2006

Rhode Island taxpayers have contributed an enormous sum to wage a war that most of us know nothing about. The systems our state established to protect children have instead subjected many to danger and trauma that will profoundly shape the rest of their lives. Who will help to build public awareness and political consensus to protect children from those who prey on them or who profit from their abuse? How should government respond in ways that are transparent and accountable?

Monday, September 22, 2014

End the Nightmare at Family Court


Leora N. Rosen, Beyond the Hostage Child: Towards Empowering Protective Parents
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1500551996/ref=cm_cr_mts_prod_img

This clear, readable, and affordable update to Dr. Rosen’s 1996 text, The Hostage Child, focuses our attention on the lifelong harm done to children by family courts and the remedies needed. She identifies specific federal funding streams that have done great damage (for example, the “Responsible Fatherhood Programs” that inspired the deadly rampage by Beltway Sniper John Muhammad from West Coast to East and another by Joshua Komisarjevsky in Connecticut).

This book holds validation for those who have been traumatized when courts removed terrified children from protective parents and gave them to the sole custody of abusers. Dr. Rosen shines a light we need to go forward.

She asserts that alleged crimes of domestic violence and child sexual abuse within the family should never be sent to civil courts that are designed for compromise. She briefly describes five proposed models for change and offers more detail on a sixth, composite model, CARCO (Child At Risk Classification Office) that focuses on a public health assessment of the child’s risk of being exposed to violence or abuse. She uses the acronym TRIAL to represent key elements of CARCO: Training, Reporting, Investigation, Adjudication, and Long-term planning – that are woefully absent from the present practice of adversarial litigation in family court.

Dr. Rosen has performed a huge service by focusing those of us who feel numbed by our own inability to protect desperate children and non-offending parents from the lies of lawyers and psychologists who have reduced them to a profit center. She concludes by urging Congress to use its authority and enact CARCO for the District of Columbia, creating a model for the nation. Federal funding incentives can be redirected to inspire other states to follow suit and to end the nightmare that breeds child abuse at family court.

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About the Author & Purpose

Parenting Project is a volunteer community service provided since 1996 by Mathewson Street United Methodist Church, Providence, RI, to focus on the needs of children at risk in Family Court custody cases. The coordinator, Anne Grant, is a retired United Methodist minister and former executive director of Rhode Island's largest shelter and service agency for battered women and their children. We research and write about official actions that endanger children and the parents who are trying to protect them. Our goal is to reform this area of government and to establish an effective, transparent and accountable child protective system.

We first reported on this case at http://custodyscam.blogspot.com/

To read the blog more easily, please reduce the width of your column. Some of the pictures can be enlarged by clicking once on them.

Comments and corrections may be sent in an email with no attachments to parenting project @ verizon.net

About "Parental Alienation"

If you are not familiar with Richard Gardner's theory of "parental alienation" and how it is being used in custody courts, scroll down to the earliest posting, "Junk Science in Custody Courts." For more scholarly research, visit  http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/pas/1.html

For more on the scandal in custody courts, see:
http://www.centerforjudicialexcellence.org/PhotoExhibit.htm