In this episode of the Children First Family Law Podcast, Krista welcomes Seth Goldstein, a California-based family law attorney, expert witness, and former police officer with over four decades of experience in child protection. The conversation centers on how courts respond—or fail to respond—when child abuse allegations arise in the context of divorce or custody disputes.
Drawing on his experience in law enforcement and years of litigating high-conflict family law cases, Seth offers a rare dual perspective that spans criminal investigations, forensic evidence, and courtroom advocacy. Krista and Seth examine how family courts often lack the protections, resources, and trauma-informed systems that exist in dependency courts, leaving children vulnerable in legal battles that prioritize parental rights over child safety.
Krista and Seth also discuss how allegations are frequently dismissed as custody tactics, the limitations of child protective services, the misunderstood role of minors’ counsel, and how new legislation, like Colorado’s Kayden’s Law and House Bill 24-1350, aims to shift the focus back to the child.
This episode is a must-listen for family law professionals, child advocates, and parents navigating abuse concerns in the middle of divorce. It’s also a sobering look at what can go wrong and what needs to change to prevent tragedy.
In this episode, you will hear:
- The disconnect between how criminal courts and family courts handle child abuse allegations
- Why dependency courts offer more protection for children than family courts
- How courts evaluate the credibility of abuse claims in custody disputes
- The critical role of evidence, mandatory reporters, and multidisciplinary teams
- Why some abuse reports are dismissed, even when they’re credible
- The dangers of forced reunification and outdated views on co-parenting
- Colorado’s response through Kayden’s Law and HB 24-1350
- What parents can do if they suspect abuse, and fear the system won’t believe them
- The long-term effects of domestic violence on children, even without direct exposure
- A call for reform: shifting from shared parenting presumptions to child-centered outcomes
Resources from this Episode
www.childrenfirstfamilylaw.com
www.lawofficesofsethgoldstein.com
www.peaceoverviolence.org/iii-the-cycle-of-violence-and-power-and-control
www.thehotline.org/here-for-you
All states have different laws; be sure you are checking out your state laws specifically surrounding divorce. Krista is a licensed attorney in Colorado and Wyoming but is not providing through this podcast legal advice. Please be sure to seek independent legal counsel in your area for your specific situation.
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Protection and Custody Collide: Child Abuse in Divorce Cases with Expert Seth Goldstein, Former Police Officer & Child Abuse Attorney Podcast Transcript
Seth Goldstein 00:00
The preconceptions, misconceptions that people have about those who raise allegations, the misunderstandings of how children disclose abuse and then report it, what I think, in many cases, misleading research that came from the late 70s and early 80s have tainted the system in terms of its ability to recognize what abuse is. These cases are devastating. I was in the courtroom when a judge ordered a mother to return the child to the father, who was abusive, physically abusive to her and a threat to the child based on what the mother reported. I was also in that same courtroom when that morning, the news came in that the father killed the child, and you could see the reaction of the judicial officer, who was devastated. We all want to do what’s best for kids, but there are mistakes made, and it’s very difficult to determine whether cases are either largely because sometimes their people make this stuff up. It’s hard to tell the difference between what they are from the very beginning, they often look the same.
Intro/Outro 01:12
Welcome to the Children First Family Law podcast. Our host, Krista Nash, is an attorney, mediator, a parenting coordinator, and child advocate with a heart to facilitate conversations about how to help children flourish amidst the broken area of family law. As a child advocate in demand for her expertise throughout Colorado and as a speaker on these issues at a national level, Krista is passionate about facilitating and creatively finding solutions to approach family law matters in a way that truly focuses on the best interests of kids. Please remember this podcast is provided to you for information purposes only. No one on this podcast is representing you or giving you legal advice. As always, please enjoy this episode and be sure to like, subscribe and share the podcast with others you think would benefit from this content.
Krista Nash 02:01
Today’s episode of the Children First Family Law podcast dives into one of the most difficult and emotionally charged issues in family law, allegations of child abuse in the midst of child custody disputes, the stakes couldn’t be higher, especially when one parent raises concerns about a child’s safety. But what happens next? How are those claims handled in court? And who’s truly listening to the child? Joining us today is someone uniquely qualified to unpack this issue. Seth Goldstein, a California Attorney, expert witness and former police officer with more than four decades of experience at the intersection of law enforcement, child protection and family courts. Since 1977 Seth has dedicated his career to litigating child abuse allegations, serving as both an investigator and an advocate in an attempt to protect children. He’s taught at the FBI Academy, Stanford, USC and Harvard, and advised judges, Child Protective Services, law enforcement and legal professionals worldwide on how to properly handle abuse allegations and protect kids. He’s also a founding board member of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Child Abuse Forensic Institute, among many other organizations in which he is involved. In this episode, we’ll talk with Seth about how courts assess abuse allegations, what we can learn from the dependency and neglect cases, what kinds of evidence actually matter in divorce, how children’s voices are sometimes tragically overlooked, and what parents can do if they feel the system isn’t hearing them. If you’re a legal professional, a parent navigating custody, or anyone who cares about protecting children, this conversation is essential listening.
Krista Nash
Welcome everyone to today’s episode of the podcast. I am honored to have with us Seth Goldstein from California, who has so much to share with us today, from having a background in child abuse and in the prevention and protection of children, having been a police officer and now an attorney, and I’m really glad you’re here. Thanks for doing this with me.
Seth Goldstein
Oh, the pleasure is mine.
Krista Nash
Great. Well, let’s start with just sharing a little bit of the specifics of your background. Just tell us how you got into this continuing screaming.
Seth Goldstein 04:13
I was a juvenile officer at one point, the responsibilities for the function of a juvenile officer were twofold. One is to try to prevent children from becoming further involved in the criminal justice system, and the other was to investigate child abuse and cases where children were hurt. And what I found in both areas is that in the 1970s when I was assigned to this particular function in the city of Berkeley, where kids were, for the most part, running to Berkeley as a place, both for a safe haven because of the liberal atmosphere and places for them to hang out with kinds of street things that were going on. Kids were turning tricks on Telegraph Avenue. They were involved in child prostitution, pedophiles who would pick them up at the various places where these things were going on. And as a diversion officer working with kids who had either committed an offense and then we were trying to keep them out of the justice system, I found that the runaways that were running away were running away from home. So this was a time when the word ‘pedophile’ wasn’t even the American lexicon for one thing, and secondly, law enforcement at that time really looked at these kind of cases as an aberration, that it didn’t happen very often, and you could easily recognize these people because of the way they looked, the things they did, right? So it was an eye opener. I belong to an association of juvenile officers throughout California where we became very concerned about some of the things that were happening. One of my kids, who was diverted, ended up being a victim of the Hillside Strangler in Los Angeles. And so the network, at that point, underground network, became something that was very frightening for us as people who were trying to protect children, finding that it was international in some ways, and happening right under our noses.
The very first case I had was when I was in uniform, working at graveyard shift. I found a kid who was on the street boosting car radios from the cars at that time. And when I took him home, which was one of the functions of policies the police department at that time, and you picked up the money, you take him home, bring him into the station, and when I walked down the hallway of the house that he was living in, there were pictures of nude boys on the wall and framed and turns out, when I got finally involved in juvenile work, this fellow was going to the probation department and getting kids from the probation department to become part of his sort what they then called, I forgot what they call them, the term for kids who were involved in a network pedophiles. So I ended up talking to people in the organization. I ended up teaching, and I’m writing a textbook. I was hired by two TAS offices, first to work in San Jose, where a special prosecution program was created. This was again before all of the functions that have come about now to be common practice had begun, and the prosecutor for the sexual assault unit was trying to assure that in the cases that were brought to them, that the kids were treated in a trauma informed way, although we didn’t call it that then, and the special, in particular, unique needs of these cases had a support system around them, and that’s what eventually became what’s called the multidisciplinary programs. We had a rape crisis center director who helped with our kids in preparing them for court and being working with the families. And although they charged a lot of the cases that they had brought to them, they pretty much cherry picked those which they presumed they could get a conviction with a 95% conviction rate. But again, that was cherry picking their cases. So eventually I moved to Napa as a project director for a state funded program that was for the purpose of prosecuting sex offenders against children. It was called the Child Abuse Vertical Prosecution Program, which was funded by the Feds through the states to try to assure that these cases were properly handled. And at the conclusion of our program, we had a 96.5 conviction rate at charging 75% of the cases that were brought to us, which was unheard of. And as a result, I kept getting calls from civil lawyers saying, gee, how do you do that? Can you help me in my case? And the very first case that I was asked to testify as an expert in was a Family Law matter. And I’ve learned from the process that family lawyers have no clue about what sexual abuse is or how to gather evidence, and then, once they got the evidence what it means, right? But in the process, both because I was working with the state of California in trying to create protocol. I helped write the guidelines for investigation, initial guidelines for investigation of child abuse and sexual abuse, in particular, for law enforcement, or
Krista Nash 09:36
that was for California?Seth Goldstein 09:39
And I was teaching for our commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, and got pulled in to assist in doing that, and discovered that the system is not really well prepared to handle these kind of cases. The larger agencies that have detectives that handle cases from start to finish, had a better way of dealing with abuse, but in large part, what the normal response is from law enforcement is that a uniform patrol officer is the first to the scene and the first to take statements and gather evidence. In California, as I believe in many other states, there’s some requirement that there be a coordination between Child Protective Services when the child is involved in a family, where the issue is, how do we protect the child against the parents? So what we discovered is that, number one, the procedures in California were not either victim oriented, as we now call, trauma informed. And the sentences were ridiculous, that for molesting a child, you could face as much as six months in jail. They were misdemeanors. So we went through this committee that I ended up chairing to the legislature, and I worked with legislators in revising the codes both evidence and procedure, to improve both the practice as well as to better protect children once the case went through the system successfully, and to keep these people off the street. What I found in the family court, and as I advanced through my career with the DAs office, I had been teaching for a long period of time. I’d had the opportunity to meet the people who had written the books about interviews and evidence and so on, and had always intended to go to law school. So I created, at that time, a nonprofit which was intended to provide expert direction and advice to lawyers for the purposes of assuring that if a case came about, that whatever evidence was possible was both discovered, if we could find it and direct the lawyers to as to how to develop it and then to properly present it in court, and that was the Child Abuse Forensic Institute, which now is, at this time, not currently, as a nonprofit. But the fact is, is that what’s important is that the success of the multidisciplinary system is that it has as its base every discipline that is involved in both caring for victims as well as being able to understand and to help develop evidence that will sustain a conviction. And of course, that’s in the criminal courts. And so what I found is because there was no such thing in the civil sector that drawing together a cadre of people from throughout the country, and I again had the good fortune of meeting many of these people in the process of both research that I was doing as well as litigating cases and then teaching, I’d go to conferences just like the one that we went to recently in New Orleans, and essentially meeting and having the opportunity to speak with people who have advanced theories and had the skills and knowledge as to what’s best to both understand what’s happening and then how to help the courts resolve these cases. So in the Juvenile Dependency Court, there’s a very different system, as it is in the criminal cases, where the judge and the trier of facts, be it a jury or whatever, is given expert direction through lawyers who then find professionals who have the special expertise in each area that’s necessary to put on evidence criminal obviously, there’s an adversarial system where a jury is to determine who’s the right person, who’s giving the best evidence that’s believable. Adversarial role, however, in the dependency courts, that’s where juvenile courts work to protect children. Their sole focus is on what’s best for the child and how to resolve the issues with parents. For the large part, juvenile courts were created around the idea that if abuse occurred, such as physical abuse or emotional abuse, that you could redirect the parents, and then once they’ve learned a better way to parent their children, as opposed to hurting them, either physically or emotionally, then they would reunify. Well, that also spilled over into the area of child sexual abuse. And the difficulty with sexual abuse is that it has such a wide spectrum of motivations in terms of the reasons why people commit these offenses. Reunification isn’t always the right choice, and California eventually, through some of the work that I did, as well as others, created criteria that courts would then use to determine when it was inappropriate for reunification, given the fact that there was a significant risk to the child, were that child to be placed back in the environment in which the abuse occurred. So the juvenile court also, because it focuses solely on protection of the child against the world, the issue then becomes how to best handle cases, and as a result, evidence law and procedures in the juvenile courts are very different from those in criminal courts and in the family court. So the question then becomes, how to best deal with the same kind of issues that arise in the family court. Well, the problem with the family court is, first of all, you’re not entitled to a lawyer. Children are not entitled to lawyers. It’s driven by people who essentially have to pay for the services that they get, a lawyer, an expert, a therapist. And now there’s this industry that’s been created around and I think all in well meaning, and I think they all intended to do something that’s best for children, to try to make the kind of system that works in the juvenile dependency court of reunifying children back to families where abuse has occurred is essentially the edict that judges must follow. So the problem, of course, where you have something that’s driven by and in essence, the ability of a person to litigate, then there are going to be inequities. There’s an imbalance, both because of the power dynamics that come from family units, and you have the power dynamics of who’s making the most money and abusers for again, the many motivations that they have often are the ones who are the high earners. And once an abuse allegation arises in a custody case, which happens for many reasons, the parent who’s trying to protect the child usually isn’t disadvantaged unless they have money to pay for lawyers and professionals. So it’s a long answer to
Krista Nash 16:54
Llet me ask you a question. I appreciate all that detail. It’s wonderful. So you did ultimately go to law school, right? And so when, at what point in your career did you end up doing that? Was it after you’d been a police officer for decades, or at what point did you go?
Seth Goldstein 17:10
Well, after 20 years of service, I was working for a prosecutor’s office that was essentially funded at least the program that I was involved in was essentially funded by outside monies, and when the money ran out, they kept it for another year. But once, this was in the height of the 80s recession, some police departments are driving cars with 200,000 miles on them because they couldn’t afford to buy new ones. And so I was laid off as when eventually was another prosecutor who was hired for the same reasons, and I had already started law school when I started law school, because I figured that there’s number one, eventually I was going to retire law enforcement, and what I really wanted to do was learn how to better beat lawyers at their game, so to speak. So I went to law school figuring, okay, I’ll learn, I’ll learn the rules and procedures and be able to provide them with the kind of advice that would be necessary to help their cases. So that’s how I became a lawyer. And then when I started consulting, it’s I realized that really I needed to practice law and protect kids directly, as opposed to and
Krista Nash 18:17
So how did you start that, like when you actually got out of law school? Then what kind of cases were you already still involved in? Were you still doing that Child Abuse Forensic Institute?
Seth Goldstein 18:27
And basically, because of the concentration of working on sexual abuse, having written the textbook that I wrote and some other articles, I pretty much solely work in the field of protecting kids from working with a parent who’s trying to protect the children. But I’ve handled other cases as well, because I’ve seen situations where prosecutors have taken cases and parents have made accusations that are not founded in either reality or are totally false because they’re being made up for some other reason, which sometimes happens, not very frequently. Fortunately, the research in the area of false allegations of sexual abuse during the course of a child custody case has been well researched, and fairly recently, as matter of fact, through, I want to say, 12,000 or 20,000 cases across Canada in one single year, and they found that there was a very low percentage of truly false allegations that were made up for malicious purposes. Think the percentage went down to 5% or something to that effect, somewhere between five and 15%.
Krista Nash 19:33
So right now you do… I mean, it looks like I was looking at your website. So you still serve as an expert witness and as helping people develop their case for trial and doing second sharing for them, second chair attorney, and then seminar, workshop, lecturing. It looks like you all practice essentially, many of these roles nationally, right? Yes, okay, and so how much of your work is still in the criminal setting or versus, how did you pivot into I mean, I realize you recognized pretty early that you’re already helping civil cases. When you say civil cases, that’s probably largely the divorce kind of cases, right, as opposed to your criminal experience. How much are you now seeing this problem? Because we’ve got, certainly so many different statutory changes going on with Kayden’s Law and Pennsylvania and then all of the things that have flowed. Colorado has that. Now where did you start to really kind of pivot into more working into the divorce arena?
Seth Goldstein 20:26
I would say probably from the very beginning my case, although I’ve had some personal injury cases, the lion’s share of the cases are divorce. Okay, the problem with the divorce courts is they’re not prepared to handle these cases. They don’t have the resources that are available to either the prosecution or in a dependency setting to assist them. So the other thing that happened unfortunately during the time that I go back to the feminist movement and the discovery of the fact that rape and sexual assault were much more prevalent, and the women’s movement came to bring that to light. Then, of course, #MeToo, and some of the other, what you call them, trends in terms of recognizing that victims are doing things which are counterintuitive, as well as victimized in greater numbers than perhaps had been thought in the past. So the family courts had, I think, want to say, pretty much in the 80s have been following a professed view of one particular individual who wrote books and marshaled the courts to his favor for this syndrome, which he called Parent Alienation Syndrome. There’s a high controversy over this particular issue, and whenever abuse is alleged by a child, the unfortunate knee jerk response often is, well, this kid has just been alienated against the other parent. It’s the parent who is supporting the child’s accusation, who’s made all of this up, and therefore they should lose. The child should be transferred from the so-called accusing parent to the accused parent.
Krista Nash 22:04
And I will just note that that we have had on the show. And so just for listeners who are interested in more of this, there are quite a few podcast episodes that we have where we talk about the domestic violence statutes, the changes changes in Kayden’s law, and perspectives about parental alienation and this whole debate. So I’ll just refer you all back earlier in the podcast to those if you’re interested, because they are indeed a very highly debated and contentious topics right now across, really internationally. I think so go ahead, though. So yes, there’s unfortunate knee jerk reaction that it’s just going to label parental alienation, right?
Seth Goldstein 22:41
And I think the unfortunate part is that that’s permeated down to the original investigators, or I should say, the first line responders. And you know, these cases are very difficult, especially when children are young, especially when they’re very young, and are inarticulate, to whatever degree that they can articulate what happened to them. So it’s not easy to discern what’s true or false. I think the biggest problem is people tend to jump to the conclusion that perhaps this is something that’s made up by somebody because they’re vindictive or histrionic or whatever, which is what the theories are. And with domestic violence, which is where the big controversy arises, because women who’ve been abused are angry, and they have a right to be angry for what’s happened to them because they’re angry, or they do things which are not necessarily what would be the anticipated norm to respond to abuse, they’re automatically attacked and discredited many times for things which are already established by research to be consistent with what an abused mother and what an abused child does, and this is the problem with the system, is that it’s not geared to be able to adequately handle these things when it’s people who are inexperienced, even though they’ve handled many of the cases, as far as the numbers of cases that have come before them, both judges and mediators and court employees and lawyers themselves. I mean, it got to the point where, and I think in many cases, from what I’ve seen, it’s still happening. Lawyers are telling moms, and I say moms, because mostly it’s men who commit these offenses. They’re telling them not to bring up this accusation, because it’ll backfire. If you don’t have the evidence that is convincing, then the likelihood of the child being taken away from a parent who is genuinely trying to protect them and a child who’s genuinely making accusations and reports, because that’s what’s happening to them, end up in the custody of the other parent through this concept of reunification, number one and number two, there’s this belief that, which now, even at just recently, at this conference that we attended, is being questioned where parents are supposed to have equal to. Time and co-parenting is the expected outcome of a divorce case, and unfortunately, when you have abuse, that may not be the best thing for children.
Krista Nash 25:10
What is a typical presentation? If you were to map out an example, right, we have just give me one. You see a lot right? Of the allegations that come in and how, like, let’s say somebody does bring it up, right they are bringing up, and maybe we should talk about this. And maybe you tell me if this is a good idea or not to talk about it. Where we do have, like, in Colorado, we have statutes now, like we have much more intense statutes because we adopted basically the principles of Kayden’s Law pretty early. So certainly, I was just a hearing yesterday where I had to invoke those statutes, and the judge talked a lot about child abuse and how it really has evolved. The dad was saying, well, I never hit the kid. And the court is responding, well, that isn’t what our statute is saying anymore. We have all sorts of things about coercive control, and a lot of these things have evolved quite a bit in Colorado, but there are a lot of states that have not done so. So I don’t know if you want to talk about two examples, sort of, how you see these go through the court when they don’t have those kinds of protections, or how you see them go through when they do. Do you have those kind of counter or are we even seeing that much change through these statutes?
Seth Goldstein 26:17
I’m not sure I could speak to the statutes. I think the case in Washington is probably one of the classic signs of the failures of the family courts to protect children in these situations.
Krista Nash 26:27
Let me mention, as Seth and I were planning and just getting on this podcast, I happened to get an update that I forwarded to him, which is just couldn’t be more appropriate for our conversation today, but it was about three little girls in one family in Washington were found dead, I think, on June 2, just a few days ago. Today is June 5, 2025, that we’re recording, and it was after, you know, in the middle of a case about, you know, where the mother had brought up concerns about this dad’s violent propensities. I haven’t looked into it, so I might not be saying that exactly perfectly, but Seth, and that’s to what he’s referring now, is and Washington is a state that does not have, at least, according to the articles I’ve looked at, the same types of domestic violence statutes. But go ahead, Seth, I didn’t mean to interrupt you, just to frame that for people, though.
Seth Goldstein 27:17
For the most part, although, as I always joke with people, it has to do with the people who are involved in these cases. Yeah, the only candidate for everybody in this system is the human race. AI isn’t going to help you here. And robotic responses, be they knee jerk or otherwise, are not the way to deal with these cases, because every case is unique. Every case has its own dynamics and the preconceptions and misconceptions that people have about those who raise allegations, the misunderstandings of how children disclose abuse and then report it, what I think in many cases, misleading research that came from the late 70s and early 80s have tainted the system in terms of its ability to recognize what abuse is. These cases are devastating.
I was in the courtroom when a judge ordered a mother to return the child to the father, who was abusive, physically abusive to her and a threat to the child based on what the mother reported. I was also in that same courtroom when that morning the news came in that the father killed the child, and you could see the reaction of the judicial officer, who was devastated. We all want to do what’s best for kids, but there are mistakes made, and it’s very difficult to determine whether cases are either, largely because sometimes their people make this stuff up. It’s hard to tell the difference between what they are from the very beginning, they often look the same. And to answer your question, are there examples of how things work when they’re they work when they’re right? Well, when you get the right people and they understand what’s before them, then things work out. But I mean, I had a police officer in a metropolitan city respond to a mother’s call for abuse. She’d just been raped by her husband, and it was over a manner in which the child had come home, and he got angry with mom. She went through the door looking like a woman who had just been through quite a very traumatic experience, and the officer was a motorcycle officer in helmet and full blackack boots. When she told her what happened, he said, well, this doesn’t happen up here in the hills. You’re in a divorce court. Go tell the judge another case in another metropolitan area mother calls in for suspicions that the father is abusing their daughter because she finds pictures of what either are teenagers or people who look like teenagers dressed up in cheerleader outfits, exposing things that wouldn’t necessarily be exposed so the deputy uniform deputy. He looks at them, looks back to the mother, and says, every man has this fantasy. So if you get the right people, things may go the right way. And I’ve seen those happen. I mean, there are systems that are created to properly handle these cases, but there are so many things within the response system that cause difficulties in the ultimate outcome because of the delays that are necessary in terms of getting the right resources aligned. For example, as is many places, the policy that the uniform officer and the social worker not to detail, let’s say it a different way, not to ask questions in great detail, because we want to be able to assure that through proper interviews that are well documented by video recordings or some other manner that is then capable of being brought to court at a later time, as well as to give the accused parent an opportunity to see what the evidence is against them, which is our due process rights, they bring them to an interview center. Well, if it’s 12 o’clock at night, the interview center doesn’t open until Monday, the next morning, at least, and sometimes they’re so backed up, it’s not for weeks before the interview occurs. And the key is, when a child’s talking about being abused, the window is open, and it may not stay open for long, especially given the kind of pressures that are employed and the system’s inability to handle cases quickly. In a family court, a mother runs into court with a protective request, and the court makes an order, whatever it may be, there’s still sometimes access. There are family members who are not believing of what happened, and so pressure is put upon the child that the child stops talking, or, in many cases, retracts what they’ve said, all common responses of traumatized victims. So once that happens, it’s sometimes almost impossible to determine what happened unless you can find other evidence, which is why it’s so important to understand the dynamics and where to look for evidence.
Krista Nash 32:07
So in terms of the flip, talk about that a little. I mean, so, I mean, how would courts distinguish between valid abuse claims and sort of this weaponization, sort of strategic allegations that a lot of people are concerned about, and we’ve already acknowledged happens in some cases. What do you recommend a court do about that? And so maybe that also gets into sort of the evidence development. What do you recommend a parent is to do about that? I mean, certainly we don’t want our system quashing valid complaints of abuse, valid assertions that it’s happening. We also want to make sure that it’s difficult, because sometimes there are parents that are weaponizing this stuff. So what are some of the best ways to be thinking about this? Maybe for parents and for the whole entire court system itself.
Seth Goldstein 32:51
First of all, I think education is the key for everybody. They understand what the dynamics are. They understand how they play out, then decisions can be made. With an education of the theory, the practice, and an understanding about how children and parents who try to protect them act, then you’re likely to have a much better outcome. The problem is for family courts is that they’re totally overloaded in terms of their case loads. Judges spend a lot of time trying to sort through people who simply can’t get along together, and as a result, perhaps an excessive amount of time is taken to try to resolve things that would be much better handled by a mental health professional or in some other capacity, but they don’t have that time, and even where you have people who are knowledgeable if the procedures themselves are not geared towards supporting a child and a parent who’s bringing it forward, and sometimes it happens with men who are trying to protect their children from a mother or a relationship that the mother has. So I’m not going to exclude men, right? But as I said, the lion’s share of these cases are male perpetrators. So by the way, that’s another thing I can’t tell you the number of times judges looked at me when I said, this person is a perpetrator. He’s doing this kind of judge says that’s not a word we use in the family court. One judge specifically told me you got to change your terms thinking, well, you know the bottom line is that shows a bias right away. It shows a bias. So the failures usually happen because people have either jumped to a conclusion. Have taken too long to do the things that are necessary. Evidence gathering, as the police are told, is the time to do. It’s now. If you wait too long, things have a tendency to dissipate and change, and more importantly, statements of people who would otherwise have a clear memory, and one which is not influenced by others, either people or facts or circumstances, will be best interviewed at or about the time that these cases are handled. I created a three day course for law enforcement to deal with these cases, because what you have to realize is it takes a village, so to speak, to approach these cases, you have to have as many people as necessary to conduct interviews before the statements are tainted from whatever by whatever reason, and the evidence is sought either by search warrants or some other techniques, which are something I don’t want to necessarily disclose in a public forum like this, so that the officers are capable and able to handle a case without its being self defeated, and then the system itself has to be able to adequately handle it. What often happens is that there are multiple interviewers through the process, and as a result, either because the child is saying the same thing, but it’s interpreted differently by more than one individual and reported that way, inconsistencies surface that are really not inconsistencies. They’re simply the child describing the same thing with either different words or a different time, or whatever the conflict is in the facts has come out from these interviews and the people
I have one case now where I was just talking to a mother. The case has been in the system for six years. Therapists who have seen this child divergent beliefs as to what the veracity is of the reports, the court has not made up its mind are moved to protect the child for the most part. But you know, here it is, six years later, and now the father is asking for custody again because the child doesn’t want to see him. Well, there may be a good reason for that. So it really comes down to a system change, a paradigm change in the way to approach these cases, and a system that is capable of handling all of the dynamics that come to court. And until that happens, it’s going to be catch as catch can as far as how successful we are in protecting children in the family court.
Krista Nash 37:22
So let me ask you a couple questions, because I’ve so many thoughts in my head from all this. So, for example, there’s many times where I get consultations with people, you know, not you know, I work as a child advocate, so it’s more when people call me, want me to be a parent’s attorney, you know, as a typical family law attorney, and there will be allegations that they are making, that there has been some level, of course, control abuse of some nature. But you know, police have never been called. There are no reports. You know, some of the things you’ve been talking about sound like there is police involvement. I see a lot of when, first of all, when I do see that and there is a divorce going on and the police get called, or CPS gets called, there’s a huge level of dismissal of it, right? So even as a child advocate, when I have to go make I’m a mandatory reporter, there’s many times where I have to call and make a report, and I know almost never is actually Child Protective Services going to do anything. And I’ve had these fights with Child Protective Services. I’m like, You’re not helping us over here, you think, because it’s in domestic court, you have one protective parent, your little risk assessment wheel spits out something that says to you, this is no big deal because we’ve got one protective parent. So goodbye. And I understand that the system is overwhelmed as well, and maybe they need to work on cases where there are two non protective parents. I understand that, but what happens is exactly what you just said. We go back over to the fundamental rights land of parents to have parenting time, and the parents rights being put above the children’s in family court, and we run into all the evidentiary problems that you’re sort of alluding to about why we can’t get these voices in. How do we get the child’s voice in? How do we get a lot of these things in that we can’t get in. And so we end up in a real bind, because that kid is going to try the court, is going to try to force that kid to go back into that home and that we don’t normally have. So that’s one experience we have where CPS or, you know, the dependency neglect system just kind of has to blow it off, like a lot of times, they don’t even follow up on it. They just don’t even go out and even talk to the kids or talk to the parents, and they, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen them really, actually open a case like very, very rarely.
Sometimes, as a child advocate, I actually come in and file motions with the court to try to force the Department of Human Services to investigate it, right? And there’s some jurisdictions where that works, but even then, they’re always just trying to shove it back over to divorce land, right? So it was very, very difficult then. So then I’ve got those kinds of cases, and then I also have the kind where I’ve got a parent calling me, and this is way more common. A parent is calling and saying, I have to leave my husband. He’s abusive. I’m terrified. I don’t make the money. He has my access to finances. I don’t even know where everything is. My kids are scared, but we all have not. We’ve never reported anything, you know, and I don’t have any recordings, and I basically have no evidence, right? And so it’s really difficult, because it’s true that when you run into as a family law attorney, you’re saying, Well, we have to be able to prove this to somebody right? I mean, that and people will say that you’re probably making this up. So is that that was a lot of information I was giving you, but what thoughts does that spur in you? Because it seems like that is what a lot of these parents are, are worried about, and then all the way to the extreme. I mean, I don’t tell people, don’t bring it up. It’ll backfire, but I certainly understand why some lawyers would, right? Because they are going to label you as an alienator, and they are going to, and I don’t think like our child custody evaluators, I mean, what are they going to do? They’re trained in it. We’re all trained in it in Colorado, at least, like we have to do, we and the judges have to do a lot of training on this. But still, I mean, it’s very difficult, because you’ve got the dad who then is presenting, well, like, what the police have never been called. I mean, I don’t, there’s nothing to this. There’s nothing to see here, especially with little kids. And you’re, you know, you’re an older kid, they’re going to just resist and say, forget it. I’m not going and then we have to do all this counseling, and eventually I have to invoke these statutes to say they’re not going to come over potentially. And we have to take that very seriously, because this is abuse. But for littler kids, like, they’re likely to have to go over there, and the mother’s terrified. So with all of that, is that the typical scenario that you see a lot of and like, what are we to do about that? I mean, what is that mom supposed to do? Should she be recording everything in her home for a year?
Seth Goldstein 41:36
I just want to look back at a book that I think your audience would be suited to for the best direction, and it’s written by Professor John E, B, Myers, m, y, E, R, S of McGeorge School of Law. It’s called a Mother’s Nightmare in Incest, and you’ve described many of the cases that I have where it’s never been reported, the mother has had signs but didn’t want to accept it. Denial is not a river and wherever it is. I wrote an article. It’s really true. Kids deny, moms deny, and of course, people who do it deny. So how do you figure out how to get the right information? I think the thing that a parent has to be aware of is, once there’s a suspicion they need to consult with somebody that they have confidence in that has an understanding of, number one, what abuse is, and number two, how to deal with it at that point and get you to the right place. And sometimes that’s a therapist, sometimes it’s a lawyer, and lawyers are, unfortunately, both helpful and sometimes are not, because as soon as the lawyer starts making an inquiry, then the motivation is even further questioned in terms of the reason why a parent might bring this forward for advantage in a situation where custody is going to be litigated. So the best thing that a parent can do is, once that suspicion is raised for whatever facts they are, is to document them in the best way that they can, in writing, sitting down and recording something is not necessarily helpful, because the issues that are raised about the recording itself, As far as what happened before the child made the statement, what influence was in some way given to the child, or somehow or other, the child is following a direction of the parent, but finding immediately somebody who can give them the right advice. Everybody in the world thinks that when they walk into a court because the judge is wearing a robe, justice is going to happen. Well, unfortunately, that’s not the case, and it all depends on how that evidence gets to the judge. So you’ve got to from the very beginning, make the right steps questioning the child beyond what the initial statements are made are used against parents. Even though that’s what you would expect a parent to do, you don’t want the parent to run into court and say, Well, my child just said this, if it turns out that there’s another reason because something didn’t happen. So what I found, unfortunately especially for women, because of the gender bias that permeates this kind of case, is that they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. All the things that parents would ordinarily do to try to protect their parents are then thrown in their face when it comes into court. And you know, it’s a crime if it’s committed, and the system needs to act to protect the child and protect society from the individual who’s committing it, if indeed it happened. So it is not something that I would recommend that they not call the authorities. The question is when and then how the facts are presented to the responding social worker. Or a police officer. And there’s no way to say every case should be this way, and every case you should do this. It all depends on the facts and circumstances that arise.
Krista Nash 45:11
When you’re working on these cases, is it a very wide range of child abuse and child sexual abuse, or is your work more on the sexual abuse side, or really across the board?
Seth Goldstein 45:22
The majority of cases that I have are sexual abuse. That’s because of the area in which I concentrated in investigating as a law enforcement officer. But I do have cases involving physical abuse and emotional abuse.
Krista Nash 45:36
Sometimes I hear attorneys or courts say even when there’s really good evidence of violence against a parent. Okay? So it’s like the mom and the dad have had a conflict, or mom and mom, whatever it is, but let’s just say mom and dad, a mom and a dad have had a conflict, and maybe it’s ongoing for years, that there’s like, even like, even founded abuse on that mother. Okay? And I hear a lot in court, well, we have no proof that the kid was even part of that. Like, this didn’t affect the kid. This is just between the parents. Now we’re getting divorced and so, yay, they shouldn’t be married anymore. Obviously, they don’t do well together, but now we can go into two different homes, and it didn’t affect the kids in your work. Is that true that a kid is like, really that isolated? I mean, as I know the kid was sleeping, the kid didn’t experience it. Do you find that to be like, highly unlikely?
Seth Goldstein 46:29
Research shows that where a child is abused in a family environment, that there’s a likelihood that the other parent is being abused as well. The percentages vary from 30 to 70% if the mother is abused, there’s a potential relationship of what’s called co morbidity, that the child’s being abused. So this, again, is one of those things that it’s taken a long time for the family courts to finally recognize that they have to screen for every case whether interpersonal violence has occurred, that’s domestic violence and it’s new. What did you call it, intimate partner violence? Well, either interpersonal or intimate partner violence, either way,
Krista Nash 47:10
Which is the right way? Interpersonal violence is the new? I’ve heard it many ways. I want to make sure I’m saying it right. I don’t know changes on us. Okay?
Seth Goldstein 47:19
Intimate Partner Violence talks more about the individual and interpersonal, makes sense? Yes. So the thing is, one must always be considerate of the fact that if abuse is occurring in a family, long situation between the parents, one has to consider that the child is at risk both because they may be caught in the crossfire. I’ve had cases where things are being thrown and it’s the child who gets hurt, where the child is being held by the mother, while the battering parent is actually hitting them. And to say that the children are not affected by domestic violence in the home or interpersonal violence is ridiculous. They know what’s going on. They know what’s going on either because they’ve been present when it occurred. They know it because they’re in another room and they hear it. They know what’s going on because they see the aftermath of what’s happened, either because of the mother’s emotions and how she’s treated, or the broken dishes and other things. The holes in the wall that have been punched and things like that. So in California, for example, the mere presence of a child in the household, anywhere in the household, with the existence of interpersonal violence, is sufficient to sustain a petition to remove that child from the parents home. So I would guess that largely across the country, there are cases which follow that, because there is an enormous amount of research that shows that children are adversely affected by the conflict that is violent in the home.
Krista Nash 48:51
What about for young children who might not be as aware of what’s happening?
Seth Goldstein 48:57
Still affected. It affects them in utero, the mother’s infusion of stress, toxins, whatever.
Krista Nash 49:02
I don’t know for sure that’s not the right way to call it, but yeah, adrenaline, cortisol, yeah, yeah, right.
Seth Goldstein 49:10
It goes through the blood system. And I have a case that’s been in the system for probably about seven years since I’ve been involved. The kid isnow 11, and they totally missed the fact that the father was beating up the mother at the time that she was pregnant, and when that kid came out, she was in a heightened state of alertness. And because the mother was afraid of the child, and because the child is present during these arguments, the kids been afraid of that parents ever since and reacting negatively to both seeing that parent or going to that parent because of her fear of how he will treat her, and some of the threats that the person’s made. So you know, it’s
Krista Nash 49:55
What does the research show that are the long-term effects of abuse on kids when they’ve experienced this kind of violence in their lives?
Seth Goldstein 50:07
Brain development has been one of the main areas of concentration, and they’ve shown that it severely affects development of the brain and certain parts of the brain that are counter to learning and to interaction with others. So it’s, there’s ample research that shows that children are affected adversely from being in the presence of domestic violence in whatever form and at whatever time.
Krista Nash 50:35
Okay, and so if somebody says, well, they weren’t in the room, there’s no evidence that it’s that they’re in the room. That would be really prettyof ignorant view of it.
Seth Goldstein 50:45
That’s one way of describing, right?
Krista Nash 50:47
I mean, it’s kind of harsh, but I mean that it’s affected. It’s safe to say it’s affecting the kids in the household, like you said. I mean, I do think even if they didn’t hear the punch or the slap, right, they see something, the mother’s affected, the dynamics, the relationships affected. There’s like you said,
Seth Goldstein 51:04
So it’s a short-sighted view, very short-sighted view of children that are either going to be continuing in a relationship with the other parent or going to be forced to be in their presence by visitation orders.
Krista Nash 51:18
Okay? So we’re kind of running out of time. We could talk for about 10 hours. I might just have to have you back on to talk about some specific things, if you’re willing. But let me just kind of ask a couple of probably broad and could take an hour themselves. But what changes would you like to see in the courts? That if the courts could handle one thing, or the judges could really like change things in a way that you think would really handle, do reform in a way, or an approach that would really make this system better for the protection of children and of spouses and of parents. What do you think that reform needs to be?
Seth Goldstein 51:53
So it happens, I’m right now working with a number of professionals, two judges and two mental health professionals, in preparing an article of talking about how the focus needs to change from the rights of the parents and their equal time and the other presumptions that have to do with how custody should be shared to focusing solely on the child using some of the dependency theories and procedures as well as evidentiary rules to focus solely on that child as the subject of the custody dispute, which is, unfortunately, I think, misperceived as parents are the ones who really should be talking about their and the judges should be talking about how the parents share this this child, as opposed to what’s best for the child in that, that thing. So I think that’s the key factor, and I think the other is that the courts need to have the resources that are successfully used and utilized in the other forums. Dependency courts have counselors and have psychologists and have procedures which are intended to protect the children directly. Criminal Courts have evidentiary rules which allow for certain kind of evidence that might necessarily be excluded otherwise, as do the dependency courts and those need to be adapted to mold the system to a way that’s best to protect the kids and to have the resources of the team of people who can come around, whose only responsibility is to represent kids. That was my original intention when I created the institute, was to have a lawyer, a mental health professional, a forensic specialist, and a medical team that could look at a case and then provide whatever advice or direction or evidence in court would be necessary. Unfortunately, those things don’t exist anywhere that I know.
Krista Nash 53:52
I was going to ask you that, are there any states that are doing that? Nothing in the United States. I do know. I had justice Altobelli from Australia on a few weeks ago, and he like a lot of these, countries that have bigger welfare states, right? Or they’re more like, Canada has voices, children, reports, at least, like, there’s a little bit more of that going on there. Sweden, I think, like, there’s a lot that of those countries that have more services available in divorce and Australia has kind of the team you’re talking about. You know that every kid because they’ve got this, like the kind of system we have in our dependency systems, they also have in their divorce system,
Seth Goldstein 54:30
Yeah, which is interesting, because Australia and Canada have endorsed the Parental Alienation concept in its original form. And so to jump to that, so I don’t, I mean, that’s what I know about them. I don’t know specifically how it works.
Krista Nash 54:43
So what would you what message would you give to parents if you were if somebody listening to this says, I am worried about this, what should I do? Obviously, I guess I would tell people is, you probably do need to call the police, right? If there’s something happening. I find a lot of and I understand all the fears about not doing that, but. I think it is really important. But what would you tell parents about what they should do or prioritize if they know their children or they have strong suspicion that their children are being abused and they’re going they’re considering divorce, or they are in a divorce case, you know, they’re about to pull that trigger, you know, pull the trigger that they’re about to go run in and have a custody dispute. What advice would you give a parent in that situation?
Seth Goldstein 55:23
Well, I think the best advice I can give is find a professional whom they trust and who can help shepherd them through the process, be it a mental health professional or a lwayer.
Krista Nash 55:34
about that a little bit before, so all right. Well, I do wonder. You know, if you have any final reflections here as we wrap up on a couple things. One, the importance of getting it right for the child’s sake, and then also, what, what keeps you in this work? Like a lot of people, I mean, you’re in an incredibly hard space as having done this for decades as a police officer, you’ve done sounds like an enormous amount of had an enormous amount of impact. Amount of impact and influence on the way it’s done in the criminal landscape and now also in the family court system. You know what? What makes you get up every day to do this kind of thing?
Seth Goldstein 56:12
The success stories that we see were, I just got an email from one of my clients saying that her kids have not only excelled, but they’re now being asked to skip a grade where they were failing prior to that is what gets me going. I’ve always been a victims advocate, and that’s what drives me as far as, what was the second question you asked?
Krista Nash 56:38
Why it’s important, so important to get it right? Yeah.
Seth Goldstein 56:42
Well, the reason it’s important to get it right is you can’t go backwards. If you don’t have at the beginning, it just makes it worse at the end. And what professionals, unfortunately, don’t do is they don’t think about, if I do this today, what’s it going to look like tomorrow?
Krista Nash 56:56
Right down the road, right? Okay, well, I thank you for your time today, and I’m gonna ask you to stick around just for a minute after I say goodbye formally on our podcast, but just so I can say goodbye to you, but thank you for doing this, and I hope you’ll maybe be on again. Maybe when you finish this other article, we could talk about that, specifically about the kind of the things you all are finding, because I love that there’s some momentum behind I mean, you and I both were just at a conference recently, but there’s some momentum around really finding solutions. I know in Colorado here we are just now adopting new rules of procedure, and in some of our cases, it’s not a sort of whole cloth change, but it’s at least a piece of it. We’re moving in that direction. I’m involved in committees that are talking about family court, doing a dedicated family court. And so that’s a big problem that we have where we have so many rotating judges, so few people with any family court experience, and so they just view it like a civil litigation case, like business on business violence. And I’m sure that, I’m sure that’s part of the problem as well, right?
Seth Goldstein 57:58
So the best system that I’ve seen with the way courts work is one judge, one family, number one and number two. Some of the best judges in terms of being able to sort through these things, are judges who have had dependency court experience, because they’re being taught and trained by people who are only interested in the kid, as opposed to one of the parents.
Krista Nash 58:18
I agree. I mean, I’ve actually in Colorado, been able to, I mean, I don’t know. I think at the conference, somebody said I’m pioneering it, which is maybe generous, but I have been probably the leading person trying to push for the use of best interest attorneys for children in the divorce landscape. And the reason that I have gotten that, gosh, the momentum behind it is because judges who had done dependency and neglect, and we’re now doing the domestic cases. Were able to kind of train me on how to do that like that. This is what we did over here in dependency and neglect. And why don’t I have this over here? These kids are just as at risk, maybe more so, because we don’t have all these protections and all these resources and all these things. And so they’re throwing the red flag, going, help me here. Somebody help me. And so that is how we actually have been developing this best interest role and getting momentum behind it. And it really has been driven by the very best judges, I think, are the ones that have that experience, exactly like you’re saying. So it’s they’ve really have an important role in bridging that..
Seth Goldstein 59:16
That subject is something that could take a full hour, and it represents kids every once in a while. But you know, my experience is, unfortunately, that they become just an advocate for another parent, and the courts lean on the minors Council as, oh, here’s a quick way to get an evaluation and a recommendation, and
Krista Nash 59:34
Yeah, and I’ve heard I actually have been presenting and presented at this conference on I don’t know very much about minors Council in California, other than to know, there’s a lot of concerns about how it’s sluggish. You know, the process is slow. There’s not a lot of actual like it can really muddy everything. It isn’t necessarily always consider to be a very probative, helpful role. And we have varying degrees of success and approaches that we do in Colorado, because it is pretty newly emerging. So we don’t really have nearly the scope that California does of people doing it, but the way I’m doing it is very different than what you just described, right? And it’s very much like it’s listening to the child, but it’s also helping to navigate solutions. So I think if it’s done, well, there’s a whole nother massive amount of topics we could do about that, and there’s a lot of episodes we have about it, about how we need to really focus on how that best interest role and minors Council role needs to be also changed and beefed up in a way, and evidence, rules changed and things like that, so that we can get some questions about it.
Seth Goldstein 1:00:30
I was one of the main advocates to get the statute in California for minors Council in the family law arena, because it worked in the Juvenile Dependency Court where I worked, Yeah, unfortunately, it’s backfired in many instances.
Krista Nash 1:00:46
That’s right, okay, well, but I’m going to say goodbye officially on the podcast. So thank you for being here.
Seth Goldstein 1:00:51
Oh, you’re very welcome.
Intro/Outro 1:00:54
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