The bad stuff hurt too much, the girl said, so she took trips in her head. She imagined she was playing in the park, not lying on the basement floor or standing naked in the bathroom where, she said, her father touched her.
He told her not to tell anyone, she said, but she told anyway.
She told her mother, who went to the police. She told her therapist, who wrote a letter. She told the people who supervised her visits with her mother, who filed reports.
“I tried to tell anyone who would listen, but no one believed me,” said the girl, then 7, during a trauma evaluation conducted last spring. The Globe is withholding her name to protect her identity. [Read Full Article]
Note from CJE: Kudos to the Boston Globe, and to our allies Eileen King, Barry Goldstein and Richard Ducote, among others, who helped get this family court expose to see the light of day! Obviously, they don’t quite nail it here, and in many ways kinda miss the boat on what is truly happening in family courts, but it’s great to see a major mainstream U.S. paper spend the time and resources to look into this. Hopefully more articles like this are on the way from the Globe, and hopefully, they will do a better job next time of exposing the calculated, methodical way that family courts routinely push abused children away from their safe protective parent and into the arms of their sexual and physical abusers.
