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What You'll Want to Know about Divorce Lawyers, Domestic Violence and Child Custody

By Dr Jeanne King PhD

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 27Apr2009 Word count: 1165 Viewed: 115 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

The family court nightmare leading up to my exile has lots of people scratching their heads wondering what actually happened. I detail all of it in All But My Soul: Abuse Beyond Control, but the whole story is so heart-wrenching that many people are blown away before they fully digest the final ploy.

And knowing this final ploy is an important piece that could best benefit you if you are headed to family court with domestic violence in your relationship. There's a lot you can learn from this story to hold your own and save your own.

After 11 years of family violence, I was in family court wherein I received four Orders of Protection for my children and me over four solid years. However, all awhile we lived under the blanket of "protection" my then-husband was granted permission to destroy our contact with one another.

Here's What Happened in a Nutshell.

He got a civil finding of abuse because of the court-documented abuse to our three minor children and to myself. He was removed from the marital residence and given supervised visitation. But that didn't stop the domestic abuse. No, that just made for a different avenue to prevail...to save face and to regain control over the family.

There was no custody battle as he was not a candidate for custody because of the court- documented abuse. There were no findings of my being unfit because none of the psychiatrists could or would label me with any psychopathology. My ex was the one blessed with the psychiatric diagnosis.

So how the hell did they pull it off? Grab a cup of coffee. Hold onto your chair and learn this classic ploy.

To "prepare" for a so-called custody battle, the court removed the children from both parents to take them out of the "stress of the litigation." That meant that the children were removed from my custody, as I was the custodial parent during the entire four years of the proceedings (in which nothing was actually litigated).

Then, when my counsel pointed out that you cannot legally remove children from a parent NOT found to be unfit, the judge consented to reverse his ruling. But the "reversal" was another ploy.

Now a true reversal of a ruling would be to give them back to me as they were taken from me, but instead they were simply handed over to my ex. Thus, they were essentially removed from my custody WITHOUT a hearing.

Then to add insult to injury, I was repeatedly denied access to my children as prescribed by our visitation schedule. Upon my showing up to visit with my children (with a supervisor mind you), my kids where nowhere to be found.

With each of these interferences of my visitation, I filed a complaint and the police where in shock...mainly because I was being treated like the criminal, yet had all of the official court documentation of victimization to my children and to me.

Technically, the third compliant of interference of visitation, is met with a six-month prison sentence. But the police were given word from the divorce court to NOT interfere. You see the civil proceeding PREVENTED any criminal protection of my boys and me.

Now you might wonder why this was done. The Judge's wife was a physician at the same hospital as my ex-husband, which was the hospital where I was bringing my children and myself for physical injuries resulting from family violence by their father/my ex.

So from the get go, I was on the wrong side of the politics in this case. However, we were not successful in getting this judge to recuse' himself from the case due to this obvious conflict of interest. And compounding this was the fact that there were no checks and balances to employ, as he was also the presiding judge in the district.

Now Here's the Climax of the Ploy.

After fully denying my access to my children and legal remedy for this violation, I fled the state at the recommendation of the domestic violence shelter. They obviously saw the next ploy coming.

My final exit was met with the court placing a body attachment on me for not showing up in court to fight over the marital residence where I had been residing. Now normally this would result in a default judgment giving the house to my ex, which at that point I was fine with. Instead, I'm told, after the fact, that an officer was sent out to fetch Jeanne. You know what I mean. Fortunately for me, I was already gone.

Then there was the luring back period. I was told I could have "consideration" for contact with my children if I yielded to my ex's desire that I be placed in a psychiatric hospital for a minimum of a 30-day psychiatric evaluation.

But my belief about this is that you never surrender your mental health to someone who is threatening to take it away all under the guise of bargaining especially when your kids are a few years from being of age. My oldest was months from turning 16. And my ex's promise was to "___ ____" me using my own profession, as he would routinely threaten. This was to be my punishment for coming out with the abuse in our family.

And, most importantly, I believe you never surrender your mental health to someone's whim when you are the one with the clean bill of mental health by all the evaluating psychiatrists, psychologists and custody evaluators over the last four years. Especially in light of the fact that the custody evaluator has declared you to be the psychological parent of the children and your soon-to-be ex is "using the system to batter you and your children."

Now with my unwillingness to allow my soon-to-be ex to compromise my mental health, he then has a way to say to my kids... if she really loved you, she would simply cooperate and allow me to hospitalize her. Needless to say, I'm sure you can imagine what this did to my kids.

The blessing here is that I had the cogency (as one attorney noted after the fact) to recognize the ploy that leaves women destroyed on psychotropic medications for life. I managed to keep my sanity and rise above to re-unite with my kids after they became 18. However, the downside is the pollution to them in the interim. The upside is our love is a testament to the power of a parent-child connection.

If you are in family court, learn to spot the politics and block the legal psychiatric ploys before they spiral out of control as they did in our case. When you can rise above the tide, you can prevent much of the legal domestic abuse and you can prevail.

If you play your hand right you can walk away from this nightmare with your kids in your arms (without missing a soccer game) and your sanity still intact.

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