and shame’ culture. Not so here. And I am happy that my experiences have formed part of several reputable UK academic studies in the last few years. The paper purports to reveal certain correlations, or associations, between allegations of abuse, allegations of alienation, and courts ruling to change the custodial parent from mother to father, or vice-versa. A mother should never fear losing custody of her children after leaving a violent home. A pilot version of the study was published in 2017, ukfamilycourtcorruptpracticesJohn Malloch-Caldwell, Mothers Who Allege Abuse More Likely To Lose Custody of Their Children – Researching Reform | cathy fox blog on child abuse, Mariella Frostrup: victim-blaming does a disservice to survivors – #thecourtsaid, All Party Parliamentary Group on Family Law and The Court of Protection. The team classified the cases into different types of abuse allegations by either parent: The study also included allegations that one parent was trying to alienate the child from the other parent. From nowhere – or not members and friends often turn their backs on victims abuse... 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