Mission: Protect the health, safety, and well-being of children whose parents separate or divorce.

Problem: Policies and practices in family court, child welfare (CPS), and domestic violence put children in harm’s way when their parents separate and contest custody. Instead of protecting the safety and well-being of children, systems more often exacerbate child abuse and family violence as children are put in the middle of their parent’s conflict.

Underlying Systemic Failures:

  1. Failure to recognize and assess for the child’s most significant risk in contested custody: loss of a healthy, safe, and secure relationship with a parent.
  2. Failure to protect children from being abused and weaponized as pawns in their parent’s custody battle.
  3. Failure to hold parents accountable for knowingly making false allegations of child abuse, domestic violence, or parental alienation in an attempt to weaponize CPS, law enforcement, and family court. False allegations are made without fear of consequence.
  4. Broad discretion of judges, case workers, and evaluators, with no accountability for anyone involved or for systems that deny due process or are negligent.

Colorado Resilience (COR) brings a perspective that has long been missing in these policy discussions. COR believes that moms and dads are equally safe and essential in their children’s lives and that it’s of paramount importance to protect both parent-child relationships equally.

Policy Solutions:

  1. Rebuttable Presumption of Equal Parenting: Equal protection for both parents’ relationship with their child unless either is proven unfit or unsafe.
  2. Parental Alienation (PA): Define PA in Colorado Children’s Code of Abuse and Neglect, elsewhere in C.R.S Titles 14 and 19, and acknowledge PA throughout CPS policy.
  3. Prosecute parents who knowingly use false allegations as the basis for obtaining protective orders or for filing other custody-related court motions.
  4. Enforce existing criminal statute, C.R.S. 18-3-308, for custodial interference, knowingly violating court custody orders by withholding a child from a custodial relationship.
  5. Allow systems and system professionals (judges, case managers, evaluators, ect.) to be held liable for negligence, falsification of records, or denying people due process.

Colorado Resilience is forming a Family Systems Policy Counsel and recruiting 12 to 15 members representing relevant state/county departments or agencies, other child and family policy organizations, and moms and dads with lived experiences in family court, child welfare (CPS), and domestic violence systems. More than just lived experience, we need people who can rise above their own situations and positively contribute to policy solutions that protect the whole family.

Contact Carl Roberts at carl@coloradoresilience.org or Julie Grayson JD, CFM at jfamilygrayson@aol.com for more information.