Children! (part 2)
Supervised Visitation. The holy grail of child warfare.
Now I know that there are some legitimate safety concerns with some parents. But percentage wise, it is extremely less likely that a parent is "a serious risk of endangerment to the child" (legal standard) then a trip to domestic court will have you think. I think its disgusting when a parent lies in an attempt to block access to a child by the other parent. Fortunately, courts are becoming more and more aware of the rampant abuse of this tactic.
Having argued both sides of the issue, I am glad that Illinois courts have made it hard to block a parent from seeing their kids, while at the same time providing a mechanism to protect the few children who need protection.
In a recent case, I represented a father who could not see his daughter unless he went over to the mother's house for an hour or two a week, while the mother stayed in the room. He had no criminal background, no drug past, no red flags. His one fault had been to listen to his ex-wife when she said he did not need an attorney for his divorce, and that her attorney would take care of everything. Sheesh! A related thought is that when people ask me if being a family lawyer is satisfying, I think of the pure joy in my client's voice when he got to be a father to his daughter for the first time in three years.
