RECENT TRAGIC DV INCIDENT IN CT RAISES QUESTIONS REGARDING PARENTAL ALIENATION THEORIES IN FAMILY COURT!

A RECENT "NEW YORK POST" ARTICLE REPORTED THE FOLLOWING:

"A Connecticut man viciously attacked his wife and three children on Tuesday morning — before he was fatally shot by police when he refused to stop advancing on them, police sources said. Christopher Andrews, 51, a lawyer with an office at 420 Lexington Ave. in Manhattan, first struck his wife, Kathleen, in their home at 22 Mount Laurel Road in Fairfield, inflicting severe stab and blunt force wounds in the face, police sources said.  He then struck his 12-year-old son in the face, attacked his 13-year-old daughter and tried to hit his 15-year-old son with  a baseball bat, the sources said.

The girl fled to a neighbor and called 911, while the 15-year-old also escaped after he managed to wrest the bat from the deranged dad..."

For more on this story, please click on the link below:

http://nypost.com/2016/02/16/cops-shoot-man-who-attacked-wife-and-kids-police/

I did not immediately report on this incident on the blog because it brought up so much turmoil and pain for me.  I have personally known victims of domestic violence who have also subsequently ended up being victims of the CT Family Court System because they had the nerve to raise the issue of the physical abuse and/or coercive control they experienced.  As a result, for me, this most recent incident of domestic violence coming so soon on the heels of the Baby Aaden case, raises several questions, but one question in particular is the most urgent for me.

This is my question: if Attorney Christopher Andrews had survived and like David Messenger been acquitted based upon the insanity defense and eventually released back into the community, would CT Family Court have insisted that the mother continue to co-parent with him?  

Let's take this further--after a few years, would the mother have been expected to move on and get over the domestic violence, and would she have been required to happily drop the children off with Dad, so father could have unsupervised visitation with him? 

Would any anxiety she might have at such an arrangement be dismissed as unconscious alienation of the children?  Would the children, if they were fearful of their father following this incident, be considered to feel this way because the mother must have been alienating them from their father, not that father had done enough damage all by himself?  

Seem bizarre?  

Isn't this what happened in the Angela Hickman case?  Isn't this what happened with Kathi Sorrentino?  Isn't this what has happened with so many mothers who have experienced domestic violence and were then accused of parental alienation when they tried to protect themselves and their children subsequently?  

How can any woman in the State of Connecticut believe the protestations of judges, or attorneys, or law enforcement, DCF, or the State Legislature that they take domestic violence seriously when women who try to defend themselves from abuse end up being accused of parental alienation and lose custody if not all access to their children as a result?  

The Divorce in Connecticut blog has documented case after case after case where scenarios like this have taken place, and they continue to happen.  Mothers who are victims of domestic violence are losing custody to abusive men at alarmingly high rates.

What this tells me is that Judges, attorneys, community leaders, legislators are far more worried about the sacred cow of fatherhood than they are about the safety of women and children.  

There is now an outpouring of financial support and expressions of caring for the Andrews family.  They would be far better served if the State of Connecticut would stop harming the victims of domestic violence by taking away their children and cutting these children off entirely from their primary caretakers simply because their mothers sought protection from abusers.  

In recent emails, Elizabeth A. Richter, an independent journalist who writes often for the Divorce in Connecticut blog, asked the CT Judicial Branch what their position is regarding judges who tell victims of domestic violence to get over it, and if they don't do so promptly, then accuse them of parental alienation and take their children from them.  She was unable to obtain a response from the Branch.  

Isn't it about time that the Connecticut General Assembly directly addressed this issue and made it illegal for judges to take children away from the victims of domestic violence and hand them over to abusers using quack parental alienation theories as an excuse, as if motherhood accounts for nothing?