Understanding Psychological Abuse in Custody Cases
Three, two, one, go. Hi, my name is Carl Birkhead. I’m a Tulsa child custody attorney with Wirth Law Office in Oklahoma. I’ve been a family attorney for about eight years now, and I want to help you make law easy by talking about the changes that have come about in the last year in the family law world, specifically regarding custody, visitation, and guardianship.
So I’m talking today about 112.5, Title 43, Section 112.5. This is the title that talks about when a parent is fit or unfit for custody, visitation, or guardianship of a child. I’ve been talking a lot about how this statute changes in subparagraphs C and D because it carves out specific scenarios where a parent is unfit to have custody, visitation, or guardianship.
New Definitions and Legal Protections
These are scenarios regarding abuse, stalking, harassment, substance abuse, and coercive controlling acts. That’s what I’m going to talk about today because this is such a huge change in how these cases are being prosecuted. While this isn’t a criminal thing, it’s about how they’re being pursued.
It used to be that psychological abuse was very hard to define, it’s very hard to quantify, and it’s really hard to get the courts to pay attention to unless it’s being accompanied by some physical abuse. It’s something that I know, countless family attorneys have faced, having to tell clients they can’t put a picture of emotional bruises on the stand like physical ones.
The Impact of Legal Changes
The law didn’t really make any protections or allowances for such cases. The law never said, hey, if someone’s maybe not hitting a child, but telling a child that they’re terrible every day and making the child feel they don’t deserve to be alive, at least they’re not hitting the child. That’s what this law is changing now.
Psychological and pattern-based abuse is now legally relevant to these proceedings. And not that it wasn’t relevant before, but now it’s been specifically defined. If you’re able to show that a parent is perpetrating these coercive and controlling, demeaning acts, then that triggers the rebuttable presumption.
Taking Action: Building Your Case
This law makes them unfit to have custody, unfit for unsupervised visitation, and unfit for guardianship. This is going to be a huge game-changer in domestic violence situations because often there’s no physical evidence left, but the emotional harm is severe.
So if you’re in these situations, please give me a call. I want to go over your evidence, and I want to see what we can do to build this case for you. My name is Oklahoma family law attorney Carl Birkhead. I’m with Wirth Law Office, and I want to help you make law easy.
Start Your Journey to Justice
Don’t let emotional abuse go unnoticed in your custody case. Schedule a low-cost initial strategy session to discuss your situation. Call us today at 918-879-1681. Let Wirth Law Office provide the support and guidance you need to protect your children and secure their well-being.
