The National Organization for Women is holding its annual national
conference–”Fast Forward: Women Take Charge”–on July 13-15. One of NOW’s main complaints is the alleged mistreatment of women in family court.
One of their presentations–conducted by Renee Beeker, President of Michigan NOW, and Vickie Masotti, is titled “Women Victimized in Family Courts: How to Make the System Accountable.” NOW writes:
“Many feminists believe that the family courts are in crisis, as the number of women losing custody of minor children to documented batterers and sexual abusers mounts. One woman whose family has suffered as a result of aggressive courtroom tactics by so-called fathers’ rights activists and biased court personnel will tell her story. In addition, there will be a review of data from a national survey of court watches conducted by the chair of the NOW Family Law Ad Hoc Committee. This information is intended to hold the family courts accountable and to enable activists to effectively aid women and children victimized by an unfair system.”
The “woman losing custody to abusive ex-husband” script is one of NOW’s bugaboos. I’ve looked into the three most highly-publicized cases featured by NOW and their colleagues with the Battered Mothers Custody Conference–the Genia Shockome case, the Sadia Loeliger case, and the Bridget Marks case. In each case, we were told that a fit, loving, protective mother was stripped of custody by an abusive father.
When I first started looking into these cases, I figured there probably were some where the mothers really were mistreated. I still think those cases are out there, but I haven’t found them yet. Neither the Shockome case, the Loeliger case, nor the Marks case fit the NOW/BMCC “protective mother losing custody to abusive father” model. None even came close.
In the Loeliger case, it was the mother who had been found culpable of child abuse by a California juvenile court. The father got custody not due to family court machinations, as the mother’s supporters claimed, but because the juvenile court removed the little girl from the mother’s care because of the physical abuse.
In the Marks case, all five judges who heard the case, male and female, concluded that she had coached her little girls into asserting that they had been molested by their father.
In the Shockome case, the mother’s absolute refusal to co-parent with her ex-husband led the courts–eventually, after giving her many chances–to transfer custody of the kids from Genia to her ex-husband.
I explained all of these cases in more detail in my co-authored column Shockome Syndrome.
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