Domestic violence and custody decisions sit in a tension that family courts have struggled with for decades. Most states have some form of statutory presumption against awarding joint or sole legal custody to a parent with a history of domestic violence; the operationalization of that presumption has been uneven, and the federal government in 2022 attempted to standardize it.
The federal floor: Kayden's Law (VAWA 2022)
The 2022 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, codified in relevant part at 34 U.S.C. § 12464, conditions state eligibility for STOP-program grant increases on adoption of specified protections in custody proceedings where child abuse, child sexual abuse, or domestic violence is at issue. The protections include: limiting court reliance on expert testimony unless the expert demonstrates training in the dynamics of abuse and trauma; restricting use of "scientifically unsound" theories such as parental alienation syndrome to discredit abuse claims; requiring evidentiary hearings before ordering "reunification treatment" that requires cutting a child off from a bonded parent; and requiring judicial training on these issues. The provision was named for Kayden Mancuso, a seven-year-old killed in 2018 by her father during a court-ordered unsupervised visit.
Implementation is state-by-state. As of 2025, Colorado, Maryland, Pennsylvania, California, Tennessee, and a growing list of others have enacted conforming legislation. The NCJFCJ tracks implementation status; the Battered Women's Justice Project publishes practitioner guides.
State statutory presumptions
Before the federal floor, the state landscape was already structured by statutory presumptions. All 50 states require courts to consider domestic violence in custody determinations (NCSL, 2024). Roughly half create a rebuttable presumption against custody awards to a perpetrator. The triggers vary: some require a criminal conviction, some require a finding by a preponderance of the evidence in the family case itself, some accept a protective order as sufficient. The Bartlow study (Journal of Child Custody, 2014) documented that even where presumptions exist, judges frequently award shared custody anyway, often citing the absence of a criminal conviction.
Coercive control and what it adds
Evan Stark's Coercive Control (2007) reframed domestic violence away from the discrete-incident model toward a pattern of intimidation, isolation, micro-regulation, and control of resources. California (Family Code § 6320(c), 2020), Hawaii (Act 60, 2020), Connecticut (Jennifer's Law, 2021), and Washington (RCW 26.50.010, 2022) have all extended their domestic-violence statutes to include coercive control as a basis for protective orders, and these statutory changes now inform custody analyses in those states. England and Wales criminalized coercive and controlling behavior in 2015 (Serious Crime Act § 76); Scotland followed in 2018. The research base (Stark & Hester, 2019; Crossman et al., 2016) establishes that coercive control predicts post-separation harm to children better than discrete violent incidents alone.
Financial abuse and post-separation abuse
Adrienne Adams's research (Violence Against Women, 2008, developing the Scale of Economic Abuse; and Adams 2011 on the financial impacts of IPV) documents that nearly all survivors of intimate-partner violence experience economic abuse — the widely cited 99% figure comes from the 2011 work. Post-separation, this commonly manifests as litigation abuse (filing repeated motions to drain resources), withholding of child support, manipulation of shared accounts, and refusal to cooperate with court-ordered financial disclosures. A number of states have created "vexatious litigant" or abusive-litigation provisions targeted at this pattern, and Illinois's 750 ILCS 5/610.5 sets a two-year waiting period on most modification motions to limit serial relitigation.
Children's outcomes
The Adverse Childhood Experiences research (Felitti et al., 1998, and the CDC's continuing ACE Study data) establishes long-term physical and mental-health consequences for children exposed to intimate-partner violence. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention's Childhood Exposure to Violence study (Finkelhor, Turner, Shattuck & Hamby, 2015) found that more than one in four children witness or experience family violence in their lifetimes. The Kitzmann meta-analysis (2003) established that the effects on children of witnessing IPV are statistically comparable to the effects of direct physical abuse.
Read next
- What actually makes a co-parenting message court-admissible — Screenshots get challenged. Timestamps get questioned. Here is what family courts actually look for in a digital communication record, and how to make sure the one you bring holds up.
- Children's rights in co-parenting: what they are, and what they are not — Children have a legal and moral right to two functioning parents and a calm environment. Here is what that looks like in practice, and what it does not.
- Parents' rights in family court: what you keep, and what you trade — Filing in family court does not erase your rights as a parent. Here is a plain-language guide to what those rights are, where they bend, and how to protect them.