Alleged Neo-Nazi Parents in Custody Battle

Just seven years old, she showed up at school with neo-Nazi propaganda written all over her body, calmly described how to kill black people, and spoke proudly about white people being superior to all other races.

Now the disturbing views of the girl are at the centre of a heated child-custody case that began Monday in Winnipeg.

Read more here.

Custody Judges Rule on Parental Vengeance

The scope of the courts' reach into family affairs has long been contentious, but a recent trend in Canada's legal system has brought a new controversy that has some onlookers praising judges and others condemning them for accepting what they call "voodoo science."

More than ever before, Canada's judges are recognizing that some children of divorced and warring parents are not simply living an unfortunate predicament, but rather are victims of child abuse and suffering from Parental Alienation Syndrome.

Though debate swirls as to whether the occurrence should be termed a syndrome, a disorder, or simply ‘parental alienation,' Canadian and American judges, lawyers, and psychologists are increasingly buying into a view that sees programming a child to despise a non-custodial parent as grounds for removing the "brainwashed" child from the alienating parent's custody - or what is known in the extreme as a court-ordered "parentectomy."

Read more here.

Mom Loses Custody for Alienating Dad

In a stunning and unusual family law decision, a Toronto judge has stripped a mother of custody of her three children after the woman spent more than a decade trying to alienate them from their father.

The mother's "consistent and overwhelming" campaign to brainwash the children into thinking their father was a bad person was nothing short of emotional abuse, Justice Faye McWatt of the Superior Court of Justice wrote in her decision.

The three girls, ages 9 to 14, were brought to a downtown courthouse last Friday and turned over to their father, a vascular surgeon identified only as A.L.

Read more at the Toronto Star.

International Custody Battle Resolved

A sharply divided Vermont Supreme Court on Friday waded into a long-running international custody dispute, reversing a Vermont Family Court decision and giving jurisdiction in the case to a Canadian court.

The 3-2 decision reverses a 2002 ruling by Judge John Wesley in Bennington that gave custody of a son born to a Bennington couple to the father and ruled that a Canadian court was right to give the mother custody of the child.

The mother in 2003 obtained her own child custody order in Canada, where she had fled after claiming her ex-husband had abused her and threatened to harm her and their son. She was convicted in federal court last year of kidnapping her son.

"This is one of those rare cases where the best interests of the child must take precedence over the policy goal of deterring parental wrongdoing," Justice Marilyn Skoglund, writing for the high court's majority, said in the decision. "Canada was the more appropriate forum to resolve this matter."

In a stinging dissent, Justice Brian Burgess said the majority's ruling sends the wrong message to parents unhappy with court custody decisions.

Lesbian's Children To Be Returned To UK

An Ontario judge has ruled that a woman who fled to Canada from the United Kingdom with her two adopted daughters must return with them to allow her former lesbian partner full access to the children under what amounts to a joint custody agreement.

Justice Jennifer Mackinnon, of Ontario Superior Court, ordered Connie Springfield to return to England with her two daughters, 8 and 6, whom she adopted with her long-time partner Sarah Courtney six years ago. Ms. Springfield had spirited the two children to Canada late last year in what the judge called a "long thought out, deceptive method of her removal of the children."

The lesbian couple had broken up five years earlier and had, apparently amicably, continued to share custody of the children until Ms. Springfield took them on what was supposed to be a visit to family members in Ottawa last December, but which she acknowledged planning for some time as a permanent move.

Stuck Together: Inside the Modern Divorce

Martha McCarthy, who has been practising family law for more than 15 years, says "You cannot agree to anything on a temporary basis that you wouldn't be willing to live with in the long term."

And so, she explains, for anyone who seeks some sort of serious child custody arrangement or desires sole custody of children, relinquishing any bit of ground in the household arrangement -- even temporarily -- is simply out of the question.

Grant Gold, another family law lawyer who has a surprising number of clients who continue to live together for increasingly long periods of time, says he tells those who say they cannot stand living in the matrimonial home that "what you lose by getting out is the ability to get back in in a hurry.… I don't want anybody leaving until there are arrangements in place for kids, for money; if you're the dad, I don't want you leaving until we have visitation nailed down."