Extracting intelligence from children

This op-ed by Anne Grant originally appeared in the Providence Journal on Monday, June 21, 2004.

MANY AMERICANS have been shocked to discover how torture is used to extract information when conducting a war. This has unsettling parallels to what happens when children are abused to extract intelligence in contested custody and visitation cases.

For more than a decade I've been following these cases in the Rhode Island Family Court, trying to understand how the problem ever got so bad and what can be done about it.

I have focused on those cases where one parent had a history of domestic violence, and the other parent was trying to keep children safe. Abusers with enough money, power, and obsession have learned to use Family Court to their advantage by treating children like prisoners of war.

Children tell of an abusive parent requiring them to gather intelligence for court. They are rewarded or punished according to the usefulness of the information they deliver on the other parent. Some learn to fabricate evidence: Lying becomes a way of life that torments them for years to come.

Well-intentioned judges try to get children to tell them the truth in chambers. It rarely works. Children who have been sexually humiliated are too ashamed to talk about it. If children speak candidly to the judge in front of warring attorneys, they are punished severely afterward. So-called "expert witnesses" favor the parent who pays.

Children distrust some judges' air of self-importance. In one Rhode Island transcript, a judge tells a 13-year-old: "Maybe if your dad and mother had come in here in the first place we might have helped them stay together."

The judge never knew that, eight years earlier, the boy had watched his step-father shoot his mother in the head with a 38-caliber pistol. After four misfires, one shot struck home. She recovered and eventually won a divorce. But her volunteer lawyer told her not to complicate matters with the history of domestic violence.

The boy's court-ordered visits with his stepfather grew increasingly disruptive until he finally suffered a breakdown and told his mother that he had seen her shot. By then it was too late. Within months, he committed suicide, shooting himself in the head.

We must remove cases of contested custody and visitation from the routine terror that accompanies domestic violence. Children in intractable cases should be represented by an advocate who is independent of the courts and works solely in the child's interest, dedicated to discerning the truth as quickly as possible.

Child protection agencies cannot do this. Under federal guidelines to preserve families, their social workers and attorneys have buckled under parental threats, abandoning these children.

We need dedicated teams, trained to recognize patterns of abuse, who can closely follow intractable cases and assure that children’s physical, emotional, and financial needs are met. The team could be called guardian ad litem if only that term were not so badly tainted by those who colluded in the past with whichever parent paid them. The team would monitor child support. They would provide supervised visitation that would show them what is really happening. They would deliver independent psychiatric assessments to a small number of select judges who specialize in these cases. They would break the grip of malicious game-playing that delights an aggressive litigant.

One woman recalled her husband's threats when she left him. A deputy sheriff in Family Court with a history of abuse, he had shouted at her, "What do you love most in life?"

She said, "My children!"

"Watch what I do to them!" he screamed.

Too many children suffer long-term damage in intolerable, court-ordered circumstances, because the details of their lives cannot be adequately presented in litigation. Too often judges and magistrates have conflicts of interest or stereotypes about one parent or the other. These cases assure callous lawyers a perpetual income if they let them linger.

Leaders in the legislature and the courts must end the sanctioned abuse of children in contested custody and visitation cases.