The Family Resolution Center

The impact of divorce on families can be devastating, especially the collateral damage to children "caught in the middle." A hallmark trait of high-conflict divorce litigation is the power struggle that results when both parties place the child in a “tug-of-war” position.

What further mucks the waters of divorce is when one parent has even remote ties to another country. We find that one of the elements of retaliation against parents who win cases against child protective services is that Child Protective Service Agencies are able to have a parent with even remote connections to another country – even when that parent is an American Citizen deported from the United States. We have witnessed the deportation of these parents summarily deported without any due process procedure.

Children already experience devastating damage as pawn in a power play. Evidence suggests that children further suffer when their parents are deported, when they have no control over when or if they may see their parents again. Lawyers and judges throughout the country involved in divorce work, spearheaded by the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (AFCC), are looking to mitigate the negative impact on children. But there exists little accurate, deep diagnostic understanding of the family dynamics, or accurate psychosocial diagnostics relevant to the consequences to children from fractured families.

With the help of the foundation, The Foundation for the Child Victims of the Family Courts, and the dedicated professionals working tirelessly on our board, we are optimistic our efforts can sensitize court-appointed professionals within the Family Court system, child protective services, and other agencies who might unwittingly be complicit in international abductions.

The Foundation, nationally based in Nyack, New York, also has international interests. Because we currently assist parents internationally whose children have been abducted to the United States and visa verse, we are concerned about the connections between the abduction of children from the United States and the international difficulties in having the rights of American children returned to American parents. The United States has signed the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of Child Abduction. Dated October 25, 1980, The Hague Convention of 25 October 1980 on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction is a multilateral treaty, which seeks to protect children from the harmful effects of abduction and retention across international boundaries by providing a procedure to bring about their prompt return. But, it is our Board’s opinion that the treaty is prejudicially applied with a separate agenda other than that of child protection.
As an initial outreach to train the professionals within agencies who might have connections to high-conflict divorces and possible international abductions, The Foundation has and continues to distribute at no charge "How to Talk to Your Children About Divorce." This book was the collaboration between Allison Quattrocchi, an internally renowned divorce mediator, an attorney, and author of the series “Divorce-in-a-Nutshell” and our Executive Director Jill Jones-Soderman, a forensic psychotherapist with more than thirty-five years of experience.

The mission of the book is to serve as a tool for attorneys and divorcing parents on keeping children as healthy and happy as possible. As of this date (June 2008), The Foundation is seeking to distribute more than 100,000 copies of the book and through AFCC referrals to family courts in all fifty states. The book, “How to Talk to Your Children About Divorce is currently translated into Spanish and funds are being aggressively sought to distribute the books to family courts across the country so that the court programs can provide books to the populations they serve free of charge.

The Foundation has a truly distinguished and active board of international professionals composed of attorneys, a pediatric physician, teachers, children advocates, parenting coordinators, therapists, and writers. Board members fly in regularly for Foundation meetings and conferences to collaborate on issues relating to international abduction, corruption in the family court and child protective service agencies, and to assist families with issues no other professionals will touch. In addition, we have an active and outstanding list of friends and contributors.

We are eager to partner with or to support organizations and professionals who share our profound concerns relating to public policy and legal functions which are obfuscating due process procedure and encouraging rights violations in our society. Mostly we are concerned in defending those most vulnerable—children, families destabilized by high-conflict divorce, those not fully represented because of age, illness, or lack of understanding of laws and legal procedure.

Our training and legal agenda includes legislation and assistance with focused law suits on a Federal and State level. One of our current concerns is the power structure or rather unchecked power within the child protection agencies. In agencies such as New York ACS and the New Jersey State DYFS, parents are routinely stripped of parental rights in a domino effect process, impervious to legal intervention and rule of law. We know that ninety percent of children seized by child protective services/families who undergo termination of parental rights actions, do not have children returned.

As a result children become warehoused in a foster care system that protects itself through layers of bureaucracy afforded by government agencies. Government policy creates a feeding frenzy in a direction of termination of parental rights or family reunification depending on the direction of funding legislation. Children's rights are abrogated to guardian ad litem, yet another layer of bureaucracy subject to affiliation processes. Another layer of bureaucracy further contributes to violation of Constitutional rights and fosters additional trauma to children. Children, suffering loss of childhood, attachment issues to family become part of a thoroughly institutionalized population—through evolution into criminal behavior or mental illness and therefore become part of the prison system or part of a mental health crisis - which in turn places the unsuspecting innocents - our general population - in grave danger.

The goal of the Foundation for the Child Victims of the Family Courts is to share our expertise, to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves and to lend legal support for those who cannot defend themselves.