About Family Court in America

 

Family Court in America

 If you go to  The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children website, you’ll see, “800,000 children younger than 18 are missing each year…” 

You’ll also see this:

“The largest number of missing children are, from most frequent to least frequent:

1. Runaways
2. Family abductions
3. Lost, injured or otherwise missing children
4. Nonfamily abductions (in these cases, the child is at greatest risk of injury or death).”

Please notice what’s second on the list. Instead of looking at this short list, putting two and two together, and flooding our state and federal offices with calls for family court reform, we spend billions of our tax dollars each year to keep the family court cottage industry in business. Family court attorneys brag about the income stream  they receive from prolonged “high conflict cases” while 58,000 children are endangered each year.

For the past 40 years, protective mothers in our family courts have had to choose between handing their precious children over to a corrupted family court system or “running” to protect them. Many decide it’s best to pack their children’s belongings and their own essentials into a few light bags and drive down an open road to a relatively safer unknown future. Those of us who stay to fight do the best we can to protect our children, expose the corruption and work for family court reform.

That’s what this website is about.

A week ago, headlines about the “kids for cash” scandal in Pennsylvania were on the front page of almost every national paper. All the big television stations aired videos of protective parents demanding justice. It was a small group of attorneys and advocates working for a non-profit group called the Juvenile Law Center who initiated that investigation.

Will we have to wait for another small non-profit law office to expose the biggest scandal in the history of our courts? Or will our states’ attorneys and federal investigators help out a little bit and save tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars sooner rather than later?

A  few state governments are finally beginning to audit their family courts. Our federal government recently appropriated funds for study groups and non-profit advocacy centers. But there are family court hearings scheduled all over the country tomorrow about children who might or might not be safe the next day. Surely we can do better than this. 

If you are willing and able to help, please do. It’s in the best interests of our children – and in everyone else’s best interests too. 

Julia

juliafletcher714@gmail.com