Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody [Paperback]

Phyllis Chesler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2011

Completely updated and revised for the twenty-first century, Mothers on Trial remains the bible for all women facing a custody battle, as well as the lawyers, psychologists, and others who support them. This landmark book was the first to break the false stereotype about mothers getting preferential treatment over fathers when it comes to custody. In this new edition, Chesler shows that, with few exceptions, the news has only gotten worse: when both the father and the mother want custody, the father usually gets it. The highly praised Mothers on Trial is essential reading for anyone concerned personally or professionally with custody rights and the well-being of our children.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Heavily documenting her book with legal precedent, expert input, and studies, Chesler makes her case with all of her zeal intact. Fresh, [and] timely content” —Library Journal in its STARRED review of the revised, 2nd edition of Mothers on Trial

“An unblinking look at gender bias in child-custody battles.”—Kirkus Reviews on the revised, 2nd edition of Mothers on Trial

 

“Sure to inspire anger, understanding and action.” —Gloria Steinem on the 1st edition of Mothers on Trial

 

“Extremely subversive. . . . It should and will enrage, entice, incite and liberate.” —Kate Millett on the 1st edition of Mothers on Trial

 

“A stunning and exhaustive indictment of the treatment of mothers by the modern justice system. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal on the 1st edition of Mothers on Trial

“No brief review can do justice to the scope or style of her current book, a rich fabric of woven of compelling data from her interviews with warring parents, evocations of myth and poetry, and the transcribed voices of mothers on trial.”

—Psychology Today on the 1st edition of Mothers on Trial

“An essential work.” —Erica Jong on the 1st edition of Mothers on Trial

About the Author

The author of thirteen books and thousands of articles and speeches, feminist icon Phyllis Chesler is an emerita professor of psychology and women's studies at City University of New York, a psychotherapist, and an expert courtroom witness. She is cofounder of the Association for Women in Psychology and the National Women's Health Network, a charter member of the Women's Forum and the Veteran Feminists of America, a founder and board member of the International Committee for the Women of the Wall, and an affiliated professor with Haifa and Bar Ilan Universities. Her pioneering work, Women and Madness, is a long-standing classic. She lives in Manhattan.

Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Chicago Review Press; Second Edition, Second edition edition (July 1, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556529996
• ISBN-13: 978-1556529993
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #102,462 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #4 in Books > Law > Family Law > Parental & Juvenile

More About the Author

Phyllis Chesler is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at City University of New York. She is a best- selling author, a legendary feminist leader, a psychotherapist and an expert courtroom witness. Dr. Chesler has published thousands of articles and, most recently, studies, about honor-related violence including honor killings. She has published many classic works such as Women and Madness, Mothers on Trial. The Battle for Children and Custody, and Woman's Inhumanity to Woman. She is about to publish her fifteenth book in October, 2013, titled An American Bride in Kabul.

Dr. Chesler has lived in Kabul and Jerusalem and now lives in New York City. She has led campaigns and lectured in Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East.

Dr. Chesler is co-founder of the Association for Women in Psychology (1969), the National Women's Health Network (1974), and the International Committee for the Jerusalem based Women of the Wall (1989).

A revised and updated edition of Women and Madness was published in 2005; a new edition of Woman's Inhumanity to Woman with a new Introduction was published in 2009; and a Twenty Fifth anniversary edition of Mothers on Trial with eight new chapters was published in 2011. In 2009, 2010, and 2012, Dr. Chesler published three pioneering academic studies on honor killings and an academic article about the Burqa. All four studies appeared in Middle East Quarterly. Her work has been translated into many European languages and into Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Hebrew.

Since 9/11, Dr. Chesler has focused on the rights of women, dissidents, and gays in the Islamic world; on anti-Semitism and the demonization of Israel; the psychology of terrorism; the nature of propaganda; and honor-related violence. She has testified for Muslim and ex-Muslim women who are seeking asylum or citizenship based on their credible belief that their families will honor kill them.
Over the years, Dr. Chesler has appeared in the mainstream, leftwing, and rightwing media. She has been on The Today Show and The O'Reilly Factor; on Donahue, Geraldo, and Oprah--and on the 700 Club; Israel National radio, and Al-Hurrah. Dr. Chesler has been on Nightline, Court TV, the History Channel, MSNBC, NPR, the MacNeil-Lehrer Report and CNN--and on FOX News.

Dr. Chesler has been published, interviewed, and reviewed in The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, The Times of London, The New York Times, The Weekly Standard, National Review, Il Foglio, Ha'aretz, Frontpage.com, Salon, The Globe and Mail, The London Guardian, Israel National News, The Jewish Week, The Jewish Press, Psychology Today, Science Magazine, etc.
There are over 4 million references to Dr. Chesler's work online. She has been profiled in many encyclopedias, including Feminists Who Have Changed America, Jewish Women in America, and in the latest Encyclopedia Judaica. Approximately 100,000+ people visit her website each year and from more than 180 countries. Her articles are archived at her website http://www.phyllis-chesler.com/ where she may also be contacted.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Must read for EVERY MOTHER - -even still married ones ! March 27, 2000

By "ksward2000"

Format:Paperback

Every mother should read this eyeopening book about the patriarchal legal system. Mothers do not get custody if fathers (even poor fathers) want to ask for it. Good mothers lose custody, bad fathers get custody (and child support) and the court system is biased toward men and their money. Mothers are slammed if they work for not being a full time mom, and equally so if they ARE full time moms for being lazy. I read this book ten years ago and rarely a week goes by that I don't think about it or tell someone about it.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent, fact-filled book that is must read for anyone June 25, 2011

By Talia Carner

Format:Paperback

Not since slavery in the USA were mothers punished by having their children taken away from them. Yet, in family courts all across America, judges and quasi-judicial officers of the court do just that: children who are abused or molested by their fathers are removed from their primary-care good mothers and are placed in the hands of their molesting fathers.

How this scandal can go on for decades with hardly any change, without any public outcry, and without any protest from human rights' activists is due to the fact that outsiders to the gutter of our family courts' justice simply refuse to believe it.

In her revised and updated milestone fact-filled book, "Mothers on Trial," Phyllis Chesler fights to save thousands of children from becoming yet another generation of victims of a court system that betrays them time and again. She points out that while adult women often recount childhood sexual molestation at home by close relatives--and these women's stories are believed--people tend to disbelieve when actually facing such cases as they happen in real time, right in front of them.

It is a documented fact that when fathers fight for custody, 70% of the time they obtain full or partial custody. People often assume that the reason these men who, in most part, have not been fully involved in their children's lives--sometimes have been absent for months or even years--now gain custody is because the mothers are unfit. The naked truth is that in most of these cases, the father is emotionally and verbally abusive or outright violent. The mother, often the product of an abusive home, often abused for years in her marriage to the father of her children, now faces battle for which she is woefully unequipped to wage. Distraught, terrified, isolated, alienated in a system that scrutinizes her with the same critical and belittling attitude she's encountered in her private lives, panicked over the fate of her sexually molested children, she seems "emotional" "unreasonable" and "difficult." Her refusal to share parenting or give access to a man who sexually molest her children is viewed as her being "rigid" and "uncooperative."

Furthermore, with limited or no financial resources, she comes to court either unrepresented by an attorney, or by an incompetent lawyer with little interest in the complexity of such a case. Or, as is often the case, she does not have the funds to keep the protracted legal battle a high-conflict custody case requires. Filing fees, transcripts, payments to evaluators and her lawyer's hourly rate quickly rise to thousands of dollars.

In the 1990s I stumbled upon the phenomenon of protective mothers losing these battles in drove, researched it for a few years, and finally published a novel about one such fictional mother in 2002. (Puppet Child.) Since then, I became an activist, trying to find ways to save thousands of children each year from family court's "justice." What amazes me is how little has changed in the over decade in which I've witnessed more mothers enter the nightmare of family court, where they are discredited, disenfranchised and disbelieved.

Dr. Chesler has been at it a lot longer. Twenty-five years ago she published "Mothers on Trial," a book that starts with the history of men's ownership of their families and the lingering feudal notion of male supremacy as the head of the household. She pointed then--and continues to do so now in this excellent revised edition--that society and court hold men to much lower parenting standards than they do women. Mothers fail at every single check list (Does the divorced mother have sex? Is she overwrought with anxiety? Is she poor?) while men can be cold, disinterested, dysfunctional or even violent and they will be excused. In fact, fathers are given new chances time and again to foster their relationships with their children regardless of their abhorrent personal histories, while mothers' contact with their children are not only curtailed or cut down to expensive supervised visitations, but all too often are severed completely.

If a father poisons a child's mind against the mother, it does not enter into the question of his parenting skills. But all too often, a child's fear of an abusive father is regarded as the mother's brainwashing the child, rather than the father's own doing. A judge will then chastise the mother for not encouraging enough the relationship with the father--and actually transfer custody to that abusive father. The notion of the best interest of the child and how much the child stands to suffer from cutting the bond with the primary caretaking mother while shuttling into a new life with a man the child fears, does not enter into the equation.

A chapter on Fathers' Supremacist Movement, reports that fathers' rights groups have also gathered steam in recent decades and have organized themselves in ways that mothers have failed to do. Some leaders in fathers' groups have a recorded history of battering their wives or girlfriends, or are convicted pedophiles. Others may have a legitimate concern about shared parenting, but have been expressing strong misogynistic opinions. Common to both ends of the spectrum is the way fathers have been presenting themselves: as persecuted victims. They have been receiving media attention and courtroom sympathy with bogus theories (foremost is Parental Alienation Syndrome that is used almost exclusively against mothers,) and have been successful in passing legislation, due in part to Federal funding under the uncritical assumption that children need equal contact with both parents. Mothers do not have access to equal Federal funding.

In this revised edition, after editing out six chapters and adding eight more while updating the available research, Dr. Chesler examines closely many such cases of outright injustice that defy anything people know and believe possible in our society.

Phyllis Chesler's book is a must read for every judge, court evaluation, guardian ad litem, social worker, psychologist and lawyer. But more importantly, it should be read by anyone who cares about human rights or about children, because it is time we raise our collective indignation to stop and reverse the life sentence without parole our courts inflict upon children placed in the hands of their molesters.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Mothers on Trial (2011) 25th Anniversary Edition October 24, 2011

By Maureen T. Hannah

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

It's been twenty five years since the initial publication of Mothers on Trial (MOT), Dr. Phyllis Chesler's exposé of the gross injustices inflicted on battered women by family/divorce courts in the U.S. and across the world. MOT first came out in 1986, in an era when marriage and "family values" were worshipped while single mothers were vilified (remember Dan Quayle? Murphy Brown?). It was during this same period when the anti-feminist fathers rights (aka male supremacist) movement--an evil sibling of other male-worshipping organizations like the Promise Keepers and its ilk, all born out of the womb of the religious right-- was in its early formative stage.
A used copy of Mothers on Trial found its way into my hands right around the time I was awaiting the court's final decision in my own child custody battle. When I first filed petitions for legal protection and child custody in the Albany County (New York) family court, I thought the evidence in my case was rock solid, if not overwhelming. I naively assumed that the court's orders would be based upon the evidence and the law. What I encountered, instead, was the convoluted system described by Dr. Chesler in MOT. I found a system driven by cronyism and the profit motive. I was confronted with a legal climate that seemed utterly obsessed with the rights of fathers, no matter how monstrously those fathers behaved toward their partner and children. I encountered legal professionals who dismissed my allegations, ignored the evidence I'd gathered, and gave little credence to my record of parenting. I witnessed legal professionals making nonsensical recommendations that barely masked their disdain for women in general and battered women like me in particular. I was subjected to court orders that not only failed to deliver the protections I was seeking but instead added to my own and my children's suffering.
But at the very least, reading Dr. Chesler's masterpiece at that particular juncture was immensely cathartic. The legal scenario described therein mirrored almost perfectly all that I'd just gone through during approximately three years of custody litigation. It assured me, in my traumatized state, that what I'd experienced was not about me personally, nor was it unique in the least. At the time, I was glad that I hadn't come across the book earlier on in the litigation process; my ignorance had actually protected me from the paralyzing fear I'm sure I would have felt if I had really known all along what was going on in the belly of the family court beast.
Having gone through this up-close-and-personal experience, I became active in the women's custody movement (often referred to as the protective mothers movement). Sitting here now, nearly a dozen years later, I can assure you that what MOT describes is, to this day, standard operating procedure. The custody courts continue to be infested with legal "experts" whose misuse of psychological tests and application of bogus psychological theories arenothing less than unethical and incompetent if not outright corrupt. The courts are led by judges who continue to issue outlandish custody and visitation orders that fly in the face of everything we'lve learned in the past several decades about the toxic effects of abuse on children and their development. Twenty five years later, mothers are still very much on trial.
As the new Mothers on Trial demonstrates, the legal landscape faced by protective mothers has only gotten darker. The nightmare facing them is even worse than the one their mothers and grandmothers faced in earlier decades. Don't let the fathers rights misogynists, or anyone else, tell you otherwise.
Sill not convinced? Do you still believe that mothers are favored in the child custody courts? Then read this book.
Reviewed by: Dr. Mo Therese Hannah, Chair, Battered Mothers Custody Conference [e-mail] [...]