Victims Break Silence After Family Courts Forced Children to Live With Abusers

A child holds a sign outside of a courthouse as part of a protest against court-ordered reunification therapy. (Courtesy of Alienation Industry)

A 15-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy refused to leave their grandmother’s Santa Cruz, California, home in October 2022 when transport agents from a private company arrived to enforce a “reunification therapy” court order by a local family court judge.

At the beginning of a video of the incident, the agents appear to reason with the children. When that fails, havoc ensues, with the agents dragging the children and forcing them into a car.

The incident ignited protests, spawned local media outrage, and led Santa Cruz lawmakers to impose a no-touch policy on the transport agencies.

The video, which has since been watched at least 40 million times, was just one flashpoint in a long-running controversy over family courts ordering therapy in private custody disputes and forcing children into relationships with parents that they say are abusive.

California Family Court Judge Rebecca Connolly ordered the two children in Santa Cruz to attend a so-called reunification camp as a means to force them into a relationship with their mother, despite allegations they both made that their mother sexually abused them for years.

Two transport workers, operating under a court order, lifted the teenage girl to carry her into the car, with her clothes being pulled off in the process. The girl yelled for help as the workers struggled to force her into the car. One of the handlers appeared to step on the girl’s hair as she screamed, “Get off of me.”

The Epoch Times reported earlier this month on a trend of family court judges’ granting full custody to a parent despite evidence that the parent abused the child. In some cases, the parent murdered their children.

Tina Swithin, founder of One Mom Battle and Alienation Industry, a national advocacy group she founded based on her own experiences with the family courts, told The Epoch Times that what’s going on with court-ordered coercion therapy is equally as disturbing.

“We have heard about children who had their clothing taken away piece by piece until they were down to their underwear in an effort to degrade them and humiliate them,” she said. “ Some of the stories coming out of these camps are criminal.”

The court practice, which Swithin said has been going on for more than a decade, has become so public recently that earlier this month, one of the top U.S. law firms contacted her and offered to file a class action lawsuit on behalf of children and parents victimized by court-ordered reunification camps. The firm has asked to remain anonymous but is collecting names of alleged victims for the suit on a dedicated website.

Breaking Code Silence, a national organization against institutionalizing troubled teens, has partnered with Swithin on the lawsuit.

Swithin emphasized that the children sent to reunification camps were never deemed troubled children but that they are sent to for-profit facilities such as those for troubled children.

There are dozens of national organizations working to bring awareness to court practices of ordering reunification therapy.

Reunification therapy isn’t recognized by the American Psychiatric Association and isn’t covered by insurance. An initial four-day program costs $40,000. Judges decide how parents split the bill. The four-day program usually leads to a longer stay, with the camps essentially becoming a child’s home. One of the bills reviewed by The Epoch Times was more than $100,000. Some parents have had to mortgage their homes to shoulder the payments to avoid the other side of a court-ordered ultimatum: never seeing their children again.

‘Parental Alienation’ Theory

According to family court reform expert Elizabeth Peterson, reunification therapy was born out of the theory of “parental alienation.”

Richard Gardner, a known pedophilia-friendly psychiatrist, coined the term as a defense against mothers when they report their children’s fathers for molesting their children. Gardner committed suicide in 2003.

In a book titled “Creative Therapeutic,” Gardner wrote, “Special care should be taken not alienate the child from the molesting parent ... [The removal of a pedophilic parent from the home] should only be seriously considered after all attempts at treatment of the pedophilia and rapprochement with the family have proven futile.

“Older children may be helped to appreciate that sexual encounters between an adult and a child are not universally considered to be reprehensible acts.”

In citing Shakespeare, he also concluded that “the child might be helped to appreciate the wisdom of Shakespeare’s Hamlet ... ‘Nothing’s either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’”

According to Pearson and several other accounts tracing the origins of reunification camps, the launch of these “wildly profitable” treatment programs can be found in Gardner’s theory.

‘Begins With Violence’

Friends of the Santa Cruz siblings, teens themselves, say they see the court-ordered therapy as a green light to commit kidnapping, child trafficking, and acts of violence.

“There’s no way for reunification camps to be a healing process if it begins with violence,” one of the friends told a local television station.

As questions about the Santa Cruz incident and the teens’ well-being continued, videos in another closely watched case over court-ordered reunification therapy emerged out of Utah.

There, a 15-year-old brother and his 12-year-old sister barricaded themselves in one of their bedrooms and began livestreaming about their case on TikTok after Family Court Judge Derek Pullan ordered them to attend a reunification camp to force them into a relationship with their father.

Pullan made the order despite pending charges against the children’s father for felony child abuse and a past finding by child protective services that he had sexually assaulted them.

The videos captured national attention on social media as the Utah siblings talked about their father’s alleged abuse and a court that they saw as deliberately putting them in danger.

“The court system isn’t trying to save us—nobody’s trying to keep us safe,” the 15-year-old says in the video. “I am the one that’s going to have to choose my own safety.”

He said he and his sister were afraid to go to school or leave the room they were barricaded in out of fear of retaliation from their father.

“I am scared if I get sent, I will be killed by my father because of how many threats he has made to me and my family if I told anybody,” the teen said.

Pullan wouldn’t budge on his order until the Utah County Sheriff’s Office refused to enforce it and asked for a hearing in the matter.

On March 13, after the standoff garnered national media coverage, Pullan announced at the hearing that he had decided to pause his order until the investigation could be completed. The Utah County Attorney’s Office has since stated that they’re starting an investigation into the case.

“The only reason that judge stood down is he got caught,” Darrel Riley, a Seattle father whose two daughters were forced to attend a reunification camp, told The Epoch Times.

Darrel Riley, with his oldest daughter Arianna. As a minor, she and her younger sister were court-ordered to attend a reunification camp when they were minors after they accused their mother of abuse. (Courtesy Darrel Riley)

As in most of the cases examined by The Epoch Times, when Riley brought up the abuse, he was stripped of custody.

According to Riley, who shared court records from the case, his oldest daughter was so sure she was being kidnapped and trafficked that she caused security to shut down the Seattle-Tacoma Airport.

When the airport refused to allow the camp transporters to board with the teens, they put the girls in cars and drove with them alone for hours to a reunification camp.

“After a few weeks, my oldest daughter leaped out of a second-story window barefoot and told a person passing by to catch her as she fell,” Riley said. “They were told that they needed to watch psychological videos to understand that their memories were false and told that if they didn’t obey everything their alleged abusers said, they would be starved or drugged into submission.”

Riley now runs a support group on Facebook for parents and children caught up in what he calls “the reunification camp scam.”

Contradictions

Richard Ducote, a Pennsylvania attorney who’s considered to be a national expert on reunification therapy, pointed to the contradictions at the core of it.

“You have judges who immediately disbelieve child abuse despite criminal convictions of it, but without examining a single piece of evidence or listening to any testimony, and before parties even walk into a courtroom, the judge has already made a finding of parental alienation against a parent,” Ducote told The Epoch Times.

“It’s a simple case of following the family court’s well-worn money trail.”

Ducote has talked nationally about the dangers of reunification therapy.

Swithin said family court judges appear to not have any legal authority to send children to unregulated camps. A review by The Epoch Times of family court laws in all 50 states found that there’s no statutory provision for ordering children into any kind of reunification therapy when child abuse is alleged in private custody matters.

“This is a cottage industry that completely deviates from any child abuse laws or even normal court procedures,” she said.

Ducote noted that “alienation is the only disease diagnosed by lawyers.”

Order Reversed

On March 1, the 2nd Appellate District Court in California ruled that Los Angeles County Judge Steven Ellis abused his discretion and reversed his order forcing a pair of teenage siblings to attend reunification therapy.

In the three-judge panel’s ruling, the appellate court cited Ellis’s ruling denying the children’s mother an evidentiary hearing as a primary basis for its decision, concluding that the court didn’t demonstrate “good cause” for the denial and that it left itself without any reason to make such a drastic ruling, which included stripping the mother of custody and ordering the children into reunification therapy.

According to court and police records in the case, the mother had primary custody because of a previous court finding of domestic violence against the children’s father.

After refusing to allow the mother to call witnesses or offer evidence, Ellis issued a ruling concluding that it was in the child’s best interest to award full custody of the children to their father, with little explanation as to why.

The California appellate court disagreed.

“Nothing in the record supports the court’s finding that this significant disruption to the children’s established living arrangement with the mother was in their best interest,” the judges said.

‘Never See Your Kids Again’

As part of reunification therapy orders, judges usually strip the so-called alienating parent of custody and then order them to pay for at least half of the cost of the reunification camps. Riley, a computer programmer who spent his life savings to comply with the court mandate, said that in his case, the court made it very clear that “it was either pay up or never see your kids again.”

As it turned out, what was supposed to be a one-week camp turned into an indefinite time at the facility. Riley said he didn’t see his daughters for years. Swithin said that experience isn’t unusual.

“Reunification camp is the start of separating kids from their safe parent,” she said.

The first generation of children subjected to reunification camps who have reached adulthood have recently started to come forward with what sound like stories of survival, rather than therapeutic sessions. Many give disturbing accounts of being dragged out of bed at night, handcuffed, and driven to reunification camps hundreds of miles away from their homes.

Among them is Ally Cable, who, after turning 18, filmed and shared on social media a video about what happened to her after being forced at the age of 16 by a family court judge to attend a reunification camp.

“I was terrified,” Cable said, noting that her clothes and phone were confiscated by transporters. “I could barely stop shaking.”

Cable said she and the other children were told that if they didn’t denounce their safe parent, they would be sent to a psychiatric facility or foster care.

Others have spoken about the abuse, including sexual abuse, that they were sent back to endure by the court orders. Addyson Bender held a press conference accusing Texas Family Court Judge Susan Rankin of subjecting her to eight more years of being molested, beaten, and tortured by her father.

“And to top it all off, Susan Rankin barred me from seeing my mother at all for three of these years,” Bender said.

She also mocked the courts for trying to create a narrative that mothers are part of what she called “a men-hating cult for brainwashing [children] to hate their fathers.”

According to Swithin, family court judges often, at least initially, award custody of the children to the transport companies.

“That’s how they are getting around the trafficking laws,” she said, pointing out that the transport companies often take the children across state lines without following any legal procedure to do so.

In the Santa Cruz case, police were called to the scene but stood by and did nothing. The department later released a statement claiming that their hands were tied because the handlers were acting under a judge’s order.

Protesters outside the courthouse in Santa Cruz, Calif., following the release of a video showing two teens being dragged out of their homes under a court order that they be taken away to a reunification camp. (Courtesy of Alienation Industry)

Custody is then switched to the camps and then eventually to the alleged abuser, according to Swithin.

“The family court judges pass these kids around like beachballs,” she said.

Legislative Efforts

Some legislative efforts have been made to ban court-ordered reunification therapy.

In 2021, California state Sen. Susan Rubio drafted Piqui’s Law, named after 5-year-old Aramazd “Piqui” Andressian Jr., whose father killed him in 2017 by suffocating him in his car seat. The father killed his son after the boy’s mother was accused of parental alienation for raising concerns about her son’s safety with his father.

Rubio withdrew the bill under pressure from the Judicial Council of California. The council didn’t respond to inquiries by The Epoch Times. The Epoch Times also reached out to judges Pullan, Ellis, and Connolly. They didn’t respond.

New Hampshire Republican lawmakers have repeatedly introduced a bill calling for a ban on reunification therapy, but each time the bill has come up for a hearing, family court judges and court administrators show up and convince them to kill the proposals.

In testifying against a bill to ban reunification therapy in New Hampshire, Family Court Judge Jennifer Lemire told the New Hampshire Child and Family Law Committee that the court orders the therapy only after it has been determined to be in the best interest of children in a custody dispute matter. She urged the committee to not take away what she called a “sustainable solution” available to the courts.

“Why would anyone want to take one of the very arrows we have left in our quiver?” Lemire said, indicating that she was repeating the words of a colleague who was also against banning reunification therapy.