September 23 Ask the Experts Eric Friedlander, MS Beyond the Test Result: Understanding Addiction in Family Law Working with families where substance use is at issue is one of the most demanding areas in family law. The job requires racing between hearings, reports, and progress notes, trying to make a fair determination on facts that rarely hold still. At that pace, it's easy to fall back on the shorthand our systems have built around addiction: a positive test means unsafe, a clean test means safe, a relapse means the case is closed on trust. It makes sense under this much pressure. It's also, more often than not, the wrong call.
September 23 Ask the Experts Kellsey Forest, LICSW Pet-Related Abuse as a Marker of Coercive Control in Family Court Assessments Family court evaluators often investigate allegations of domestic violence, child abuse, coercive control, and post-separation abuse. In that work, pets are easy to overlook as collateral or as a simple dispute over property. In some families, however, threats to harm a pet, refusal to return the animal, withholding veterinary care, provoking the animal, or using a child’s bond with the pet to intimidate the other parent are not peripheral details. They may provide important evidence of coercive control, child trauma exposure, post-separation abuse, and parenting-capacity concerns.