By Frank Parlato
Family court is supposed to be a place of order, of professionals doing what’s best for children. Family courts are designed to resolve custody and domestic disputes.
But sometimes it is a place where wolves wear neckties, a system devoid of juries, opaque in procedure, and imbalanced. Family court is not a neutral forum. It is a place where truth is secondary, due process elusive, and hope obliterated. With no jury to provide balance, and unchecked judicial discretion influenced by power dynamics, it can bring mental, emotional, and financial exhaustion.
It can bring being separated from your children without recourse. It can bring financial depletion.
You will witness:
Alienation from your child treated as ordinary.
Lack of legal representation against well-funded opposition. The ex had lawyers. They had none. They brought in receipts and worn shoes. They got called unstable. The ex got called reasonable.
Reputation destroyed by unverified accusations
Hypervigilance mistaken for paranoia.
SYMPTOMS OF FAMILY COURT TRAUMA
How do you describe the latter:
They went to court and lost everything. They looked tired. Not just tired. Empty. They couldn’t sleep. They had no money. They heard the word custody and froze. The kid was still alive. But gone.
They stopped believing in justice. They told people. People didn’t believe them. They stopped talking.
Then they started again. Not to save themselves. But to warn others.
You ask about their kid and they show you a photo, like it’s the last relic of a life that once was. They tell you words like ex parte, contempt, motion to strike.
They eat antacids Their hands shake when they reach for their phone. They trust no one. they try to tell the truth in a binder full of notes and timestamps.
Money dissolves. The child becomes a ghost, living somewhere else, taught to forget. And they fight. Not for revenge. For their child. For something the court forgot long ago: humanity.
They go in thinking the judge will see the truth. Instead, the judge sees paperwork and calls it a day. They haven’t seen their kid in months, but the kid is alive. Meanwhile, the lawyers bill by the hour.
THE SIGN ABOVE THE DOOR
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” inscribed on the gates of Dante’s Inferno, was meant to mark the threshold of Hell. You don’t walk into family court expecting fairness. You walk in knowing the judge can silence you, disbelieve you, strip you of your child. No jury. No open hearing.
You speak. They ignore you. You show proof. They look away. You want to believe the court will protect your child, It protects itself. Leave hope at the door.
This is the place, not quite Hell but close enough, where families walk in with hope and walk out with fewer rights than they had going in. It is Family Court.
They walk in thinking a judge is like a teacher or a priest. They walk out realizing he is something colder.
The lawyers smile. The ex lies. The judge shrugs. The child waits, caught between people who love him and a system that never will.
There is no fire. No sulfurous clouds. Just benches, files, and a judge in black, but you will do the mourning. Dante placed the sign at the gates of Hell. Today, it hangs above the door of any family court in America. Parents enter not with sin, but with love. And they are punished.
THE PUNISHMENT OF THE PROTECTIVE PARENT
They are told to be quiet. Told they are liars. Told their children are better off elsewhere—often with the very person who made them beg for safety.
And when they leave, they are not the same.
Hell isn’t underground. It’s just down the hall from the DMV. Courtroom 3B. The sign doesn’t say “abandon all hope,” Instead, it says “Family Division”
If family court were a pill, it would be white, bitter, and coated in law. Administered in doses over years. Always with side effects.
Take two pills – or hearings – and you may no longer recognize yourself.
Take four and you may forget the sound of your child’s laugh.
