This story is part of an effort by
Safe Kids International to raise awareness about an issue of social injustice that is endangering millions of children around the world. There is an epidemic of family court judges deliberately disregarding and covering up substantial evidence of sexual abuse and granting custody to the abusive fathers. This is a
human rights crisis which we are presently
organizing to battle.
In this case, a Marriage and Family Therapist (MFT), who was herself psychologically abused as a child by her mother, was told by Family Court that if she did not "cooperate" and send her children to regular unsupervised visitation with their physically and sexually abusive father, she would be considered an "unfriendly parent" and lose custody. This is the horrible choice so many women face in Family Court: allow your child to be abused and keep partial custody; continue to try and protect your child and the perpetrator gets full custody, with you on supervised visitation or even no contact.
Either way the children are abused. But one way at least the children get to come home and be with their safe mother. That's what this mom chose, but her daughter, who had been regularly sexually assaulted during unsupervised visitation with the father, is now an adult and hates her mother for not protecting her and will not even speak with her. The daughter simply cannot understand the terror inflicted upon her mom by the very system that exists to protect children.
Her younger son is in high school, and the mom is still terrified to use her real name for fear of retaliation, so SafeKids is posting this story for her. Gag orders are the norm in abuse cases which is why the public is not aware of the cover up of abuse in Family Court yet.
This is her story.
My story starts as a “worthless good-for-nothing who’ll never amount to anything”. I was told to “go cry to your God because He’s the only person who’ll ever love you”. Some people shouldn’t be let near a child let alone be allowed to have/keep one.
IF it were real, my childhood would’ve been a perfect science observation lab for the study of “Parental Alienation”. If you think being called “a worthless good-for-nothing who’ll never amount to anything is bad” you should hear the things my “mother” has to say about my father (and yes, you read that correctly – I did use the present tense because she hasn’t stopped her verbal assaults against him in 40+ years and yes, they’re STILL married).
Father wasn’t the only person on the receiving end of Mother’s badmouthing – my beloved paternal grandmother she hated more – but here’s the thing: my grandmother was the only source of constant love and affection I received throughout my childhood, so no matter what Mother said about her, no matter how badly I was treated and beaten for being “her favorite” my love for my grandmother remains.
I don’t care for my father – not for what Mother said and says about him – but because he heard and saw what Mother did to me and he never intervened; to this day, he will not stand up to her nor stand up for me. As a non-protective parent, he allowed Mother to abuse me and that’s why I don’t like him, NOT because Mother badmouths him.
As for me, Mother’s words had more power. When she’d drag me to the mirror, shove my face into it and tell me how ugly and disgusting I was, I believed it. I still don’t believe people when they compliment me because I know (ok, feel) they’re just being polite.
When she smashed the side of my head into a doorframe as a teenager and a lump resulted, it was one of the many moments throughout my childhood where I wrestled with reality because Mother told me that I was being clumsy again - that I trip over my own feet (so I still watch my feet when I walk). When I said, “No, you did this” she got into my face and carefully enunciated, “You know, I think you’re going crazy. When you speak, you don’t make any sense. Go ahead, tell your crazy story – no one’s going to believe you” but the point was, I believed her.
Whenever you hear the term “alienated”, substitute that word for “abused” because that’s what you’re actually looking at.
By my estimation, the odds of anyone believing me were insurmountable so I held my tongue, bided my time in that hell house and decided to prove Mother wrong by making something of myself. I knew that what she did to me was wrong and I firmly believe that no child should ever deserve the childhood I had, so I figured if I became a therapist, I could take abusive parents like Mother and reform them into non-abusers so children would have the chance of a “new and improved” parent that (once reformed) would never hurt them again – a chance I never got.
After “acting out” and getting involved with a lot of morally irresponsible shenanigans in my late teens/early 20s (that would be later used as “evidence” of my mental/emotional instability and unfitness to parent), I finally settled down and worked diligently to become the most professional professional ever. I wanted and sought out the worst of the worst abuse cases to work with because if I could heal and save them I could “heal and save” myself. It became a joke that I’d rush into cases that everyone else would run away from.
When working with abusers, I’d rate them on my “Mother Richter Scale” (how the abuser would compare on a 1–10 scale where my “mother” ranked at a 10; no one ever made it to 10 but I did have a 9 once).
No one knew my personal history – I masked and hid it as if my career depended upon it because it did: I learned through my schooling that it’s not cool/acceptable/professional to be a therapist and “a client” at the same time so my “expertise” in abuse came strictly from the books for all outward appearances. At the same time I remember praying to God asking Him to put a man in my life who’d think of “me, me and only me”…
One of the things I learned in school - “There are two human tragedies: NOT GETTING your heart’s desire and then GETTING it” – and boy did I ever get it!
I didn’t see his abuse as abuse; I saw it as a woman’s lot, something a wife endured, the “worse” in the “for better or worse” and at his worst, he would only rise to a 5 on the “Mother Richter Scale”. His behaviors weren’t a problem until we had our children. I could take what he could dish out so long as he didn’t touch the kids and one day he crossed that line. I was not going to be my father so I grabbed the kids and left, leaving behind a note that said “Get help and we’ll come back”; he never got help and we never went back.
Strange, surreal experience to go from being a housewife and stay-at-home mom in a 4-bedroom home one day to being a domestic violence victim on the verge of becoming a single parent hiding in a room in a homeless shelter for women and children on Christmas the next, but more strange and surreal was soon to follow.
Domestic Violence and Child Abuse weren’t subjects taught in therapy school – those were subjects you could learn about at conferences or through on-the-job training. I didn’t realize how crucial the absence of such education would be until my children and I were tossed into the very response system I used to work in.
At the hearing for the Restraining Order, the judge had already heard enough. He asked my husband point-blank: “Did you hit her while she was pregnant?” He responded truthfully, “Yes”. The judge asked, “Did you kill her cat?” He truthfully responded again, “Yea, so?” Last question: “If I don’t grant this Restraining Order, can you guarantee your wife’s safety?” The silence was deafening until the judge banged his gavel and read out the terms and conditions of the Restraining Order.
For three years there was peace. The kids and I went in to counseling and therapy and participated in groups – we healed, we were happy. I worked in abuse prevention services and even met someone along the way – a good, decent and non-abusive man who couldn’t even wrap his head around what the kids and I had been through; he believed us, he just couldn’t “believe it” until he got his chance to witness it all for himself.
At the end of the three-year Restraining Order, my husband came back into our lives with a vengeance. My son, who was now 5 years-old, had no recollection of the series of events that led to our cross-country escape or how I ended up exiled by family members but my daughter, who was now 8 years-old remembered EVERYTHING. I knew what my soon-to-be-ex was capable of, so did my daughter; those who would be assigned to “our case” didn’t and would learn the hard way.
Here’s the thing of it: with his history of behavior towards me and my daughter laid bare for all to see, the system’s predominant attitude about his abusiveness was an optimistic one – “that was then, this is now” – the children NEEDED to be reunified with their father for their “best interests” despite his acts of stalking and terrorism; all was forgiven (NOT by me but by those in charge of our case) in the name of harmony and reunification. Idealism, theoretical principles and professional opinions would out-trump acts of ongoing abuse, court orders and evidence – go figure.
The first day my daughter had to see her father again, she was terrified – NOT because I badmouthed him (after living with Mother, I’d NEVER do that to anyone!) but because she had her own memories of him. Young and little as she was, when I tried to help put the bad memories behind her and into some perspective, she’d get irritated with me saying, “Stop making excuses for him Mommy!”
My misplaced faith in the system I worked in plus a warning from my own attorney that I’d better reassure her led me to tell my daughter the following on her first day of supervised visitation with him: “Don’t worry, it’ll be fine – he can’t hurt you anymore, no one will let him – everybody’s watching”. I knew that saying this would turn me into a liar but considering my profession and my position (“You have full custody but that can be easily changed depending upon your cooperation”) I had to hope for the best and just do as I was told.
Not because of compliance to the court orders or because things were going so well between him and the kids, visitations went from supervised to UNsupervised in a year’s time just at my ex’s belligerent insistence; apparently his rights to visitation overruled the children’s right to safety from harm – and more specifically, his harm. Once no one was looking, he kicked his abusiveness towards the kids and manipulative behaviors into high gear.
How do I convey how much went wrong in such a relatively short period of time from the stupid to the severe? Here’s an example of the stupid:
With weeks of advance notice about the date, time, terms and conditions of his unsupervised visitation, he complained bitterly that he would be unable to return our daughter if she were given to him because he lacked transportation. The “only solution” (according to him) was for me to pick her up, alone, at his apartment. He was advised to take advantage of one of the following options: bus, taxi, rent/borrow a car – his choice and his responsibility to get her back to the specified drop-off/pick-up location at the specified time, 7:00pm.
Instead, he took our daughter by bus to a university class and at the appointed time, took her back by bus to his apartment (instead of the drop-off location) where he began to furiously make emergency phone calls to the Guardian Ad Litem in the dark (my daughter said he didn’t even turn on the lights in his apartment before bee-lining to the phone).
On a Sunday night, the GAL was out at dinner when her cell phone began ringing relentlessly off-the-hook. Irritated at the disruption, the GAL called me to fix the situation but because the Restraining Order had been extended, there was nothing I could do except repeat the options my ex had been previously given.
Rather than get a taxi, catch a bus or impose upon his girlfriend for a ride, my ex instead called my maternal aunt (whose relationship with me was already strained, courtesy of my ex) and asked her for a ride. Furious that her Sunday evening was being disrupted by me, my aunt called to inform me that thanks to my immaturity, she “had no choice” but to drive my daughter and her father back to me (an hour and a half round-trip for her). Shortly after that call, the GAL angrily called me because she had just arrived back home to find that my ex had gotten her home phone number and had filled her answering machine with messages.
When my daughter finally returned home it was late and she was an emotional wreck from the experience BUT it was still “in her best interests” to have to keep on going through this same situation again, and again and again because the optimistic idea was that my ex would see how this was harming her – he’d stop and he’d change; he never did.
And here’s an example of the severe: when my ex started to become sexually inappropriate with my daughter, her response was to try to look like a boy and she did a good job of it; I was frequently complimented on my two handsome sons.
After one weekend visitation, I asked my daughter how it went and she told me how she had made an “alarm system” from fishing line and her cat’s collar’s bell so when her father tries to sneak into the bathroom when she’s showering, she’d hear him. She was 10 years-old and I didn’t know whether to be proud of her ingenuity or appalled that a girl her age would have to construct something of that nature to thwart her own father! At one point, the GAL “put her foot down” and insisted my ex get two beds in his apartment to accommodate our daughter but my ex said the one bed was working just fine so there was no need for a second.
I think the worst for me was when the captain of our police department’s Domestic Violence Unit called me one January morning and literally begged me to take a Restraining Order out for my daughter against her father. I had already consulted with my attorney previously about this and was told not to. I began crying when the captain asked, “I don’t understand – don’t you want to protect your daughter?” I tried to explain, “Yes, I do want to protect her but if I get a Restraining Order for her, the family court will see that as obstructing my ex’s visitation with her and I’ll lose her. The only way I can keep her is to keep surrendering her”. The captain said he didn’t understand; I told him I didn’t either but that’s just the way it was/is.
My daughter’s visitation came to an abrupt end when the psychologist assigned to do Psych Evals on us all called the court to report my daughter’s abuse BUT just because my daughter was being abused didn’t mean that my son was so his visitations continued. My son, now 7 years-old, said that he and his dad were boys so he didn’t think he’d be treated like how his sister was. Exactly a year later, the court suspended my ex’s visitations with our son after reports from the Parenting Coordinator were submitted about his physical abuse; the PC subsequently withdrew from our case citing fear for her own safety.
My family court case has been going on for 14 years now, four years longer than my marriage to my ex, so I remain bound to family court jurisdiction. Throughout this time I have been directed by professionals to keep the details and occurrences of our case confidential from our kids because it would be poor parenting and age-inappropriate information with the threat remaining that if I don’t want to operate by these rules, then custody could be easily changed to my ex.
At one court hearing I was told that my daughter was “not allowed” to speak about what her father was doing to her until she was over 18. Terrified into submission, I quickly agreed, but then I began thinking: I’ve spent my life fighting abuse and telling victims to break their silence, but now I’m going to silence my own daughter? Over my dead body! But despite all this, my story doesn’t have a happy ending.
Their abuse is over, their visitation is over/suspended and with the exception of silencing my daughter, I did 12 years of following every single court order, every professional directive (no matter how wrong my instincts told me they were) to 100% A+ perfection and you know where that got me?
When my daughter left for college, she informed me she no longer wanted a relationship with me. I’m a liar and a hypocrite. All those years she suffered in visitation and what did I do? (In her eyes) nothing – despite all that she told me he was doing to her, I kept surrendering her. (From her perspective) I gave more value to what the professionals said than to what she’d say and I was always consulting with so many professionals, why couldn’t I just think for myself? I’m that weak and that dependent? I’m not worth her respect, I’m not worth knowing and she prays that I’ll die and go to hell so I can see how I screwed up her entire childhood. By cooperating, complying and placing the family court system’s orders and directives over my own maternal instincts, intuition and a police captain’s advice, I’ve lost my daughter.
I no longer work for the system that failed me and my children but I am an advocate who helps other victim-survivors try to keep/get their kids back through navigating the system. How’s that for irony: I can save everyone else’s children except for my own.