Domestic Violence -- World

LYNN HECHT SCHAFRAN, JD, is Senior Vice President of Legal Momentum, the Women's Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Director of its National Judicial Education Program (NJEP) since 1981. She has designed and presented courses for numerous national, state, and federal judicial colleges, focused on the ways explicit and implicit gender bias can undermine fairness in family, juvenile, civil, criminal, and problem-solving courts. She has a long-standing interest in neuroscience and the Adverse Childhood Experiences study (ACEs). In 2000 she added a ground-breaking unit on the neurobiology of trauma to NJEP’s two-day judicial education curriculum, Understanding Sexual Violence: The Judicial Response to Stranger and Non-stranger Rape and Sexual Assault. Her article Domestic Violence, Developing Brains and the Lifespan: New Knowledge from Neuroscience was published in The Judges’ Journal in 2014. She is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a member of the American Law Institute.

In this podcast, Lynn and Neeta discuss the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. They discuss a recent case of a Hague Mother Narkis Golan whose case went all the way to the Supreme Court in 2022, where she won her case. Tragically the mother died (her death is under investigation) and the courts will now determine her son's fate and whether he gets to stay with his family in the United States or is released into the custody of social services in Italy for supervised visitation with his father.

For additional resources on the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction see:

The Hague Convention & Domestic Violence: Fleeing to Safety – Returned to Abuse

The Women Lost Everything: The Hague Convention in Australia

Hell is for Children is a show by and about Protective Mothers

The Hague Domestic Violence Project