George Washington University Professor of Clinical Law Joan S. Meier has received a $500,000 National Institute of Justice (NIJ) grant to fund in-depth empirical research into how family courts decide custody cases involving abuse allegations.
Ms. Meier’s three-year study seeks to produce a database of published custody and abuse cases from around the country. She and her team of research assistants will analyze around 2,000 state court custody cases from a 15-year period. They will look at a spectrum of factors in each case, including what each party alleged, what the court found and what custody or visitation order was issued.
There is a growing concern among domestic violence scholars and advocates who assert that family courts are awarding unsupervised access or custody to abusive fathers, according to Ms. Meier.
The GW Law School professor is the founder of the Domestic Violence Legal Empowerment and Appeals Project (DV LEAP), a nonprofit organization that provides free legal representation in domestic violence appeals. She said her organization and many others receive numerous pleas for help from women who say that judges do not believe their claims of abuse and instead seek to maximize fathers’ access to children. But there is relatively little data to indicate how prevalent this problem is.
“Most people assume the opposite—that courts are sympathetic to the mothers who complain of abuse. But in our experience, they’re much more reluctant to believe abuse claims,” Ms. Meier said. “That’s simply a fallacy.”
Rather, she said that “pseudo-scientific” theories like “parental alienation” have had an enormous impact on family courts. The theory propounds the idea that when mothers allege a father is unsafe for the children, they are doing it merely to “alienate” the children from the man.
It builds on a stereotype of vengeful ex-wives who employ false child abuse allegations as a weapon to punish ex-husbands. Ms. Meier called the theory “junk science,” but forensic evaluators and family courts still commonly rely on it to reject abuse allegations.
Results from Ms. Meier’s pilot study, which analyzed 240 custody opinions involving abuse allegations, indicate that mothers who alleged child sexual abuse lost primary custody 20 percent more often than mothers who did not allege abuse. The preliminary research also showed that even when courts validated adult domestic violence allegations against fathers, the fathers received a custody outcome in their favor more than 40 percent of the time.
Anecdotal experience, along with evidence from the pilot study, have led Ms. Meier to hypothesize that family courts may be biased against mothers who allege domestic abuse, child abuse or child sexual abuse against their children’s fathers.
“I don’t believe that these mothers are fabricating abuse, but I think the system thinks that they are,” she said. “The numbers may provide powerful evidence that the system is too skeptical.”
Data showing that courts are awarding custody to parents found to have committed abuse will be important information for courts, litigants and policymakers, Ms. Meier said.
Past studies have demonstrated that intentionally false allegations of child abuse are rare. If family courts overwhelmingly disbelieve such allegations and penalize mothers for making them, this would support advocates’ views that family courts are generally unfriendly to mothers’ abuse allegations.
If the results from the new study are consistent with the pilot’s findings, then Ms. Meier hopes the research will help to persuade family court professionals that there is an implicit bias against mothers who allege abuse. Once court professionals are made aware of the problem, they can be taught to minimize this bias through training and appellate courts may take appeals in such cases more seriously.
“Advocates around the country have seen that courts are moving toward the extreme in terms of judging credibility on abuse,” Ms. Meier said. “If it becomes clear empirically that there is a strong bias for fathers and against mothers who allege abuse, then hopefully courts will start coming back toward the middle. They will stop taking parental alienation at face value and will be more prepared to understand children’s fears as legitimate.”