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This book examines the serious dysfunction of the nation's family courts--a dysfunction that too often results in the courts' failure to protect the people they were designed to help. Specifically, the authors chronicle cases in which mothers who believe their children have been sexually abused by their fathers are disbelieved, ridiculed, or punished for trying to protect them. All too often the mother, in such a case, is deemed the unstable parent, and her children are removed from her care, to be placed in foster care or even with the father credibly accused of abusing them.
Employing ethnomethodology, they show how a closed and claustrophobic family court setting that makes practical sense to the system's practitioners looks like madness to everyone else. They also describe the social interactive work of mothers trapped inside the system who litigate furiously, take their stories to the press, or turn fugitive with their children.
From Madness to Mutiny offers an overview of family court malfunction and the parental mutiny that results from it. The authors outline the legal landscape that makes the madness possible and discuss ways to reform the family courts.
This second edition analyzes the recent "business model" that has taken hold of the family courts. Mothers must pay exorbitant fees to court-contracting visitation centers to see their children after losing custody to violent, credibly sexually abusive ex-spouses/partners, many of whom have cocaine habits, arrest records, unregistered (or unsecured) firearms, and histories of mental illness and suicidal behavior. While children have died under such conditions, courts are protected by judicial immunity.
Table des matières
- Foreword by Margaret B. Drew
- Preface by Robert Geffner
- Acknowledgments
- Prologue: What Has Changed in Two Decades, and What Remains the Same?
- Introduction
- Part I. Family Courts: The Problem
- Chapter 1: An Overview of Family Court Madness--and Mothers' Mutiny
- Chapter 2: The New Legal Landscape
- Part II. Observations in Depth
- Chapter 3: Research Methods
- Chapter 4: Robed Rage
- Chapter 5: Lawless Law Guardians
- Chapter 6: Anti-Social Services
- Chapter 7: Mental Health Quackery
- Chapter 8: Mothers and Madness: The "Aftershocks" of the System
- Part III. Changes
- Chapter 9: "Rebirthing" the Family Court System
- Chapter 10: Reforming the Courts
- Chapter 11: Reforming the Court Auxiliaries
- Notes
- References
A propos de l'auteur
Amy Neustein, PhD, is an independent scholar and an award-winning author/editor of 16 academic books, which have been reviewed in leading journals and cited in the
New York Times and
Newsweek. She serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the
International Journal of Speech Technology (SpringerNature), and was featured in 2018 in Women in STEM as part of the UN campaign to recognize women who edit scientific publications. She edits three academic book series in speech technology and text mining and has contributed more than 200 opinion editorials to major papers such as
The Hill,
Newsweek,
Jerusalem Post,
City Journal (Manhattan Institute),
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
Baltimore Sun, and
Women's eNews. Her letters to the editor have been published in the
New York Times,
Washington Post, and the
Washington Times. Her academic work has earned 1,532 citations as reported by Academia.edu.
Michael Lesher, JD, Esq, is a private attorney specializing in
protective parent cases and in appellate law. He has argued successfully before the New York State Court of Appeals in a landmark Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case. He also argued before the federal appeals court in a child sex abuse survivor case. He has been quoted a number of times in the
New York Law Journal for his efforts to help incest survivors seek justice, and for his penetrating analyses of closed systems that perpetuate cover-ups of child sexual abuse in religious communities. He has been invited to write opinion pieces for publications such as the
Forward and the
New York Post. His investigative reporting on criminally dysfunctional systems has appeared in muckraking papers such as the
Village Voice and other news outlets.
