The Family Court Crisis
TO LEARN MORE, read the rest of the Afterword and "To Learn More, To Get Involved" in Not If I Can Help It. You'll find lists of organizations that are working to promote family court reform, to provide services to victims of the current dysfunctional system, and to educate lawmakers and the public about the scope of the problem.
Click on the buttons below for more information about the family court crisis and about organizations that are working to make a difference.
From the Afterword to Not If I Can Help It
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THE EVENTS DESCRIBED IN THIS BOOK took place in two counties in Pennsylvania between the years 1983 and 1989. If these events seem like relics of the past, I have bad news. Everything that happened then and there not only could happen today but is happening today, in every county and in every state in America. ​
Domestic violence is an enduring scourge, and our legal system continues to do it injustice.
In 2021, when I began writing this memoir, 5,360 victims of domestic violence were murdered in America by an intimate partner or a family or household member; 109 were from my home state of Pennsylvania. I do not know how many of those victims were children, but I do know that child fatalities resulting from domestic violence have increased nationally by an average of 4.3 percent every year for the past decade. The yearly number of nonlethal incidents of domestic violence in America is staggering. According to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, an average of 24 victims of domestic violence are raped, physically abused, or stalked every minute in America. That adds up to more than 12 million a year. More than one in three American women (35.6 percent) will be victims of domestic violence in their lifetime. For one in four, the abuse will be severe. As with the death toll, the actual numbers are far greater. The majority of incidents of abuse are never reported. More often than not, victims don’t tell. And even when they do tell, their reports are often discounted. ​
So the epidemic of domestic violence continues to rage, unabated. The American an justice system has failed to contain it.
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--Meg Groff
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