Was Lindsay Clancy acting deliberately when she strangled her three children in their Massachusetts home in 2023, or was she suffering from postpartum psychosis? Did her husband or health professionals miss warning signs? What about Kristopher Karolkiewicz, who murdered his wife and six children in late July before setting fire to their Michigan home? Were their alleged marital problems sufficient cause for someone to worry that he might do something violent? It’s hard to look at these headline-grabbing cases and come to definitive conclusions.
But in thousands of other cases every year, it’s clear that officials did ignore warning signs. These cases concern children murdered by their parents or caregivers, or who died from abuse or neglect, following well-documented histories of child maltreatment or domestic violence. In many of these cases, courts had access to these records yet ordered children back into the arms of dangerous adults anyway.
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A recent article published by the Association of Professionals Solving the Abuse of Children (APSAC) notes that in many cases “filicides by parents have followed some court-ordered contacts of children with divorced parents whom the children feared and rejected.” Courts frequently made these decisions because they “accepted the allegation that the preferred parent is ‘alienating’ the children and persuading them to fear and avoid the other parent.” The researchers argue that, while some parents no doubt badmouth the other in custody disputes, courts should not take claims of parental alienation at face value and should consider the “abundance of evidence that earlier violence predicts poor outcomes after divorce.”
The paper’s recommendations make sense: fathers who are abusive toward their wives and children during marriage are not likely to become calm and peaceful once a court assigns custody to their ex.
My colleagues and I have compiled information on 5,000 child maltreatment fatalities between 2022 and 2026 into a database called Lives Cut Short. We found that almost a fifth of these cases involved a history of domestic violence. More than 1,400 had a record with authorities. While some parents manage to hide their abusive behavior, most have some form of contact with law enforcement, child protection, school administrators, homeless services, or the like before the fatal incident.
All too often, courts ignore these records when making decisions about custody. Even if they don’t buy into the parental alienation theory, they may simply assume that parents will reform themselves, or that children’s testimony is unreliable.
Of course, children don’t always give accurate accounts of what is happening in their homes. The daycare sex abuse panic of the 1980s resulted in the wrongful prosecution of adults on the basis of outlandish testimony by children (often after meticulous coaching by adults). The APSAC researchers acknowledge that sometimes courts order supervised visitation that isn’t really necessary, but they reasonably suggest that “the court’s first thought about a child’s stated fear of a parent should be that the child may have an excellent reason for fear.” Such reasons, especially when combined with a record of violence or threats, should not be ignored or pathologized with “treatment.”
Lawmakers in New York are apparently fed up with the pattern of red flags ignored. Nearly ten years after two-year-old Kyra Franchetti was shot to death by her father during a court-ordered unsupervised visit (despite warnings from the child’s mother that he was stalking and threatening her), the legislature passed Kyra’s Law, which would require judges to consider “any party’s history of domestic violence or child abuse or incidents involving harm to a child” when making custody decisions.
Governor Kathy Hochul has yet to sign the law, which would require family court judges to take account of “police reports, including domestic violence incident reports or reporting of incidents involving child abuse or domestic violence,” and “threats to harm or kill the child, the other party, the other party’s children, self or others, or companion animals,” as well as “sexual abuse or other sexual offenses against the child or the other party.”
Other states have created their own versions of Kyra’s Law. One researcher described Om’s Law in Utah as “a bill to better keep children away from abusive parents.”
Determining how effective such laws have been or will be is tricky. Family courts are rarely held accountable for their decisions. Rulings are almost never overturned on appeal; higher courts typically assume the judges know more about the families involved and thus are better equipped to make the call. Child welfare agencies frequently face blame for leaving kids with abusive parents, but courts approve all of those decisions.
This should change. We should hold judges accountable, too. Not every filicide follows a clear history of violence, but when it does, judges should have to answer for it.