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Abstract: 

Seasoned domestic violence expert, attorney, and author Nancy Erickson offers this masterful piece on the glaring deficiencies in the ways family courts in New York State decide child custody cases involving allegations of abuse. The author bases this article on the testimony she, along with a few other experts and stakeholders, provided to a subcommittee of the New York State legislature in 2019. As evidenced in Ms. Erickson’s testimony, which is laid out almost-verbatim in this report, after many decades of advocating, lobbying, and testifying by members of the battered women’s movement, the legal landscape faced by battered women and children in the Empire State has, at best, improved minimally; to this day, as the author eloquently argues, massive reforms continue to be urgently needed.

Keywords: Presumption against Custody or Unsupervised Visitation to Abusers; Exception to the Use of the So-Called “Friendly Parent” Custody Factor in Cases Involving Domestic Violence; Repudiation of Parental Alienation Belief System

Affiliations:  1: Attorney at Law.