Divorcing a Narcissist and the Family Court System: Why Children's Voices Are Still Being Silenced

I did not come to this work from the outside. I came from inside it, as a child who was failed by a system that was supposed to protect me.

My mother lost custody of me before I was a year old. She had been hospitalized with a mental health crisis, and the early years of her life had layered trauma onto trauma in ways I would only begin to understand decades later. She reappeared when I was around five, and after that, she exercised parenting time sporadically. I have a vivid memory of standing at the picture window in our house in Manteno, Illinois, watching for her car. She had said she was coming. She didn't come.

When she did show up, I was always excited to see her. What child wouldn't be excited to see their mother?

What I was not doing, what I could not bring myself to do, was telling anyone what was happening during her parenting time. I was a child of a different generation, a generation that was not trauma-informed. No one asked questions. No one had the right language and so I stayed silent.

My father was the healthier of my two parents. He remarried when I was two years old, and my stepmother, carrying her own childhood wounds, was emotionally unavailable and cold. I slipped through the cracks between two households and a system that wasn't paying close enough attention to any of it. When my father and stepmother divorced, I was nine. Things got harder. I watched my dad struggle to provide the basics, food and housing, because of the child support order for my half-siblings. There were several times when we were homeless, and I was sent to live with friends or acquaintances. The court did not account for the fact that he also had me full-time, and that he had never requested child support from my mother. He was penalized for doing the right thing by a system with no mechanism to see the full picture.

So when I eventually began advocacy work, I was not starting from neutral ground. None of us do. I had seen the system fail from multiple directions. I had been the child who wasn't believed because I wasn't disclosing. I had watched a good father get squeezed by an order that had no interest in his full reality. My early lens as an advocate was shaped by all of it. I was focused almost entirely on the children. I didn't care whether it was a mother or a father at the center of the harm. I had seen both. I started out pro-child and to this day that has never changed.

But somewhere around year five of my advocacy journey, watching and following cases all across the country, sitting in courtrooms, absorbing pattern after pattern, something shifted. I started recognizing that one of the biggest systemic issues was a war being waged specifically against women and mothers. I had to consciously set down the personal lens I had been holding, the one forged in my own childhood, and pick up a wider one. Not to abandon what I knew. But to see what I had not yet let myself fully see.

That wider lens has only gotten harder to argue with. And this week, the research caught up with what survivors have been saying for years.

An advocacy report released this week by Right to Equality in the United Kingdom, titled Scratching the Surface, analyzed 91 family court judgments, analyzed 91 family court judgments and found that 72.5% contained at least one instance of judicial victim-blaming. Of 530 total instances of victim-blaming by court professionals across those judgments, the majority came from judges themselves. The most prevalent form was discrediting, with 233 documented instances, followed by behavioral blame at 173, and trivialisation at 99. Perhaps most troubling, 62.5% of the victim-blaming identified was subtle. The quiet, deniable kind that is the hardest to name and the most corrosive to survive.

The pattern the report documents is not abstract. Mothers' behavior was scrutinized and criticized while fathers' conduct was contextualized or minimized. Women were far more likely to be described as "emotional" by judges, a word that functions less as observation and more as disqualification. Despite the Domestic Abuse Act of 2021 (UK) bringing reforms to the system, the report concludes that attitudinal change within the judiciary has simply not kept pace.

An article in The Independent titled, “Six shocking things UK judges have said in courts – and what it says about the ‘boys’ club’ problem,” accompanied the report's release included direct quotes from judicial decisions that anyone who has spent time in an American family courtroom will recognize immediately. One judge wrote that a woman could not have been raped because she was not "pinned down" and could have "physically made life harder" for the perpetrator. Another expressed doubt that an educated woman would have stayed silent about ongoing sexual abuse in her marriage. A third described a mother as likely to "take a trivial incident and blow it out of all proportion," a phrase that should sound instantly familiar to anyone who has ever tried to report coercive control in a family court setting and been met with the word "high-conflict" instead.

These are not isolated moments. The report counted them. That is not a rogue judge. That is a culture.

Also published this week, and equally important, is a peer-reviewed study out of the University of Ottawa titled "Domestic Violence and Child Custody Proceedings: Children's Voices in Family Evaluations." Researchers Simon Lapierre, Alexandra Vincent, and Michèle Frenette analyzed 23 custody evaluation reports from cases involving documented domestic violence. What they found should stop every family court professional in their tracks.

Children's voices were marginalized or ignored entirely. Most reports gave little to no consideration to what children said they wanted or how they described their own experiences. When children did speak, evaluators frequently dismissed what they said as irrational, concluding that they had been influenced by their mothers' "alienating" behaviors. The alienation label was applied with little to no supporting evidence, and once applied, it functioned as an override switch. Whatever the child said after that point was filtered through a lens of suspicion rather than belief.

One case in the study involves a six-year-old girl who pulled the evaluator aside just before a scheduled meeting with her father and whispered what had been done to her. She counted the abuses on her fingers. She reported that her father had pulled her arm, locked her in a cupboard, screamed at her, and sexually abused her. She seemed relieved to have finally told someone. The evaluator's response was to tell her that the upcoming meeting with her father would be "a good occasion to discuss these issues with him" and then, despite the child's resistance, walked her into the room where her father was waiting.

I was once a child with things I could not say, in a system that was not designed to hear me even if I had said them. The difference between me and that six-year-old is that she did speak - and the system still failed her.

The researchers also documented an impossible double-bind that children in these cases cannot escape. If a child cannot provide a detailed, consistent account of the violence, evaluators deem them not credible. But if a child can provide more information, particularly about incidents they did not personally witness, the evaluator concludes that they must have been coached. There is no version of telling the truth that lands safely. The study's authors put it plainly: the recourse to parental alienation theory does not only discredit mothers. It discredits children.

The researchers close with a question that deserves to be hung on the wall of every family court in this country: are these proceedings promoting children's welfare, or are they promoting father-child contact?

I want to be clear about something, because it matters to me that it is said. I have seen healthy fathers and unhealthy mothers. I have lived that reality personally. Acknowledging a systemic bias against women and mothers does not require pretending the opposite never happens. What it requires is the intellectual honesty to hold both things at once, to be pro-child while also being willing to name what the data shows. The system fails children most reliably when it fails the protective parent. The research, on both sides of the Atlantic, keeps pointing in the same direction about who that parent most often is, and which direction the institutional skepticism most reliably flows.

MP Kirith Entwistle, speaking in response to the Right to Equality report, said what survivors in communities like ours have been saying for years: "Too many women have told me that the family courts felt like an extension of the abuse that they were trying to escape."

That sentence is not a statistic. It is a lived experience that is documented 530 times in a single study, carried by thousands more who never made it into any report at all.

The children inside those cases are still waiting. They are waiting for a system that will hear them the first time, believe them when they speak, and stop using the language of alienation to walk them back into rooms they are afraid to enter. They deserve better than a courtroom culture that counts a child's fear of her father as evidence against her mother.