On Navigating Custody & Visitation Evaluations in Cases With Domestic Violence: A Judge's Guide

Abstract

In 2006, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges issued a revised and improved edition of Navigating Custody & Visitation Evaluations in Cases with Domestic Violence: A Judge's Guide, which now focuses on safety for victims and their children. This new edition explains the dynamics of domestic violence, that parental alienation syndrome and parental alienation have been discredited, and why psychological tests are largely useless and unreliable in domestic violence cases. The guide, however, is still too optimistic about the success of batterer programs. The guide is sometimes misleading and gender biased as it uses gender neutral language and because what men and women do differs and usually affects them differently.

KEYWORDS:

• child abuse
• Conflict Tactics Scales
• credibility
• custody
• custody evaluations
• domestic violence
• family systems theory
• gender bias
• incest
• parental alienation
• psychological tests

Notes

All page references without further explanation in the first and second sections of this article are to Navigating Custody, 2004. All page references without further explanation in the fourth and firth sections about Navigating Custody, 2006 are to the second version of the guide.

From here to the end of this article all page references without further explanation are to Navigating Custody, 2006.

This was Congress' rational for mandating that states honor and enforce the orders of protection granted by other states and tribes, except for those issued without reasonable notice and opportunity to be heard or for mutual orders when no pleading was filed or no finding of abuse was made. See 18 U.S.C. §§ 2265–2266.