Clinical Evidence in Child Custody Determination
In family courts throughout this country, ritualistic transactions and emotional drama cloak highly destructive and lethal court games seldom in the best interest of a child. These Kafka-like scenes (now common in other countries as well), are caused not simply by the dynamics of divorce but by the traumatic “interventions” of the court. If family court in the United States “protects” our children in divorce, who protects our children from the family court? In a recent article, a reputable team of forensic expert witnesses concluded:
“Our own thorough evaluation of tests that purport to pick the ‘best parent’, the ‘best interests of the child’, or the ‘best custody arrangement’ reveals that they are wholly inadequate. No studies examining their effectiveness have ever been published in a peer-reviewed journal. . . . Court tests that expert evaluators use to gauge the supposed best interests of a child should be abandoned. . . . We believe it is legally, morally and scientifically wrong to make custody evaluators de facto decision makers, which they often are because judges typically accept an evaluator’s recommendation. . . . Parents – not judges or mental health professionals — are the best experts on their own children. We are simply urging the same rigor that is applied to expert testimony in all other legal proceedings”.
One clinician recently reported that eight out of ten of his divorce cases at any given time included false allegations of sexual abuse on the part of a maternal parent. If this clinical statistic were valid, eighty percent of the male population in the United States would be molesting their children! One divorce attorney closely wired to a district attorney’s office stated that he considered it his “fiduciary” in any divorce case to indirectly encourage maternal parents to contrive false sexual allegation charges because any such allegation assures maternal parent custody of the “victimized” child. For more on this story click here.
