Ask the Experts - Association of Family and Conciliation Courts

October 19 Ask the Experts

William Bernet, Benjamin D. Garber, and Alan D. Blotcky

Adversarial Collaboration is Alive and Well in Family Law

[Adversarial collaborations] require disagreeing scholars to (a) work together in pursuit of truth, (b) articulate their precise and empirically testable disagreements, (c) mutually agree upon rigorous and unbiased tests of their competing hypotheses, (d) commit to conditions of falsifiability or at least belief updating, and (e) pursue publication of the results regardless of their outcomes” [emphasis in original]. - Ceci, Clark, Jussim, and Williams (2026, p. 375)

AFCC has a long history of adversarial collaboration. Peter Salem (2019) said that starting in the early 2000s, “AFCC decided to emphasize opportunities to address critical issues in family law” (p. 232). This was the initiative behind several AFCC “think tanks,” which were elaborate discussions that addressed difficult and controversial topics. A more recent example of inter-agency collaboration was the “Joint Statement on Parent–Child Contact Problems” (PCCP), a shared project of AFCC and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (2022). Representatives of the organizations met several times and eventually published the “Joint Statement,” a balanced account of various factors related to PCCPs.

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.

August 25 Ask the Experts

Natalie Malovich, PhD & Samuel J. Sorensen, JD

It's Just a Phone…Or Is It? Managing Technology to Reduce Conflict in Coparenting

Rick is helping his five-year-old daughter get ready for school when he notices a set of small numbers written neatly on her thigh. “What’s that, honey?” he asks. She responds, “Oh, that’s Mommy’s phone number…so I can call her if I don’t feel safe.”

Julie is at an appointment with the custody evaluator and hands her a stack of photos. These include a picture of several beer bottles in a trash can and a wine bottle on a pantry shelf. When the examiner turns to her with a puzzled look, Julie explains, “I think this shows you what a heavy drinker Nate is,” adding, “The girls worry a lot about this, so they take pictures to show me.” Continue Reading.

July 22 Ask the Experts

Jennifer Myers Harrison, PsyD, ABPP, ATR-BC

A Trauma-Informed Lens for Family Court: 10 Tips for Applying It Across Roles

Families arrive in our courtrooms and offices at some of the hardest moments of their lives. Many carry histories of harm that long predate the case in front of us, and the legal process itself can stir those histories back to the surface. A trauma-informed lens helps us see this clearly. It does not ask every professional to become a therapist, and it does not ask us to set aside neutrality or critical judgment. It asks us to understand how adversity and fear shape behavior, and to do our work in a way that does not add to the harm.

What follows are ten practical considerations for bringing that lens to family court, whatever role we play. Judges, evaluators, mediators, parenting coordinators, minor's counsel, attorneys, and treating clinicians each have a different vantage point, but the lens is available to all of us.

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About

AFCC is the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts – the premier interdisciplinary international association of professionals dedicated to the resolution of family conflict. AFCC members include many of the leading practitioners, researchers, educators and policymakers in the family court arena. AFCC provides training and education, and does not license, certify, or regulate the practice of its members.

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