Key Factor #5 for Hannah's House Professional Supervised Visitation Services: Forensic Record Keeping and Reports

Forensic science is any scientific field that is applied to the field of law. In the case of supervised visitation at Hannah's House, the areas of science are social science and behavioral science. Forensic scientists are tasked with the collection, preservation, and analysis of scientific evidence during the course of an investigation and all of that evidence is.related to, used in, or suitable to a court of law.

The provision of supervised visitation services requires 100% eye shot and earshot observation and documentation. The 2015 California Rules of Court sets forth Standard 5.20.

Uniform standards of practice for providers of supervised visitation

(a) Scope of service

This standard defines the standards of practice, including duties and obligations, for providers of supervised visitation under Family Code sections 3200 and 3200.5. Unless specified otherwise, the standards of practice are designed to apply to all providers of supervised visitation, whether the provider is a friend, relative, paid independent contractor, employee, intern, or volunteer operating independently or through a supervised visitation center or agency.

The goal of these standards of practice is to assure the safety and welfare of the child, adults, and providers of supervised visitation. Once safety is assured, the best interest of the child is the paramount consideration at all stages and particularly in deciding the manner in which supervision is provided. Each court is encouraged to adopt local court rules necessary to implement these standards of practice.

Nonprofessional providers are held to the same standard as professional providers in most areas of the standard. They are not required to document, maintain records or produce reports. Only professional providers are held to the record keeping and reports portion of the standard.

5.20 requirements are detailed clearly:

(1) Professional providers must keep a record for each case, including the following:

(A) A written record of each contact and visit;

(B) Who attended the visit;

(C) Any failure to comply with the terms and conditions of the visitation; and

(D) Any incidence of abuse as required by law.

(2) Case recordings should be limited to facts, observations, and direct statements made by the parties, not personal conclusions, suggestions, or opinions of the provider. All contacts by the provider in person, in writing, or by telephone with either party, the children, the court, attorneys, mental health professionals, and referring agencies should be documented in the case file. All entries should be dated and signed by the person recording the entry.

(3) If ordered by the court or requested by either party or the attorney for either party or the attorney for the child, a report about the supervised visit must be produced. These reports should include facts, observations, and direct statements and not opinions or recommendations regarding future visitation. The original report must be sent to the court if so ordered, or to the requesting party or attorney, and copies should be sent to all parties, their attorneys, and the attorney for the child.

(4) Any identifying information about the parties and the child, including addresses, telephone numbers, places of employment, and schools, is confidential, should not be disclosed, and should be deleted from documents before releasing them to any court, attorney, attorney for the child, party, mediator, evaluator, mental health professional, social worker, or referring agency, except as required in reporting suspected child abuse.

Hannah's House has a database of clients which includes the initial phone screening, intake information, and a phone log where all phone conversations are logged. Since the advent of email and the internet, electronic documentation has become the more common method of communication and all emails communication is maintained on all clients.

Supervisors complete Activity Reports during each visit and each exchange. Documentation on the Activity Report is completed at the time of service delivery and then reviewed in a weekly Quality Assurance meeting for completeness and accuracy.

When a court report is ordered or requested by any legal party to a case, the individual activity reports are compiled into one report document and distributed to all legal parties to the case. All phone logs, emails and in-person communication is also included in the court report.

Hannah's House provides supervised exchange services that are guided by the 5.20 Standard. However, it's important for consumers to know that, as of January 1, 2015, any reference to supervised exchange in the Rule were eliminated. This means that there is no standard for supervised exchanges.

Key Factor #4 for Hannah's House Professional Supervised Visitation Services: Team Approach

When we began our research for program development in 1988, we found that one of the first common concerns expressed by the majority of parents, extended family members and professionals in the community related to the bias of professional monitors.

Users of the services experienced the providers as "taking sides." Sometimes it was a perception and sometimes it was an accurate report. We realized that there was no way in family disputes to ensure that both parties had a positive customer experience. We also realized that we had to develop a service delivery system that controlled for the perception or the reality of a professional provider "taking sides."

We decided to use a Team Approach to service delivery. This seemed like the best way to ensure that there were multiple perspectives and experiences of each family receiving services. It is human nature to become accustomed to a situation, to begin to generalize from our past experience in that situation, and then to lose accuracy and completeness in the experience.

We recognized that everyone has biases, prejudices, beliefs, and values that filter our daily experiences. It made sense to us that multiple professionals interacting with the same family would produce a much more accurate picture of parent-child relationships over time.

We also recognized that we all have had the experience of instantly liking or disliking someone. We knew this would happen for staff members and for clients. We decided early on that these responses would not dictate staffing assignments.

Staff members needs to be able to observe and document accurately regardless of personal reactions to someone. Skill development for a professional includes learning how to self-observe negative reactions to a person or behavior and then document without prejudice or editing.

Parents need to focus on just spending time with their children. Countless times over the past 27 years, parents have complained about the prejudice of a staff member. When we review the notes in these cases, 9 out of 10 times we find that the documentation provided a picture of a good parent and a positive parent-child relationship.

The parent was having a negative reaction to the Team Member and made the assumption that it meant the person didn't like the parent and that the Team Member would document with a negative tone. Imagine if we changed Team Members or assigned Team Members based on the requests of a parent. That would be bias or at the very least the appearance of bias.

Hannah's House has successfully used the Team Approach to forensic service delivery for over 27 years. We do assign one staff person to particular cases but only when there is a clearly documented medical reason for such an assignment.

We are the eyes and ears of the judge who will never meet the children, at least in most cases. We have a legal, moral, and ethical obligation to provide the clearest possible picture of the family. The Team Approach helps us meet all of these obligations in a forensically validated manner.

Why Isn't This Considered Child Abuse?

A 5 year old returns to his mother's house and asks his step-father, "does my mommy really love my daddy more than she loves you?" An 8 year old returns from a week-end spent with her father, and tells her mother "it's your fault that daddy doesn't have any money anymore." A 14 year old, angry when her father won't buy her a new cell phone, tells her father "you're a loser anyway who can't even pay child support and spends all your money on your girlfriend." The parent who hears these words from a child rarely reacts in a helpful way to the child because it is so clear the child is echoing something heard in the home of the other parent. And the immediate response is almost always in reaction to the other parent, as the parent demands "why would your mommy tell you that?" Or exclaims "your daddy has plenty of money?" Or sarcastically says "gee, I wonder where you heard that?!"

The parents who talk to their children or even in front of their children about the child's other parent are engaging in parental alienation behaviors. For most parents, these moments are rare and typically occur only in the first few months of the transition from living together in one home to living apart in two homes. These hurtful disclosures are also rarely intentional and most parents regret the words almost as soon as they are spoken when they realize the hurt they have inflicted on their child.

Unfortunately about 10-15% of parents struggling with family break up either don't notice that they are hurting their child, or they don't care because they place a much higher priority on making sure that the child knows which one of their parents is good and which one is bad, which one is right and which one is wrong. These parents have deficits, either temporary or permanent, that prevent them from being able to protect their children from abuse and maltreatment.

So why isn't it child abuse when a parent repeatedly engages in behavior that is clearly harmful to the child? The answer is complicated. Children are rarely protected from the psychological abuse of a parent, whether the family situation emerges in a Juvenile Court context (Welfare & Institutions Code) and or in a Family Court context (Family Code.) The exception in both Juvenile Court and Family Court is domestic violence. Children exposed to domestic violence in the home are considered to have been victims of child abuse and the law requires that those children be protected from further abuse. Exposure includes visual and/or auditory and does not include any physical abuse of the child.

Domestic violence exposure was not always considered to be child abuse. It came to be categorized as child abuse as a direct result of research documenting the devastating effects on children exposed to parental violence. The harm to these child victims of exposure to domestic violence occurred regardless of whether the domestic violence between the adults included physical harm to one of the adults. Perhaps the research on parental alienation behaviors will eventually result in similar changes to the law in order to protect children exposed to parental psychological abuse from a life time of problems startlingly similar to those documented in children exposed to parental domestic violence: low self-esteem leading to depression and alcohol/drug addiction; relationship difficulties involving psychological control and manipulation; and excessive dependency on others for approval and attention that prevents self-sufficiency and adequate adult adjustment.

Parents who use parental alienation strategies with the intent of harming the child's relationship with their other parent, can be considered to be psychologically maltreating their children. The expression of these strategies inevitably and directly results in children feeling worthless, flawed, unloved, unwanted, endangered, or only of value in meeting another's needs, a commonly accepted definition of psychological maltreatment proposed by Binggeli, Hart, & Brassard.

Parents who use alienating strategies also behave in other ways that add the child's feeling of being abused and mistreated. They intrude on the child's life in every area in order to prevent the child from feeling comfortable or safe anywhere except in the presence of the abusive parent. Parents who abuse their children lack empathy and are unable to accept or acknowledge any needs or perceptions the child may express that are different form those of the parent. This lack of empathy and intolerance of interpersonal differences are the hallmarks of the child abuser.

For now, it is an unusual experience for a child victim of parental alienation behaviors to be removed from or protected from the abusive, intrusive parent. The parent's constitutional rights usually take precedence over the child's need for safety and security because there is not adequate proof or belief that the child needs protection. When a judge does see and understand the profound psychological damage to the child, they find themselves stuck for adequate intervention strategies. In most communities, there just are not adequate resources available to provide all members of an estranged and traumatized family with any hope of finding some peace and resolution. Hopefully, these community challenges will be addressed.

These real world realities and limitations do not change the fact that it's child abuse. Any parenting behavior engaged in with the intent of doing harm to a child's sense of love, safety and well-being in their family relationships is, in fact, child abuse. Perhaps it's time to just call it what it is instead of denying it. Like any real problem that interferes with a positive life, the first step to being able to solve a problem is to admit that it is a problem.

It Doesn't Necessarily Take Two...

Family law cases are often designated "High Conflict" because of repetitive litigation and a chronic state of seemingly high tension between the co-parents. Sometimes though, the tension exists within just one of the co-parents rather than between them. In these case, the unmitigated negativity in one of the parents gives the entire case/family the "feel" of a high conflict situation. Thus, one parent may continually be swept along in the tumultuous currents of emotion and tension generated solely by the other parent.

How do you know if this is happening to you? The Honorable Donna J. Martinson is a Judge in British Columbia who advocates a change in the overall system to provide High Conflict cases and the children in them the attention they deserve. While Judge Martinson is focused on changes in the judicial approach, some of the ideas she raises are important for each coparent to seriously consider as well.

Sit down with someone who is mature, neutral, intelligent, AND uninvolved and talk with them about your answers to a series of questions. You will notice that these questions focus on your behavior, not the behavior of the other coparent. Be honest and answer these questions as directly and straightforwardly, factually, as possible without explanation or defense.

• Has your court case becomes the major focus of your life?
• Are you in battle mode most of the time?
• Do you blame the other parent, view the other parent with contempt, and see yourself as a victim?
• Do you want to control the other parent and control what happens when the child is with them?
• Are you focused on the past, using inflammatory, blaming language in affidavits and/or testimony
• Are the facts often distorted, either minimized or exaggerated, and your anger palpable?
• Are the children encouraged to support you in a number of ways including showing them court material, encouraging them to contact the court to support your position, and even bringing them to court?
• Have you recruited friends and relatives to join in the mudslinging?
• Do you attempt to delay the proceedings by changing lawyers or deciding late in the proceedings to be self-represented, filing last minute materials, coming late to court, or deliberately being unprepared?
• Are there highly charged, emotional proceedings in the courtroom, with allegations made, with your supporters gathered to cheer you on?
• Do you attempt to dominate the process and to treat the other person with contempt?
• Do you attempt to sabotage professional assessments or interventions by undermining the credibility of the professional(s) by unilaterally involving other professionals and by not cooperating or making accusations?
• Do you involve the police and/or child welfare authorities when there is no danger?
• Do you make unjustified complaints about the conduct of the professionals involved,including the opposing lawyer, the assessor, and the judge, to their professional disciplinary bodies?
• Do you try to involve the media in support of your "cause.”

If you find that you are engaging in these behaviors then you are probably a High Conflict person yourself. On the other hand, if you are the one getting hooked, overwhelmed and swept along, then get some help and support to ground yourself and find some equilibrium.

Each coparent can only control his or her own behavior with the child, with the court and toward the other coparent. So get the focus on yourself and your behavior and make the changes you need to disengage from the conflict. Hannah's House has FREE support groups for Moms and Dads who are co-parenting 2-home children. Child care is provided. Dad's Group is Monday night from 6-7 pm and Mom's Group is Friday night from 6-7 pm. The groups are open to any Mom or Dad with 2-home kids!