Richard Abbott
Program Director Administrative Office of the Courts
Annamaria Walsh
Director
Alternative Dispute Resolution
Appellate Court of Maryland
| John Neufeld Court Achievement Award
Maryland Judiciary
Family Mediation and Effective Screening for Abuse Project
As more Maryland jurisdictions implemented mediation alternatives for family cases, the need for effective screening methods for abuse and intimate partner violence became a critical component to ensure the process and potential outcomes are fair, voluntary, and do not further endanger victims. The Maryland Judiciary’s Family Mediation and Effective Screening for Abuse Project is a carefully developed process to effectively and efficiently screen all child access cases filed in Maryland to determine whether mediation is appropriate and, if so, whether certain safety precautions should be utilized.
In January 2020, the Maryland Judiciary’s Domestic Law Committee first created the Family Mediation and Abuse Screening Work Group to review the Mediation of Child Custody and Visitation Disputes rule (Md. Rule 9-205) to ensure it sufficiently guides Maryland courts in (1) screening custody and visitation cases for abuse of a party or child; and (2) referring appropriate cases for mediation. After determining that the definition of “abuse” in Rule 9-205 only included physical acts of violence or threats of bodily harm, but not those “coercive control” type behaviors that would also make referral to mediation inappropriate, the Work Group was successful in having the Court of Appeals adopt a modification to Rule 9-205 to define “coercive control” as “a pattern of emotional or psychological manipulation, maltreatment, threat of force, or intimidation used to compel an individual to act, or refrain from acting, against the individual’s will.”
The Work Group then analyzed the various screening tools and determined that the Mediator’s Assessment of Safety Issues and Concerns (MASIC), an empirically validated diagnostic tool for mediators to screen for intimate partner violence, should be the recommended screening tool for statewide use. The work group sought out the advice of the creators of the MASIC tool, Professors Amy Applegate and Amy Holtzworth-Monroe from Indiana University, who agreed to help the Judiciary study the effectiveness of a new shorter version of the MASIC that also includes a danger assessment for each screen (i.e., the MASIC-S, with DA) in a pilot project in the Circuit Court for Baltimore County.
Finally, the work group developed several recommended policies, procedures, and practices on how child access cases should be screened. These include doing multitiered screening, conducting separate and private screening interviews with each party, keeping confidential all information obtained through the screening, ensuring all screeners are qualified and trained on use of the MASIC tool, and providing parties with information and education on why cases need to be screened. Now, through the Administrative Office of the Court’s Juvenile and Family Services office, the Judiciary is implementing a centralized screening process to effectively and efficiently screen all 13,000 child access cases that are filed in Maryland each year. |