Selecting an appropriate visitation supervisor can present practical challenges for litigants and attorneys. The PSFVRA does not allow supervision by people associated with the party who is abusive, and it is generally not safe or appropriate for a victim’s friends or family to supervise. The best option is usually a supervised visitation center. In communities that lack supervised visitation centers (i.e., most communities), lawyers and clients have limited options. Petitioners may specifically request that the court appoint a police officer or competent professional as the supervisor.1 Supervisors can be police officers with some sensitivity to juvenile or domestic issues. These officers may be more willing and able to intervene to prevent harm to the child during a visit. Social workers in your community may also be available for supervision. It is a good idea to have a specific list of potential supervisors and their contact information available at the hearing on custody. Otherwise, the court may appoint a supervisor with whom you are unfamiliar and who may be ill-suited to supervise in a family violence case because they lack understanding about the physical and emotional risks to children.
When selecting a supervisor, keep in mind that people who abuse their intimate partners can be highly effective at manipulating and co-opting mental health and social work professionals, including visitation supervisors. Most mental health professionals have little, if any training in domestic violence, and even those that do rarely have enough to meaningfully understand basic dynamics of abuse.2 Parents with a history of perpetrating abuse are likely to be on their best behavior in settings where they know they must be. And children are often delighted to see even an abusive parent in a setting where they are safe and where “good daddy” shows up to see them. Courts often give far too much weight to testimony about parent-child observations in a supervised setting; information from these visits rarely leads to relevant or probative evidence in abuse cases.
For this reason, lawyers should be cautious about eliciting professional opinions from even trained visitation supervisors and should seek to exclude the testimony if offered by supervised party. A visitation supervisor’s testimony is usually not relevant to any issue that would be before the court, other than the abusive party’s violation of orders. The mere fact that a parent with a history of perpetrating abuse does not abuse in a supervised visitation setting, or that a child enjoys the parent’s company in a safe supervised setting has no probative value on issues such as whether there is a history of past abuse, whether there is a likelihood of future abuse, or whether unsupervised visitation is in a child’s best interest.