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.

 

​Mapping and Transforming Courts’ Responses to At-Risk Children  

Experts in the field of family violence know that the best predictor of future violence is past violence. Experts in intimate partner violence know that many partner-abusers direct their rage at the children when their partner is no longer available, post-separation. Nonetheless, family courts nationwide regularly treat past domestic violence as irrelevant to future risks to children, sometimes with disastrous results. 

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The Family Court Outcomes Study 

Between 2015 and 2019, the 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. Read More.

 

​The Center is using this research to fuel its four-pronged approach to transforming courts’ responses to families with a history of abuse.  First, it is educating and training judges, lawyers, psychologists and others on both the problems and the solutions these data compel.  Second, it is disseminating this much-needed data to a wide array of print, online and visual media.  Third, it is providing drafting and research support for lawmakers and advocates doing policy work at both federal and state levels.   Finally, the Center provides expert consultation and supports selected litigation in both federal and state courts, using friend-of-the-court (“amicus”) briefs to educate the appellate judges.

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