The Battered Women's Justice Project
presents
Custody Challenges for Battered Women:
Research & Practice
Webinar - Tuesday, Aug 20th, 2013
11am- 12:30pm (Texas Time)
Faculty:
Lenore Walker, Ed.D., ABPP is currently a Professor at Nova Southeastern University in the Center for Psychological Studies where she is Coordinator of the Forensic Psychology Concentration. She earned her Ed.D. degree in psychology from Rutgers, The State University in New Jersey in 1972 with expertise in working with children and their families. She also holds a M.S. from City College of the City University of New York in 1969 and an A.B. degree from Hunter College of CUNY in 1962. In 2004 she earned a Post Doctoral Master of Science degree in Psychopharmacology from NSU. She became licensed to practice psychology in New Jersey in 1974, in Colorado in 1975 and in 1994 in Florid. She was Board Certified by the American Board of Professional Psychology in Clinical Psychology in 1979 and in Couples and Family Psychology in 2003.
In addition to her academic credentials, Dr. Walker has been in the independent practice of psychology for almost 40 years. Her work began with abused children and their families in the early 1970’s when this country was first instituting child abuse reporting laws. After noting the trauma to both the children and their parents from abuse, Lenore began research that was supported by funding from the National Institute of Mental Health on the psychological effects from domestic violence, calling it Battered Woman Syndrome. It was the first research to look at the psychological theories of how trauma and abuse caused the psychological problems that we work with today in families. She’s been on national policymaking committees, testified numerous times before Congress, in state and Federal courts around the US and other countries. She’s been an advisor to NATO, the ILANUD project of the United Nations, Pan American Health Organization, WHO, and others. She has been elected to the Board of Directors and Council of Representatives of the American Psychological Association and served as Chair of the APA Presidential Task Force on Violence and the Family. She’s authored or co-authored over 15 books, including the classic The Battered Woman, and 50+ scientific articles and is often traveling to do training in different countries.
In her work at NSU Center for Psychological Studies, together with Dr. David Shapiro and Dr. Ross Seligson, she trains and supervises doctoral students in forensic psychology who both provide psychological evaluations at no charge to families involved with the dependency courts in Broward County and run groups in the Juvenile Detention Center and the jails to help the people there heal from trauma.
Becki Truscott Kondkar, J.D. Professor Kondkar is Deputy Director of Tulane Law School’s Domestic Violence Clinic, where she teaches civil litigation skills and instructs third-year law students in their representation of victims of domestic violence. After graduating from the University of NC at Chapel Hill School of Law in 1999, Professor Kondkar devoted her legal career to representing victims of family violence. She has litigated hundreds of domestic violence and child abuse cases in trial and appellate courts in eleven states, both in private practice and non-profit firms. In 2006, she took a 10-month hiatus from family violence work to provide full-time disaster relief legal services to low-income New Orleanians returning home after Hurricane Katrina. In November 2006, she joined the faculty of Tulane Law School.
A national educator on legal issues relating to both domestic violence and child sex abuse, Becki has been invited to train hundreds of attorneys, judges, law enforcement officers, domestic violence advocates, child welfare workers, custody evaluators, mental health professionals, and United States Department of Justice grant recipients. Her work focuses on raising standards of practice for attorneys litigating family violence cases, confronting the intersection of domestic violence and child sex abuse, addressing the family court=s systemic failure to protect adult and child victims of family violence, and challenging the family court=s bourgeoning reliance on inadequately trained mental health professionals in family violence cases.
In New Orleans, Professor Kondkar has participated broadly in civil and criminal justice reform efforts around domestic violence, and she serves on a variety of committees addressing system reform in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. She has worked with the State Attorney General’s Office and the U.S. Attorney’s Office to provide training to the New Orleans Police Department, and has developed curriculum for advanced law enforcement training on a variety of topics relating to sexual assault, domestic violence, and predominant aggressor investigations. She conducts annual trainings on domestic violence and health care at Tulane Medical School, and provides mentoring, individual training, and Continuing Legal Education training to a network of pro bono and public interest attorneys representing domestic violence victims in family court cases. Becki was awarded the 2010 Esprit de Femme Award by Louisiana State University, for her exceptional work toward the advancement of women.
Content:
Dr. Walker and Professor Kondkar will discuss the challenges confronted by battered women as they consider whether to seek a custody/parenting time order from a court. In making decisions about mediation, negotiation and/or litigation of custody issues, battered women must consider the risks posed by the batterer to the children during access, any risks both to the battered woman and children at exchange, whether these risks can be mitigated by supervised exchange or visitation, and whether a 3rd party, such as a friend or family member, can safety supervise or if supervision should be done at a center. Immediately after separation, battered women may want to see a temporary custody order in a civil protection order. But it may be that the batterer is not interested in custody of the children and poses no risk to them. In this case, seeking a custody order may not be necessary or can be sought at some time after the crises and emotions of separation have somewhat abated. Battered women need to know the law, the court system, the inclination of judges, the options for supervision (and the risks of supervision center staff judging her protective parenting negatively), the likelihood that a judge will respond swiftly to a batterer's violation of a custody order, the kinds of behavior that constitute "a change of circumstances" that may be the basis for a modification of a custody order, and the portability of a custody order within the state and across state lines - among other things.
Registration Information:
If you are an OVW Arrest/GTEAP/Community-Defined Solutions grantee, please use your OVW-issued grant number. If you are NOT an Arrest grantee, no number is required.
If you do not receive a confirmation email within a few minutes of registering, it has likely gone to your Spam or Junk Mail folder. Please add noreply@bwjp.org to your list of safe addresses.
Questions of a technical nature and questions regarding your grant or eligibility for the webinar can be directed to Kari Sonmore (ksonmore@bwjp.org). If you have questions about the content of the webinar, please contact Barbara Hart (barbarha@aol.com).
Register online at:
http://conferences.bwjp.org/webconferencedetail.aspx?confid=342
Registration ends at 3 pm EDT on 8/19/13
