Wings For Justice started when a few protective moms from Ottawa County, Michigan found each other while experiencing Domestic Violence by Proxy (legal abuse after separation and divorce) after leaving our abusive spouses. We realized we weren’t the only ones being gaslit by caseworkers, attorneys and judges working with our former spouses and decided to use our painful experiences to help others. We started sharing what we learned about the laws and statutes to help keep our kids from being taken from us, the protective parents, and being given to the abusive parent. As we progressed through our cases, we started seeing similarities in our cases and realized that the same corrupt “players” were involved. These players wrongfully labeled our cases as “high-conflict” cases blaming the protective parents with a bogus syndrome called parental alienation.

Some of us went to jail protecting our children and some of us lost them altogether and had to pay exorbitant amounts of child support, travel expenses and supervised visitation fees to only see our children for a few hours a month. Our children were subject to shady “counselors” who gaslit them saying that their mothers made up the abuse and brainwashed them into believing it. Even when the children recounted the details of what their abusive fathers did to them, they were told they were lying to protect their mothers, taken away from their mothers and given to their abusers. Many children became severely depressed, disparaged and suicidal. Some children even took their own lives rather than being forced to stay with their abusive parent. We knew something had to be done, but what could we do?

So we studied, supported each other in courtrooms and worked together on our cases to learn the laws to fight the illegal tactics being used in Ottawa County. Soon we learned that it wasn’t just our county, although it is one of the worst in the nation. We decided to start a non-profit to tell our stories and expose the dark underbelly of the family court system.

We launched in April 2016 with an event with Lundy Bancroft, link to https://lundybancroft.com/ author and national speaker on Domestic Violence. Many of our abusive players were in attendance listening as they were called out in front of a crowd of about 200 in Holland, Michigan. They retaliated against some of us by levying fines and taking away child and/or spousal support when they could not legally take our children.

Once word started getting out, others came to us who experienced the same atrocities. Each case we’d learn more and more about the system and found more and more people across the country who were becoming experts in the field who could help us.