Consider making a report to police, even if CPS is already handling the case

6. Consider making a report to police, even if CPS is already handling the case. Pursue the criminal case to the maximum extent possible.

This advice may seem a little off track. After all, you've already got more than you can handle with the CPS case. So why consider opening up another case with police?

But making a report to police, either of the child abuse or of domestic violence against you, or both, may be more help to you in your CPS case than anything else you can do. Our best advice is that you make a police report on the perpetrator's abuse of the child, as well as a separate police report on any of the violence or threats of violence the perpetrator has committed against you. A strong criminal case against the abuser can often protect you against CPS in a number of ways.

* The existence of a criminal case against the perpetrator usually forces CPS to work in coordination with the criminal justice team. Since the criminal justice system only goes after the abuser and never goes after the non-offending parent, CPS is often forced to work more in that vein, too, and tends to move away from treating you, the non-offending parent, as a bad parent.

* Police and prosecutors (the criminal justice team) usually aim to protect the child from contact with the perpetrator. This often puts a damper on any attempts by CPS to mandate mediations, family conferencing, and family reunification with the perpetrator. And, of course, if the abuser is incarcerated by the criminal system, that further curtails CPS attempts to reunify the child with the perpetrator.

* Police and prosecutors will be much more rigorous than CPS in developing evidence against the abuser. Moreover, the evidence developed by police will be tightly focused on the abusive acts. By highlighting the perpetrator's violent criminal behavior, the evidence developed by police exposes the risky and threatening situation you were in as the child's mother, and the limited options you had for dealing with the situation. As such, the evidence developed by police can often be your best evidence for defending yourself from CPS accusations.

* The criminal justice system packs more weight and power than CPS. So the criminal justice usually calls the shots at critical junctures in the handling of the case.

The existence of a criminal case against the perpetrator doesn't guarantee that CPS will stop targeting you, the non-offending parent. But at the very least, it usually does tend to shift the overall blame more onto the perpetrator where it should be. And in many cases the existence of a criminal case may shift things enough to keep the CPS/juvenile court system from taking your child from you.

NOTE: You may have to push a little to get police to take the report, particularly if CPS is already involved in the case. But if a family member has been violent with you or your child, police cannot refuse to take a report. And if you run into an officer who does refuse to take a report, go immediately over that officer's head to the sergeant or to the head of the department's family violence unit.

If you still have trouble getting police to take your case seriously, there are a number of resources in our Online Handbook Advocating for Women in the Criminal Justice System