Florida's supervised visitation programs: the next phase.

• Author: Oehme, Karen

Enormous changes have taken place since 1997, the last time The Florida Bar Journal included detailed information about supervised visitation programs in Florida. (1) At that time, 15 programs supervised a few thousand visits by nonresidential parents with their children. These programs were considered pioneers in an emerging court service. While supervised visitation programs still serve courts and communities by providing a safe and neutral setting in which noncustodial parents can have supervised access to theft" children in dependency, domestic violence, and high-conflict custody cases, (2) the number of visits has substantially increased. In 2002, over 40,000 visits were supervised across the state by 42 programs. (3) Today, every judicial circuit is home to at least one program. (4) As in 1997, however, family court judges and lawyers still call for the development of more supervised visitation and monitored exchange programs and the expansion of existing ones. (5) This article offers an overview of the growth of, and current issues surrounding, supervised visitation and exchange in Florida and nationally.

Minimum Standards and Essential Elements

At the vanguard of the nation, there were only two other states--California and Kansas (6)--that had developed statewide minimum standards for supervised visitation centers. The Florida Supreme Court's Family Court Steering Committee began developing a skeletal set of standards for supervised visitation and exchange programs in 1998. In an attempt to create some uniformity in such areas as staff training, terminology, and basic practice norms, the committee presented a set of standards to Chief Justice Harding. The chief justice endorsed the standards and crafted an administrative order in 1999 mandating that chief judges of each circuit enter into an agreement with local programs (to whom trial judges referred cases) that agreed to comply with the standards. (7) The purposes of providing supervised visitation expressed by the standards include "enabling an ongoing relationship between the noncustodial parent and child by impartially observing their contact in a safe and structured environment and to facilitate appropriate child/parent interaction during supervised contact." Monitored exchange, which is offered by some of Florida's supervised visitation programs, means the supervision of the child's movement from the custodial to noncustodial parent at the start of noncustodial parent/ child visit or from the noncustodial parent back to the custodial parent at the end of the visit. This type of supervised contact is for those cases in which contact causes conflict between the adults but the contact between the parent and child could be expected to proceed without incident. (8)

Still, some circuits do not have agreements between the courts and local programs (even in circuits in which judges actively refer cases to those same programs). Nevertheless, supervised visitation is listed as one of the 12 "essential elements" of a model family court in the Family Court Steering Committee's report, (9) which the Supreme Court "wholeheartedly endorsed" as essential to the successful function of a model family court.

The ABA Takes Notice

Legal commentators have touted supervised visitation and exchange as a valuable service for vulnerable children and troubled families, (10) especially in domestic violence cases. The American Bar Association acknowledged that allowing family members to supervise visits does not sufficiently address issues of safety and may place the monitoring family member or friend at risk of violence or manipulation by an abusive parent. The ABA approved a policy in 2000 encouraging courts to "provide or identify and make use of" locations in which supervised visitation can safely occur. (11)

Additionally, in 2001 the ABA's Family Law Section published its Wingspread Report, (12) an action plan replete with recommendations for changes in the legal and mental health systems to mitigate the effects of high-conflict custody cases on children. As the Wingspread Report's preamble states, "high-conflict custody cases seriously harm the children involved." The report then lists supervised visitation among services that should be available to all families without regard to income to alleviate that harm.

Many other states have recently sanctioned the use of supervised visitation programs, among them New Mexico, (13) which empowers judicial districts to develop programs by local court rule; Idaho, (14) which touts supervised visitation as an effective response to families in domestic relations disputes; and Tennessee, (15) which authorizes its Human Services Department to apply for federal grants for supervised visitation. The national media, from the New York Times (16) to the Chicago Tribune, (17) have run items on supervised visitation and monitored exchange. Still, Florida remains at the forefront of supervised visitation with more programs listed by the international Supervised Visitation Network than any other state and with an unsurpassed active support by the Florida Department of Children and Families, which provides some funding and technical assistance for programs and all levels of the judiciary. It seems logical, then, that the most vexing issues arising from supervised visitation should be addressed in Florida.

Safety and Critical Incidents

Only a small minority of family court cases ever gets referred to supervised visitation. Thus, visitation programs provide services to probably the most emotionally volatile group of litigants in the court system. The anxiety, fear, anger, despair, and grief that these parents feel--and the actual harm they have experienced--can manifest themselves in many ways at visits, a time of heightened emotions. In 1999...