Well, what we have received for our huge sum of money + stress + dealing with this abusive legal apparatus is that my very young nephew has not been physically alone with his biological father for several years, thus ensuring that he hasn't been sexually abused by his father, nor has his picture been used to trade with others in exchange for pictures they might have, nor used to signal in his father's online accounts that he is open to exchanging pictures (apart from the one photo that was wrongly taken while he was at a supervised visit). And through the civil case we gathered affidavits from counselors and psychologists which are also useful to the criminal case and may end up being a cornerstone in the criminal case.

How to put a price on ensuring your 5-year-old nephew is kept away from a highly probable source of abuse? Had we not pursued this through the abusive, misogynistic legal system, we would have had no enforceable way to keep my nephew out of immediate risk of grave and really, truly serious harm. Not the false, inflamed stereotype of harm you described earlier about dead beat dads who get railroaded. Not that. But real sexual and/or physical abuse, and well as the potential for psychological harm related to seeing or being made to take part in child pornography.

The legal apparatus, for all of its horribleness, allowed us to convert metric shitloads of money into safety for my nephew. At least we've gotten several years of safety for him, even if the father ultimately slips through the cracks and gets off easy in some way. At least we've given my nephew the chance to have some years of a safe and normal childhood routine, and allowed him to age and hopefully get to a point where he could recognize if his father ever tried to do something wrong to him in the future.

One way to put it is that you love them so much you agree to basically free fall into PTSD and financial instability if it spares them the strong risk of harm. You hate that that's what the scammy legal apparatus makes you do, but you do it for them. Avoiding it to keep the money really, really won't be better for them if they are significantly abused. People can go on and on about how you shouldn't throw yourself into ruin, much as how you should eventually embrace hospice care and physician assisted suicide when you're terminally ill instead of cranking up the medical bills hoping to prolong life in vain. I see a lot of people mistakenly think the same sort of logic applies when a young, defenseless child is at risk of serious abuse or harm. It doesn't. If the best you can do is throw all your resources at it and you still come up empty handed, well you still have to try. Having saved all those resources and secured a more comfortable life in other ways in the future is completely devoid of meaning or utility if your defenseless young family member really does suffer the harm you failed to relentlessly try to prevent.

I think a lot of your comments are moralistic as well. Of course no one wants to "play the game." The mother in this situation, my sister, was extremely young, uneducated, and in no way even remotely close to a life situation in which she should have made these sorts of decisions. Now she's older, busting her ass at a decent job, raising her kids as a single mother who receives no child support, went back and finished college while working. Frankly she's one of the most impressive people I know. And yet her life is defined by living with mistakes she did not even understand she was making at the age of 21. Being punished over and over for decisions made out of youthful ignorance and small, isolated moments of rebellion.

Yeah, if you're lucky to emerge from youth not happening to have made these mistakes, it's great to turn around and blame others. Or, in my case I didn't make mistakes myself, and in fact managed college and grad school really well, and still had my life ruined by extension when it fell to me to bear the bulk of financial responsibility, and then later also a whole bunch of other things too.

I'm sure the same thing happens to drug users and their families, and all sorts of other hardships. It's like what Philip K. Dick wrote: these people were punished entirely too much for what they did. And what's so sickening is that the other side, the biological father who has caused all of these problems, is not punished at all. His license is suspended and he drives around town anyway, never gets in trouble. He's thousands of dollars in arrears on child support, never pays it back, doesn't matter, no one does anything to him, even as he is delinquent in payment for years. His family are close friends with a local attorney who has basically worked his civil case for free, meanwhile we've paid a huge sum of money just to secure bare minimum supervised visits (which aren't even conducted properly).

The victims in these situations are the ones who are punished. Not the perpetrators. And they are punished for decisions they did not comprehend or understand -- often which they could not have comprehended at all. Yes, it's better if you don't "play the game" but truly no one ends up there through their own volition -- not even when it was based on a choice like drug usage or unprotected sex. When these things are lifelong problems for which you are perpetually punished for something you did before you could even legally buy alcohol, it's really just an unlucky lightning strike that you'll be punished for forever. It's not "your fault" in any realistic sense.

But grandstanding moralists who want to blame the victim will still say it is. Oh, you don't want to have to spend > $100k in legal fees to protect your son from a child predator when you're in your late 20s? Welp, then when you were extremely depressed that one semester in college 6 years ago, you shouldn't have accidentally drank too much and then had unprotected sex that one single time and gotten pregnant. Since you did "choose" that, you are hereby punished for decades. Ugh.