1

NafissatouDicko
Research Paper

After the Relationship Ends: Post-Termination Issues Faced by
Battered Women with Children

Abstract: Being in a violent relationship is difficult enough; finding the courage to finally
leave may be even harder. Many people think once domestic violence victims leave, they are free
of all abuse and can go on to live a happy and safe life. However, its a complicated process and
is even worse when children are involved. This research focused on women as the victims of
abuse and men as the perpetrators. After reviewing the literature, three themes that emerged
were issue of system responsiveness, lack of understanding intimate partner violence, and bias in
the courts. I used a deductive strategy to determine if these three themes were present in in-depth
interviews conducted with mothers who were domestic violence victims and had children with
their abusers. The 13 women who had children with their abusers talked at length about the three
themes`. In conclusion, the interview data and the literature review reinforce the issues related to
the continuation of violence after the relationship ends and I raise recommendations for the
criminal justice system to follow to do a better job of protecting the women and their children.

Introduction and Literature Review:
Being involved in a violent relationship is difficult enough; finding the courage to finally
leave may be even harder. What everyone thinks is once domestic violence victims leave, they
are free of all abuse and can go on to live a happy and safe life. However, its even more
complicated when children are involved.This paper focuses primarily on women as the victims
and the men as the abusers, given that this is the typical gender combination for this crime. The
goal is to expose the issues related to the womens complicated negotiations with their abusers
because they share children together and how the abusers use their on-going contact with the
children to further perpetuate abuse of the victim/survivors, both psychologically and sometimes
even physically. After reading the research literature that exists on child custody issues when
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dealing with intimate partner violence (IVP), there are clear issues or themes that reoccur. One
issue entails the issue of system responsiveness for the various programs that are implemented to
support people experiencing IPV and child custody issues, as well as the training that should be
implemented for lawyers and judges in order to better approach IPV and its different dynamics.
Identification of this theme leads to a second issue - the lack of education or quality of education
for criminal justice officials in that they do not have a full understanding of the seriousness of
intimate partner violence and how that can affect children. Despite what criminal justice officials
may believe, IPV impacts children negatively. For example, research reveals that with IPV, there
is an increased risk of physical, sexual and psychological abuse of children, and it can affect their
social and academic development (Bancroft & Silverman, 2002). The last theme that emerged
from the literature review concerns the bias from the court system; judges appear to strive for
equity and compromise among the couples, even when there is an indication of domestic
violence. Judges often ignore IPV and its effects on children and impose joint custody
arrangements. In cases where one parent is abusive, I do not feel that it is necessary to try and
push for co-parenting and compromising because the abuse will just continue. The main focus
should be the safety of the survivor and her children. Thus, a judicial ruling based on equity isnt
always a good thing. These three themes will help to develop policy implications, to shed light
on an overlooked problem, and to find solutions as well.
I ssue of System Responsiveness: One of the biggest issues is the lack of financial
resources available to help the survivors of domestic violence and their children. For example,
studies demonstrate that judges were more reluctant to require a third-party supervision when the
father had custody of the kids because of the expense and limited availability of supervision
services, especially services that used trained and objective professionals (Ernsdorff, Holt,
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Kernic&Koespell, 2005). This is a problem because it gives the abusers the opportunity to harass
their former partners and their children even more since they arent being supervised. In other
words, judges ignore the abuse background, and do not award supervised visitation to fathers
who had a history of being abusive because of the lack of resources. Though courts did not
utilize third-party supervision often, judges were willing to impose other serious restrictions on
fathers who batter such as limiting the time or the conditions of the child visitation or limiting
their parental decision-making authority (Ernsdorff, Holt, Kernic&Koespell, 2005). Another
problem concerns the lack of programs that exist because of meager funding, batterer treatment
programs arent really available; instead, standard parent education classes are offered by the
courts but those classes arent appropriate for perpetrators of abuse (Chung & Hardesty, 2006).
Offering Batterer Intervention Programs that are tailored to limiting the power of abusive fathers
are essential to give batterers the chance to turn their lives around for the better if they want to
remain in their childrens lives. Moreover, the cost of custody and divorce litigation has risen
dramatically. This trend primarily impacts women, who tend to be poorer, particularly when they
are battered (Bryan, 2006).One survey found that the average contested custody cost for battered
women in the United States was over $90,000 (Stahly, 2007). Many of these cases go on for
years as well. So the women who start out with legal representation end up having to represent
themselves due to the exorbitant financial costs. Furthermore, many court systems have no
mechanisms or fees to pay these costs, even for indigent parties (N/A, 1971).Thus, it is
imperative that the criminal justice system handles these issues in a more cost effective way to
better assist battered women.
Lack of understanding Intimate Partner Violence: Another issue concerns the lack of training
or understanding of intimate partner violence by the very criminal justice officials that are
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supposed to be there to advocate for the survivors and their children. There is a false assumption
that violence ends at separation. But most relationships characterized by violence are
complicated. For example, when using mediators in child custody disputes, Johnson et al. (2005)
found that mediators may lose sight of the domestic violence because of other factors that are
usually involved in dysfunctional family situations like drug/alcohol abuse, financial crisis and
mental health problems. As a result, mediators will tend to focus on those factors more and not
really think about domestic violence as a factor especially since they assume once the partners
separate, the abuse will stop. Research demonstrates that this is not the case and that battered
women are at a heightened risk of stalking, serious injury, and death once they leave their
abusive partner. Another alarming fact is that three percent of those mediators trained in
domestic violence and seventeen percent of those untrained revealed that they always conduct
mediation as usual, even in IPV cases (Koen, Johnson &Saccuzzo, 2005). These percentages
may seem small, but it is still very disconcerting to think how careless these mediators can be,
especially since the judges are heavily influenced by the mediators opinion when determining
the final verdict. Strong evidence indicates that mediators failed to recognize and report IPV
even when there were clear indicators of it (Koen, Johnson &Saccuzzo, 2005).Victims of IPV
are disadvantaged when it comes to mediation regarding child custody because in many abusive
relationships, the abused spouse has usually been conditioned to stay quiet and to compromise.
As a result, the dominant spouse has the ability to achieve greater control during mediation
which defeats the whole purpose of mediating in the first place. Battered women are also
frightened into silence, so the batterer's presence alone could facilitate her unwillingness to share
details about his abuse. If these mediators and other criminal justice officials cannot recognize
when an offender is exerting power over a victim, how can these programs be effective? How do
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we know that the best interests of the mother and children are being heard? In Kernic et al.'s
(2005) research, the court was made aware of less than one fourth of those cases with a
substantiated history of IPV. Also the courts lack of knowledge about the dynamics of IPV and
disbelief in the survivors credibility can lead to the minimization of the seriousness of the
violence (Ernsdorff, Holt, Kernic&Koespell, 2005). Judges and lawyers also like to believe that
IPV does not really affect the children. They often treat it as an unrelated entity because they
dont understand that there is a correlation. As earlier established, IPV has a huge impact on
children, such as increasing their risk of physical, sexual, and psychological. Children can
exhibit these effects by becoming aggressive which can affect them socially and academically
(Bancroft & Silverman, 2002). Therefore, it is very important for the various criminal justice
officials to fully educate themselves on the different dynamics of IPV so that mistakes like these
are never made again, particularly in mediation or court arenas where men tend to be more
comfortable minimizing their participation in IPV.
Bias in the Courts: Even though our criminal justice system is supposed to symbolize equality
and fairness, sometimes gender neutrality in the case of IPV is not the best idea especially when
dealing with an abusive parent in child custody cases. Unfortunately, survivors and their kids
may be disadvantaged by judges attitudes towards IPV. For example, some judges are resistant
to considering IPV as a factor in custody adjudications because they may feel that the adverse
effects it may have on the children arent sufficient enough to warrant the restricting of the
fathers access (Dai, Dunn, Morril, Smith & Sung, 2005). Moreover, a distraught woman in court
because of past abuse and current fear of abuse is not going to appear to be a better fit parent
(Dai, Dunn, Morril, Smith & Sung, 2005). Mothers often seem hostile or angry in the court room
because theyre afraid that their children might be taken away from them,which may make the
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father appear more credible. Also, battered women are disadvantaged byother state laws that
encourage or mandate the sharing of parental rights and responsibilities (Dai, Dunn, Morril,
Smith & Sung, 2005). This means that the abusers now have the opportunity to continue the
abuse because they have contact with each other at the beginning and end of each visit as well as
information about where they live, where the mother works and where the children go to school.
This is extremely unsafe for both the survivor and her children. Survivors of abuse have also
become disadvantaged due to two theories, the Parental Alienation syndrome or PAS and the
Friendly Parent concept. These theories were created by Richard Gardner (Zorza, 2010). Parental
Alienation syndrome is a theory that gives accused fathers a defense against incest allegations
(Meier, 2003). It blames the mothers for any hostility that the children may feel towards their
fathers, assuming that children normally always love and respect their fathers unless their
mothers put ideas in their head that are untrue but used to manipulate the court officials. PAS has
no scientific basis and has never been recognized within the mental health profession (Jaffe,
Lemon & Poisson, 2003). Despite the false assumptions that PAS has about mothers fabricating
allegations, Canadian statistics has shown that fathers are sixteen times as likely as mothers to
maliciously fabricate allegations of child sexual abuse even though mothers make about 71
percent of the allegations and fathers only 17 percent of them (Bala, Paetsch, Trocm, Schuman,
Tanchak, &Hornick, 2001). This theory also recommends that to treat the alienating parent,
one should imprison her and or give custody to the other parent, even if he is a batterer, and if
she protests in anyways she should be cut from all visitation rights (Zorza, 2010). Another theory
proposed by Gardner, called the Friendly Parent Concept, has the same goal. Although
proponents of the theory argue it is gender neutral and it helps ease the burden on children post
separation, it is fraught with danger. It uses a scheme to deprive custodial parents of custody if
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they are unfriendly to the other parent but what does not constitute as unfriendly behavior of
non-custodial parents are things like not paying child support, physically or verbally abusing the
mother, or stalking her(Zorza, 2010). For example, men who batter their intimate partners are
three times more likely than other fathers to be in arrears (Tishler, 2004). The "friendly parent"
concept encourages the abusive father to have access to his victim by assuming his monitoring
and stalking exist solely to see his children or to promote more cooperative parenting (Zorza,
2010). This gives them the opportunity to maintain control of their former partner.
Unfortunately, judges like the friendly parent concept because it enables them to decide custody
disputes with greater ease and it almost always favors the abusive fathers over the mother since
the mother is described as unfriendly or unpleasant (Abrams &Greaney, 1989). Another
tactic that abusers use is the filing of frivolous legal paperwork, also known as paper abuse
(Miller &Smolter, 2011).Unfortunately, criminal justice officials do not view paper abuse as a
form of harassment towards the victims. These excessive filings of paperwork and constantly
forcing a battered woman back into the courtroom to face her former abuser can take a
psychological toll on survivors. These forms of abuse are not documented or addressed by the
courts as part of the continued abuse that battered women experience (Miller &Smolter, 2011).
Since the courts do not take those kinds of abuse into consideration, judges are more likely to
give the parents joint custody or sole custody to the mother, with little or no restrictions given to
the abuser. As a result, the abuse is more likely to continue and could have horrible effects on the
way the children are raised. Gag orders are also another tactic that abusive partners can use if
they want to silence and control their former partners. Gag orders are used mainly against
women and can result from either the misogynistic theories of PAS or the Friendly Parent
concept (Zorza, 2010). Gagging an abused party from speaking out prevents that party from
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validating her experience and obtaining support. Gag orders are the ultimate weapon in
preventing each member of the family from ever understanding that the abuse was even wrong,
illegal and extremely harmful, which makes them a favorite tactic of abusive fathers (Walker,
2000). Consequently, they actually protect the abusers from being shamed while reinforcing
victims feelings of desperation, isolation and self-blame (Zorza, 2010). Shockingly, some courts
have used gag orders to prevent the survivors of IPV or children from seeking therapy, medical
treatment, or help from a DV program, clergy, child protection agency, sexual assault programs
or even from the police (Zorza, 2010). Closing these hearings to the public can also make the
judicial system more susceptible to corruption.
After reading the literature that discusses child custody cases when dealing with intimate
partner violence, there are still many questions that are unanswered. Although the various studies
have touched upon the many problems that arise with these child custody cases, there are some
questions that I believe are pertinent to explore. For example, when dealing with protection
orders, which punishments for violating protection orders are most effective in holding batterers
accountable for their actions? Also when dealing with the mediators and the different programs
or counselors that are there to help the survivors of IPV, what are the service providers
demographics like and how does this affect case outcomes? Do programs hire people that reflect
diverse backgrounds so advocates can better relate to in some way to victims so their experiences
with help-seeking are less intimidating? When dealing with mediation, how well does it address
child safety and health factors relevant to the custody decisions since mediators dont seem to
acknowledge IPV? When dealing with paper abuse, a lot of these mothers have young kids and
the abuser is always dragging them into court. This concern raises pertinent policy implications.
Should there be daycare provided for mothers with young kids, and what other support services
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would be helpful? Even though the existing literature has helped to shed light on the many
problems that survivors have to face when dealing with abusers, there is still a long way to go in
making sure that these survivors of abuse dont have to worry about their safety when leaving
their abusers and to make sure that the children involved are getting taken care of.
Methods and Data Analysis:
To illustrate these themes that were highlighted in my literature review, I was able to look
at my faculty advisor's data to determine if the themes were present in battered women's
experiences. I used a deductive strategy to determine if the same themes emerged in interviews
conducted with domestic violence victims who are mothers and who also have left their
relationships or marriages. These in-depth interviews were conducted over the past two years
with 16 women who participated in a larger study that explored factors that contributed to long-
term resiliency. Interviews lasted between one hour and 45 minutes and 5 hours. Interviews
were tape-recorded and later transcribed. 13 women had children with their abusers. Not only did
the women talk at length about the three themes that I identified as most salient in the extant
research studies, but also some additional themes emerged.
DEDUCTIVE THEMES
THEME ONE Issue of system Responsiveness. My literature review suggests that the
courts imposed same amount of restrictions on fathers who do not have a history of being
abusive and fathers who have a history of being abusive. At the same time, however, studies also
demonstrated that the criminal justice system isnt correctly responding to the issues of domestic
violence when the abuser wants custody because of the lack of resources and trained
professionals.
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Here are quotes from the data that illustrate this theme, taken from the women who
were interviewed:
So the judge ordered supervised visitation here at the Visitation Center. they are complaining
to me, the workers, constantly every time I come here to pick them up, well, the kids arent doing
what they are told by him, theyre this, theyre that. I said I dont know why you are coming to
me and telling me this when I take care of these kids 39 hours or however many hours are in a
week, he has them for 1 hours. Dont tell me he cant handle these kids for 1 hours, but yet
he wants custody of them.

The parent aide shows up for the children. Hes about 25 and hasnt graduated from college.
He goes to Del State. What experience he has? Hes a music major, I did find that out.

So my kids are getting in the car with their new parent aide and they go over to the store where
he works and they meet their father and they come home and they are really upset. I said what
happened? Oh, an alarm on the parent aides car door opener stopped working and he needed a
battery so he locked us all in the car in the parking lot. The parent aide did this, right and went
into the Dollar Store and told daddy to watch us in the car and daddy said, oh, ok Ill watch
them. Now hes supposed to be supervised at all times. The parent aide had him watching the
kids while he went into the car and left my kids in a parking lot at night in the dark


THEME TWO Lack of understanding IPV by the CJS. The research reveals that
mediators, judges, and other CJ officials that make crucial decisions regarding child custody and
visitation often have little training or understanding of the issues related to IPV. The data
gathered support this theme.
Here are quotes from the women who were interviewed:
She kept telling me I needed to go make contact with him, because in Delaware with custody,
you are responsible to provide the other parent with this, this, this and this. Im thinking do you
know anything about domestic violence? No, she didnt know that. Because shes just a regular
divorce attorney.
So I thought well maybe if I had gone in there myself without the lawyer I maybe could have
made the judge more aware of the problems that were happening, because he didnt take the time
to make the judge aware of that. He brought a knife to visitation. Do you know, Your Honor,
that he couldnt handle the kids for 1 all 4 of them at the same time? Those would be very
important things to make the judge aware of so the judge could have decided where the logical
place is for visitation.So I was all frustrated needless to say.
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Yeah, the thing is that I dont think he understood all the dynamics and I try to make it very
clear to him all the problems that I have faced and the thing that has upset me the most is going
to court and everything.
He didnt provide good help and told everybody he was doing it out of the kindness of his heart
and he was getting paid anyway.

THEME THREE Bias in the courts' decisions about children due to gender neutrality.
Though courts strive for fairness, sometimes gender neutrality in IPV situations is not ideal when
dealing with an abusive parent in child custody and visitation cases. This issue was very apparent
in the interview data
Here are quotes from the women who were interviewed:
He keeps going to court saying he wants visitation, so the judge says, well, youve had this
incident and that incident he said. Im going to appoint a parent aid to see how you do with
visits. So a parent aid works for social services or they hire parent aids and this and that, so its
been all this time they have been having supervised visits, supervised visits. Im coming back
twice on every Sunday, bringing two, dropping them off and coming back with 2 more.
He started having visits at his home, his apartment, once a week, with the parent aide. So we
had to go back to court in between that time. So we went back to court and the judge says I just
want to continue with this parent aide for a little while longer because I dont know why the
older two children are so against being alone with him.

INDUCTIVE THEMES
I did not expect to find data about the harassment of women by batterers' filing of absurd
legal claims because the women were not asked specifically about this issue. However, the data
revealed that it was a salient topic for the women interviewed. Paper abuse is the frivolous filing
of paper work to further harass the survivors of domestic violence in the courtroom.
Here are some quotes from the women:
His rationalizing just isnt there, but he keeps going to court saying he wants visitation
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I just know that he goes the next day and files a modification of the child support. So I get
called in there and the woman at the courthouse thought it was odd. I didnt say anything, but I
remember being very scared, because he had that kind of threatening look on his face.
They had a security guard walk me out to my car. I thought that was very upsetting to me
having to go in sit in the same waiting room as the person who has abused you in the past.

Discussion:
The objective of this research is to shed light on the problems that battered women with
children face after leaving their abusers. The three themes that I found in my literature review
that were later reinforced by the data indicate that there are still many issues that survivors and
their children face upon leaving the abusive relationship. My first theme is the issue of system
responsiveness. The criminal justice system has failed to tailor to the needs of IPV survivors and
their kids because of the lack of resources and money. For example, judges tend to ignore the
abusive background of the abuser because it would ultimately result in the need for some sort of
supervised visitation and there are just not enough resources for that. Even when they do impose
supervised visitation, most of the time the supervisors arent trained or objective individuals
(Ernsdorff, Holt, Kernic&Koespell, 2005). For example, in one of the interviews, a concerned
survivor and mother talked about how the court ordered supervised visitation at the visitation
center but the workers couldnt handle it. Once the judge realized that wasnt going to work out
then he ordered for a parent aide to be with the abusive father while he had custody of the
children. This didn't help matters either. This so called parent aide had no experience with
parenting at all or with watching kids, he was a music major but the court used him because it
was a lot cheaper than to assign a parent aide than fix the visitation system so it worked better.
There have been some steps taken to assist women who have been victims of violence through
the Violence Against Women Act, also known as VAWA. VAWA awarded funding to law
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enforcement officials and other criminal justice entities to tackle the issue of domestic violence.
However, the vital local community-level support services are insufficient because they don't
receive enough funding to operate since VAWA had more of a top-down approach to its policies
(B. D Fleury-Steiner, R.E Fleury-Steiner & Miller, 2011). So although it is beneficial to fund the
bigger agencies, it is as important to not forget about the local support services as well because
that is where most survivors and their children go when looking for help.
My second theme concerns the lack of understanding of intimate partner violence by the
various criminal justice officials. There is a shocking number of judges, lawyers, mediators
etcthat seem to minimize the seriousness of IPV because they do not truly understand its
dynamics. For example, when one of the survivors had acquired a lawyer he wasnt much help.
He didnt realize that having the survivor in the same room or vicinity as her former abuser
would make her uncomfortable so he wasnt very compassionate in that sense. Since most
battered women cant afford their own lawyers, they usually are assigned a lawyer from the state.
Most of these lawyers do not know much about IPV and tend to treat these cases like any other
normal case. They keep advising the mothers and survivors as if it is like any normal situation
when it isnt. The mothers fear for their lives and they would rather have little or no contact with
their former abuser but instead you have a lawyer whos telling them to do certain things which
would be okay in a normal situation but if they were trained in intimate partner violence they
would know that that is not the way to go about it. This is a huge problem that should be
addressed because if the lawyers arent able to help these women and children in court then who
will? Therefore more lawyers and judges need to be educated on all aspects of IPV so that they
know how to better handle it while in court. The theory that one size fits all will work is very
misguided and very wrong.
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My third theme raises the issue of bias in the courts in the name of gender neutrality.
Survivors of domestic violence already have to deal with having to face their abusers in court but
because of the interest in creating equity and striving for compromises, the safety of the children
and women are getting disregarded. For example, the two theories created by Richard Gardner
are very misogynistic in that they do not give the women or children a fair chance to talk about
the abuse that they endured while with the abuser because it will be deemed as hostile towards
the abuser. How can the judges/lawyers not see that as the survivors just telling them their side of
the story? Instead, the victims are being characterized as being the mean or unfriendly
parent because theyre speaking out on all the horrible things they had to endure. For example,
when advocates of Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) talk about how to treat a woman by
imprisoning her or taking away her custodial rights, it sounds more like punishment than
treatment. No matter how abused she or her children are, this fear would prevent her from raising
abuse allegations during child custody hearings - which is the true goal of PAS and the Friendly
Parent Concept (Zorza, 2010). This puts a lot of pressure on the women because they want the
judges to know the truth about their former abusers but there is always this fear that if they tell
the truth, they can be seen as being manipulative especially since abuse allegations are always
questioned and not taken seriously. For example, one of the survivors felt that the safety of her
children was being jeopardized but she didnt want to seem like she was being uncooperative in
front of the judge so she went along with what the judge thought was best even though she knew
it wouldnt be the best for her children. She of all people knew how her former abuse acted yet
she was afraid to speak out because her abuser would somehow use that against her while in
court. For some reason when it comes to things about abuse allegations, often judges turn a
blind eye and try to find another excuse for why the kids are acting up because of the guiding
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assumption that the abuser has a right to be a father even if he isnt much of a father. What is
consistently supported by the data with all three of these themes is the opportunity for the abuser
to further harass and antagonize the survivor and her children. He no longer has the power and
the control within their shared household, so to get some kind of control over his ex-wife, hes
willing to file all kinds of paperwork just to hurt the survivor in any way that he can (Miller &
Smolter, 2011). For example, one of the survivors talked about how the abuser didnt really care
but that he just wanted visitation rights as a way to get back at the survivor for leaving. As a
result she was afraid of making any kind of contact with him. Also, for a victim, just facing the
abuser in court is very traumatizing and abusers know that, which is another reason why they
feel the need to file all different kinds of paperwork and continue intimidating her in the legal
arena.
Hopefully, this exploration of the research literature and my presentation of the words of
survivors of IPV has shed light on many the issues that battered women and their kids face after
leaving their abuser. A more complete understanding of the continued harassment experienced
by women and their children after the relationship has ended facilitates the development and
implementation of new policies to change the way the criminal justice system handles these
situations for battered women and their children.




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