Nightmare in Hostage Hills

Christina Mask

Description

“Sadly, Christina’s journey, and her children’s experience of being collateral damage, is not atypical. Kudos for her strength and bravery in putting her story out there as a cautionary tale for others.” (Dr. Susan Weitzman, author, Not to People like Us: Hidden Abuse in Upscale Marriages).
“Christina Mask’s Nightmare is constructed around fragments from a life in agony as one woman attempts to escape abuse, retain her sanity, and regain the custody of three children the family court and her husband have taken from her. It’s all here—the daily records over months, then years; the diary entries; the self-blame; the excuses; the shame; the absurdist dialogues with family therapists; marginalia from readings or lectures or religious texts; letters pleadings with judges and lawyers and evaluators; poems; letters to and from the children, real and imagined; the reports that put her claims of abuse in quotations; and so, so much more. These pieces are loosely joined by a narrative and an interior monologue that I sometimes found too much to bear. But then I realized I was scanning something akin to a Picasso painting, whose underlying truth lay not in what was on the page, not the fragments, but in the hope that put them out here, no more evident than in the endlessly reasonable letters Mask writes to intractable foes. Mask has cast her eye on what Yeats termed ‘the broken, crumbling battlement’ of the self and lived to write it. As one director famously said about the sixty women and children crowded into her six-bedroom shelter, ‘If they can manage this, they can manage anything.’ Christina’s book gives us faith that she is right.” (Evan Stark, PhD, MSW. The writer is professor emeritus at Rutgers University, and author of Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life [Oxford, 2007]).

Sujets

• Droit et juridique
• Malpractice
• Law

Informations

• Publié par: WestBow Press
• Date de parution: 20 novembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781973608820
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

Nightmare in Hostage Hills
 
 
 
 
by Christina Mask
Edited by Margaret M. FitzGerald, L.C.S.W.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Copyright © 2017 by Christina Mask.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
This is a work of creative nonfiction. The events are portrayed to the best of my memory. While all the events and entries in the book are true, some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.
 
 
 
WestBow Press
A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.westbowpress.com
844-714-3454
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
ISBN: 978-1-9736-0880-6 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-9736-0881-3 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-9736-0882-0 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017916881
 
 
 
WestBow Press rev. date: 05/31/2023
CONTENTS
Prologue
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Appendices
Appendix A Slaughterhouse Custody Evaluation of Mask Family 2005
Appendix B Guide to Assessing Risk to Children From Batterers
Appendix C Brain Systems Diagram
Appendix D 2009 Slaughterhouse Mask Family Custody Evaluation Report
Appendix E Drs. Craven & Silence Mask Family Report August 2009
Appendix F Attachment in Parental Alienation
Bibliography
Endnotes
 
 
 
For my Jade, Zach, and Leo nard, May the truth set you free. Love you for ever, Mom
 
PROLOGUE
My name is Margaret FitzGerald, L.C.S.W.
I have known Christina Mask for quite some time. We reconnected after she moved close by. I barely recognized the woman she had become. We were sitting together at a local coffee shop as she relayed some of the horrors of her experience through almost 6 years and over $500K thrown into the family court system fighting for and losing her 3 children. She sank into my arms through a flood of tears.
As I have heard bits and pieces of very similar stories in my private practice, it became clear to me that this story of the silent epidemic of mothers and children being ripped apart by professionals in family court system could no longer remain hidden in the dark. The stories from decades ago to these ongoing cases where mothers are being handcuffed to hospital beds for trying to contact their children must end immediately. { Mom Arrested, Handcuffed to Hospital Bed for Attempting to Contact Kids , Women’s Coalition News and Views : April 9, 2023}
It became clear to me that in order to assist my friend in recovering from all the loss and trauma she endured, Christina needed to write her story. She also expressed that she wanted the public to become aware through her true story of the profound malfeasance that is occurring in the family court system.
As this task of organizing and writing her story through all the evidence she had collected over the years from her children’s childhood pictures, love letters, artwork, journal entries, custody evaluations during the legal case, legal documents through her custody massacre, Christina requested my assistance in writing Nightmare in Hostage H ills .
Step into the nightmare Christina and her 3 children endured at the hands of the organized crime syndicate of family court system USA, crime of the century-family court exposed.
FOREWORD
“My first indication that family courts are unable to respond appropriately to domestic violence cases was seeing decisions that were not within the range of reasonable or possible outcomes. In every case the mistakes were tilted in favor of abusive fathers and placed the children in jeopardy.
One case was so egregious I decided to write my first book so I could share the story. A judge awarded unsupervised visitation to a father who admitted kissing his daughters on their privates. The father penetrated his four-year-old daughter during the first visitation after the judge’s order. Only new charges by CPS finally stopped the dangerous visits. The mother won custody and the CPS caseworker and I were invited to a celebratory dinner. The children called us believers because we believed them when the professionals who were supposed to protect them did not.
At the first Battered Mothers Custody Conference, I learned that the danger is not limited to a particular judge or location. Good and credible mothers from across the country shared their painful stories of ignorance, bias, and retaliation. Professionals and researchers supported the conclusion that the family courts are broken. And soon children who had aged out of their custody orders and called themselves the Courageous Kids told heartbreaking stories of the abuse they suffered and of courts that separated them from mothers trying to protect them.
And then I accepted a case that would end my legal career. An evaluator used the normal probability standard for the father, but a certainty standard for the mother. The evaluator said she could not accept the abuse allegations as long as the father denied them. The evaluator also said she was influenced by her belief the judge and law guardian wanted the father to have custody. Any first-year law student would know courts cannot use probability for one party and certainty against the other, but over twenty judges reviewed the case and none ever objected to the most fundamental violation of due process and equal protection.
I was forced to leave the case after the trial for health reasons. The judge forced the mother to appear without representation when the father sought to move to Texas where she was likely never to see her children again. The judge held her in contempt because she kept saying objection in order to preserve her right to appeal. He never told her she had preserved her exception but only yelled and threatened her. The judge put her in jail for almost a month when she was seven-months pregnant. I wrote an article criticizing the judge and asking the legislature to pass a law so other victims would not be similarly mistreated. The judge filed a grievance against me and his colleagues closed their eyes and supported him.
Mothers’ Sto ries
Ben Atherton Zeman is an actor who works to prevent men’s violence against women. He often performs vignettes to illustrate how men take our unearned privileges for granted and does it in a humorous way that men can hear. Ben often says that he feels privileged when protective mothers share their stories with him. This is such a provocative formulation because the stories are often painful to hear and not always well organized. As a result, judges, lawyers, evaluators, police, reporters and others who need this information often try to avoid or cut these stories short. At the same time, most protective mothers desperately want to share their story because they believe it will help the public understand the widespread failure of family courts to respond appropriately to domestic violence custody cases.
For many decades, the media failed to expose the scandal and children continued to suffer. The conundrum for the media is that personal stories provide human interest but are too often viewed as “he-said-she-said” because the inadequately trained professionals don’t know what to look for to confirm the frequent truth in victim’s reports. The media avoided the stories because of the expense to properly investigate the cases, uncertainty about who is telling the truth, and the fear of lawsuits from litigious abusers. Scientific research can be used to demonstrate the frightening frequency that family courts get abuse cases dangerously wrong; but statistics tend to be boring and, therefore, are unable keep viewers’ interest.
Scientific Research Supports Protective Mot hers
There is now a specialized body of scientific research that definitively establishes that a large majority of domestic violence cases are decided wrong and tilted to favor dangerous abusers. We know this from research that demonstrates the courts are ignoring important studies that would help courts recognize and respond to domestic violence and from scientific research that demonstrates the frequency courts make decisions that harm children.
The ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) Research, from the CDC, found that domestic violence and child abuse are far more harmful than previously realized. And it is living with an abuser that causes fear and stress to the direct victim and the children in the home. The resulting stress makes children’s lives shorter and unhealthier. Perhaps most disconcerting, when children exposed to ACEs come to family court the