So I had the misfortune of being subpoenaed to testify in an Order of Protection hearing (not ours), and by ‘misfortune’ I mean not the fact that I had to testify, but that there had to be an OP going on at all.
I seriously thought the petitioner was prepared, with photos and police reports and stuff, but as it turned out, the particular photos and police reports couldn’t be used in their petition because they weren’t about anything that happened to the petitioner, but were merely only against the person the order was being sought against…and that just didn’t fly.
So sad. Because of this glitch, a little girl is going to be terrorized when she goes to visit her father.
I’ve seen this terrorization. I was personal witness to it; it was a single instance, and very limited in scope, and when I got on the stand, it left my mind; I completely blanked out.
But what I saw reflected what I was being told by the petitioner was happening to her daughter on a regular basis, and was the reason why the little girl is so terrified of being around her father.
And the petitioner can’t tell about what her little girl is going through.
Because it’s “hearsay.”
Can’t use it
I can understand this concept fully. You can’t testify to what “someone else” has said to you. If you could, unscrupulous people could concoct all kinds of things “you said,” and then you’re screwed when they testify in court against you.
However, when it’s a 4-year-old, a very bright, intelligent 4-year-old who has more than a passing keen perception of the obvious, you can’t exactly put that child on the stand and quiz him or her. Four-year-olds are notoriously attention deficit as well as self-conscious if there’s a whole courtroom staring at them and often an elderly, paunchy, balding old-guy attorney with an overblown opinion of himself asking them weird questions.
So go our Family courts, unfortunately. Since no-fault divorce and having babies out of wedlock became the norm some years ago, it’s created a whole ’nother revenue source for a whole bunch of attorneys who specialize in those kinds of things. Whereas before our courts dealt with just crims and certain civils, like property line disputes (when they’d actually deal with the latter; come to think about it, these days they don’t seem too interested in that kind of thing, either), they now deal with disputes between parents, whether married or not; disputes between babymommas/babydaddies; Orders of Protection, and that latest overly-abused civil remedy that was a good idea when it started by has been bastardized beyond recognition, OP’s cousin, Stalking/No-Contact Orders.
And none of them—NONE of them—have an easy solution to give the child a voice.
Nutcases abound
Yes, Family court has to be careful. You get nutcases who poison their children against their other parent, telling them the most outrageous things and confusing them beyond the point of repair, wherein they come to believe that a parent who would lay down their lives for that child is evil incarnate.
But then you also get the situation wherein the child is legitimately terrified of having to go spend time with the other, non-custodial parent. Why? There are circumstances where the child is abused physically while in that parent’s care, true; but there are other things that can bring about this fear; it doesn’t have to be anything so overt. The other parent can be neglectful, absent; when the child is in that parent’s presence, they feel like they’re just a burden, getting snapped at for simply wanting to play with the parent. Then there is the terror a small child feels when they’re alone: The non-custodial parent oversleeps, the child wanders the house by herself or with other, neglected children. The child is hungry; the parent tosses him or her a loaf of bread and some lunchmeat. I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine, being a four-year-old, what it’s like to be given the elements of a cold sandwich and being told “Here, make yourself something.” Or having to be that little child while the parent, complete with a new stepparent or otherwise significant other, sits at a kitchen table for hours on end, smoking cigarettes, drinking booze, and plotting retribution against the child’s other parent, hearing that parent’s name being spoken over and over with hatred, venom and disgust.
Seriously…that would scare me to death if I were a child.
It’s happening
And folks…it’s happening.
And these children have no voice, because their concerned parents, believing in the court system, think they can tell the judge, “Look, here’s what my kid’s saying to me, completely unsolicited, something will happen and it will spark my kid’s memory and she’ll just pop up with this thing that she can’t possibly be making up because she can’t possibly have any sphere of reference to it in the life I see her living with me.”
You can’t say that to the judge. It’s “hearsay.” Like I said…the unscrupulous have ruined that for the rest of us.
But there is hope.
Within less than 24 hours of retrieving my granddaughter from having spent six weeks away from us, she was saying things that disturbed us. The most haunting things she said were how her mother and stepfather were forcing her to not call Jack and I “Gampay” and “Mammaw,” but calling us by our first names…and if she slipped up, she was punished; how she was being told that we wanted to “steal her away from” them; and the most gut-wrenching one of all, “My mommy hurt my life.” I knew I had to get this child help in dealing with it; with the exception of two months in 2010, the little bit of time we stayed in Harrisburg, and then that long, arduous six weeks, that child had never been away from us for longer than maybe a two-week stretch. It was more than her little psyche and emotions could endure.
The hope
I asked around to my Harrisburg friends and was referred to Sheryl Woodham at The Guardian Center. From there, Sheryl referred us to the Baptist Children’s Home and Oma Rice at Pathways Counseling.
It wasn’t that we were looking for a specific kind of spiritual counselor; we have differing religious views from that denomination. However, we definitely knew that we wanted something that wasn’t so inured in secularism and pop psychology, stuff we absolutely don’t adhere to. So Pathways it was, especially upon our first meeting with Oma.
The play therapy the child is involved in gets a level of trust built quickly between the staff and the patient; I mean, kids are always asking an adult to “play with them,” doesn’t matter if it’s dolls or coloring or race cars. Pretty soon, that child is blurting out things they’ve been saying to anyone who’d listen anyway, like “My mommy doesn’t take good care of me” and “My mommy doesn’t feed me good food” (remember tossing those sandwich components at the child.) And Pathways is accredited…so when that’s blurted out, depending upon the circumstances, that’s chronicled. And best of all: When it’s time for that child to have a voice—as in, in a court setting—Pathways can come to court and testify to it.
And at that point, it’s not “hearsay.” I don’t know how that works, but it does. And thank God.
Some people just shouldn’t be parents
There have been people who, over the past three to four decades of uninhibited breeding without responsibility and no-fault divorce and the decimation of the family in the various ways it’s been accomplished, simply should never have been allowed to become a parent at all.
Those people have raised horrible, spoiled, unaccountable people who in turn have bred and have now produced another generation of kids who don’t have the slightest clue what it’s like to be raised in a stable, loving, responsible two-parent home environment, and if they are fortunate enough to have at least one stable parent, they’re forced by the court to be taken for “joint parenting” to the neglectful, atrocious parent whose time with that kid is little more than a punishment set forth by Family court…which rarely has to answer for the broken, maladjusted little ones it leaves in its wake.
Check out such counseling as offered by Pathways and others in your area. These children need a voice, and the courts are too demanding on them. Give them their voice, through others who can speak for them, like Oma Rice can.