Lawmakers, experts and advocates across California are pushing for legislation that would make judges take regular training in recognizing domestic violence and child abuse. The crusade is an attempt to lessen the chances that a judge will place a child in the custody of a dangerous parent.

Family court judges routinely decide that domestic abuse claims are not credible and grant custody to the allegedly abusive parent. But making the wrong call can end with children losing their lives.

Pallavi Dhawan, director of domestic violence policy for the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office, said that mothers can end up being punished for claiming in family court that the father is abusing the child.

“The fathers will often counterclaim that the mother is trying to alienate the father from the child,” Dhawan said. “And so the judge will oftentimes give weight to that counterclaim and then punish the mother and give the father custody or visitation rights when the mother is seeking sole custody, believing that the mother is fabricating the claim.”

Fathers who initiate claims of abuse against mothers do not get the same treatment, according to a 2019 study on child custody by Joan Meier, director of the National Family Law Violence Center at George Washington University. The study showed that courts lack impartiality and neutrality when domestic abuse is alleged.  It concluded that there is an “apparent systemic gender bias against women” in U.S. family courts.

The consequences for dismissing claims of abuse can be dire. The Center for Judicial Excellence, an organization advocating for judicial accountability and child safety in family courts, said that 864 children have been murdered by separating or divorcing parents in the United States since 2008. For more than a decade, the center has tracked these deaths through news coverage in which divorce, separation, custody, visitation or child support was mentioned.

San Francisco resident Lesley Hu is the mother of one of nine children in California who died in 2021 at the hands of an abusive parent during a divorce.

Hu was married to Stephen O’Loughlin for five years before separating in 2015. They agreed to share custody of their then-3-year-old son Pierce. But when O’Loughlin insisted without evidence that Pierce was vaccine intolerant — even though the boy’s pediatrician said that he was a normal, healthy child — Hu appealed for medical custody in San Francisco family court.

In 2021, the judge in the case initially gave Hu sole custody. But he reversed himself and ordered a shared custody arrangement while giving O’Loughlin time to find evidence that Pierce was vaccine intolerance. That was Jan. 12, 2021. Pierce stayed with his father that night. The following day, O’Loughlin murdered their son and killed himself.

“Steve shot Pierce while he was sleeping and then he hung himself. That didn’t succeed, so he had to shoot himself like an utter coward,” Hu said.

Research by Lisa Fontes, author of “Invisible Chains: Overcoming Coercive Control in Your Intimate Relationship,” showed that in 20% to 30% of cases of domestic homicide, there are no prior physical acts of violence. During a webinar for the organization Domestic Shelters, Fontes said family courts can enable domestic abusers to further victimize their former partner and children during divorce or separation.

“The court system, the legal system, is supposed to be here to make us all safer, it’s supposed to be here to assure our rights,” Fontes said. “And so, it’s particularly tormenting for both the target of coercive control and children to find that the courts are not protecting them, that they are serving as an arm of further abuse by the domestic abuser. So, we really need to educate judges, attorneys and the general public about legal abuse.”

California state Sen. Susan Rubio introduced a bill in June 2022 known as Piqui’s law that would mandate training for judges on child abuse and domestic violence. She rescinded the bill last month after encountering strong pushback from the Judicial Council of California.

In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee opposing Piqui’s bill, the Judicial Council of California wrote that the bill “represents an impermissible interference in the operations of the judicial branch,” and that it creates “serious concerns about impartiality and neutrality.”

Supporters of the measure aren’t backing down. Among them is Kathleen Russell, founding executive director of the Center for Judicial Excellence.

“We’re regrouping and going to be reintroducing Piqui’s law next year,” Russell said.

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The council, which represents judges and other judiciary branch staff, sent a letter to the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Aug. 24, saying additional continuing education requirements would “overwhelm” judges with work. The group called the mandate “duplicative and unnecessary in light of the robust training that judicial officers and court-connected staff already receive.”

The Judicial Council also argued that imposing targeted training topics could “implicate an advocacy agenda intended to improperly influence judicial impartiality” and open the door to pressure from other special interests that could skew its ability to rule fairly.

State Sen. Susan Rubio, a Democrat from Baldwin Park who introduced Senate Bill 616, nicknamed Piqui’s Law, said she wanted to continue to work on it, add amendments and reintroduce it later. The Assembly unanimously passed a version in early August.

“It is unfortunate that the Judicial Council’s resistance stifled our ability to include stronger protections for victims,” Rubio said in a Sept. 1 statement. She said that in early June she put forward the bill “because children continue to be murdered at the hands of an abusive parent during custody disputes.”

Piqui’s Law would have included provisions that:

• Required evidence-based training for judges and court personnel on domestic violence and related topics. The training would have added 25 hours of orientation training for new judges who sit in family law on top of the 30 hours they are currently required to undergo. Additionally, the bill required a minimum of 20 hours of continuing judicial education every three years thereafter. The training includes coercive control, the subject of a 2020 California law that allows victims to claim nonviolent abuse or manipulation in cases involving custody or temporary restraining orders. The Public Press found in a recent series that not all judges apply the law equally.
• Restricted expert testimony in custody hearings to those who have previous first-hand experience in such cases.
• Done away with the court-ordered “reunification therapy” services, which a judge can order if a child is reluctant to see one parent after a divorce. The nationwide practice is designed to encourage children to emotionally reunite with an abusive parent they have been separated from.
• Required judges to consider any past or current sexual or physical abuse by the accused parent.

Much of the language in Piqui’s Law was inspired by a federal regulation called Kayden’s Law, a provision in the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2022, which President Biden signed in March. It was named after a 7-year-old Pennsylvania girl, Kayden Mancuso, murdered by her father in 2018 during an unsupervised visit. Her death spotlighted the country’s weak child custody process.

The child’s death spurred Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican, to work with Joan Meier, a professor of clinical law and director of the National Family Violence Law Center at George Washington Law, to introduce Kayden’s law, a court reform measure in Congress. Meier hoped the legislation would serve as a blueprint for states to pass their own versions. The federal reform promised grants, capped at $25 million, to states with child protection systems that adhere to its guidelines.

Rubio’s bill earned its nickname, Piqui’s Law, in honor of Aramazd Andressian Jr., a 5-year-old South Pasadena boy whose father suffocated him in 2017 in the back seat of his car. The father later said his motive was anger at his wife for divorcing him. He is serving a 25-year-to-life sentence.

Ana Estevez, the boy’s mother, had fought unsuccessfully in family court to get full custody, saying she was worried about her estranged husband’s abusive behavior. Eight months before the killing, a judge denied her request for a restraining order.

“Piqui was among those innocent children and one of the reasons behind our national movement to reform the judicial system,” Rubio said in her public statement.

Meier said she had worked with Rubio in drafting Piqui’s law. She said last month that the bill had been significantly weakened as it made its way through the Legislature and was a “fragmented version of the original federal model.”

Despite repeated requests, Rubio’s office declined to tell the San Francisco Public Press what provisions had been stripped from the original bill.

Among groups that opposed the bill were Mothers Against Child Abuse, Family Reunion and The Hero’s Circle, which advocates for adult children who live in homes with only one parent after that parent had “alienated” them against the other. Members of The Hero’s Circle said they opposed Piqui’s Law because it just focused on domestic violence training while neglecting “many other aspects of child development, personality disorder and family dynamics.”

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Aug. 24, Sen. Andreas Borgeas, R-Fresno, said that “as meritorious as more education and continuing education are” for the judiciary, he was “initially concerned” that we are “building and building a curricula on top of those that work in the system.”

He said that some of his judicial districts have some of the busiest dockets in the nation and by mandating more training judges will be so overwhelmed that “at some point the system could break.”

But supporters of the bill who showed up at the hearing said such legislation could improve child welfare and, as one speaker put it, stop “preventable homicides.”

The Center for Judicial Excellence, a San Rafael-based nonprofit group founded in 2006 to hold judges accountable, had worked closely with Rubio on Piqui’s Law and sponsored the bill. The center’s Executive Director Kathleen Russell said Rubio would likely reintroduce the bill next year with unspecified amendments.

Russell said she had fought for more than a decade to eliminate reunification therapy programs in California and across the country, describing the practice as “harmful and traumatic.”

On Aug. 28, the Institute on Violence, Abuse and Trauma hosted a conference in San Diego in which three people who were sent to “reunification camps” told their stories. One of them compared her experience of being taken out of her home as an “abduction.”

Ally Cable, 20, said she was forced by the courts to “reunify” with her father when she was 16. Cable said she had been sexually abused by him and forcibly taken to a camp in Bozeman, Mont. There, therapists worked alongside her father, who shared custody of her, to try to recreate an emotional bond between them. “They treated me like a criminal,” Cable said. “It was terrifying.”

But at least one person who disagreed that the therapy was harmful, spoke at the Aug. 24 senate hearing. Beverly Hills-based family law attorney and psychologist Virginia Griffin Donnell said that that provision in Rubio’s bill was a “blind spot” and advocates who speak against the therapy have a “nefarious agenda.” 

“It’s an insidious form of child abuse called parental alienation,” asserted Griffin Donnell.

California’s child custody laws, despite some good provisions, are not working, say childcare advocates. According to data from the Center for Judicial Excellence, since 2008 the nation has logged at least 859 reported cases of children killed by abusive parents during divorce or separation proceedings. Many died during family court-ordered visitation despite evidence that they were in danger.

Russell said California has the highest number of preventable child murders in the country, three times more than Texas and five times more than New York.

“These deaths are not just random, violent tragedies,” Rubio and Russell co-wrote in an Aug. 17 opinion piece in The Sacramento Bee. “They are often preventable and due to mistakes or bias in the family court system.”

They added that in California, “the courts operate with almost no meaningful oversight and very limited training for judges and other court personnel on domestic violence and child abuse.”

In Pennsylvania, a bill called Kayden’s Law is now working its way through the Legislature. Its aim is to make child welfare and safety primary concerns in custody disputes. It too calls for domestic abuse training for judges and court personnel.

Meier said about 20 states are currently readying to introduce their own versions of Kayden’s Law, and nearly all of them are facing headwinds from judges.

CORRECTION 9/16/22: Corrects the number of Senate Bill 616, which is nicknamed Piqui’s Law.

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On average in the U.S., more than 1 in 3 women, and 1 in 4 men, will experience physical violence, rape or stalking by an intimate partner, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Nevertheless, when victims turn to family court for protection from their abusers, they often face skeptical judges. And that’s especially true when the abuse doesn’t leave a mark.

That’s what San Francisco Public Press reporter Viji Sundaram found through her reporting on a new movement to protect victims of what experts call coercive control. (See: “Coercive Control: Abuse That Leaves No Marks.”)

“He kept telling her, ‘How can I believe this?’” Sundaram said of one judge’s reaction to a victim’s request for a temporary restraining order to keep her partner away from her. “Just because a woman is staying within an abusive situation, it doesn’t mean she is not abused. And that is what the judge did not seem to understand.”

In San Francisco, the Department on the Status of Women reported in 2019 that crisis hotlines and 911 got more than 15,700 domestic violence-related calls over the previous year. 

And it only got worse during the pandemic. Lockdowns limited victims’ ability to safely contact the outside world for help. The isolation increases the opportunity for abuse, aggression and coercion. 

A study by the National Commission on COVID-19 and criminal justice shows that domestic violence cases in the U.S. increased by over 8% following lockdown orders in 2020.

That spike also hit San Francisco, according to an organization that assists domestic abuse survivors called Women Organized to Make Abuse Nonexistent, or W.O.M.A.N. Inc. The group reported that in 2020, its San Francisco crisis hotline got 11,000 calls and its Domestic Violence Information Referral Center website had 125,000 hits.

At a San Francisco Board of Supervisors public hearing in May 2020, Beverly Upton, the San Francisco Domestic Violence Consortium director, described the escalating problem of domestic violence in the early days of the pandemic lockdown in March 2020: “The first couple of weeks, we saw W.O.M.A.N. Inc’s numbers alone go up 130%,” Upton said. “So that was, you know, quite alarming.” 

The form of domestic abuse called coercive control can be harder to detect than physical violence. Behaviors like isolating a spouse from friends and family, depriving them of basic needs, spying on them, sexual coercion, intimidation, repeatedly degrading and humiliating them — these are all examples of coercive control. 

But the lack of physical evidence often pushes domestic abuse into a gray zone that even survivors sometimes fail to grasp, according to Sundaram.

“In fact, one woman told me when I was going to interview her, ‘You know, I wish he had hit me. Then I would have had a good reason to leave him,’” Sundaram said.

Coercive control is no less ruinous for victims than physical violence, according to Evan Stark, the man who pioneered the concept. A sociologist, forensic social worker and award-winning author of “Coercive Control: The Entrapment of Women in Personal Life,” Stark said his research found that around 25% of abusive relationships involve violence that’s either nonexistent or below the radar — meaning they don’t result in serious injury or hospitalization. But abuse that does exist is equally harmful.

Stark’s work focuses on the cumulative effects of this treatment: “What I call the death by 1,000 cuts — the push and shove, the grab, something that wouldn’t impress a judge, wouldn’t impress a police officer, but whose cumulative weight was such that it could lead to a feeling of being imprisoned.”

Despite such research, according to the domestic violence and sexual assault prevention organization No More, 65% of domestic abuse survivors who come forward report no one helping them when they do. They report that law enforcement treats domestic abuse as a “domestic dispute” rather than an act of escalating violence.

In January 2020, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law that integrated coercive control into the state’s Domestic Violence Prevention Act. Senate Bill 1141 expanded the Family Code to allow the abusive behavior to be used as evidence in family court hearings. It was meant to empower survivors trying to protect themselves and their children during appeals for restraining orders and child custody. But getting family court judges to embrace the new legislation has been slow going.

A 2019 study by Joan Meier, a law professor and director of the National Family Law Violence Center at George Washington University, shows an apparent “systemic gender bias against women” in U.S. family courts. Her study found that women often grapple with the high cost of legal help and are penalized by courts that favor fathers. 

One woman using the name Sarah to protect herself from her abusive ex-spouse and father of her two children said she’s been fighting that bias in court for two years.

During her 10-year relationship, Sarah was subjected to threats of violence, absolute control over every aspect of her life, and destruction of property during bursts of rage. Three incidents that involved police even led to the temporary confiscation of his firearms. Their children also endured his volatile need for control. In one incident he physically overpowered their 4-year-old son, pinning him down to a bed by his neck.

Sarah applied for a restraining order in family court. As court transcripts show, the judge said he didn’t believe her testimony.

“The court finds that there are credibility issues that causes the court to doubt as to whether or not abuse as defined by the Domestic Violence Prevention Act has occurred,” the judge said. “The court will deny the request for a domestic violence restraining order.”

The ruling left Sarah dumbfounded.

“Even though, you know, I’ve never damaged property, cell phones, laptops, doors, etc., the judge just found me not credible, which I thought was shocking,” Sarah said. “And it was almost as if he didn’t care. He really didn’t care to look at the facts. He didn’t care to look at the history.”

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Emily provided written documents and audio to show how he had allegedly abused her time and time again. In her testimony, she said he monitored her phone conversations, even those related to the web design business they jointly set up before their marriage. Sometimes, she recalled, in a fit of jealousy he would hang up on male clients while she was negotiating a business deal.

Trevor was so controlling, she said, “I felt I was not allowed to have my own thoughts.”

So she bit her tongue and said nothing, afraid of his mercurial temper. In November 2020, after receiving a bruised arm from him — an episode his lawyer says was mostly her fault — representatives from his church told her she should accept physical discipline from her husband, she said in an interview. Their message: She needed to learn to forgive.

Her attorney, Minty Siu-Kootnikoff, filed for a temporary restraining order in February 2021 and custody of the couple’s then 6-year-old son. It was a complicated case, with accusations of bad parenting and disruptive drug use flying back and forth between the couple.

Siu-Kootnikoff was one of the first lawyers to invoke a new legal tool California had enacted just a month earlier that expanded on the law’s long-standing conception of domestic violence. The reform allows victims to claim a pattern of “coercive control” — psychological abuse that does not necessarily end in physical harm. Siu-Kootnikoff is the legal services director at Sojourn, a domestic violence shelter in Santa Monica.

Siu-Kootnikoff viewed the recently enacted law as the best tool for getting her client a legal remedy. “Domestic violence is about control, and is not limited to physical abuse,” Siu-Kootnikoff said. “Therefore the amendments adding coercive control to the definition of ‘disturbing the peace’ are critical to addressing abuse that is not dealt with in the criminal codes, yet is as damaging and destructive as a black eye or broken arm.”

Not all judges are sympathetic to the stories of intimate partners who claim emotional abuse, and some even exhibit misogynistic conduct, women’s rights advocates say. More than six in every 10 California judges are male, down from seven a dozen years ago. It is not uncommon to hear a judge cast doubt on a claim of domestic abuse if one partner returns to the other after the abuse was alleged to have started. But the conclusion of the judge who heard Emily’s case shows that at least a few jurists seem to have gotten the message.

“The dynamic of domestic violence is not subject to black-and-white rules,” Judge Michael J. Convey of the Los Angeles County Superior Court noted in his Feb. 5, 2021, ruling on the case. “It is individual. It is nuanced. It is changing. The court’s views of domestic violence are evolving over the years to reflect a more proscriptive assessment — and a set of orders designed to recognize more subtle, more insidious, if you will, behaviors that can be called violence or abuse.”

Convey echoed the observations of sociologist and forensic worker Dr. Evan Stark, whose prize-winning book “Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life” helped to stimulate the conversation on the newly recognized crime of coercive and controlling behavior in the United States and throughout the United Kingdom and Australia. “It’s not about hitting or hurting, but taking away women’s autonomy,” Stark said in an interview.

Convey agreed with Siu-Kootnikoff that what Emily had undergone for years was indeed coercive control, that there “was an exercise of coercive control by Trevor and that it was pervasive and that it was long-standing and that it was part of the dynamic between them.”

The judge also said that by going back to Trevor a year after they divorced in 2015, he was not persuaded to discredit her story, citing research showing that it is not uncommon for victims to return to their abusers.

It remains to be seen how many more judges affirm what proponents of the concept say is the purpose of the reform, which is to give victims like Emily the benefit of the doubt.

The 2020 California law, introduced by state Sen. Susan Rubio, herself a survivor of domestic abuse, widens the definition of domestic violence and allows victims to introduce evidence of coercive control in applications in family court for a restraining order or child custody. The coercive control law applies to civil, but not criminal, cases.

California became the second state in the nation to adopt such a reform, following Hawaii in September 2020. In July 2021, Connecticut passed a law similar to California’s, with a couple of additional provisions: It set up barriers to vexatious litigation, preventing abusers from dragging their intimate partners to court for frivolous reasons, said Meghan Scanlon, president of the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence. The law also established a grant program to provide low-income survivors with access to legal assistance when making an application for a restraining order in five of its cities where the most domestic violence cases are heard. California’s law has no direct funding provision.

All of the laws passed so far recognize coercive control as a subtler form of abusive behavior that is often overlooked when a victim testifies about abuse. It occurs when an abuser isolates an intimate partner from friends and family, takes over their personal finances and surveils their activity, or uses verbal attacks to reinforce authority.

In her book, “Invisible Chains: Overcoming Coercive Control in Your Intimate Relationship,” author Lisa Aronson Fontes, a survivor of domestic abuse, says coercive control describes an ongoing and multipronged attack, with tactics that include manipulation, humiliation, isolation, financial abuse, stalking and sometimes physical or sexual abuse.

Coercive control is “about domination and control,” noted David A. McLeod, an associate professor in the Social Work Department at the University of Oklahoma, who has researched and published papers on intimate partner violence. “If the abuser feels he is losing control, he will push his partner back into compliance.”

The view from the bench

Women’s rights advocates say it is hard to convince court officials that victims who claim coercive control should be taken seriously, rather than wait for them to be bruised or hospitalized.

“We prefer to use the term abuse rather than violence because it means so much more than physical violence,” Convey wrote in his ruling on Emily and Trevor’s case. “And the term has been used here, coercive control.”

He continued: “Where appropriate, it can be found to be mental abuse. It can be found to be upsetting enough to cause one’s peace to be disturbed and their calm, their emotional calm to be upset.”

The education of judges in how to apply the law will be key to its success. Women’s rights advocates say enshrining the concept of coercive control gives family courts additional options to punish behaviors that have severe mental and financial consequences for victims, and might become violent if not addressed early.

On average in the U.S., more than 1 in 3 women, and 1 in 4 men, will experience physical violence, rape or stalking by an intimate partner, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

During the pandemic, domestic violence in the U.S. has risen by more than 8%, studies show. In response, the Biden administration last year invested nearly $1 billion from the American Rescue Plan to support services for domestic violence survivors, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Even prior to California, Connecticut and Hawaii passing coercive control laws, some jurisdictions in the United Kingdom and Australia had broadened definitions of abuse. But it may take at least 10 years to know how well the laws are working, said Chitra Raghavan, a women’s rights advocate and forensic psychologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Meanwhile, in California at least, some judges, inspired by the intent of the new law, are taking action.

Drawn-out court battle

Emily tied the knot with Trevor in 2011, two years after they began dating. She was 30 and he was 28. He checked all the boxes: charismatic, tall, attractive, a good business partner with a shared interest in travel. And she loved how he showered her with attention.

They ran their web designing business out of their home in Castaic, in Los Angeles County. Her skill was in designing animated cartoons and games. Between them, they were pulling in between $15,000 and $20,000 a month, Emily said.

But early on she also noticed how “controlling and narcissistic” Trevor could be, she said. Even so, she kept excusing his behavior and was determined to make the relationship work. That didn’t happen, and in 2015, they divorced. They shared joint custody of their son, then a toddler.

Three years later, they got back together because they decided that it would be better if Trevor were more involved in the child’s life, according to both parents.

“He’s absolutely my world,” said Trevor about his son in a recent telephone conversation. When Emily went to his church, he added, “I took it as a hopeful sign.”

But once they were back together, she said the abuse she had earlier experienced only intensified and at least once turned physical.

In November 2020, when Emily was trying to get her son ready for school and sought Trevor’s help because the boy would not cooperate, Trevor held her by her arms and pushed her “multiple times” in front of their son, according to testimony presented at the February 2021 trial. She included pictures of bruises on her arm as exhibits.

Trevor’s attorney, Matthew J. Chung, defended his client’s behavior on that day.

“Emily was the one that was getting up in Trevor’s face,” Chung told the court. “Emily was the one who was pushing forth towards him. Emily was the one who was yelling” at the boy.

“Had she not gotten into Trevor’s face,” Chung said, “he would not have a need to have defended himself and pushed Emily away.”

In his conversation with the San Francisco Public Press, Trevor alleged that he was a victim too. “It’s difficult to summarize these very personal events,” he said. “But I can tell you there was a lot of violence perpetrated by her against me.”

In testimony, Emily alleged that Trevor manipulated the boy, telling him Emily’s opinion didn’t matter and encouraging the child to side with him against her. She heard the boy once tell Trevor, “It’s OK to hit mommy if she doesn’t do what you say.”

She told the court that Trevor did not allow her to “actively parent,” or have a say in what school he attended. Trevor also made all the household decisions.

She accused Trevor of spanking their son, sometimes so hard that it left welts, a claim Chung sought to discredit in court. He suggested it was a “light clap.”

“Nothing more than that,” Chung said. “No lasting redness, no lasting lumps on the minor child’s body.”

But Judge Convey dismissed that claim. After pointing out that Trevor did testify that he used physical discipline on the boy, evidence “also shows that the physical discipline caused red marks on the child. That is excessive physical force to a child.”

Chung said that if anything, it was Emily who, through a deluge of text messages, kept gaslighting Trevor — making him question his own sanity. The messages cast Trevor as “always a bad person,” paraphrasing them as “Why are you abusing me? You should stop abusing me.”

At the trial, Chung said that Emily smoked marijuana in the presence of their son. “Emily used marijuana at the household and at family events to excess,” and even in the presence of the boy, to deal with her diagnosed anxiety disorder, diminishing her parenting skills, said Chung.

But Convey dismissed that allegation: “There has been insufficient evidence that this use of either prescription drugs or marijuana has altered or impacted her ability to care,” he said.

He just as emphatically dismissed Emily’s accusations that Trevor was using non-prescription opioids and alcohol to excess. “The evidence was absolutely to the contrary,” he said, finding that Trevor had been sober for several years.

Convey said he believed Trevor when he said that after the November 2020 incident, he did not “kick” Emily out of the house, that she left the premises voluntarily.

In his ruling, Convey granted Emily a temporary restraining order against her ex for three years and denied Trevor one against her. He also gave Emily sole custody of their son. Trevor was given unsupervised visitation rights three weekends a month.

“I made mistakes,” Trevor said in an interview. “I wasn’t perfect.” But he said he found the judge’s decision distressing: “I’m having to entrust our child to someone who’s not stable.”

Emily said she did not ask for child support from Trevor because she wanted to make a “clean break from him.”

Both Trevor and Emily were ordered to attend parenting classes separately. Emily said she continued to take medicine to treat her anxiety disorder and migraines, and attended court-mandated group therapy.

Asked why she went back to Trevor after she experienced so much psychological abuse during the four years she was married to him, Emily said that’s a question she has often asked herself.

“All that I went through,” she said, “is behind me now.”

This article is part of a series on California’s coercive control law, underwritten by a Domestic Violence Impact Reporting Fund grant from the Annenberg Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California.

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Kimberly’s husband, Albert Abutin, “had a hair-trigger temper, would slam doors,” and often hurled sexist insults at his wife, the lawyer told the court.

While Albert denied fault in one altercation that left Kimberly with a head injury, attorney DeAnn Salcido instead built her case around a legal concept that was relatively untested at the time called coercive control — a pattern of financial, emotional and psychological manipulation that victim advocates say can be a precursor to domestic violence.

But Judge James A. Mangione was unimpressed. He denied the request to order Albert to stay away from Kimberly. If Kimberly were speaking the truth, Mangione asked, why would she remain for five years in a marriage with an abuser and have a child with him?

“To this court, having a relationship as she’s portrayed it, and yet conceiving a child with him is inconsistent,” Mangione wrote in his Aug. 4, 2021, ruling, agreeing with the argument put forth by Albert’s attorney. “I found her not credible.”

Experts in domestic violence say judicial skepticism of abuse victims, often with misogynistic overtones, has long been widespread in U.S. family court, creating dangerous hurdles to justice. The expanded conception of domestic violence on paper is of limited use if judges continue to cast a skeptical eye on testimony, usually from women, of manipulation within intimate relationships.

Mangione was appointed to the Superior Court of San Diego County by former Gov. Jerry Brown in 2015 at age 61.

If Mangione had ever heard of the then brand-new California law allowing victims to claim coercive control — a broad range of behaviors including humiliation, surveillance, intimidation, gaslighting and isolation that strips an intimate partner of a sense of autonomy and personhood — it seemed lost in the courthouse.

Sandra Ross, a board member of California Protective Parents Association, said that as important as California’s law is, for it to be used effectively, “a lot depends on the personal biases of judges and attorneys.” She maintained that victims are at the mercy of judges’ experiences and prejudices.

The California Judicial Council, which oversees the state judiciary, said it has “always included content on coercive control as a form of abuse, even before the statute was enacted.” The council said it has included training on the law in at least 10 of its courses, with another three planned for this summer.

Under the 2022 California Rules of Court, every judge who hears family matters “must participate” in a periodic update on domestic violence education. But it doesn’t have to be through the judicial council, but may be through other providers approved by it.

The San Diego County Superior Court’s public affairs office said it could not disclose whether Mangione had received this training prior to hearing the case because the judicial code of ethics would “prevent the judge from speaking about this case.”

When state Sen. Susan Rubio introduced California’s coercive control bill, which was signed into law in September 2020 and took effect the following January, she said victims would be able to use a “pattern of abuse as part of their testimony in court” when seeking custody or a restraining order. For Rubio it was personal —- she survived an abusive relationship. She said the new law would give victims another tool to escape dangerous situations in the home.

But the success of a plea for court protections depends on many factors. Navigating a justice system that tends to favor those who can afford protracted litigation can become a nightmare. Some women obstructed in this pursuit end up feeling let down by the justice system and regretting their decision to come forward.

Mothers and ‘monsters’

Sociologist Evan Stark, who first articulated the concept of coercive control in 2007, said in an interview that behavior of the kind experienced by Kimberly was a manifestation of “gender oppression rooted in patriarchy.” He also emphasized that coercive control is not just what men do to women, but what men prevent women from doing for themselves. And, he noted: “Patterns of behavior and instances of control can add up to abuse.”

In Kimberly’s case, attorney Salcido said that threshold had clearly been met. In her five-year marriage to Albert, a deputy in the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office, the couple constantly argued, according to testimony from Kimberly’s two teenage children from a previous marriage.

“Why should anybody have to live their life that way on eggshells, waiting for his next hair-trigger temper tantrum to happen?” Salcido said in the courtroom.  She pointed out that one of the significant provisions in the law is that it includes behavior that threatens the victim’s peace of mind. She warned that Kimberly would never get the peace of mind she was entitled to if “Mr. Abutin escapes the consequences of his behavior.”

ABUSE THAT LEAVES NO MARKS | Second in a Series

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Without a protective court order, Salcido told the court, Albert “will be emboldened to continue to verbally harass her at exchanges, at any school events, to mutter under his breath like he did when he would walk away from fights to the point where their children would hear the mother called the C-word.” Salcido said the restraining order would help to prevent the escalation of Albert’s behavior into something even worse.

But Mangione was having none of it. He also dismissed the claims of Albert’s first wife, Heather who, in testifying on behalf of Kimberly, said he had abused her, too.

“With regard to Heather Abutin, I found her not credible — again, ‘He was living hell,’ that ‘He’s a monster,’ ‘He’s out of his mind,’” Mangione said according to the court transcript,  paraphrasing Heather’s side of the case. “And yet, she had three children with him. And not only had three children with him, but after they broke up, is so frightened and intimidated by Mr. Abutin, she continued to stay in contact with him asking for advice and asking him for money.”

Kimberly said Heather had no stake in the outcome of her case, yet “she felt brave enough to let the judge know it is a cycle.” And Heather volunteered to testify, Kimberly said, because “she wanted to finally tell her story since she never did when she divorced him.”

During the trial, Salcido said Heather had warned Kimberly, an emergency nurse at Kaiser, even before their child was born that she should leave Albert “as his behavior would never change.” Salcido told the judge that Albert made every effort to keep the two women “isolated from each other.”

Albert’s attorney, Ermilla A. Martinez, argued that Heather should not be trusted because in her declaration, she accused Albert of having hit her when they were married, and then asked that that statement be retracted during Kimberly’s hearing.

Martinez argued that Kimberly should not be trusted either. How could she say he had financially controlled her when a year before they separated she had bought herself a $75,000 BMW, Martinez asked.

Martinez questioned why Kimberly married Albert even after noticing his allegedly explosive temper in the two years they dated. “And then she planned and she had a child with this person that had an explosive temper,” Martinez said.

That kind of reasoning has long been discredited by research on why women stay in intimate relationships even if they are abused. In a recent case in Southern California, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Michael J. Convey said studies and case law helped him decide in favor of a woman seeking a restraining order against her abuser. “Many studies have shown and cases have addressed situations where parties continue to have, for example, sexual relations after the breakup, or after a restraining order was already in place.”

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most women will, on average, attempt to leave an abusive relationship between five and seven times before successfully and permanently doing so.

Salcido told the court that Albert blew up again in March 2021, after he and Kimberly had signed a “civility agreement” outlining the terms of the divorce that Kimberly had long wanted. Soon after, Kimberly told him he could no longer share their bed, and he should move out.

“He lost his temper for whatever reason,” Salcido told the court, and he threw a clipboard he was holding at the headboard of the bed where Kimberly was sitting. According to Kimberly’s testimony, the clipboard ricocheted and hit her in the back of the head, causing a concussion.

“She was taken to the hospital that day by her son, and she has been seeing a therapist ever since to deal with the PTSD and the anxiety that it created,” Salcido told the court.

Martinez questioned that claim, saying she has “absolutely no medical records to show that she had an exam that day by a doctor, and that she had a CT scan that day or in the future.”

She argued that Albert lashed out only when Kimberly “threatened,” soon after signing the agreement, to take their son to Menifee, a city one hour away from Chula Vista in San Diego County, where they were living. Kimberly said in an interview that she owned a house there. Martinez said Kimberly’s motive in seeking a restraining order was to get more child support and get Albert to pay her attorney’s fees. The two are also entangled in a custody battle over their 4-year-old child.

Women’s rights advocates would say that the abuse Kimberly said she experienced in her marriage is not uncommon in families of law officials. As the National Center for Women and Policing noted, “Two studies have found thatat least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10 percent of families in the general population.”

Anna Lvovsky, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School, where she teaches the history of policing and criminal law, wrote in an article published in the June 2017 issue of the Harvard Law Review about the “judiciary’s undue willingness to accept what the police say as gospel truth.” Kimberly said she often wonders how fair a judgment she received from Mangione.

She decided not to appeal the denial of the restraining order, which she could have done within six months of the ruling, said Julie Saffren, who practiced family law in Santa Clara County for 15 years and is currently an adjunct professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, where she teaches a course on domestic violence. Kimberly said she let the deadline expire because she did not have the money to pursue that option. “I have spent $50,000 on this case so far,” she said.

Just last month, a judge denied her the child support she had sought from Albert, saying she was earning as much as he was.

A pattern of misogyny

A 2019 study by Joan Meier, a law professor and director of the National Family Law Violence Center at George Washington University, shows an apparent “systemic gender bias against women” in U.S. family courts.

Her study found that women often grapple with the high cost of legal help and are penalized by courts that favor fathers. Women risk losing custody if they accuse men of abusive behavior toward their children. Family courts do not provide public defenders because the two parties in the controversy are individuals on a relatively equal footing, unlike in a criminal court, where it is a state versus the defendant. So women with little financial means are sometimes forced to act as their own attorneys.

“Mothers who allege abuse are losing custody at disturbing rates, and children often face grave consequences when they are forced to return to their allegedly abusive parent,” Meier said. 

Some advocates for domestic violence victims say the courts have become a venue for more abuse. After hours of preparing for court, survivors are likely to be re-traumatized there, especially if the judge is not sensitive to interpersonal issues and traditional gender dynamics.

Kimberly Abutin would be the first to agree.

“The system is horrible and disgusting and I was mistreated by it,” she said in a recent interview. “What is it going to take before an abused woman can get help? Should somebody get killed before she can get justice?”

Women’s rights advocates underscore Kimberly’s concerns.  According to a 2017 CDC report, the most recent available, more than half of women slain in the U.S. are killed by intimate partners.

“Too many are forced to go through our courts without legal representation and the expert support needed to have a fair chance at justice,” said Dr. Aleese Moore-Orbih, executive director of the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence. “That’s why legal assistance for survivors is a key funding priority for the partnership at both the state and federal levels.”

Mistrust of the system

Feelings of structural disadvantage in the courts can drive victims of abuse away from pursuing their legal rights. Such is the story of one woman living in Southern California, the African American mother of an 8-year-old.

The former actress, currently working as a wine salesperson, spoke about her case on the condition she not be identified by name. Here, we’ll call her Iris.

She said she cycled in and out of Southern California courts, making at least 80 appearances there over seven years, running through a number of attorneys and sometimes even representing herself, all to protect herself and the child from the father who, she alleges, has a documented history of abuse.

The child was born after what she described as a “brief entanglement” that lasted all of 97 days. He represented himself as a pharmaceutical sales representative. He showed up on their first date in a sports car. But “from the first moment there were red flags,” Iris said, adding: “I thought I was to blame.’’ He would keep deriding her passion for acting and gaslighting her. “He would tell me I was too old to pursue a Halle Berry, and kept comparing me to other women in the industry.” He would also “initiate an argument and then record my response.”

Three months into what she described as a coercively controlled relationship, Iris, then 41, found out she was pregnant. “Oh, so now you are carrying my child,” was how her ex reacted, she said. She recalled him also telling her, “It’s an inopportune time to get pregnant,” and encouraging her to terminate the pregnancy.

But Iris decided to continue with the pregnancy, even though she had made up her mind to end the relationship. Throughout her pregnancy, she said, he refused to assist in prenatal care. “He felt that because I was having his child he could control me,” Iris said. Eventually, she gave up acting and started working as a paralegal. By that point, he was regularly parking and loitering outside her job and home, as well as calling her repeatedly, including during working hours.

Initially, “I didn’t know I was being abused,” Iris said. “I had no black eye or broken bones.” She said she just thought he had a personality disorder.

When their child was born, Iris said her ex did not want to sign the birth certificate, but at the same time filed for sole custody when the child was 2 weeks old. The parents have 50-50 custody.

“Abusers will sue for custody because they don’t want to pay child support,” said Lisa Aronson Fontes, author of “Invisible Chains: Overcoming Coercive Control in Your Intimate Relationship.”

According to Iris, “there were no less than 27 hearings related to his requests for a reduction in child support,” and it still has not been resolved. The court calculated in October 2020 that the child’s father owed her more than $79,000 in child support, attorney fees and accrued interest.

Iris claimed he ceaselessly engaged in so-called litigation abuse, where an abusive partner tries to retain power and control over the victim by misusing the court system against the victim, according to the nonprofit WomensLaw.org, a project of the National Network to End Domestic Violence.

Court documents showed her ex filed repeated petitions and motions requesting multiple adjournments or violating the judge’s orders by not paying the right amount in child support.  Or he would take repeated action to force her to come to court. These actions are similar to those described by WomensLaw as litigation abuse.

“The court allowed him to come in and create utter chaos in my life,” she said.

Iris said the protracted legal fights forced her to spend so many hours in court and away from work that it ruined her financially. Fearing that he still might be stalking her, she said she has changed her telephone number five times over the last few years. She said she has been forced to learn how to advocate for herself, something she is planning to do at the next custody payment hearing.

“I have lived my entire life fearing he can harm my child,” Iris said. She said she has been diagnosed with depression and PTSD.

“If you are constantly feeling you are living under siege, it harms your body and mind,” noted Chitra Raghavan, a professor in the psychology department at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and the director of its forensic mental health counseling program. “It leaves you no longer feeling human.”

Like with many domestic abuse survivors, Iris said she has lost faith in the justice system. Too many judges have discredited her. “The overall issue that faces litigants like myself is patriarchy,” she said. “If you are not male and white, then you are at a severe disadvantage.”

Iris said she did not want to even try seeking legal remedies from California’s coercive control law because one of her former attorneys told her it would be futile. Besides, her experiences have led her to believe that women like her risk facing more trauma in courtrooms.  “Our legal system has become a springboard for abuse,” Iris said, noting that she is on her “third trial judge and technically, third trial.”

Asked about Iris’ comments, Pallavi Dhawan, director of Domestic Violence Policy for the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office, who helped craft the coercive control law, said they echoed “the documented trend in family courts where judges will sometimes interpret allegations of domestic violence in a manner unfavorable to the alleged victim.” But she noted that each survivor would have her own experience.

The bigger picture is that without a culture of understanding within the courts, systemic bias will continue, regardless of the laws on the books, said Moore-Orbih, the domestic violence activist.

“Gender and racial bias,” she said, “are significant barriers to ensure that survivors are believed and therefore treated fairly.”

This article is part of a series on California’s coercive control law, underwritten by a Domestic Violence Impact Reporting Fund grant from the Annenberg Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California.

The post Expanding View of Domestic Violence Gives Survivors New Tool, but Unsympathetic Judges Remain an Obstacle appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

The emotional abuse had been going on for years, according to Blanca. She said he constantly denigrated her appearance and Spanish-accented English. He refused to put her and their two sons on the health insurance provided by his job as a mechanic, telling her to buy her own. He rejected her pleas to let her write checks and have access to their joint bank account. He made her pay all the rent on the Bay Area home they shared with his relatives.

Experts in sociology and family law have a name for the kind of behavior Blanca experienced: coercive control. It refers to the way people — usually men — nonviolently manipulate their intimate partners into doing their bidding. But while this type of abuse by itself leaves no telltale signs such as black eyes, broken bones or marks on the victim’s arms, it can be a steppingstone to physical violence, research shows.

Coercive control is under-reported, much like all abuse. Often, it is hidden in plain sight.

“I began to feel worthless and ugly,” Blanca said. “I began to feel depressed.”

As with many victims, it is hard to tell Blanca’s story completely. She spoke on the condition that we not reveal her last name and that her husband not be contacted for comment, for the safety of her family. This reporter has been one of her housekeeping clients since 2017.

Blanca said she was aware that leaving an abuser was the most dangerous time for a woman.

After decades of damage to her self-esteem, Blanca has finally severed ties. Under a California law passed in 2020, the government is finally offering some acknowledgment of the harm she experienced. But the reform applies only in civil court — and can be used only in limited types of cases.

Recognizing the damage coercive control can cause

Coercive control encompasses a broad range of behaviors that cause emotional distress, according to social scientists. Common practices include isolating someone from friends, relatives or other support. Depriving them of basic necessities. Controlling communications, daily behavior, finances and economic resources. It could also include gaslighting — making victims question their sanity.

At its core, “coercive control is a power imbalance obtained through cruel, forceful and manipulative means,” said Chitra Raghavan, a forensic psychologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Raghavan is often called by the courts as an expert witness in cases of intimate partner violence, sex trafficking and trauma.

In the U.S., more than 1 in 3 women, and 1 in 4 men, will experience physical violence, rape or stalking by an intimate partner, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

There are no federal laws addressing coercive control in this country. But as academic researchers and advocates worldwide are calling attention to these behaviors, a handful of states have recently taken action to make them illegal.

In 2020, the California Legislature revised the state’s Family Code to include coercive control as evidence of domestic violence, expanding the definition enshrined in the state’s 1993 Domestic Violence Prevention Act. The statute defines coercive control as “a pattern of behavior that in purpose or effect unreasonably interferes with a person’s free will and personal liberty.”

California acted one month after Hawaii added coercive control to its definition. In Hawaii, though, it is incorporated into criminal statutes. When someone is convicted of coercive control that person is required to participate in an intervention program and spend two days in jail, said Nanci Kreidman, chief executive officer of the Domestic Violence Action Center in Honolulu.

Last June, Connecticut passed a similar law. But there, the bill also establishes a grant program to provide low-income victims with legal representation when applying for a restraining order. Bills in New York, South Carolina and Maryland are pending.

“The fact that so many different jurisdictions want to codify coercive control into law means that it is recognizable as a harm for which there should be a legal remedy,” said Julie Saffren, who practiced family law in Santa Clara County until 2019, and who now teaches a course on domestic violence at Santa Clara University School of Law as an adjunct professor.

In California, if a court finds a person has committed coercive control, the petitioner can get a restraining order against the abuser in family court. “The law can also be used separately when the victim is seeking child custody and the court is making a finding about the best interest of the child,” said Pallavi Dhawan, director of domestic violence policy and prevention for the Los Angeles’ City Attorney’s office, the bill’s sponsor.

“In other words, a court could make a finding of domestic violence, including coercive control, in the absence of an existing restraining order,” Saffren said. “This is because, courts recognize that domestic violence, in all its forms, is detrimental to children.”

A violation of a restraining order, whether or not it comes from family court, is a crime. Once served with one, the restrained person cannot own or purchase firearms as long as the order is in force. The recent fatal shooting of his three children and a friend at a Sacramento-area church by a father who had a restraining order slapped on him shows that there are many holes in enforcing this provision.

Scotland leads the way

The coercive control legislation was introduced by state Sen. Susan Rubio, herself a domestic abuse survivor. She said in an interview that she was propelled to get the law passed because of her own experience and after hearing the experiences of many women.

“I dealt with domestic abuse myself and I know what survivors go through,” she said, adding: “It was time people recognized that domestic violence is more than just physical abuse. This bill protects survivors of domestic violence by making their cases harder to dismiss and easier to prosecute. It will also empower victims to come forward.”

Dhawan, who worked closely with Rubio in crafting the legislation, said the bill initially faced resistance in the legal and women’s rights communities, with some abuse survivors wanting to make coercive control a crime.

Rubio said she decided against criminalizing it because as it was, the issue was “foreign to some of my colleagues and making it a criminal offense would have stalled the bill.”

Women’s advocates also point out that a criminal response is not the most effective way to get justice for survivors. They just want it to end.

“Criminal response creates barriers to reporting,” said Shiwali Patel, who advocates for policy and culture change for women and girls at the National Women’s Law Center near Washington, D.C. “If it’s a civil matter, the survivor will have more control over the process.”

In 2007, Dr. Evan Stark authored a book: “Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life.” A forensic social worker in Connecticut and founder of one of the first battered women’s shelters in the United States, Stark has helped shape law and policy across the globe, in both the civil and criminal arenas.

In an interview, Stark called coercive control “oppressive behavior grounded in gender-based privilege” that is “typically ongoing rather than episodic. Its effects are cumulative rather than incident-specific.”

In 2019, Stark helped Scotland enact comprehensive laws criminalizing coercive control. Today, that country’s law is considered the gold standard, he said. Even before the law was enacted, thousands of police officers and support staff received training on how to enforce it, thanks to the government allocating 825,000 pounds in funding to the national police force of Scotland.

Marsha Scott, chief executive of Scottish Women’s Aid, a nonprofit that helps protect women’s financial independence, who helped craft the law, said that the bill’s supporters realized that to succeed, enforcers had to be trained beforehand. In the first year of its implementation, the government pursued about 1,000 cases and secured an 80 percent conviction rate, she said.

California’s coercive control bill didn’t have an “outreach and education component,” Rubio said. Nor did it have a funding provision, she said.

There is no available data that shows how many survivors have benefited from the law because there are no reporting requirements, Dhawan said.

Born of patriarchy

A nearly 30-year U.S. resident born in Mexico, “Blanca fit the textbook definition of a coercively controlled person,” said her attorney, Sara MacDwyer, in an interview three months before she recently died.

Blanca, 50, said that at first her husband, a U.S. citizen of Mexican descent, seemed nice and caring. She considered his financial control of her something to be expected because he came from a society organized in a patriarchal structure, a culture that tells men it was normal for them to dominate their wives. It was similar to how, in Blanca’s childhood, her father treated her mother, except that he was also physically abusive to both his wife and daughter.

But within months after Blanca was married, her husband began to belittle her. The insults became more personal after she confronted him about an affair he was having with another woman. He would tell Blanca that he hated her and loved his mistress because unlike Blanca she took good care of him. “Your hands are coarse and rough,” he would tell her. “You have chicken legs.” “You have a masculine build and stretch marks on your stomach.”

MacDwyer said “the barrage of malicious comments” psychologically harmed Blanca. “He made her feel unattractive, so how could she have any self-esteem?”

But it was his actions, not just his words that made the relationship coercive. Blanca had no control over her finances, even though the self-employed woman was making as much money cleaning houses as her husband did as a mechanic.

He insisted she pay the entire rent for the four-bedroom house they shared with their sons, his mother and his brother in Contra Costa County. She did not complain when he said he expected her to pay for utilities, groceries and other household expenses.

“But I felt bound all the time,” Blanca said, crossing her wrists in front of her and tearing up.

Particularly humiliating, Blanca said, was when her husband had his new girlfriend call her to tell her she had only herself to blame. Blaming the victim is a tactic many abusers use to maintain power and control, according to MacDwyer.  

Saffren drew upon her years of experience representing abused women in family court. “In mental health terms, I think it’s a form of projection where it is unbearable for the abuser to acknowledge their behavior because at some deep level they know it’s wrong, so they project outwardly to their partner to make them responsible; that’s how they reconcile their self-view with their violent behavior.”

Last fall, Blanca filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. Court documents show that her husband has also filed, citing the same reason. Blanca said she was unlikely to get financial support from him because he has filed for bankruptcy.

Asked why she did not leave her husband sooner, Blanca said she could not imagine a life without him.

“I would always keep excusing his behavior,” she said, frowning. After a pause, she continued. “Now, while I am going through divorce, I wonder why.”

This article is part of a series on California’s coercive control law, underwritten by a Domestic Violence Impact Reporting Fund grant from the Annenberg Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California.

The post How California’s Coercive Control Law Could Help Women Manipulated by Partners appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.