My Testimony to the Arizona Senate

For the Ad Hoc Committees on Family Court Orders

*A video recording of the testimony is far below.

My name is Bandy Lee. I am a forensic psychiatrist and violence expert with 25 years of experience serving as an expert witness in approximately 200 criminal and civil court cases around the country, of which about 50 were in family court across 22 states. I am also president of the World Mental Health Coalition and cofounder of the Violence Prevention Institute. I was a research fellow of the National Institute of Mental Health, and taught at Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School for 17 years before recently joining the Harvard Program in Psychiatry and the Law. In 2007, I helped coauthor the United Nations Secretary-General’s chapter on “Violence against Children,” among other international documents on violence prevention to help governments implement prison reform and other violence reduction projects around the globe. I am a recipient of the National Research Service Award and author of the textbook, Violence (Lee, 2019), as well as over 100 scientific articles and chapters. For clinical practice, I work in maximum-security prisons, treating some of the most violent individuals our society produces.

Yet, nothing prepared me for the family courts. We do not ordinarily think of family courts as sites of violence, but by denying or, worse, by exploiting the existence of domestic violence and child abuse, family courts have become one of the deadliest places for children and the adults who try to protect them. I commend you for addressing this serious issue and for calling out family court abuse as the national emergency that it is. I have testified before the legislatures of Colorado, New York, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Washington, and I am very honored to be here.

I will be submitting a more scholarly written testimony with empirical data to back my assertions, but for now I will not mince words: family courts are a danger to society and, unless dramatically reformed, they need to be abolished altogether for the safety of our children and their loving families. This may sound extreme, but when an institution causes far greater harm than good — indeed, sends close to 100,000 children per year to their soul murder (Silberg, 2008), if not actual murder — then such an intervention is necessary.

Despite my 25 years as an expert witness for the courts, I did not know about the family courts. Since learning about them, I have tried to take as many family court cases as possible. However, while I am considered a highly-qualified expert in criminal or any other court, only in family court am I unwelcome. In fact, judges often try to find almost any reason not to admit me. This is because they as a rule are not looking for qualified experts; they seek poorly-trained or compromised, so-called “experts” who will fix the results in the direction they desire — that is, the opposite direction of which the case should go (George Washington University, 2018). Unfortunately, sending children to their abuse, rape, battery, murder, sex trafficking (Sprang and Cole, 2018), and pornography production (Salter and Wong, 2024) has become a lucrative business.

I would not have known about family courts, except for my sister’s divorce. One moment, her children are thriving under her care, with perfect physical and psychological health, and she is praised around the neighborhood for her parenting skills, consulted by other parents and teachers. The next moment, their previously absentee father files for divorce, and her children are seized in a police raid without warning on her legitimately-assigned weekend with them, and the violently abusive father who almost killed each of his two children by head injury gets sole custody, and the mother has not seen or heard from the children she raised from birth for the next four years. What reason did the family court give? She was supposedly “mentally ill” — even though no licensed professional ever raised any concerns. Subsequently, she has been evaluated by eleven world-renowned psychiatric experts, some of them consultants to the United Nations, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the International Criminal Court, who all unanimously said she has “excellent mental health” and “exceptional talent in parenting,” but none of this mattered. Only one unlicensed and unqualified associate counselor — Tara Devine — with a non-social work master’s degree contradicted them all, and this is the singular report the family court judge accepted.

In addition to these so-called “experts”, family courts make use of guardians ad litem. In my sister’s case, the guardian ad litem lied or perjured 600 documented times, and even co-conspired with her ex-husband to attempt to cause her demise, hospitalizing her in the intensive care unit, but to the end Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca only protected her. In fact, the judge now appoints this guardian ad litem, Evelyn Nissirios, in almost every case she presides over….

After participating in approximately 50 family court cases, I have come to learn that my sister’s situation is not unique. Cases may vary widely, but family courts all across the country produce almost identical results when abuse is involved — which is the vast majority of custody cases. That is, custody is almost invariably taken from stable, nurturing parents who are well-bonded with their children, to be given to their abusers — under unscientific pretexts such as “parental alienation” (Meier, 2020). The more clear-cut the cases, the more draconian this formula (Dreyfus, 2023), and the stronger the evidence the good parents present, the more retaliation they face. I have not once seen supervised visits be applied to the dangerous parent, and if the children resist, as healthy children do, they are sent to “reunification camps,” which are in truth reeducation torture camps (McElwee, 2024)….

I have often compared Family Courts to the prison system I have studied for decades. Medieval barbarism that civilized society cannot imagine happens within them. Those who enter are grievously maltreated, and all manner of human rights violations occur with no accountability because of a lack of transparency. Torture is routine, and even murder goes unpunished — only, family courts are worse, since the targets are innocent children. In family courts, judges have the authority to “seal” their cases, and this essentially gives them Star Chamber-like secrecy. What usually occurs within is unmoored from the law (Summers, 2023). The exceptional discretion that family court judges have was granted so that judges could exercise benevolence with vulnerable families, but a 120-year chronicle has shown that it has rather regularly been used for malevolence (Spinak, 2023).

When tragic deaths happen all too often, the public assumes that there must have been extenuating circumstances or that these institutions are doing their best under difficult circumstances. They do not imagine that family courts actually facilitated the deaths, or even forced them on families that mobilized all their resources to prevent (Goldstein, 2013). I have come to call family courts “anti-courts,” where case fixing replaces fact finding, pseudoscience is given precedence over established science, conflicts of interest replace the requirement of impartiality, and the greatest injustices done to families are committed in the name of “justice”.

Instead, prisons and family courts, because of their secrecy and impunity, have become magnets for violent, sadistic, and psychopathic individuals who relish exercising power over others. Those who do not “go along” with the culture are threatened and ousted. Prison guards may be seen as poorly-trained individuals from similar backgrounds as the prisoners, but family court players are even more dangerous, since they are driven by a 50- to 175-billion-dollar industry (Berger, 2014), hidden beneath the power of being called a “court”.

The Center for Judicial Excellence (2025) has tracked 990 children murdered by a divorcing or separating parent over a 17-year period in the United States. A detailed study of 175 child murders by fathers in relation to contested custody showed that family courts had in many cases given the access they needed to murder their children, over the objections of the mother (Bartlow, 2017). It is possible that up to 1 in 8 child murders by parent may be reduced with the abolition of family courts (Department of Justice, 2005). And for every murder, there are many more suicides, and for every death, there are hundreds of injuries that require medical attention (World Health Organization, 2002). Yet, these numbers are an undercount, as near-universal record concealment, sometimes against the litigants themselves, makes it virtually impossible to track the true number of child murders family courts enable.

Even if the children survive, they are maximally exposed to lifelong psychological and physical illness, substance abuse, relationship problems, vulnerability to future abuse, as well as decades of loss of life, according to the highly-respected, nationwide study of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) (Felitti et al., 2002). Not only that, when the “protective” parent loses custody for simply bringing up the abuse — which family courts universally take as false, even though false allegations are exceedingly rare (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2010) — the children are stripped of the primary mitigating factor that could help them heal from the abuse: their primary support. Child abuse not only affects the current levels of violence in society but has measurable impacts on the levels of heart disease, cancer, obesity, high blood pressure, mental illness, substance abuse, crimes, suicides, and life expectancy (Petruccelli et al., 2019). The economic cost of child abuse and neglect in the United States was estimated at 592 billion dollars in 2018 (Klika et al., 2020).

The public is unaware of this epidemic of violence occurring through the family courts, because judges threaten reporters and journalists to control their coverage. When a major magazine published an interview with me, the judge in my sister’s case issued an order for them immediately to “unpublish” the article. When their legal department sternly rebuked her for violating the First Amendment, she rather returned to her drawing board and issued a second order! It turned out that even the Washington Post had shamed her 10 years ago for trying to order the takedown of another article (Volokh, 2015), but because of impunity, she remains undaunted and her constitutional violations continue. The end result is that this magazine and others vow never to cover a family court story again.

Recently, the United Nations (2023) issued a major Human Rights Council report, decrying the public health crisis that has emerged from the U.S. model being exported around the globe, but nothing has changed within the U.S. — if anything, family courts have stubbornly “doubled down” on their practices and become even more severe.

What is the solution? Correction is not going to come from the source of the problem. There needs to be significant judicial oversight at nationwide scale, and I am encouraged that Arizona is leading the way. Oversight may occur in the form of open courts, actual accountability, journalistic reporting, access for scientists, and whistleblowing protection for experts. Education of the public is essential; I am doubtful of the utility of educating judges, unless the incentive to give children to the wrong parents for the proliferation of profits is removed.

Absolute immunity must not be allowed where there is corruption, fraud, and routine felony crimes such as child abuse, kidnapping, and even murder. Judges and their court-appointed personnel must be indictable like everyone else when they cause the deaths of children and their loving parents. Too many previously healthy young mothers are dying of suicide, heart attacks, “broken heart syndrome,” cancer, and other medical conditions seen almost nowhere else (Dalgarno et al., 2024). If this system of utter impunity, gross abuses of power, and rampant criminality, concealed under self-imposed secrecy cannot be eliminated, we must consider abolishing family courts altogether. Family violence cases are not complicated, and they can be adjudicated quickly in criminal courts, instead of being drawn out for years if not decades in family courts, for the sole benefit of court players. If not, family courts have the potential to become the scourge of our society, as they have already become the epicenter of the greatest crimes being committed against innocent children and loving parents on U.S. soil.

Dr. Bandy Lee before the  Joint Legislative Ad Hoc Committee on Family Court Orders

(Video recording of testimony at around 4:50:30: https://www.azleg.gov/videoplayer/?clientID=6361162879&eventID=2025061002.)

(Please sign the petition to impeach Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca: https://www.change.org/p/petition-to-impeach-judge-jane-gallina-mecca.)

References

Bartlow, R. D. (2017). Judicial response to court-assisted child murders. Family and Intimate Partner Violence Quarterly, 10(1), 7–54.

Berger, P. (2014, August 1). Divorce is big business. Hawaii Business Magazine. https://www.hawaiibusiness.com/divorce-is-big-business/

Center for Judicial Excellence (2025). Child Safety First: Preventing Child Homicides During Divorce, Separation, and Child Custody Disputes. San Rafael, CA: Center for Judicial Excellence. https://centerforjudicialexcellence.org/2023/07/17/cje-releases-child-safety-report/

Dalgarno, E., Ayeb-Karlsson, S., Bramwell, D., Barnett, A., and Verma, A. (2024). Health-related experiences of family court and domestic abuse in England: A looming public health crisis. Journal of Family Trauma, Child Custody and Child Development, 21(3), 277–305.

Dreyfus, H. (2023, August 19). In the child’s best interest. ProPublica. https://www.propublica.org/article/both-parents-agree-child-is-being-harmed-who-will-courts-believe

Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F., Nordenberg, D., Williamson, D. F., Spitz, A. M., Edwards, V., and Marks, J. S. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245–258.

Friedman, G. (2019, September 18). Fatal Court: ‘The Harm to Children in the Nation’s Family Courts Has Reached Crisis Proportions.’ Deseret News. https://www.deseret.com/2019/9/17/20805882/fatal-family-court-parental-rights-custody-battles-child-deaths-harm-center-for-judicial-excellence

George Washington University (2021). Draft Summary: Overview of Family Court Outcomes Study. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice. https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/302141.pdf

Goldstein, B. (2013). What can be learned from court-assisted murder cases? Family and Intimate Partner Violence Quarterly, 5(4), 369–378.

Klika, J. B., Rosenzweig, J., and Merrick, M. (2020). Economic burden of known cases of child maltreatment from 2018 in each state. Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal, 37, 227–234.

Lee, B. X. (2019). Violence: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Causes, Consequences, and Cures. New York, NY: Wiley-Blackwell.

Lee, B. X. (2025). Dr. Bandy Lee files lawsuit with impeachment initiative to bring transparency to Star Chamber-like family court. Medium. https://medium.com/@bandyxlee/dr-bandy-lee-files-lawsuit-with-impeachment-initiative-to-bring-transparency-to-star-chamber-like-312f695f62fb

McElwee, J. R. (2024, August 25). A court-ordered therapy that separates kids from a parent they love stirs a backlash. Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/us-news/reunification-therapy-custody-family-court-5b4e9279

Meier, J. S. (2020). U.S. child custody outcomes in cases involving parental alienation and abuse allegations: What do the data show? Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, 42(1), 92–105.

Petruccelli, K., Davis, J., and Berman, T. (2019). Adverse childhood experiences and associated health outcomes: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Child Abuse and Neglect, 97, 104127.

Raphael, J. (2020). Parents as pimps: Survivor accounts of trafficking of children in the United States. Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence, 4(4), 7.

Silberg, J. (2008). How Many Children Are Court-Ordered into Unsupervised Contact with an Abusive Parent after Divorce? Baltimore, MD: Leadership Council. http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/med/PR3.html

Salter, M., and Wong, T. (2024). Parental production of child sexual abuse material: A critical review. Trauma, Violence, and Abuse, 25(3), 1826–1837.

Spinak, J. M. (2023). The End of Family Court: How Abolishing the Court Brings Justice to Children and Families. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Sprang, G., and Cole, J. (2018). Familial sex trafficking of minors: Trafficking conditions, clinical presentation, and system involvement. Journal of Family Violence, 33, 185–195.

Summers, H. (2023, July 6). Family Court Files: Parental alienation ‘used to silence claims of abuse.’ Bureau of Investigative Journalism. https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2023-07-06/family-court-files-parental-alienation-used-to-silence-claims-of-abuse

Thomas, E. (2023, September 4). Family courts: Children forced into contact with fathers accused of abuse. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-66531409

United Nations (2023). Custody, Violence against Women and Violence against Children: Report of the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and Girls, Its Causes and Consequences, Reem Alsalem. New York, NY: United Nations Human Rights Council. https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/thematic-reports/ahrc5336-custody-violence-against-women-and-violence-against-children

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2010). Child Maltreatment 2010. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research/index.htm

U.S. Department of Justice (2005). Family Violence Statistics. Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/fvs03.pdf

Volokh, E. (2015, May 31). New Jersey judge orders newspaper to take down article. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/31/new-jersey-judge-orders-newspaper-to-take-down-article/

World Health Organization (2002). World Report of Violence and Health. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9241545615