Blogger's Note: This is the first of what will be several entries on the 2006 Battered Mothers' Custody Conference, which I attended over the weekend. It was an experience in which I learned and absorbed a great deal about things as wide and varied as the system, those who manipulate it, are manipulated by it, and are victimized by it, and about myself. To try to do this all in one entry would not do it justice.

As I was preparing to go to Albany, it occurred to me that the stories of abuse that would be collected in one room would be staggering.

I was right, although not in the way I had contemplated. While I was thinking of abuse at the hands of a husband or boyfriend or father, the abuse that was center stage was abuse of a very different sort: that of a system that not only does not care about allegations of domestic violence, but often shoots the messenger, the person who brings bad news about what has happened.

The first speaker we heard was a girl named Sarah.

Sarah is nineteen years old, and was originally from Ohio. Her father is very, very prominent -- a multimillionaire with the family name on big buildings. In 1998, a divorce was filed, and Sarah says, she became a "pawn in my father's vendetta against my mother."

Because Sarah refused to say she wanted to live with her father, she became a target.

Sarah and her two sisters said they wanted to live with their mother because of his awful temper; because they found themselves hiding out in their rooms to dodge him; because they felt used since, while he fought to have them not spend time with their mother, when he had them, they were placed with babysitters.

Sarah attempted to tell these things to the guardian ad litem appointed for her; but he simply told her she needed to spend time with her father or her mother would be in serious trouble.

Sarah's father, who frequently told her that children had no rights, made sure that she became a moving target. Literally.

First, he put her in a boarding school in Connecticut.

She got out of there. So, he put her on his corporate jet, told her she was going back to Ohio, and instead flew her to Utah, to a juvenile delinquent camp.

Her mother couldn't find her, and had to get the FAA involved to figure out where she was.

When the Utah boot camp released her, he sent her to Kansas. To a psychiatric hospital. Her roommate was a coke addict.

Throughout this, he refused to address the fact she had lupus.

Sarah only got out of the situation when she turned eighteen and "aged out of the system." This is a fairly common phenomenon. When a child approaches eighteen and is loudly trying to proclaim her rights, the goal is to keep them in a holding pattern until they supposedly have no stake in the outcome. Of course, what that frequently means is a severing of sibling relationships.

Sarah spoke on behalf of an organization called the Courageous Kids Network, which is for children who've been abused by the court sytem. If the hair on the back of your neck isn't standing on end yet, visit their website. It will be.