Research, Scholarship, and Public Education
The Center’s core mission is to provide pioneering, evidence-based analyses that support urgently needed reforms in the nation’s family courts.
The Center’s and affiliated professionals’ powerful new research findings are regularly distributed in print, online, and through in-person or virtual presentations to lawmakers, judges, attorneys, advocates, and other professionals. The Center also brings scholars and policy professionals together to ensure these populations are informed of the new findings, and to discuss their implications for scholarship, policy, and system-reform work – in particular, the compelling need to create an integrated legal response to adult and child maltreatment.
Research that helps kids.
Family Court Outcomes Study
Between 2015 and 2019, our Director led a team in a federally-funded five-year national study, “Child Custody Outcomes in Cases Involving Abuse and Alienation Allegations” (2019) (“Family Court Outcomes Study”) that produced the first empirical data measuring national trends in family courts’ responses to abuse allegations. It is also the first research study to assess courts’ responses to child abuse as well as intimate partner violence claims. This new data proves quantitatively what many experts and survivors have reported anecdotally, that family courts adjudicating custody and access are failing to take seriously reports of a parent’s dangerousness, frequently reject mothers’ and children’s reports of domestic abuse, and award custody to alleged – and known - abusers at surprising rates.
About the Study
Experts in the field of family violence know that the best predictor of future violence is past violence, yet family courts continue to make child endangering custody decisions.
Between 2015 and 2019, the NFVLC Director led a team in a federally-funded five-year national study, “Child Custody Outcomes in Cases Involving Abuse and Alienation Allegations” (2019) (“Family Court Outcomes Study”) that produced the first empirical data measuring national trends in family courts’ responses to abuse allegations. It is also the first research study to assess courts’ responses to child abuse as well as intimate partner violence claims. This new data proves quantitatively what many experts and survivors have reported anecdotally, that family courts adjudicating custody and access are failing to take seriously reports of a parent’s dangerousness, frequently reject mothers’ and children’s reports of domestic abuse, and award custody to alleged – and known - abusers at surprising rates.
NFVLC leadership regularly presents at national and international conferences and events, and provides trainings for professionals, to raise awareness about the systemic problems in family courts. We consult on state, national, and international policy development, including on the recently issued UNSRVAW Custody Report, presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council in June 2023.
Additional Research by Center Staff
Denial of Family Violence in Court: An Empirical Analysis and Path Forward for Family Law
The most recent and comprehensive article containing the FCO study's data, as well as extensive qualitative discussions of why and how family law and the family law academy have missed the boat when it comes to abuse in custody litigation.
Dangerous Liasons: A Domestic Violence Typology in Custody Litigation
This article is about a common typology of domestic violence and how it is over-used and distorted in custody cases.
Domestic Violence, Child Custody, and Child Protection: Understanding Judicial Resistance and Imagining the Solutions
This article discusses how and why silos between the child welfare legal system and custody courts result in child abuse being ignored, especially by custody courts.
Articles by Other Scholars
Abusers Gaining Custody in Family Courts: A Case Series of Over Turned Decisions
This article describes how family courts give too little weight to domestic violence in custody cases, drawing on an informal survey of appellate cases.
When Coercive Control Continues to Harm Children: Post-Separation Fathering, Stalking and Domestic Violence
This article shows how domestic violence perpetrators can use coercive control against their children after their ex-partner has separated from them.
Read about "Child and Maternal Sabotage (CAMS)" as a preferable term to "parental alienation" when an abuser turns the children against the adult victim-parent. An NFVLC brief was filed in the D.C. Court of Appeals in a case that perfectly captures CAMS - although the court sadly did not respond appropriately, though a French court did recognize CAMS in recent decisions.