Preview Screening of, Breaking the Silence: Children's Stories.
Join A Safe Place and the NH Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual
Violence
for a free preview screening of this film to debut nationally on
PBS-TV in
late October. This film explores the anti-battered woman phenomenon in
child
custody cases. To be held this from 4:30-6:30 at the indoor play room
at the
Community Campus, Portsmouth.
Limited seating so please call ahead. Refreshments will be available.
Call Vicky Jaffe at the Coalition to reserve your seat 603.224.8893
x311.
Please see below for an article about the film...
_____________________________________________________________________
News: Taking away battered women's kids By Sara Catania July 1, 2005
/Mother
Jones
When award-winning documentary filmmakers Catherine Tatge and Dominique
Lasseur set out to chronicle the effect of domestic violence on
children, the
husband and wife team imagined they'd be spending most of their time
researching
approaches to therapeutic healing. What they found instead was a
system that
routinely penalizes women who are victims of domestic violence by
favoring
their abusers in battles over child custody.
While there are a growing number of courts responsive to the specific
needs
of domestic violence victims (see Order in the Court), most family
violence
cases bounce women from court to court in a judicial system that takes
no
account of their unique circumstance. The scenario Tatge and Lasseur
encountered
time and again goes like this: A woman separates from her abuser and
files
for divorce. The father, who has shown little prior interest in the
children,
decides he wants joint or sole custody. The judge, seeing no link
between
spousal battering and child abuse, grants the request. "The abuser
files motion
after motion to slowly gain more custody of the kids," says Lasseur,
who first
became aware of the issue while working on a documentary about victims
of
domestic violence five years ago. "In some cases he gains full legal
and
physical custody of the kids."
The problem, Lasseur says, is that studies have shown that in cases
where
the father chooses to seek some form of custody over the motherís
objections,
there is a high probability that he has either battered the mother,
abused the
children or both. However, if the mother accuses the father of child
abuse
in court, the judge could suspect she is motivated by revenge and to
reject
the accusation as false.
Lasseur attributes this pervasive misperception to what he calls "an
anti-woman bias in court" and to a theory called parental alienation.
First
introduced by Connecticut psychologist Richard Gardner in the
mid-1980's, the theory
states that women will concoct stories of physical and sexual child
abuse out
of vindictiveness toward their former partners. Though the theory has
been
denounced as junk science, it has caught on among batterer's defense
attorneys
and father's rights groups, as well as in the courts. "When they get
to
court, what does the judge see? The abuser usually has the better job,
owns the
house, has more money, and like all abusers, has a great talent to be
together
and likeable," Lasseur says. "The woman is upset, emotional, she comes
undone. It's like, wow, a crazy woman."
The anti-battered-woman phenomenon in child custody battles was first
explored in Small Justice, a 2002 documentary by Garland Waller. Since
then it has
become a major battleground for the battered women's movement. "What's
happening is threatening to undo the past 20 years of progress,"
Lasseur says. "Now
you have police officers who explicitly tell women, if you are in a
custody
battle and you don't want to lose your kids, donít mention sexual
abuse or
domestic violence."
Lasseur and Tatgeís hour-long documentary, Breaking The Silence:
Childrenís
Stories, is scheduled to air nationally on PBS in October.
"Children learn what they live"