PSYCHOLOGY IN THE COURTROOM? Therapeutic Jurisprudence Creates ETHICS problems For Family lawyers in Our Courts. THE CASE FOR ABOLISHING CUSTODY EVALUATORS.

Time to get educated. We must change family laws and divorce policies that benefit fathers, mental health practitioners, custody evaluators, guardians ad litem, lawyers, judges, therapists, and others, while doing nothing to benefit children or women, child welfare, children's education, or the next generation.

Less than a generation ago, married women in some U.S. states did not have the right to manage their own property, and all household property was deemed to belong to the husband upon divorce. More recently, it remained legal in some states for a husband to rape his wife. (Marital rape is still legal today in nearly every country in the world that bans abortion.)

In 1981, the Federal Work Incentive Program, three out of four of whose participants were women, was required by law to give jobs preference to men, who also received jobs paying an average of 34% more per hour.

Husbands by law routinely were defined as "head of the household."
Hundreds of laws overtly discriminated against women, and thousands of laws discriminated in effect.

Think by now it's all been "fixed?" Think again. -- liz

  

 

PSYCHOLOGY IN THE COURTROOM

SOUND RESEARCH? Custody science, By C. S. Bruch.

THE CASE FOR ABOLISHING CUSTODY EVALUATORS  By Margaret Dore.

GUARDIANS AD LITEM IN CUSTODY LITIGATION  By Richard Ducote.

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF PARENTAL ALIENATION SYNDROME  By F. Besset.

THE PROPER ROLE OF MHPs IN DOMESTIC VIOLENCE CASES  By Barry Goldstein.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH PARENTING COORDINATION?  By liz.  OUTLINE

CHILD CUSTODY EVALUATIONS  Reevaluating the evaluators.

IN  THEIR OWN WORDS MORE: THERAPEUTIC JURISPRUDENCE INDEX

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PARENTAL ALIENATION THEORY

First read:   ARTICLE BY JOAN MEIER ABOUT PAS... then read:

Joyanna Silberg on:   DOMESTIC VIOLENCE BY PROXY... and:

GETTING IT WRONG IN CHILD CUSTODY CASES  Prof. Bruch on the research. 

NAT'L COUNCIL OF JUVENILE & FAMILY COURT JUDGES: IT'S NOT PAS

JENNIFER HOULT'S ANALYSIS   and... NEW:  EVALUATORS the PAS Networks.

THE FRIENDLY PARENT CONCEPT A flawed factor for child custody.  By M.  Dore

PARENTAL ALIENATION SYNDROME: DANGEROUS AURA OF RELIABILITY By C. L. Wood.

RICHARD GARDNER: A SELF-MADE MAN  Very creative therapeutics.

COMPULSIVE TREE PLANTING SYNDROME?   liz to Gardner. bias

PARENTAL ALIENATION "SYNDROME"  Prof. Myers on "PAS."

NEW: RUEDA'S 2004 INTER-RATER RELIABILITY STUDY   Bad science. the religion of fatherhood

FETID FATHERING SYNDROME   Like Malicious Mother Syndrome, but better.

DIVORCE POISON   Cheryl Metellus on Warshak on PAS.

LETTER TO RICHARD GARDNER   By Karen Anderson.

"BUT I'VE SEEN IT!"  NO, YOU HAVEN'T.   There's no such thing.religion of fatherhood

parenting coordination, custody evaluation

 

FAMILY COURT ISSUES, ACTIVISTS Divorce reform

OUTRAGES Naming names.  IN THE NEWS  Drops in the bucket.

BATTERED MOMS LOSE CUSTODY

ADVOCATES FOR NATIONAL GUARDIANSHIP ETHICS AND REFORM

FAMILY COURT IS NOT A FAMILY-FRIENDLY PLACE  By Lisa Macci.

NOW REPORT ON THE COURTS

SMEAR CAMPAIGN   A psychologist versus CA lawyer Robin Yeamans.

2001 JUDICIAL BLUNDER OF THE YEAR AWARD (To put it politely.) research

IS COLLABORATIVE LAW A GOOD IDEA?  Questions raised...

BAD:  ADMITTING SUPERVISED VISITATION RECORDS IN COURT

RUN MOMMY RUN!  By Talia Carner, author of Puppet Child.

  

 

Child Custody Evaluations --THE CASE FOR ABOLISHING CUSTODY EVALUATORS

Parenting Evaluation, Parenting Plans...
Reevaluating the Evaluators: Rethinking the Assumptions of Therapeutic Jurisprudence in the Family Courts

THE CASE FOR ABOLISHING CUSTODY EVALUATORS  By Margaret Dore.

Reevaluating the Evaluators: Rethinking the Assumptions of Therapeutic Jurisprudence in the Family Courts

There is an evolving and worsening mess in the systems and procedures currently in place to determine child custody and perform child custody evaluations when parents disagree.

This article discusses the minimum disclosures every child custody evaluator (also known as "parenting evaluator" or "best interests" guardian ad litem or GAL) [1], or parenting coordinator (herein called a "mental health professional" or "MHP") [2a] should be required to make, responding satisfactorily and in full, before being appointed in any family law case to do a child custody evaluation -- in fact before doing anything beyond answering a list of limited, detailed, specific, and narrowly-crafted questions the answers to which are directly within the MHP's field of proved expertise. This format is being used to help illustrate a problem, and with another purpose in mind. That purpose is to call for a revolt altogether against the notion of "therapeutic jurisprudence" -- which has been proved to do little to benefit children, much to benefit the divorce industry, much to complicate and pervert our family laws, much to erode fundamental rights and liberties, and much to harm the families who become trapped in the system. There are many problems, of course. But they are symptoms. Step one is to get the agent of most of them out of our family courts. The Emperor has no clothes.

There have been many calls for reform [2b], but for the most part, while they are admirable and well-documented intentions, they miss the boat; while they identify various problems and propose fixes in the system, they fail to identify and address the core reason the system is sick. Thus the proposals seek to treat only symptoms while failing to apply a cure to eliminate the disease.

Contrary to the public perception, and the perception that those seeking lucrative appointments in the court system wish to convey, a degree in some field of mental health does not qualify the individual to perform work that consists of open-ended investigating, evaluating, recommending, or decision-making about other persons' families and children. [3] What originally commenced, and was thought to be a good idea as a judge's assigment of fairly narrow tasks designed to streamline fact-finding and protect individuals' therapy records [4] (e.g. asking a social worker to do a home study, e.g. asking a psychologist to opine on the possible effects on functioning of a party's known or suspected personality disorder or state of depression when mental health already is at issue) has burgeoned into a free-for-all in which a panoply of MHPs make work and involve themselves in the family court system at enormous cost and detriment to the parties with expensive litigation-exacerbating processes, trials-within-trials, experts and counter-experts, and inevitable referrals to additional MHPs (often cronies) for all manner of alternate dispute resolutions and sometimes endless (and often utterly unproven) therapies. [5]

(1) Do you have a law degree or previous extensive experience as a law enforcement officer doing investigations, and if not, what qualifies you to do this work?

The milieu in which the MHP will be working is the justice system, in which litigants have certain rights of due process [6] and in which decisions made in connection with one issue can materially affect a litigant's position as to seemingly unrelated issues in the same case, and in which milieu, inter alia, centuries of jurisprudence have honed certain concepts involving what constitutes reliable evidence, burdens of proof, and other legal aspects bearing on the ultimate resolution of a case. [7] Sociologists, psychologists, and even real scientists by reason of their formal training tend to have little understanding of or appreciation for these legal concepts. [8]

Read more here: http://www.thelizlibrary.org/liz/child-custody-evaluations.html