Domestic Violence and Child Custody - Legal Psychiatric Ploys of Divorce Lawyers

When divorce and domestic violence are before the court, the children can often serve as the vehicle for the perpetrator to save face and maintain control over the family. Sound familiar?

If you are in family court with an abusive partner, or abusive ex-partner, and there are children involved, you will want to know what this article reveals. Here is how your children can be leveraged to carry out a perpetrator’s agenda in family court.

Laying the Foundation to Maintain Control over the Family

Let’s say the perpetrator establishes that he wants to ask the court for sole custody of your minor children whom he has also abused, either directly or indirectly. In many cases this so-called asking may happen even if the perpetrator is not a candidate for custody.

Now once the pleading is before the court, and typically for a long time (could be years), the chase is on—even though a so-called custody battle is technically not underway.

What is underway is a mission to create a scenario to establish that the perpetrator (whether or not a candidate for custody by law) is indeed an eligible person for custody because:

a) this parent is the only parent left
b) the other parent is crazy or is a felon
c) this parent is a victim of parental alienation syndrome
…or, any combination of the above.

Most typically, we see counsel seeking to establish items b & c in combination, as this makes for a more substantial case. And further, this strategy is often a best first measure to carry out a perpetrator’s mission of eliminating the protective parent from their children’s lives.

Crazing Making Legal Psychiatric Ploys

Now if after psychiatric evaluations, there is no evidence that the mother (the gender most often in this position) is “crazy” because the evaluating psychiatrist cannot—or will not—find any psychiatric pathology, then the rush is on to find—or create—“the craziness” in the children.

The strategy here is that if we can’t show that the mother is crazy, we’ll establish that the children are either crazy or going crazy under her care. This is how children become casualties in an abuser’s use of the court to control and batter their victims.

Now making a child crazy can take days, months or years. And if there are two or more children involved, making more than one child psychologically unstable makes for even a stronger case, even if you are the recognized psychological parent of your children.

If you have witnessed this legal psychiatric ploy in your divorce proceeding or a glimpse of it coming, learn to block it and protect your children and yourself before the ploy spirals out of control.