Parental Alienation and Helen Scott ( formerly Helen Scott Goudge )
Helen Scott (her pre-married name), Helen Scott Goudge or just Helen Goudge, was a family law assessor who in our opinion is more of the problem and less of the solution when it comes to family law situations in Toronto, Ontario. Helen advised the Canadian Children's Rights Council in 2020 that she was no longer doing any work with family law consequences, including but not limited to, assessments and parent coordination.
Ms. Goudge advised the Canadian Children's Rights Council in 2021 that she was only doing psychotherapy for individual adults going through divorce at $230 /hr.
One case
The situation was that the parents both lived in the same neighbourhood, had agreed since they broke up that the children would be raised equally, alternating weeks with the change over Saturday at dinner time. The parents lived in the same neighbourhood and both homes were within walking distance of the children's schools. Both parents had an equal shared time agreement.
Prior to the split up of the couple, the mother had been caught having multiple affairs.
9 months into this arrangement the mother became enraged and extremely angry, likely because a new woman had entered the ex-husband's life and was now engaged and living in the matrimonial home which was the father's alone since it was a common-law relationship because the mother had taken 5 years to get a divorce from her 1st husband. She was unemployed when she met this financially well off father from a good family.
The mother started to send the police over to the father's home and made false allegations against the father. The mother then committed domestic violence when she forced her way into the father's residence beating him badly, damaging his front tooth and threatening to kill him. The father called 911 and the police came and took her from his home and charged her. She plead guilty and got probation for 6 months.
The mother then wanted to fight in court to get sole custody and Helen Scott was requested as the assessor by the mother.
Helen Scott, then Helen Goudge, then consulted only with the mother regarding who to interview at the children's school. The mother instructed her to see a former teacher of the children and not the current teachers. After interviewing the male teacher, whom had an affair with the mother, and upon the principal finding out that she had done so, the school principal then wrote a stinging letter stating that she had not been authorized Helen Scott Goudge to talk to that teacher or any teacher and that the teacher wasn't the right person to be interviewed and wasn't even a current teacher of the children.
With regards to the mother breaking into the father's home, threatening to kill him and badly beating him leaving him badly bruises and bleeding, Helen Goudge, stated that the mother's anger was well know to the children AND THEN SHE RECOMMENDED SOLE CUSTODY FOR THE MOTHER WHO WOULDN'T ACCEPT THE STATUS QUO OF EQUAL SHARED PARENTING WITH EQUAL PARENTING TIME.
Helen Scott talked 1st with the mother and her sister. She interviewed the children and visited the mother's home. She refused to even visit the father's home but did so reluctantly after she decided that she would recommend joint custody to the court but that should the mother want sole custody, she would recommend that instead and amend her report to the court. The father stated that she just went through the motions and then on the way out of the home she stated that the courts do whatever she recommends.
After fighting with Helen Scott about having meetings with him, his friends and the children, the father was told by Helen Scott that she would change the parenting time to 65%/35% favouring the mother EVEN THOUGH HER OWN REPORT FOR THE COURT stated that the mother's anger was well know to the children and reported that father wasn't angry at the mother. Such a change of time would get the mother child support paid by the father. Goudge recommended 'joint custody' unless the mother wanted sole custody. Helen Scott then changed her recommendation to the court because the mother wanted sole custody.
Had the assessor, Helen Scottt Goudge supported the shared equal parenting arrangement that both parents had wanted prior to the mother becoming full of anger and starting legal action paid for fully by legal aid which cost tax payers over $50,000, the children would have been safe in the 50/50 time split. The mother used the report of Helen Scott with the children to endorse her position that she should have sole custody.
If you want to know more about Helen Scott Goudge, read the best selling book Divorce From Hell written by Wendy Dennis, a well known author. Helen Scott Goudge was the assessor in that case and failed miserable.
Helen Scott Goudge was the family assessor in the case published in the book below tiled " The Divorce from Hell"
Divorce From Hell: How The Justice System Failed A Family
by Wendy Dennis
This gut-wrenching book is the story of Ben Gordon. It is written by his live-in girlfriend and author Wendy Dennis. Dennis tell us that she met Gordon when Gordon was going through a bad divorce; and a bad divorce it is. The true villain in the book is the legal system. Dennis observes Ben Gordon's ordeal as a father who just wanted to remain an involved parent to his two daughters.
Dennis exposes the so-called "experts" who yield extraordinary power with devastating consequences, and she accurately describes an arbitrary `system'' with no accountability that professes to act in the children's best interests but fails to do so. The "game" of family law is accurately described -- as well as who really profits from the "game".
The only surprise here is how Ben Gordon continues to go through his ordeal over a period of nine years and at a cost of over $500,000 by his own estimate. We are only left with the ultimate question: when is the guy going to get it? -- access will only happen if "mother" allows it to happen. For Mr. Gordon, it is apparent, the "game" was over before it even began.
This book is a description of the current reality in Canada. It is this excuse for a family law "system" that needs to be changed -- urgently -- so that so many others, like Ben Gordon, don't get ground into the dirt and out of their children's lives.
Study denouncing fathers sends danger signals
By Kathleen Parker, The Orlando Sentinel, USA, on July 18, 1999
Now is the time for all good fathers to come to the aid of the family.
But you'd better hurry; your days are numbered. In fact, if you happen to be a heterosexual male (further doomed by Caucasian pigmentation), your days are already over, according to a cover article in the June issue of American Psychologist, published by the American Psychological Association.
In their article, "Deconstructing the Essential Father," researchers Louise B. Silverstein and Carl F. Auerbach challenge one of the core institutions of our culture -- fatherhood. Read More .. less, fathers, as we've known and loved them, are obsolete.
The article makes numerous breathtaking assertions, but basically the researchers state that fathers aren't essential to the well-being of children Read More ...
REPORT: Children Need Dads Too: Children with fathers in prison
Quakers United Nations Office
July 2009
Children are heavily impacted by parental imprisonment and greater attention should be given to their rights, needs and welfare in criminal justice policy and practice. Due to a variety of reasons such as mothers often being the primary or sole carer of children, complicated care arrangements, the likelihood of women prisoners being greater distances from home and a host of factors explored in detail in other QUNO publications, maternal imprisonment can be more damaging for children than paternal imprisonment. However, it is important not to underestimate the damage that paternal imprisonment can have on children.
Children with incarcerated fathers experience many of the same problems as those with incarcerated mothers, including coping with loss, environmental disruption, poverty, stigmatisation, health problems and all of the difficulties involved in visiting a parent in prison. It appears that there are also some difficulties specifically associated with paternal imprisonment, such as a higher risk of juvenile delinquency and strained relationships between the mother and child.
The numbers of children separated from their fathers due to imprisonment is far higher than those separated from their mothers due to the vast majority of prisoners being men (globally over 90 per cent of prisoners are male. To ignore this group would, therefore, be to neglect the vast majority of children affected by parental imprisonment. Read More ..
Hammering it home: Daughters need dads
USA TODAY, June 10, 2003
It's widely recognized that boys benefit from having dads around as role models and teachers about manhood.
But does having a father at home make much difference for girls?
But even in affluent families, girls become sexually active and pregnant earlier if they don't live with fathers, according to the largest and longest-term study on the problem. It was released in May.
Compared with daughters from two-parent homes, a girl is about five times more likely to have had sex by age 16 if her dad left before she was 6 and twice as likely if she stops living with her dad at 6 or older.
The study of 762 girls for 13 years took into account many factors that could lead to early sex, says Duke University psychologist Kenneth Dodge, the study's co-author. Still, there was an independent link between teenage sex and girls not living with their biological fathers.
Divorced Dads:
Shattering the Myths
Dr. Sandford L. Braver and Diane O'Connell
This is the result of the largest federally funded 8 year study of the issues confronting parents and their children in the United States.
Shattering the Myths. The surprising truth about fathers, children and divorce.
Children seeing more of their fathers after divorce
The Sydney Morning Herald
February 3, 2005
Divorced fathers are Read More ..volved in their children's lives than conventional wisdom would have it, a new study shows.
It shows surprisingly varied and flexible care patterns among separated families, with "every other Saturday" contact giving way to Read More ..ild-focused arrangements.
Australian Institute of Family Studies research fellow Bruce Smyth has produced the first detailed snapshot of parent-child contact after divorce anywhere in the world. Published today in the institute's journal Family Matters, the analysis has implications for children's emotional and financial wellbeing.
Other research indicates children of separated families do best when they have multifaceted relationships, including sleepovers, sharing meals and doing schoolwork, with both parents.
Fathers 'have key role with children' after families split
The Telegraph, London, U.K.
Researchers say they found a direct relationship between children's behavioural problems and the amount of contact they had with their natural father.
The effect was more pronounced in single-parent families, particularly where the mother was a teenager. In such cases, children were especially vulnerable emotionally if they had no contact with their father.
Where's Daddy?
The Mythologies behind Custody-Access-Support
When 50 percent of marriages end in divorce and 43 percent of children are left with one parent, everyone is affected: uncles, aunts, grandparents, and friends, but mostly, the children. The devastation from our divorce practices is our most public secret scandal. Everyone whispers it, the whispers never acknowledged. It seems that as long as a villain can be created, society is content.
After three decades of research universally pointing to more productive options, why does Custody-Access-Support remain?
CanadianCRC Editor comment
The family law industry charges a fortune.
They prey on those with equity in their homes or who have rich relatives from which they can borrow money or maybe never see their children again.
The law says that courts only consider the "best interests of the child", which isn't true at all because fundamentally, it's not in any child's best interests to have the parents fighting, stressed out going to court, dealing with lawyers and expensive assessments.
It is not in the best interests of children to go weeks, even a year or more, without seeing both their parents.
The government makes a debate out of who raises your children and violates your rights to raise your own biological children without government interference. The only "iassistance needed is to enforce equal parenting time. Government enforcement of Parenting time has been a disaster , and is not avaiable without spending a fortune on lawyers.