It’s time to say the obvious truth straight up. No pretty ribbons, no proving how “reasonable” I am by sugar-coating the harsh reality of what’s actually happening.
Here it is: The family court system across the continent has become the moral equivalent of a slave trade. Mothers and children have no rights at all, the Constitution is thrown out the window. Millions of dollars are being made by professionals off of denying domestic violence, sexual abuse of children, and physical abuse of children, and siding with the perpetrator instead. Loving mothers are having their children torn away from them when they haven’t even been accused of anything; or where the only accusation is that they’ve tried to protect their children from an abusive father – exactly what the child needs the mother to do — and therefore are declared guilty of “parental alienation.”
Consider this: The court is ruling that even fathers who are confirmed to have beaten the mother, or are confirmed to have molested the children, should continue to have a relationship with their children as if these things hadn’t happened. But a mother who won’t shut up about abuse? That’s a reason to cut her off from her children in the court’s eyes.
Ignorance, I’m sorry to say, is not the problem. The problem is horrible mother-hating attitudes, combined with greed and more greed. And this means, unfortunately, that trainings for judges and other court personnel are not the answer. I can say this from experience because I’ve trained family court judges and evaluators in a dozen states – with no noticeable uptake. You can train ignorance, but you can’t train hateful outlooks or the hunger for money and power.
Things are just getting worse. Judges are imposing gag orders on mothers, forbidding them to discuss their custody evaluators report with anyone other than their own lawyer. So much for free speech; she’s violating the court order if she asks someone whether they actually said what the evaluator claims they said! (I had the experience of seeing a custody evaluation that I wasn’t supposed to have access to — I got it illegally – and found that the evaluator quoted me as saying the exact opposite of what I had actually said about a key question. And this is not an unusual experience: mothers are constantly reporting to me that their evaluators have deliberately lied about what the woman said.)
Speaking of which, evaluators are forbidding women to record their own meetings with the evaluator! What excuse could there possibly be for this? Obviously, because they want to be able to make up what she supposedly said. And judges are siding with the evaluators who have this policy.
There’s lots more. Judges are forbidding women to take their children to qualified sexual abuse evaluators. They’re putting women on supervised visitation for believing their children’s disclosures. (In one case I investigated, the judge stated, on the record, that the mother’s insistence on believing her child was why he was cutting her off from her kids.) Judges are requiring women and children to go off to week-long “reunification camps,” where the children spend a lot of time with their father while the mother is kept away from them and the whole family is indoctrinated to ignore the abuse and blame the mother.
I’ve done detailed interviews with mothers about all of the above experiences. None of this is rumor.
I’m afraid passing better laws won’t help much either, because family court judges consider themselves above the law so they ignore it. (Except when they want to blame their bad actions on the law – then suddenly they claim that the law leaves them no choice.)
So what’s the solution? We’re going to have to take to the streets, building a movement for freedom for mothers and children with huge numbers of mothers and their allies. We have to loudly and publicly blow the cover off of what this corrupt, greedy, and mother-hating system is doing. #MothersOnTheRise
Justice photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
No Silence photo by Michelle Ding on Unsplash
System change photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
Lundy’s new book once again takes on domestic abuse, but this time it’s a novel. A young journalist seeks to expose the victim-blaming and corruption in the family courts, and stumbles into some dangerous surprises. In Custody is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.
Finally someone who dares to state the truth of our experiences. I have become so disillusioned by the advocates who disingenuously omit our realities. Thank you!
We need law suits suing afcc and state’s first violations of ADA/AA: their dvsi provides recognized disability
In states where women have equal rights, suing the states under 9, 10th 14th amendments are needed. Nothing happens in USA unless money is involved- liability and damages
I agree…
Hi beautiful women. Currently going through court for property settlement with my abuser. Whilst he displays narcissistic traits ie shooting the dog cause it didn’t like him then getting another dog weeks later. He burnt my couches threw my microwave down the stairs. You get the picture. For me the question is not narcissist vs abuser. No hat the focus needs to be is PAST behaviour as the number of red flags is by far the best predictor of future violence. Whilst I couldn’t tick one red flag because I didn’t have kids with him I was able to tick 14 out of 16 red flags. Despite the not to enter or remain and ouster order he chooses to get his mates to fly their helicopter so low at my front door I could see the pilots facial expression. This is where the focus needs to be. Educating everyone about the red flags. The only one I didn’t tick was hostage taking. There is an unmarked good to go grave with a wheels bin upright just waiting at Davies creek. I don’t give a fart what you call my ex. No woman should live in this much fear of their life. Property settlement court on 10th. Not eligible for legal aid. Lucky me.
Sooo true
My daughter, victim of domestic violence in French Polynesia has the ordeal, the book of LB speaks about.
Ten years of fight at the local family court, Paris Supreme Court, European Court of Human Rights. She and the family a fortune on lawyers in five countries, paid fines, experts’ fees, translations and courts’ fees. Result:
-ten moths prison
-child taken away
-exorbitant reparation to be paid to the abuser
-fired from job,
-a completely ruined life of her and of her child!
A beautiful, sweet, lovable, hardworking intelligent women is annihilated by the system. See her testimony on French website LoopSider:
https://www.facebook.com/100055616895385/videos/1017907022013264
She speaks about what Lundy Bancroft has been talking about for a dozen of years!
And it is far from being over yet.
I am ready to do whatever it takes to get the word out… I have 4 huge banner signs across my front yard exposing all of this… We have to gather ourselves together this winter and hit it hard in the spring at first warmer days… We have to stay and stand our ground out children’s lives depend on it.. I leave my phone number feel free to call me… We need to unite and expose these demons for what they are.. [name and phone number removed]
Happening in uk too. Havent seen my child for 2.5 yrs. 19 years of dom abuse disappeared by court refusing to have a fact finding. Abuse becomes unfounded. I become a liar. Was told by social services I might have broken my own ribs to make abuser look bad … its insane
Oh no… I’m so sorry. That’s beyond horrible.
I left my ex boyfriend after 2 years; due to his abuse mentally, physically and stealing. He’s not on my daughter’s birth certificate and not my son’s biological. Yet he’s running me in circles through the courts demanding MY children be given to him and me give him child support and never see my own children. He was never a father figure and ISN’T their biological father. Yet the courts gave him visitation!!! The GAL actually insulted me and made highly racial comments about me being native. My ex sexually assulted my son and a criminal investigation was opened after the courts forced visitation. Yet the judge denied us a protection order… What Lundy has said has been said over and over again. I’ve seen children commit suicide because of being forced to be around the abuser. We teach our children to speak up and to trust us. We’re the moms that protect them. Then the courts shake that trust and our children don’t know where to turn.
My sister is literally going through this exact BS!!! She broke up with her abusive boyfriend and now the POS is trying to file for custody of her kids. He isn’t even their father, he’s not on either one of their birth certificates!
Please contact and join FloridaProtectiveParents@gmail.com and
FACTSCourtwatch@gmail.com
This article is telling so many of the layers of my own story.
I’m also gagged from discussing my Evaluation Report for which I was Court-Ordered to pay Tens of Thousands of dollars, (in turn for which I had to basically beg, borrow, and steal, or else I was facing Jail at the time for Contempt of Court)…
When I finally got to read my Report, (under strict supervision, of course,) I saw that the Evaluator wrote the exact opposite of what my child’s Doctor’s Report had stated regarding visitation with his abusive father. This reinforces what Mr. Bancroft describes here regarding being quoted by an Evaluator saying the exact opposite of what he’d actually said.
If my Evaluator was so bold as to rewrite a documented Medical Report, imagine what these Evaluators do with the mere “Spoken Word”.
Speaking of which, my Evaluator also had wanted me to sign a Consent Form to not record any of our conversations, however, I did not sign it and was therefore able to legally record myself talking with him. (He is unaware of this at the moment so he has no idea that I have such great incriminating evidence against his dangerous behaviour.) At the time, I was only recording for my own documentation purposes to make sure I was going to remember everything correctly that was being said since we were going to be discussing life and death circumstances etc…I was horrified to discover later on while reading his fraudulent Report that my prior recordings now serve as evidence of a dangerous setup where this Evaluator was essentially trying to facilitate Child Suicide!
I literally have nightmares about all of this, and some days all I can do is stare at the wall and repeat, “Oh My God. He knew what he was doing. He KNEW what he was doing! How does such evil exist! How could he have done this! How could he have extorted money from me to force me to pay for the demise of my children that I was trying to protect! How can he knowingly send my children to their deaths by suicide!” etc…etc…
He also had foreign accomplices helping him.
If my identity is discovered, I am facing Jail for even speaking about this much. But how can I stay silent when I now have actual evidence that these Licensed Professional Monsters are literally trying to kill my children?
Thank you Mr. Bancroft for highlighting the truth behind this dangerous system where the players know exactly what they’re doing…
Tragically, my own attorneys censored me. Yes, there were two attorneys. I fired the first one and hired another. They both censored me. The judge never saw / heard my proof, not just my side of the story, but my physical and digital proof. And I have physical and digital proof that they censored me, because our conversations were written or I recorded them. I paid for legal representation and was censored, not represented.
All so true here in the United States!
what’s incredible is that of course the male (and thus mainstream) perspective is, of course, the exact opposite. oh no, family courts are man-hating conspiracies to roll red carpets out for their wives, who of course are lying b****es who obviously made it all up like the venal treacherous femoids they are.
exactly the same as the male perception of the apparent bevies of women who falsify rape; there’s some obscene statistics out there on what men estimate Those Lying Jezebels have cooked up. how did it take so long for #metoo to oust out men who’d been raping women for decades? truly a mystery.
reminds me of sigmund freud inventing the electra complex wholesale because there were just so many women he treated who reported child sexual abuse. after all, men of high standing being incapable of reproachment or consequence must mean they’re less likely to sexually abuse, right? and then boggle when monsters like cosby, saville, weinstein and everyone involved with epstein go unreported. it’s not like throughout all known history men have actively, legally, and violently punished women who dare to admit it.
it’s a two-pronged attack from both sides, really. you have the men with (in their perspective) good intentions who literally cannot grasp the enormity of personal and systemic abuse other men have always subjected women to behind closed doors and delude themselves into it being the women’s delusion, and then the monsters who 100% close ranks under the (hopefully correct assumption) that if the rest of the world learned to ask the right questions, they’d be on the chopping block too.
if there’s anything i’ve learned from trying to talk to self-believed “good” men about this, it’s that when it comes to women men will believe what they want to believe. no data or reasoning or appeal counts so long as the truth makes them uncomfortable.
it’d be great to get some sort of expose on family court that addressed these false perceptions directly through recapping laws and specific cases. it won’t do anything to convince most men, who will be back to blaming eve because she exposed them to the knowledge of how the world really works by the next week, but if the word could get out to being common knowledge among women on how things are we might see some of them forcing legislative changes just by demanding some egalitarianism.
What you’re saying at the end is exactly what I do with my new book, In Custody. It’s an entertaining suspense novel, so I hope we’ll be able to get people to read it who aren’t especially interested in the issue. But by the end the reader has gotten a lot of education on what’s being done to mothers and children by the family courts, including detailed discussions of real-life cases (with the real names) that the journalist character comes across in the novel.
This is what I hope to do with a CBC documentary. And Lundy, you are spot-on here. Such a relief to see someone telling it like it is.
This is EXACTLY what is happening to me. My 7yr old son disclosed he has been repeatedly raped by his father.
He has disclosed this through repeated CPT interviews, counselors and even told his resource officer at school.
Nothing has been done except charges in which he was never arrest for.
My son has been taken from me on September 10th through the Suwannee county court system on an emergency pick up order with no hearing. Simply stating that I am causing mental harm. The hearing is scheduled for January 25th. I have not been able to see my baby.
He is Mormon and has family with money. My attorneys have all basically been paid to side with him and his. My son continues to be raped. Cut off from myself, his sister and any help he could possibly have.
I just found you and this site. The resources for sexually abused children link is broken.
I am a nurse that takes care of foster children on ventilators in their home daily. I can barely function and cannot find resources to help us. Dcf and law enforcement have failed to protect him at first reports and are now doing everything in their power to cover their own asses and not protect my child. I’m at a brick wall with no representation and cannot find any legal assistance with experience in this.
Oh, geez. I am so sorry you’re dealing with this.