Dr. Amy Neustein: Mothers Reporting Abuse Losing Custody ‘at Staggering Rates’

Amy Neustein, Ph.D. has worked in the fields of speech technology and preventing child sexual abuse.

Her work in the latter began in 1986, when her six-year-old daughter reported being sexually abused by her father. As a result of the child’s disclosure, she was removed from Amy’s custody, and placed with her ex-husband.

Dr. Neustein fought back. During her advocacy, she founded HURT (Help Us Regain The Children)—a legal research and advocacy center—to lobby state and federal legislators to investigate the problems in the family court system.

She gave expert witness testimony in child abuse/custody cases.

In 2005, Dr. Neustein and attorney Michael Lesher wrote From Madness to Mutiny. The book was the lead title of the University Press of New England, and is part of Northeastern University’s Gender, Crime and Law Series.

Dr. Neustein told Frank Report.

As a researcher, and as a mother, I’ve been examining the malfeasance in the American family court system for 36 years.

I see the inevitable need for a major Justice Department investigation into the profiteering family court system, where swindlers, profiteers and grifters have penetrated what was once a venerable institution.

In so doing, they have pushed their own unsavory agenda, trapping unsuspecting innocent mothers and children. This is the most serious indictment of government I’ve ever seen.

And it shows the contamination of the family court system by profiteers, responsible for the dire situation of children being stripped of their loving mothers.

The only contact they have with them is often in a sterile visitation setting, where a mother must pay about $400 a week to cover the supervisor in the setting where the visitation is held to see her child.

The mothers often do not have the money to pay for this visitation, which is roughly $20,000 a year.

As a result, their children are being wiped out of their lives, and their children grow up to feel very much abandoned by their mothers because they don’t understand the system.

The children know that the mothers abandoned them because they told the truth because they pleaded with the court. They pleaded with the law guardian, and with the social service caseworkers, to be protected from sexual abuse. And they were told they were liars over and over again. And as a result, they were severely punished with the loss of their mothers, that children have been orphanized.

I want Jill Biden to hear this message. I feel that if she understood what was going on with mothers losing children, she would come to the rescue. She’s a mother herself.

There is enough evidence and enough researchers and lawyers to make a compelling case for US Attorney General Merrick Garland to come in with the full force of the Justice Department to commence a Justice investigation on numerous grounds, from flagrant civil rights violations in these cases, to the cultivation of these children for an organized Child Exploitation network in contravention to social services laws that require investigation and protection of children of child sex abuse, to issues of racketeering, financial benefit to the agencies and departments that work with the courts, and make a profit off the the tearing of children away from loving mothers.

There is enough to show that you have a subversion of the family court system by profiteers.

It’s money making, and the financial motive is what is directing, guiding and inspiring the outcomes.

This is an extraordinarily tragic situation where children are being orphanized. They are losing their mothers, and their only contact with their mothers in a sterile visitation setting for one hour a week.

And when the mother can no longer pay $400, which is the going rate to the visitation center and to the supervisor, she loses her child.

Does anyone understand the trauma involved here? It’s cruel. And it’s heartless. And it’s motivated because of finances, because there’s a need to use the sexually submissive, abused children for the child exploitation network that has penetrated the family court system, and it nested already for quite a few years.

It has made itself systematic and routinized. It’s embedded in the court system, and that’s where the child exploiters get the children from, from middle class custody cases. That’s where they’re getting the children for the pornography in this country, and for child pedophilic activities.

Dr. Neustein, who is Jewish, also published the following in the The Washington Jewish Week.

By Dr. Amy NeusteinFX launched a groundbreaking five-part miniseries, “Children of the Underground,” focusing on a well-publicized 1980s vigilante movement that ran safe houses in the U.S. and Europe to assist mothers in hiding with their children when family courts had erroneously ordered their children to live with a sexually abusive parent notwithstanding compelling evidence to support the abuse.

Though the Underground Railroad has become a relic of the past, the danger to children posed by errant judicial decisions is just as exigent today.

In fact, the study showed that in over 73% of the time when mothers presented credible evidence of abuse, and the other parent charges “parental alienation” — when a child refuses to have a relationship with a parent due to manipulation, an unsubstantiated theory invoked as a smokescreen — the family court judges, who are easily persuaded by this fallacy, will strip the mother of custody and relegate her to restrictive and limited contact with her child — usually at a court-approved institutional setting where a visitation supervisor is hired to monitor everything the mothers says to her child so as to prevent any further discussion of abuse.

Sadly, such moratoriums even include when children themselves initiate discussion in making new disclosures of abuse.

Amy Neustein was a young mother when her daughter reported sexual abuse by her father. Parental alienation was employed, and she lost custody of her daughter, which then began her long fight for justice.

In most cases, the costs of supervised visitation become so prohibitive to the mother that she cannot continue to see her child. That is, the mother is forced to pay, in addition to child support, a few hundred dollars for each visit to cover both the costs of the supervisor and the institution, which provides the visitation setting.

Such visitation arrangements are structured after that mother has already been nearly bankrupted by attorney’s fees, court transcript costs, expert witness fees, law guardian fees, and other litigation expenses.

Yet, there is no structured government program to bankroll supervised visitation, lest the government “catch on” and see the outrage of such setups in the first place — deeming the supervision of the mother nothing other than pointless and punitive.

Accordingly, when mothers run out of funds to finance this canard — which can begin with a preschool-age child and last until the child is 18 — the consequences to the mother and child are no less than dire.

Not seeing Mommy anymore implants a terrifying message of abandonment in the psyche of the child, who has repeatedly pleaded to be protected from abuse by the other parent.

The child, who had once envisioned their mother as anchor, protector and advocate, now sees their mother as powerless or worse — often as a co-enabler to the abuse the child is forced to endure living with the dangerous parent.

Unfortunately, many children will turn against their mothers for abandoning them, and when they reach adulthood, they are reluctant to reunite with them.

Understandably, the system that has created such draconian conditions for mothers has also harmed fathers — good fathers, loving fathers, caring fathers — who have been expunged from the lives of their children. But the devastation of mothers and children as a nationwide problem must also be addressed.

Many Jewish women have been caught among the class of mothers falling prey to a jaded, corrupt, misguided system, careening out of control. Motherhood is the bedrock of Jewish society. It is the institution that nurtures, fortifies and sustains us.

The ablation of mothers from the lives of their children has proven to take its toll on the mental health of such “orphanized” children, causing depression, low self-esteem, eating disorders or worse.

As a Jewish community, we have often taken the lead when confronted with social atrocities, from civil rights to reproductive rights, from school desegregation to gender equality in the military and in civilian life.

No doubt Jewish women who were beacons in the earlier days of the feminist movement have been etched in history, and many still remain as household names today.

At Judaism’s core is an enduring sense of moral justice that suffuses our history and modern-day existence.

The mothers across America badly need our help, and they cannot afford to wait. Whether the solution is a bi-partisan Congressional hearing, a full-fledged Justice Department investigation, or a proactive lobbying effort on Capitol Hill, we must not tarry.

We must gather and unite to assist mothers — Jewish and non-Jewish — so that women are no longer punished with the loss of custody of their children and the ensuing restrictive visitation that they cannot afford to sustain. To do anything less would be a disservice to mothers mired in the failed family court system.

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