My Testimony to the Idaho Legislature

For the Child Custody and Domestic Relations Task Force

*Idaho is the first of a half-dozen states that will duplicate Arizona’s groundbreaking hearings, whieh are rippling through the nation. The video recording of Dr. Lee’s and Ariz. Sen. Mark Finchem’s testimonies is far below.

My name is Bandy Lee, and I am from New York City. I am a forensic psychiatrist and violence expert. I have 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 courts 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 joining the Harvard Program in Psychiatry and the Law in 2021. In 2002, I helped the World Health Organization launch its landmark publication, The World Report on Violence and Health. In 2007, I helped coauthor the United Nations Secretary-General’s chapter on “Violence against Children.” I am a recipient of the National Research Service Award and author of the textbook, Violence (Lee, 2019), as well as of over 100 scientific articles and chapters on violence prevention. For clinical practice, I work in maximum-security prisons and specialize in treating violent offenders. I have worked with multiple city and state governments, as well as the U.S. Senate, on criminal justice reform and on implementing alternatives to solitary confinement. On family courts, I have testified before the legislatures of Arizona, Colorado, New York, Louisiana, Tennessee, Washington, and I am now very pleased to be in Idaho.

When I became aware of the situation in family courts, I had had two decades of serving as an expert witness in criminal and civil courts. I may never have learned about family courts but for my sister’s divorce in Bergen County, New Jersey, under a judge who is currently being referred for impeachment (M. B., 2024). Family courts, as a rule, operate under strict secrecy and do not like qualified experts — especially those who are independent. Therefore, I had no previous experience that could have prepared me for the family courts.

Yale Law School’s Robert Cover said: “Interpretations in law … constitute justifications for violence” (Cover, 1986). Nowhere does this seem truer than in family courts, and nowhere is the application more arbitrary, unjust, and unnecessary.

Family court judges were granted almost unlimited discretion with the law so that they might exercise benevolence (Spinak, 2023). However, without transparency and accountability, they have become some of the most powerful members of society exploiting the most vulnerable and powerless — and their courtrooms have become veritable centers of human rights violations (Silverman et al., 2004). Much like the prison system, which is another secret institution that conducts its affairs behind concrete walls with little oversight, brutality and violence flourish in the family court system behind court seals and judicial immunity (Stengel, 2011). Indeed, the combination of near-unlimited discretion behind closed doors and immunity are a deadly mix.

It must be noted how prevalent family violence is: 1 in 2.5 women and 1in 4 men experience physical violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime (Leemis et al., 2022). 1 in 4 children experience child physical abuse or neglect in their lifetime (Brown et al., 2023). Over half of female homicide victims are killed by a current or former male intimate partner (Jack et al., 2018), and more children die at the hands of their parents than any other relationship (Stöckl et al., 2017). It is therefore unsurprising that a vast majority of contested custody cases are actually family violence cases involving some of the most dangerous individuals in society. To deny — or worse, to exploit — family violence for profit can therefore be very dangerous.

In 1997, it was found that abusive fathers are more than twice as likely to fight for exclusive custody of their children than non-abusive fathers (Smith and Coukos, 1997), but the numbers are likely much higher now. Once granted custody, many go on to kill under family court “support” (Bartlow, 2017; Goldstein, 2013), such that almost 1 in 8 of the nation’s child murders by parent could be reduced if family courts had no role (Center for Judicial Excellence, 2025; Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2025). The problem has been worsening over time, although the exact numbers cannot be known, as routine record concealment makes it virtually impossible to track the true number of child murders family courts facilitate (Friedman, 2019). For every child murder, there are at least as many child suicides, and for every death hundreds of children are injured to the point of needing medical care.

Family courts label these cases as “high conflict,” but the actual situation is usually one-sided (Meier, 2023), with a criminally violent party using this “alternative” court system not only to escape prosecution but to “frame” the innocent victim (Summers, 2023). Indeed, by circumventing due process and placing the force of the law behind family violence, family courts have become centers where violent criminals can “DARVO” (“deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender”) (Freyd, 1997).

How does this happen? First, if child abuse is alleged or suspected, custody is transferred, sometimes immediately, to the abuser (Silberg and Dallam, 2019). According to some studies, this happens up to three-quarters of the time (Leadership Council, 2023), but in my experience it has happened 98 percent of the time. I will use my sister as an example, but the methods are astonishingly consistent across the country (Project Justice USA, 2025). My sister was on her authorized weekend to be with her children, and suddenly five policemen raided her and seized her children, based on a court order that was issued without warning or due process. She was not even given a reason for the first two years — and, now, four years later, she has still not seen or heard from them.

When she learned from academic and pediatric reports that they were missing almost half of school and ceased to grow even one inch in four years — which is extreme failure to thrive — she was rather barred from her constitutional right to their records. In her case, she did not even report child abuse. The children simply kicked, screamed, and tried to commit suicide rather than go to their father, who almost killed each of them by head injury. Yet, he now has sole, exclusive custody, and no prior adult who cared for them can have access to them. Once family court is involved, Child Protective Services must fall in line (Fonta and Maguire-Jack, 2015), the state registry is often blocked (or the number of professionals making reports does not matter), and police officers must follow orders (officers are often puzzled as to why they were dispatched in large numbers to an unarmed, loving mother simply parenting her children, as in the above case, at the same time as being ordered not to intervene in some of the most clear-cut cases involving evidence of egregious abuse; mental health professionals, also as front-line mandated reporters, encounter the same dilemma).

As shocking as my sister’s case sounds, it still counts among the milder ones I have seen, while serving as an expert witness in approximately 50 family court cases, evaluating all family members, and examining all the evidence. The effort it takes to get a child to the right parent is often insurmountable — in that almost no amount of evidence is enough, and no number of professionals warning is enough. Many loving parents are also professionally and financially ruined, charged exorbitant fees for evaluations, therapy, and supervised visits — and almost nothing gets their children back (Bassi et al., 2025). And when they cannot pay the “child support” and their abuser’s legal fees, they can be incarcerated (Cozzolino, 2018).

Transferring custody thus allows the perpetrator to conceal his abuse, as well as to achieve the goal of “tangential spouse abuse,” that is, abusing the children to torture the spouse (Stark, 2023). In my sister’s case, she experienced ten near-death episodes from stress, and went from superior functioning as a former high-level government executive to requiring round-the-clock, 24-hour care after an intensive care unit admission.

I have seen courts and court appointees seek out “pseudo-concepts” (United Nations, 2023) to try to justify these abrupt custody transfers, and this is where “parental alienation” and “reunification” come in (Meier, 2020). Family courts have essentially produced opportunities for an entire industry of theories and methods unheard of outside of family court (Saunders et al., 2011). Reunification camps can charge up to $40,000 for five days in a run-down motel (Hansen, 2022), and I have personally seen a master’s-level, so-called “expert” charge $500,000 for a fraudulent report, labeling the healthy, loving parent “mentally ill,” after just 15 minutes of interview, and then permanently removing the child on that basis — a widespread practice (Emery et al., 2005).

When there is child abuse, the most critical mitigating factor is the loving, protective parent (Cicchetti and Toth, 2005), but contact with that parent is often severed for many years if not for one’s entire childhood. The oxymoronic “reunification therapy” — usually done with an actively abusive parent — is contraindicated in regular mental health practice. These family court-confined practices maximize harm and not only embolden existing perpetrators but generate new ones, since roughly one-third of victimized children move on to become victimizers themselves (Kaufman and Zigler, 1987).

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 fact-checked 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.

It is no exaggeration to say that family courts are one of the deadliest places for women and children. Men can be victims as well. Family courts are a de facto “abuse industry,” annually bringing in an estimated 50 to 175 billion dollars (Berger, 2014) for sending almost 100,000 children a year (Silberg, 2008), year after year, to what psychologists call “soul murder” (Shengold, 1989). Countless loving mothers have also died prematurely (Thomas, 2023), without prior health conditions, or are beset with diseases seen nowhere else in medicine (Dalgarno, 2024). It is a serious public health problem that, unless immediately and profoundly reformed, will continue to cause great damage to our society and our collective future. Bold legislation that can set the standard for the entire country is greatly needed.

(Video recording of Dr. Lee’s and Sen. Finchem’s testimonies:)

(There is a call to impeach the judge mentioned in the above testimony, Judge Jane Gallina-Mecca: ImpeachMecca.org/.)

References

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Bassi, S., Johnson, F., and Logan, L. (2025, June 2). California’s brewing kids-for-cash scheme: Parents pay hundreds to see their own children while unregulated industry profits from family court orders. Davis Vanguard. https://davisvanguard.org/2025/06/parents-pay-hundreds-supervised-visits-california/

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https://www.change.org/p/petition-to-impeach-judge-jane-gallina-mecca

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