More commonly, they turn family squabbles into wars. This intrusion of government power into private lives is the most extensive abuse of human rights since the abolition of slavery. It is also the best hidden, almost unknown outside the rapidly expanding circle of its victims. In consequence, fathers are sent to jail without even being so much as accused of a crime, let alone convicted. Children are taken from their parents based on anonymous accusations that lead to secret tribunals at which neither the parents nor the children nor even the accusers are allowed to testify.
Parents find out the results when their children are abducted at their schools.
The press is not allowed to identify the victims. The rule of law is completely ignored. Family courts are considered to be civil courts so the legal safeguards of the criminal system are not available. Yet they have the same powers to strip people of their rights and even to imprison them, sometimes for years. This series of articles will argue that the solution to social problems, from child abuse to drug abuse to divorce and single motherhood, is not to eradicate the problem using the heavy hand of government and the courts nor to mitigate them using the taxes of people who have never met neither the supposed perpetrators nor the supposed victims.