Some parents use the family court system to control and punish former partners, employing legal tactics that leave survivors emotionally drained and financially crippled. This piece focuses on the strategic use of court proceedings as coercive abuse, highlighting the hidden impact on children and families. Drawing on my previous reporting on family violence, it exposes how legal battles can mask manipulation and deepen trauma for those caught in these conflicts.

Children’s warnings are too often silenced in America’s family courts. Judges dismiss their fear as manipulation, while real histories of abuse are ignored in favor of vague theories like ‘parental alienation.’ The cost of these failures is measured in childhoods stolen and, too often, in lives lost.

Family court proceedings are closed-door, serious, and often stripped of emotion, designed to protect privacy but also to shield the...