The Maine Judicial Branch, comprising 622 judicial officers and staff, operates pursuant to a stated mission to administer justice through a safe, accessible, efficient, and impartial system of dispute resolution that serves the public interest, protects individual rights, and instills respect for the law.
In practice, that mission is failing Maine’s children.
A consistent pattern has become evident to those who have engaged with the family court system over extended periods. Responsibility is so thoroughly diffused across judges, clerks, guardians ad litem, lawyers, and administrators that no one is ultimately held accountable when children are harmed.
When a court issues an order intended to protect a child’s relationship with a parent, that order too often becomes another entry in a fragmented file. Therapy referrals stall. Daily contact is obstructed. Records access is denied. Implementation disputes persist for months while the child bears the resulting harm. Responsibility can be shifted indefinitely. The outcome remains unchanged: the child pays the price.
This is not the manner in which a system sworn to protect children is intended to function.
In any effective organization, efficiency serves the institution while human experience serves the individuals it exists to protect. The Maine family courts have repeatedly traded the latter for the former. Success is measured by docket clearance and procedural compliance, while children’s fundamental need for stability, parental connection, and protection from adult conflict is treated as secondary.
Within that closed system of procedure, certain attorneys engage in a pattern of misconduct. They escalate disputes that could and should be resolved. They file unnecessary motions. They obstruct implementation of existing court orders for contact, therapy, and records access. They prolong litigation for months and years — all while generating fees on an hourly basis. This is not zealous advocacy. It is the knowing infliction of harm on children for financial gain, conducted under color of the legal system.
Private-practice attorneys too often prey on vulnerable parents through what should be recognized as professionalized child abuse. Prolonged exposure to high levels of interparental conflict, combined with the deliberate obstruction of meaningful parent-child contact and court-ordered therapy, constitutes psychological maltreatment. Clinical research demonstrates that such exposure is associated with elevated risks of anxiety, depression, behavioral dysregulation, adjustment problems, and post-traumatic stress symptoms in children.
And before one scoffs, what is it about knowingly creating lifelong emotional trauma in a child that a doctorate-level education, courtroom title, or profit motive somehow makes acceptable?
Such conduct violates fundamental duties of the legal profession. Attorneys are officers of the court with obligations of candor, diligence, fairness, and respect for the administration of justice. When they weaponize litigation to extract additional fees while harming the very children the court is charged with protecting, they cross the line from advocacy into misconduct.
The system, however, rarely calls it that. Professional courtesy, diffused responsibility, institutional self-protection, and the absence of meaningful accountability mechanisms allow this misconduct to continue with little consequence.
The legal profession has constructed a self-protecting framework in which justice is treated as its private domain. Within that framework, professional courtesy, institutional reputation, and billable hours are insulated from scrutiny. Beyond it, families wait and children mature within unresolved conflict. Accountability has devolved into a shell game: because responsibility is shared by all, it is effectively shouldered by none. In such circumstances, children become collateral damage by design — and in some instances, that damage is treated as a business model.
Beyond the ethical failures lies operational incompetence of a striking order. Basic tools for document processing and case management — optical character recognition, automated workflow systems, and modern e-filing platforms — have been available and in widespread use across government and industry for decades. Yet the Maine Judicial Branch has failed to implement them effectively. The People of Maine were sold a modernization project with their tax dollars and received instead a shoddy, antiquated e-filing and digital court system that creates more work, more rejections, more rework, and more delay. Poor processes, inadequate systems, and repeated administrative rework impose substantial costs on any organization. In the courts, those costs are not abstract. They are imposed on litigants, families, children, clerks, and the public through avoidable delay, repeated rejection cycles, and prolonged uncertainty. The courts have imposed these administrative costs on the public while claiming efficiency, all while children and families wait longer for the implementation of orders meant to protect them.
Research on high-conflict custody disputes has established that protracted litigation, sustained interparental conflict, and the systematic interference with court-ordered contact and therapy can produce lasting harm to children’s mental health and development. The Maine Constitution and the Code of Judicial Conduct impose affirmative duties upon the judiciary. Those duties are not discharged through the perpetuation of process alone. They are discharged only when justice is administered with urgency and when the most vulnerable — children in high-conflict proceedings — are in fact protected rather than processed for the convenience or advantage of the adults participating in the matter.
Resource constraints exist and are documented in workload studies. Those constraints, however, do not account for the deeper cultural and structural deficiency: a system that has elevated its own procedural rituals and inadequate technology above the developmental and emotional requirements of children — and, in certain cases, has permitted those requirements to be subordinated to financial incentives while shielding attorney misconduct from meaningful consequences.
The long-term consequences of sustained psychological maltreatment and toxic stress in childhood are well established in the clinical literature. Emotional abuse, chronic exposure to interparental conflict, and adverse childhood experiences are associated with alterations in stress-responsive neurobiological systems and increased risk of depression, anxiety disorders, substance-use disorders, educational disruption, and a range of physical health problems in adulthood.
Children in these environments do not simply “get over it.” Many carry measurable developmental and psychological injuries forward for decades.
Reform will not originate from within the existing framework. External accountability is required.
The Legislature’s Joint Standing Committee on Judiciary should convene targeted oversight hearings concerning family court implementation failures, patterns of attorney misconduct that prolong harm to children, and the operational failure of the court’s digital systems.
The Judicial Branch should be directed to publish regular, public metrics regarding the actual implementation of contact, therapy, school-record, medical-record, and parental-access orders within defined timeframes, together with the consequences of non-implementation.
Performance audits must assess not merely the speed of case processing, but whether the system is fulfilling its constitutional and ethical obligation to shield children from prolonged and unnecessary harm — including harm enabled by attorney misconduct and by bureaucratic systems that were sold as modernization but function as barriers.
Maine families require neither additional studies nor additional layers of procedure. They require a judicial system that recognizes its fundamental purpose is to serve the public, not to sustain itself, protect misconduct, or waste public resources on ineffective technology.
They require clear and enforceable lines of accountability rather than the diffusion of responsibility that shields both misconduct and incompetence.
And they require institutional leadership prepared to acknowledge that when children bear the cost of systemic failure, attorney misconduct, and operational dysfunction, the system has deviated from its proper course.
Children are not collateral damage.
They are the reason the courts exist.
The time has come for the system to conduct itself accordingly.
Sources
Anda, R. F., Felitti, V. J., Bremner, J. D., Walker, J. D., Whitfield, C. H., Perry, B. D., Dube, S. R., & Giles, W. H. (2006). The enduring effects of abuse and related adverse experiences in childhood. European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, 256, 174–186.
Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F., Nordenberg, D., Williamson, D. F., Spitz, A. M., Edwards, V., Koss, M. P., & Marks, J. S. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245–258.
Harold, G. T., & Sellers, R. (2018). Annual Research Review: Interparental conflict and youth psychopathology — an evidence review and practice focused update. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 59(4), 374–402.
Laletas, S., & Khasin, M. (2021). Children of high conflict divorce: Exploring the experiences of primary school teachers. Children and Youth Services Review, 127, 106072.
Nambiar, P. P., Jangam, K. V., & Seshadri, S. P. (2024). Psychosocial perspectives on child mental health in custody disputes: A qualitative study from India. Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine.
Rhoades, K. A. (2008). Children’s responses to interparental conflict: A meta-analysis of their associations with child adjustment. Child Development, 79(6), 1942–1956.
Strathearn, L., Giannotti, M., Mills, R., Kisely, S., Najman, J., & Abajobir, A. (2020). Long-term cognitive, psychological, and health outcomes associated with child abuse and neglect. Pediatrics, 146(4), e20200438.