Hera McLeod did everything she could to protect her baby son from a father who she said had attempted to suffocate her when she was pregnant, raped her 19 year-old sister and was a suspect in killings of his mother and the mother of his other child. But it was not enough The judge in her custody case accepted her ex-husband’s favorable evaluation by a school counselor who was not certified to evaluate adults. In contrast, he did not accept a police report regarding the father’s abuse of another child in Virginia in the absence of the arresting officer. On his fifth unsupervised visit, paramedics responding to a 911 call found 15-month-old Prince naked, wet and not breathing at Rams’ home. Joaquin Rams is serving a life sentence for drowning his son.
Prince’s case is not unique. Around the country there has been a growing awareness that family courts are failing to protect children in custody cases where there is domestic violence or child abuse. Parents who attempt to protect their children from abusive ex-partners (often known as “protective parents”) are labeled as alienators or “high conflict” and often penalized and their warnings disregarded, as discussed in an earlier post by Child Welfare Monitor. The results can be tragic. The Center for Judicial Excellence has documented 758 children murdered by a divorcing or separating parent since 2008. We have no idea how many children are ordered into some type of unsupervised contact with an abusive parent: this number was estimated at 58,000 in 2008. While murder is an extreme result of bad custody decisions, the devastating results on surviving children of being left with an abuser are incalculable.
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