by Julia Fletcher
Recent posts How Does it Happen? and Looking in a Blind Eye show several ways in which family courts fail our children. The following clip from Connecticut’s guardian ad litem training shows yet another way it happens.
The woman playing the guardian ad litem seems like a trustworthy person with years of experience in the field of child protection. She’s a mother and grandmother of five who wears her heart on her sleeve next to the unexplained disconnect when it comes to protecting the children she’s supposed to protect.
If this video is supposed to teach people how to speak with parents in a family court case, maybe the woman playing the guardian ad litem was unprepared or caught off guard by ad lib comments about “child porn”. Why else would a guardian ad litem ignore disclosures of child abuse?
While we’re asking, here are a few more questions:
- Which consultants wrote the sample case for the training and who approved the content?
- Do administrators there purposely or inadvertently encourage a lack of respect for established law?
- What intolerable consequence could possibly threaten those who do the work it takes to protect children from abuse in family courts?
Here’s the sample case summary:
Mona and Howard are married and have three children, Justine, 13 years; Kevin, 6 years; and Amy, 18 months.
According to Howard, a lack of sexual intimacy with his wife led him to have an affair with Olive – the babysitter who is “half his age”. He allows his 13-year-old daughter to use her cell phone to send sexually explicit text messages and provocative photos of herself to her friends. In this video, he appears to admit having “child porn” on his computer.
Mona is anxious and depressed. Her psychiatrist ruled out all other possible reasons for her symptoms (such as her husband’s criminal behaviors) and diagnosed her as having postpartum depression. He prescribed medication which caused suicidal thoughts and excessive drowsiness. At some point, she fell asleep on the couch while her 18-month-old daughter sat on the floor chewing on a pill bottle – prompting someone to recommend supervised visitation for her when she is with her children …
Family Court in America 
Eventually, the shock will fade and you’ll just feel numb. In this clip, a Connecticut court psychologist tells a child that anyone who can’t listen to music while taking tests can’t raise children or be a good friend.
Eventually, the authorities in Connecticut will realize Connecticut taxpayers are paying for what’s been called “a racket”, “racketeering”, “a cottage industry” and “family court”. At a Judiciary Committee hearing there yesterday, one mother actually testified that someone appointed a guardian ad litem for her two Labrador Retrievers.
I am shocked by the stories here. It is a La Costra Nostra-styled racket. Although I must warn you, even those GALs that are court appointed can be tainted even though paid through paltry state funds. Those individuals are subject to contracts issued by a state agency. The administered contracts are only as good as the state agency officer initiated the contracts. The specific officer initiating the contracts has anything but the best interests of the child—or the taxpayer in mind. You see, it is not fiction when one speaks of Blacklisting in the state of Connecticut. GALs that question or perhaps are “too much of a social worker” in the eyes of a specific civilly immune state agency employee can be blacklisted. Blacklisting comprises of withheld earned pay and non-renewal of a contract. Blacklisting is also confirmed to have been a utilized methodology in the realm of “Surrogate Parents.” Taxpayer money is played with as if it is a private pile of treasure reigned over by a few specific players within state agencies. There is plenty of blame to go around and the problem not only falls on private GALs (which I agree wholly with the assessments here), but more so on public GALs and surrogate parents—whose hands are TIED due to the corruption with the state agencies administering contracts. For example, at one surrogate parent meeting (in front of hundreds of professionals vying for positions as surrogate parents), the presenter gleefully stated that anyone in the audience would not have a contract renewed by her personally, if they angered her in any way . This power over tax payer money IS the corruption that needs to be dealt with.