opinion
Mothers Who Report Abuse Still
Losing Custody ‘at Staggering Rates’
BY AMY NEUSTEIN
STOCKPHOTOSART / ISTOCK / GETTY IMAGES PLUS
T wo weeks ago FX
launched a ground-
breaking five-part
miniseries, “Children of the
Underground,” focusing
on a well-publicized 1980s
vigilante movement that ran safe houses in the
U.S. and Europe to assist mothers in hiding with
their children when family courts had erroneously
ordered their children to live with a sexually
abusive parent notwithstanding compelling
evidence to support the abuse.

Though the Underground Railroad has
become a relic of the past, the danger to chil-
dren posed by errant judicial decisions is just
as exigent today.

In 2019, The Washington Post, pointing to a
trailblazing study conducted by a clinical law
professor at George Washington University
Law School, stated that “mothers who report
abuse — particularly child abuse — are losing
child custody at staggering rates.”
In fact, the study showed that in over 73% of
the time when mothers presented credible evi-
dence of abuse, and the other parent charges
“parental alienation” — when a child refuses to
have a relationship with a parent due to manip-
ulation, an unsubstantiated theory invoked as
a smokescreen — the family court judges who
are easily persuaded by this fallacy will strip the
mother of custody and relegate her to restrictive
and limited contact with her child. This is usually
at a court-approved institutional setting where
a visitation supervisor is hired to monitor every-
thing the mother says to her child to prevent any
further discussion of abuse.

Sadly, such moratoriums even include when
the children themselves initiate discussion in
making new disclosures of abuse.

In most cases, the costs of supervised vis-
itation become so prohibitive to the mother that
she cannot continue to see her child. That is, the
mother is forced to pay, in addition to child sup-
port, a few hundred dollars for each visit to cover
both the costs of the supervisor and the institu-
tion, which provides the visitation setting.

Such visitation arrangements are structured
after that mother has already been nearly bank-
rupted by attorney’s fees, court transcripts costs,
expert witness fees, law guardian fees, and other
litigation expenses. Yet, there is no structured
government program to bankroll supervised visi-
MANY JEWISH WOMEN
HAVE BEEN CAUGHT
AMONG THE CLASS OF
MOTHERS FALLING PREY
TO A JADED, CORRUPT,
MISGUIDED SYSTEM
CAREENING OUT OF
CONTROL. tation, lest the government would “catch on” and
see the outrage of such setups in the first place
— deeming the supervision of the mother to be
nothing other than pointless and punitive.

Accordingly, when mothers run out of funds to
finance this canard — which can begin with a pre-
school-age child and last until the child is 18 — the
consequences to the mother and child are no less
than dire. Not seeing Mommy anymore implants a
terrifying message of abandonment in the psyche
of the child, who has pleaded repeatedly to be
protected from abuse by the other parent.

The child, who had once envisioned their
mother as anchor, protector and advocate,
now sees their mother as powerless or worse
— often as a co-enabler to the abuse the child
is forced to endure living with the dangerous
parent. Unfortunately, many children will turn
against their mothers for abandoning them and
when they reach adulthood they are reluctant
to reunite with them.

Understandably, the system that has cre-
ated such draconian conditions for mothers,
has also harmed fathers — good fathers, lov-
ing fathers, caring fathers — who have been
expunged from the lives of their children. But
the devastation to mothers and children as a
nationwide problem must be addressed too.

Many Jewish women have been caught
among the class of mothers falling prey to a
jaded, corrupt, misguided system careening out
of control. Motherhood is the bedrock of Jewish
society; it is the institution that nurtures, fortifies
and sustains us. The ablation of mothers from the
lives of their children has proven to take its toll on
the mental health of such “orphanized” children,
causing depression, low self-esteem, eating dis-
orders or worse.

As a Jewish community, we have often taken
the lead when confronted with social atrocities,
from civil rights to reproductive rights, from
school desegregation to gender equality in the
military and in civilian life. No doubt Jewish
women who were beacons in the earlier days of
the feminist movement have been etched in his-
tory, and many still remain as household names
today. At Judaism’s core is an enduring sense of
moral justice that suffuses our history and mod-
ern-day existence.

The mothers across America badly need our
help, and they cannot afford to wait. Whether
the solution is a bipartisan congressional hear-
ing, a full-fledged Justice Department inves-
tigation, or a proactive lobbying effort on
Capitol Hill, we must not tarry.

We must gather and unite to assist mothers
— Jewish and non-Jewish — so that women are
no longer punished with the loss of custody of
their children and the ensuing restrictive visitation
that they cannot afford to sustain. To do anything
less would be a disservice to mothers mired in the
failed family court system. JE
Amy Neustein is co-author of “From Madness
to Mutiny: Why Mothers are Running from the
Family Courts — and What Can be Done About It,”
University Press of New England, 2005; second
edition, Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

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