Kuala Lumpur’s Association against Parental Alienation recommends that all parents planning to divorce benefit from early intervention by the maximum breadth of the legal system.
The Association favors a panel of experts working with each family throughout a divorce case to protect kids from alienation, among other things. The experts would address the gamut of issues from finances to education.
The objective of all this expertise is to protect kids from the adverse impact of divorce.
Currently in Kuala Lumpur, custody evaluations by experts are made in only a small percentage of divorce cases.
The Association compares this to the many juvenile delinquency cases that the child welfare system is involved in, where nearly half of kids in “reform school” come from homes where the parents were divorced or separated (or one or both are deceased).
Their reasoning appears to be that it would be better to bring these expert resources to bear in more ordinary family cases in the hopes of preventing the delinquency cases from arising.
Among some of the more noteworthy recommendations by the Association:
- each judge should be assigned a standing panel of experts including, among others, psychiatrists, psychologists, child therapists and social workers
- judges may temporarily place children of divorcing parents with a guardian during the divorce case
- judges, lawyers and other participants in the legal system may dress more casually than in other courts and
- judges must be patient and experienced in family law
The only conceivable drawbacks are that divorce cases there may cost a fortune and take forever and someone would have to devise a “judicial patience index”.
Read more in this [Malaysia] New Straits Times article: Call for panel to guide divorcing parents.
