On January 31, 2014, the Task Force to Study Legal Disputes Involving the Care and Custody of Minor Children published its findings.
At the time this happened, I wrote a blog expressing my objection to the fact that the report depended upon commentary from the Commission on Custody which took place in 2002 instead of evaluating what is going on in 2014 to cause these problems. It repeated statements made in 2002 that the custody problems in CT Family Court are caused by "a small minority of parents [who engage] in persistent conflict because of anger, characterological or mental health problems, or the force of personality."
It further continued to state, "these families over consume system resources pursuing their conflict and frequently harm their children in the process. The ability of this population to use the constitutional right of access to the courts as a means for revenge or punishment against the other parent is an unintended negative consequence of the legal process."
My objection to this characterization of the general dissatisfaction of CT citizens with CT Family Court is that not only is it inaccurate, it is a fabricated excuse to justify Family Court's wrongdoing.
First, there are no accurate statistical studies to verify how extensive is the number of parents who are involved in high conflict divorces. I personally doubt that they are such a small minority as excuse-making family court professionals suggest. These excuses are just another way for such professionals to refuse to take responsibility for what they have done and blame innocent victims of the system.
Second, while we know there is a small minority of parents whose divorces take up to two years or more, it is not possible to determine whether length of time in court is the sole accurate indicator of the presence of high conflict or not.
Other, shorter, divorces could indicate that much of the conflict was conducted outside of court in advance of the parties appearing in court.
Some divorces could end up being short lived simply because one or the other party has been successfully threatened into compliance with an agreement he or she does not like by many of the corrupt techniques that so many Connecticut Citizens have reported about in legislative hearings that took place in advance of the task force report.
More than anything else, however, what bothered me when I read these two reports is the tendency on the part of the Commission and the Legislative Task Force to attribute mental health issues to Family Court Litigants who found themselves caught up in a Family Court legal nightmare. Most particularly I was most uncomfortable about the way in which the task force failed to differentiate between perpetrators and victims in these situations.
The reality is that when there are litigants who are pushing forward with the kind of damaging legal proceedings that task force members describe as taking up all of Family Court resources, many of the destructive litigants, (as opposed to their victims who are reluctantly sucked up into the proceedings) are most likely to be perfectly sane individuals.
In addition, those corrupt attorneys, judges, family relations officers, and mental health providers who incentivize divorce proceedings for their own personal profit are also most likely to be perfectly sane individuals as they drive litigants into bankruptcy, foreclose on their homes, empty their child client's college accounts out to pay their fees, and drive vulnerable and sensitive mothers and fathers to have nervous breakdowns and/or struggle with clinical depression.
But instead of acknowledging this, as with the Commission of 2002 before it, the Task Force of 2014 again points at the Convenient Scapegoats, i.e. the Mentally Ill.
Why?
They do this because the stigma towards mental illness is such that if a person commits a crime--white collar or otherwise--or commits murder or some act of violence, too many people cannot imagine that any normal person could do such a thing. Their internal prejudice against people with mental illness leads them to attribute those actions to some kind of mental health disability.
This is particularly true if the perpetrator appears respectable or has a prestigious position in the community. A good example of this would be somebody like David Messenger, a CT resident who bludgeoned his pregnant wife to death and was acquitted on the basis of the insanity defense. Few could believe that a wealthy, well brought up, privileged gentleman like Messenger could possibly have committed murder while in full command of his faculties. Yet there are many reasons to believe that he did.
What most people don't realize is that the majority of people with mental illness are unlikely to commit these kinds of crimes. This is because so many people with mental illness have suffered so much that they tend to be very kind and gentle individuals--perhaps too much so. Further, many folks with mental illness have had considerable mental health treatment and so they have learned to have some insight into their actions which makes them less likely to cause harm and much, much more likely to be the victim in any given situation.
Thus, the common association in peoples' minds of mental illness with criminal and violent proclivities is just specious.
This paradox is no more clear than in the article, "Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil" written in 1961 by Hannah Arendt, the controversial German Jewish political theorist who wrote about the trial of Adolph Eichmann for "The New Yorker" magazine.
Adolph Eichmann was one of the major architects of the Final Solution along with others such as Heinrich Heydrich, and as such, he was personally responsible for millions of deaths. Ms. Arendt stated that people speculated that the atrocities Eichmann committed were so serious that he must have been mentally ill or in some way demonic and deluded. Yet the reality is that he was examined by six psychiatrists, all of whom unanimously stated that he was perfectly sane.
The bottom line is that evil people commit evil in cold blood, not because they are unaware of their actions or deluded as to what they are doing and what are the consequences of what they are doing. They are often cool, calculated, amused, and thoroughly self satisfied about their premeditated criminal acts.
Thus, the likelihood is that the people creating the problems in family court are perfectly aware of what they are up to, are perfectly sane, and are acting in a criminal way because that is what they want to do and it pleases them, not because they are out of their minds. They are not mentally ill--just evil. Until our legislators understand this, until legal professionals admit this, we are unlikely to arrive at any lasting solutions to the problem of the corruption of the CT Family Court system.
