Family Court – A big, messy picture throughout the
state
It's supposed to be a place where ripped families are
mended, where the most personal kinds of wounds are healed.
It's New York's Family Court, and its mending mission is
still carried out in the adversarial setting of a courtroom. Often, there's
more than one party squaring off.
It's not as cut and dried as civil court, where property's
divided, where a judge or a jury decides if the guy who slipped on the
sidewalk is due any money or if he needs to be sent packing.
It's not as black and white as criminal court, where a jury
works with a short menu: Guilty or not guilty.
And it's failing the people who show up in the hope of
sorting out their lives.
"Despite the high hopes accompanying its creation, the
Family Court, in the opinion of most observers, has failed to fulfill its
promise." That sentence appears in a 1983 edition of the Family Court Act
– the law that created Family Court in 1962.
The author was Douglas Besharov, and he knows a few things
about family justice. He helped create Family Court. He was the first director
of the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect.
There isn't a single reason for the failure Besharov
describes. People lead more complicated lives than they did in 1962. Back
then, no one had heard of the term "latchkey kid." A family was
Ozzie and Harriet and their happy marriage and their two happy kids.
Back then, domestic violence wasn't something that was
talked about beyond the confines of a home.
Back then, Orange County was three small cities and lots of
cows.
It's now an urban county of more than 350,000, a
full-fledged New York commuter suburb – one of the few counties in the state
that's actually growing.
And the crisis of Family Court here is a reflection of the
big, messy picture of Family Court all through New York.