Family Court Crisis: Surviving A Broken System is a moving new photography exhibition from the Center for Judicial Excellence in Marin County, California.

Click on the Blue Headers below to read a short summary of each family's tragic story or scroll down to read more about the exhibit.(Go to:  http://www.centerforjudicialexcellence.org/PhotoExhibit.htm )

Divorces are never easy, and when the permanent custody of children is at stake, emotions run high.  Yet the crisis plaguing our nation’s family courts is far more serious than a “he said, she said” dispute between former spouses.

This Photo Exhibit exposes an untold story that the mainstream media has avoided for years - the systemic breakdown of America’s family court system. The fact that this type of scandal is taking place in the American judicial system defies the imagination. This is a tragic and true story that you will struggle to believe.

According to a conservative estimate by experts at the Leadership Council on Child Abuse & Interpersonal Violence, more than 58,000 children per year are ordered into unsupervised contact with physically or sexually abusive parents following divorce in the United States. This is more than twice the yearly rate of new cases of childhood cancer.

The Exhibit exposes the life altering –and often unbelievable– events of 15 families who have survived traumatic family court ordeals in eight different states. Their courageous stories represent a snapshot of a growing national and international epidemic.

Not since the Catholic Church pedophile scandal has the United States seen this level of institutional collusion and corruption harming innocent children.

As these stories indicate, family court judges, mediators, and well-paid court appointees routinely ignore the law, violate mandatory family court and domestic violence procedures, and disregard medical and other evidence of sexual and physical abuse, including police reports, domestic violence restraining orders, and child abuse reports made to Child Protective Services by teachers, therapists and doctors.

Children are routinely being taken from protective parents who complain of domestic violence and/or abuse, and then they are placed in the homes of violent, neglectful, dangerously mentally ill, and/or otherwise abusive parents with the financial means to hire a bevy of “professionals” who will pathologize the protective parent and/or child. Protective parents not only lose custody of the children they are trying to protect from abuse, but they are then forced by the court to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees to therapists, special masters, evaluators, co-parenting counselors and attorneys for their children. Many go bankrupt, making court appeals impossible. The family law ‘machine’ is operating as Big Business, and a sophisticated cottage industry has sprung up that preys on desperate parents and children who are trying to escape family violence.

It is our sincere desire that this exhibit will put a human face on the widespread destruction that is taking place in our family courts. We also wish to bring hope to all who have suffered through this nightmare ~ real hope that their devastating nightmares in the family courts will be seen and believed, and that their stories will inspire the sweeping reforms that are so desperately needed in our nation’s broken family court system.

www.centerforjudicialexcellence.org/PhotoExhibit.htm