New Book Coming Soon

New book coming - graphic for announcement. We will soon be publishing a new book co-edited with Dr. Mo Therese Hannah. The book is called Preventing Domestic Violence and Child Abuse: Medical, Law Enforcement, Judicial and Human Benefits. It is based on our belief that the ACE (adverse childhood experiences) Studies offer a similar opportunity to the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report linking smoking and cancer. ACE tells us that exposure to DV and child abuse causes cancer, heart disease, and many other health and social problems. Many different parts of society helped discourage smoking and in doing so saved millions of lives and trillions of dollars. Preventing DV and child abuse offers the same opportunity. We spoke with the American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, and the CDC about their work to prevent smoking and their work to reduce DV and child abuse. We believe courts and legislators would be more likely to listen to the research that supports protective mothers if the information is coming from these highly respected organizations.

In 1961, the Cancer Society and two other health organizations wrote a letter to President Kennedy informing him about research linking cancer and smoking. President Kennedy asked the Surgeon General to create a committee to study the problem. This led to the Surgeon General’s Report and all the subsequent efforts that have reduced smoking resulting in enormous health and other benefits.

The book has chapters by experts in a variety of fields and communities. They discuss past harmful practices and what has and can be done by each community to prevent DV and child abuse. The United States spends over $3.6 trillion dollars to tolerate domestic violence. At the start of the DV movement in the 1970s, society came together will many reforms that made it easier for victims to leave their abusers. This led to a steady decrease in DV homicides. Abusers and the cottage industry responded by developing tactics to regain what they believe is their right to control their victims by manipulating the family courts. Tragically, the courts have failed to update their practices or integrate the research that would make it easier to recognize and respond to DV and child abuse. As a result, abusers are often successful in custody cases. This makes it harder for victims to leave and exposes children to multiple ACEs. The family court failures have reversed the DV homicide rate so that women are now murdered by their partners at a rate almost as high as when the DV movement started.

We are excited to publish this book from Civic Research Institute because it could be the start of a major response to prevent DV and child abuse to gain the human and economic benefits. The same kind of social change we did with smoking. We are hoping the book will be available late this year or early next year.

Representing the Domestic Violence Survivor

The purpose of the book is not to teach lawyers how to practice law. We are assuming they know this. Rather the book is designed to help attorneys understand how to use current scientific research about domestic violence to strengthen their clients’ cases.

We want attorneys to tell judges that there is now a substantial body of scientific research that can be used to better understand domestic violence cases. The research establishes that many of the standard practices used by the courts are working poorly for children. Therefore they are asking the courts to be open to hearing this new information. The information is needed in any case where there are allegations or evidence of abuse. Some court professionals refuse to consider domestic violence expertise because no determination has been made about the validity of the allegations. This is a mistake because the information is needed to inform the decision about the validity of the complaints.

We believe that the three leading sources of good research about domestic violence and custody are the Saunders’ study, The Batterer as Parent and Domestic Violence, Abuse and Child Custody. Significantly, the Saunders’ study which comes from the U. S. Department of Justice cited the other books extensively. We included substantial information from these sources and demonstrated how they can be used to buttress the cases of domestic violence survivors.

We emphasize the research that mothers make deliberately false allegations less than 2% of the time because so many court professionals believe it is more common. We also mentioned that 85% of cases in which mothers raise concerns about child sexual abuse the alleged abuser wins custody. This means a lot of children are being sent to live with their rapists. We have a chapter to help attorneys prepare the pattern of controlling and coercive behavior which should help courts recognize domestic violence. In the chapter about shared parenting we point out that even research most favorable to using shared parenting finds it should only be used under the most favorable circumstances that include both parents genuinely wanting shared parenting, able to cooperate and living nearby. This is obviously not true in cases with abuse allegations and yet many courts still try to promote shared parenting. We have three chapters that respond to the often unqualified mental health professionals relied on by custody courts. The book demonstrates how to cross-examine unqualified evaluators and encourages the use of genuine experts, particularly domestic violence advocates who can present current research to the court.

We are hopeful that as attorneys receive training in best practices and start to present the right information to the court that it will impact all cases. As judges and other court professionals start to hear about valid research and learn the harm the present practices are doing we believe these professionals will start applying this information to other cases just as they now apply the misinformation they are constantly hearing today.

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GOLDSTEIN & YORK DV Experts, LLC