S.O.S. (Stories of Service) - Ordinary people who do extraordinary work
From the little league coach to the former addict helping those still struggling, hear from people from all walks of life how they show up as a vessel for service and drive for transformational change. Hosted by Theresa Carpenter, a 29-year active duty U.S. naval officer who found service was the path to unlocking trauma and unleashing your inner potential.
S.O.S. (Stories of Service) - Ordinary people who do extraordinary work
Army Veteran Exposes Family Court Bias Against Service Members | S.O.S. #230
A uniform shouldn’t cost a parent their child. We sit down with retired Army officer, attorney, and parent advocate Erhan Bettistani to unpack how military service collides with family court—and why a little-known administrative process, the Family Advocacy Program’s Incident Determination Committee (FAP IDC), can tilt custody decisions without basic due process. Erhan brings research published in Family Court Review and Military Law Review, plus firsthand stories from Warrior Family Advocacy, to show how “substantiated” findings spill into civilian courts, inflame stress, and even factor into veteran suicide risk.
Across an hour, we trace four forces that often work against service members: media narratives of extremes, the stigma of deployments and constant PCS moves, assumptions around PTSD and mental health, and the shadow-court mechanics of FAP IDC. We compare FAP procedures to the old Title IX campus model—informal, opaque, and vulnerable to error—and highlight reforms that state courts and the Department of Education have already embraced: clear notice, access to the evidence file, counsel in the room, cross-examination, written findings, and recorded hearings. The takeaway is stark but hopeful: the Department of Defense can integrate these protections now, without waiting on Congress, and still support victims with clinical care while improving fairness for all parties.
We also get practical. If you’re navigating divorce or custody as a military parent, you’ll hear strategies for documenting stability, addressing PTSD stigma, planning around deployments, and securing counsel early in the right jurisdiction. Erhan explains how Warrior Family Advocacy funds initial attorney consults and offers grounded guidance so you can breathe, plan, and protect your bond with your child. Abuse must be taken seriously—and so must process. Better rules mean better outcomes for families, for justice, and for the mental health of those who serve.
If this conversation resonates, follow the show, share it with a military family, and leave a review with your biggest question about fixing FAP. Your voice helps push the right reforms forward.
Resources & Links:
• 🌐 Warrior Family Advocacy (WFA): https://www.warriorfamilyadvocacy.com/
• 👥 Connect with S.O.S.
Visit my website: https://thehello.llc/THERESACARPENTER
Read my writings on my blog: https://www.theresatapestries.com/
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Like many of you, we have all raised our right hand to swear and protect the United States of America. And a lot of us are willing to sacrifice just about anything to do that, including our lives. But imagine for some service members, not only are they sacrificing their lives to protect their country, they now have to fight another fight on the home front. And that is the fight to have a relationship with their children because of the family court system and the way the military interacts with that. So to understand that issue a little bit better, I have Erhan Bettistani here with me today. Erhan, how are you doing?
SPEAKER_02:Great, great, Teresa. It's wonderful to be here today.
SPEAKER_01:Well, it's wonderful to have you. I really can't wait to share some of your research and the study that you've done into this issue. But before we get started, as we always do, welcome everyone to the Stories of Service podcast, ordinary people who do extraordinary work. I'm the host of Stories of Service, Teresa Carpenter. And to get this uh episode started, as we always do, intro from my father, Charlie Pickard.
SPEAKER_00:From the moment we're born and like us with our parents, we are inspiring others. By showing up as a vessel of service, we not only help others, we help ourselves. Welcome to SOS Stories of Service, hosted by Teresa Carpenter, here from ordinary people from all walks of life who have transformed their communities by performing extraordinary work.
SPEAKER_01:And Erhan is a retired Army officer, attorney, and parent who is taking on one of the most overlooked challenges facing the military community, the family court system. After 21 years of service in the U.S. Army, he retired in 2023 and immediately channel the expertise into advocacy. He funded the Warrior Family Advocacy, a nonprofit dedicated to addressing the unique struggles veterans and service members face in custody disputes. And too often family courts are predisposed to view military parents as unfit simply because of deployments, relocations, or service obligations. So his mission is to shine a light on this systemic bias and fight for policies that treat military families with fairness and dignity. As a devoted parent who relocated multiple times during his military career, he brings not only professional expertise but deeply personal insight into the issue and a passion project of researching, writing, and raising awareness to reform how courts handle cases involving military families. Welcome again, Erhan.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here tonight.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I'm excited to have you. First off, where were you born and raised and what uh inspired you to originally join the United States Army?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so born and raised in Hamilton Township, New Jersey. It's in central New Jersey. Um, it's an interesting part of the state because it has an identity crisis when it comes to sports teams. Half is focused on New York and the other half uh likes Philly. So it's it's a great place, though. Um grew up born and raised there, then I attended boarding school in New Jersey before going to Johns Hopkins University. And um, going to boarding school nearly bankrupted my dad, so I needed money for college. And so I signed up for ROTC at Johns Hopkins as a freshman and uh really had no intent of making a career out of my time in the service. But what ended up happening was the longer I was in service, the more I realized these are my people. I I wanted to continue to serve and not only serve in the army uh at the time I commissioned as an air defense artillery officer, but later, you know, special forces. And so just wanting to dig deeper into the army and be around the best and serve with the best. And before I knew it, uh you know, 21 years had had passed. So I didn't enter in thinking I would make a career out of it. But uh, after my first tour of duty in Iraq in 2003, I really felt like I had more to give. I saw a lot of people going in already for a second rotation, some having been extended for 18 months when it was a 12-month deployment. And so when you look to your left and your right and people are rowing really hard, you know, you never want to be the weak link. And so that's where, you know, the idea of service and duty, you know, really uh compelled me to want to stay in and uh and make a career out of it.
SPEAKER_01:I think there's so many of us like that. I was the same way. I first did my enlistment for seven or eight years, and at that point I had no idea that I'd be in for 28 years and four months. I thought each time I was just doing an additional enlistment, it wasn't until I got picked up for my officer program that I knew, okay, this is something I'll at least do to 20 years, and then to do those additional uh nine years was was not expected either. I thought, okay, I'm gonna get out right at the 20-year mark, and then I just kept going. So I think a lot of times we don't really know what we don't know, and then as you said, you get around people who are like-minded and are devoted to the mission, or there's always something exciting to conquer or a goal to achieve, and you wind up staying in a lot longer than expected. But after 21 years, you did make that transition. And what made you decide to transition into law?
SPEAKER_02:You know, towards, I would say really throughout my career, I realized that I had uh a passion for advocacy and you know, leading uh fellow service members in combat, that's something that we're trained to do. But I always felt what left a more lasting impact and was and was most impactful was how was I advocating and taking care of service members when we were back home from a deployment? You know, if there's issues with issues with pay, issues with family housing, uh whatever it is, being, you know, a go-to person to help people kind of navigate complex problems that they were having back home through the administrative bureaucracy that that is the service. Um, you know, and so I as as good as my time in the military was, and we define it by deployments and combat experience, I felt like a lot of service members were giving me a lot more. Hey, sir, thanks so much for getting me back my jump pay that they took away from me. Like I really appreciate the fact that you got those$3,000 back. Um, so that was the kind of stuff I realized while other you know officers felt like they were taking care of service members on one front, which is training and deploying and side, which all of us were doing. There was this other half of support to the service member that was lacking, and that was a void that I was filling. Um, and so I felt like going into the study of the law would definitely be the best thing. It's a natural kind of evolution, I think, of an advocate. And then my own experience with divorce while I was in the service really channeled my specific energy and focus into family law and how service members have to navigate unique challenges uh in the family law court.
SPEAKER_01:Did you know anything about this issue with family law before your own divorce?
SPEAKER_02:No, not really. I think there's there's a real degree of arrogance, I think, amongst most military members in the sense that until they are forced into this issue, they think that you know it's a failure of the service member to be able to navigate their own personal life, right? Um, so everybody is a type A personality and everybody is you know marching on this like very direct path of what success is.
SPEAKER_01:Sure.
SPEAKER_02:And you know, when you have a divorce, or uh, I would say, moreover, the specific issue I'm talking about, a divorce combined with a parenting plan issue or a custody issue, oh, this this person just you know can't manage their shit. Right. Right.
SPEAKER_01:I mean we all kind of see it that way, sadly. I mean, every time any every one of us who's ever had gone through a divorce, we we see it as like our personal failure. Instead of like this idea that how many Americans percentage-wise have have gone through a divorce, there there's quite a few of us who've done it. We we're we're different people at different stages of our lives, and we don't always make the best relationship decisions at certain stages of our lives, and then we live and we learn and we make different decisions. And unfortunately, when something like this happens, it's very difficult, I think, for the military or civilian authorities to understand what is the best thing to do for not only the parents, but but obviously most importantly, for the child. And what we have seen, or what you started to see through your own experience and then with others was that there was this gap in understanding of what was going on in terms of how to resolve these disputes in a way that was fair and that was amicable. So, what did you first initially start to do to try to get your hands around this issue and understand it a little bit more deeper?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so I just to say really quick, I think one, you know, until you are forced to deal with the issue and you personally um are pulled into it, it's very, very difficult to understand it. Even if you have a friend that's going through a divorce uh in service, you know, it's very difficult. And so I think a lot of times commanders internally are saying, oh man, he he just couldn't keep his house in order. Um, but the way they try to support with the limited knowledge of the family court system that they have and what's been handed down to them from other leaders is let me give you time and space to take care of it. Right. So ideally, at a minimum, you get time and space to take care of it. But a lot of what I'm gonna say today is actually what we would hope, and through education, what we would like is for the service to have more engagement in this process. Um, because the toll that it takes, just giving somebody space and time, you know, for those commanders that do do that, it's not enough. There needs to be engagement at a higher level. And this is an enterprise level of engagement that we really need to start with that would trickle down, um, enabling commanders uh then to do more than what they're doing right now. Um, but yeah, I would say the genesis for why I took on the problem and and how I started to really dissect it was you know, 22 suicides a day is the number that is is often recited by the VA and other sources. And um trying to understand what are the drivers of suicide is something that a number of organizations are looking at. And, you know, my central thesis and what has really guided my work towards understanding the difficulties service members face in family court all goes back towards uh veteran suicide. And I strongly believe that, and my my central thesis is that if you care about veteran suicide, you have to care about how veterans and service members are treated in family courts. Because so many of the principal drivers of suicide are inside of what happens within a divorce and specifically a divorce with a a custody, a child custody issue, right? You know, in the in the 2022 VA report on what were the primary drivers of suicide, financial loss, right? Stress, and then stress, uh subcomponents of that being financial loss, legal problems, um, you know, the risk of homelessness, and then interpersonal stressors, right? So relationship problems, alienation, a perceived burden on others. And so when you have a divorce and where your you know parent-child relationship is at risk, all of those things that I just described, which the VA has already identified as being principal drivers of veteran suicide, they're all within that family court issue of a divorce and then the subcomponent determining child custody. Right. And so if we are serious about it, about veteran suicide, let's focus on this because a lot of the information that I get back from those that reach out to me through my nonprofit Warrior Family Advocacy is look, Erhan, it's not what I saw when I was overseas in combat that has created trauma to me. It is navigating this forum, which is family court, and my service being weaponized against me, which is really impacting me emotionally. It's generating anxiety, it's generating stress, right? It is generating health problems. And I just don't know how to succeed in this forum because every time I think I'm moving forward, I'm taking two steps back because of a number of things in terms of how the court is predisposed to view veterans.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. And can you tell our audience a little bit about the genesis of the what is known as the family advocacy program? Why it was started and why it was needed when there are already NCIS, there's CID, there's civilian off-base authorities, law enforcement on other levels. What was the need for the military to create this separate program called FAP?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, definitely. So in the in the paper uh that you and I were discussing before we started, which I had published in Family Court Review, uh, that's the leading publication for family law in the United States. And it's the publication of AFCC, which is the Association for Family and Conciliation Courts. They are the principal body that deals in all issues related to family court custody litigation. So I had the opportunity to publish in their journal, Family Court Review, and then present on this topic at their annual symposium down in New Orleans. And so in that presentation, just like tonight, I highlight four drivers of what causes veterans to have an uphill battle in family court. One is the media narrative of extremes, and we can talk about that a little bit later. Two is the stigma of the military lifestyle, which you mentioned in your introduction, right? The frequent moves, you're always PCSing, you're transient in nature. So why would we ever give you, you know, custody of the child who may stay in the same jurisdiction or not? The negative stigma around PTSD or mental health that a lot of people ascribe to service members, whether they have a diagnosis or not. Um, and then this fourth thing, which you mentioned right now, which is a shadow court that we have in the military that has been weaponized within the service. It's an administrative hearing process known as the Family Advocacy Program, Incident Determination Committee. And it is a uh supposed to be a clinical hearing. Um it's administrative in nature, and it is a hearing that takes place uh at what every installation in the Department of War uh has, which is a family advocacy program. Every installation will have a family advocacy program. And it was designed in the late 50s, early 60s to address issues of uh domestic violence or child abuse on bases.
SPEAKER_01:And so isn't that redundant? Like that's what I'm trying to understand is why was it? I mean, it just seems like all they did was lile another program on top of what if the if the authorities were doing their job, if NCIS was doing its job, then you don't need this extra layer of administrative burden, I would think.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, Teresa, head on. I mean, I think one of the one of the things that my research uh identified early on is that the Department of Defense, uh, now Department of War, back in 2000, 2001, 2, 3, conducted a, I would say, multidisciplinary group uh that they brought together, conducted a review of the program in the 2000s. And they said, look, we we should be providing clinical support to people that are self-described as being victims of abuse or abusers wanting help. But the incident determination committee, which is a quasi-judicial structure that renders a decision of guilt or innocence, doesn't use the word guilt or innocence. It uses the term substantiated or unsubstantiated. Um and and I'll talk a little bit about that process, but you're right, it's it's rendering a decision, and that decision of a substantiated claim of abuse or not substantiated claim of abuse ends up impacting uh civil family core matters.
SPEAKER_01:But my thing too is like domestic violence or abuse is those are crimes.
SPEAKER_02:Those are crimes, that's right.
SPEAKER_01:And those are those are crimes that the police investigate.
SPEAKER_04:That's right.
SPEAKER_01:That you have a prosecutor who determines whether or not there is enough evidence to file a charge, and that's how the process should go. Putting this extra layer of administrative burden on that process, which as we'll talk later, doesn't have those due process protections in place, how does that serve anyone? How does I mean that that to me, I understand the need to have counseling, I understand the need to have resources, but if the people who are in those positions just do their jobs, then you then and and oh by the way, if this process doesn't provide due process protections, then it how is it an impactful process? And I'm surprised that there hasn't been more calls for it to be abolished, as I read it.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so if if you want to go down the rabbit hole of the FAP Incident Determination Committee and how it really disenfranchises not just the uh alleged abuser through the lack of procedural due process, but also the alleged victim, right? So both parties come out of this feeling like they didn't have an adequate opportunity to basically speak their story. And there's a number of reasons why. But really, Reddit is probably the only place you can go to to hear some real-world experiences, other than somebody like me who is reaching out and kind of publishing on the issue. My my larger publication on FAP and a very specific um legal perspective of FAP was published in Military Law Review, which is the leading journal for the JAG school out of Charlottesville, Virginia. And that was published back in January. It's about a 40-page deep dive into the procedural due process flaws of the FAP Incident Determination Committee. And like you said, look, if there is an allegation of abuse, the service member who's being abused, or the non-service member spouse or partner or child or somebody who is advocating for the child, they can lodge that complaint with the local jurisdiction, right? So if I'm in, you know, if I'm stationed at the Pentagon and, you know, I want to file a complaint for domestic abuse against my spouse, I can go to Arlington County to the police office there, and at that headquarters, go ahead and file a claim of domestic violence, and they will go ahead and investigate that claim. And then the prosecutor, based on what facts are are are generated, decide to to bring a charge, right? So that's that's one level of it. The other level is if you're a service member, obviously, that military police, and like you said, in the Navy, NCIS or CID in the in the Army, they will investigate in a similar manner and then determine if charges need to be also brought, right, by the uh installation commander, right? Or that information provided to the uh soldier's commander or officer's commander, and then you have UCMJ action. So there's a number of ways that this is handled, and a lot of people do say, look, the the FAP is problematic, one, because it's an additive layer. Number two, those other systems that we described, and definitely the civilian jurisdiction, right? The the civilian legal uh enterprise has matured over hundreds of years from the European law and and the British law systems, right? And so they understand a level of scrutiny and review, and then what procedural due process looks like. What we have in the FAP IDC is uh a hodgepodge of a system that kind of looks like a court and smells like a court, but is nothing like a court. And why? What do I mean by that? When the complaint is rendered, you don't have access to what the actual complaint is. Number one, you don't actually know what the complaint is. Number two, you don't have at the time that they do have a hearing, which is generally a one-day, one-hour hearing where facts are presented by one person, a licensed clinical social worker who is supposed to be the fact finder who has spoken with the alleged victim and the alleged abuser and gathers whatever information they need. So they present this to a body of nine people, right?
SPEAKER_01:Where do all these people come from? Do they work out of like the fleet and in the Navy?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, they're they're they're generally from the installation. So the installation commander or somebody that he designates in his place or her place. You have two, maybe two licensed clinical social workers, you have a JAG officer, you have a somebody from CID.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_02:Um, and so it's it's people that work on base. It's personnel from on base. Um, and then it's like a rotating body, and so other people get tagged to come in. Nine people, and so that fact finder, the licensed clinical social worker, used to be a voting member as well. So they would present the facts and then also vote. Um, now they just present the facts. And there is unfortunately in this process, like I said, you don't know what the charge is, you don't have legal representation that could be there in that body, right? Representing your equities. You don't have that. Neither the alleged abuser or the alleged victim are allowed to have counsel there. So I said, you don't have counsel, you don't know what the uh actual claim of abuse is if you're the alleged abuser. In terms of evidence, there is no rules of evidence, right? The rules of civil procedure uh and also you know, criminal courts, they have a very refined practice of what type of evidence is allowed and admitted into court, right? The FAP IDC doesn't have that. So, you know, when you don't have any kind of scrutiny with respect to what is allowed in as evidence, you're probably getting a lot of bad data. And, you know, this is one of the gripes and issues that comes out habitually when you speak with people that have gone before the FAP IDC, as well as JAG officers, right, that are present in them. When I do my research, I speak with a number of people and young JAG officers that have to sit on these are very uncomfortable with what they're witnessing in terms of procedural due process. But a lot of them are young, they don't know, you know, uh, they they don't have, I think, the the moral courage at that rank to really stand up and say something's wrong. But I guarantee you, all of them behind a closed door will tell you this is not procedural due process. And I'm very, very uncomfortable with what I was witnessing in my young career in the FAP IDC.
SPEAKER_01:Um this is frustrating to me because this is not a UCMJ change. In other words, much like the walking on eggshells that the Department of War just put out for the administrative process, this has a fix that doesn't require Congress. And that's what seems disappointing to me is that I didn't even know that this existed until I heard your Star Chamber podcast episode uh with Walk the Talk. And that was when I became exposed to the fact that there was this administrative process for people who are in a uh you know, a relationship or a child care custody dispute. And it was really disappointing to me because it just didn't make any sense when, like I said, there's civilian law enforcement, there's military law enforcement. What is the need to do this extra layer of administrative burden that has no due process protections to begin with, anyway? That doesn't satisfy anyone's um need to be fair and to feel as though justice was properly served through this process. It and we'll get into this more later, but this also impacts, or we can talk about it now, this doesn't just impact the people in the hearing and the disposition in the hearing, but then this goes over into family court and now impacts custody hearings and civil hearings on the civilian side because these documents and these determinations are binding in other arenas. Is that correct?
SPEAKER_02:It is so when you read the family advocacy program for each service, you know, they have their own uh regulation which governs it. All of them state that the paperwork, the decision from the FAP IDC, this final rendering of a decision that substantiates a finding of emotional or physical abuse, those are the two types of abuses that they will substantiate, is not to go any further than you know, the alleged victim getting the paperwork that validates that there has been a finding and what the finding is, and then the alleged abuser getting a copy of it. That it's not supposed to go any further than that. So that it's that they have the disclaimer language in there, but it is making its way into family court because a person that gets a decision, you know, that says it substantiates the other party, you know, emotionally or physically abuse them or both, that's going to carry a lot of weight in a civilian family court, right? When we start talking about best interest of the child and custody litigation, you know, the fact that a military forum found, you know, at the end of its process, as as much as we've described its lack of procedural due process, the court and a family court doesn't have time to kind of look at that. They don't read the AR, they don't have somebody like me describing, you know, hey, please temper how much you how much weight you put into how much weight this this has.
SPEAKER_01:And I mean, I would like to think that who's ever, I mean, it probably comes down to who's ever the lawyers for the particular party that was substantiated against has to fight that's the best you can do documents out of federal, I mean out of civil court, because if they are used and they are not, and it has not been fairly adjudicated, because many of these crimes I'm learning, and even if it is, even if it's a sexual assault, is a he said she said that I I did not understand that as deeply as I do until I started seeing the other side of false allegations. And I haven't done many of these shows, but I can tell you that that's a very hard decision that people have to make when you don't have a nurse examiner who can definitively say that an assault took place, when you are really relying on who somebody told a story to, and then how consistent the story that they told was to the people that they said it to. I mean, that's really what I'm seeing in a lot of these gazes. It comes down to is examining people's text messages.
SPEAKER_03:And yeah, it's just sad.
SPEAKER_01:And when I see that, I go, oh my god, like life and death decisions are being made on the basis of what someone else says. Happened.
SPEAKER_02:Well, this is why procedural due process is important. And this is why the evolution of you know the legal world and how our systems are conducted in civilian and criminal courts, right? With all of these processes, is when you render a decision and you identify somebody guilty when they're not, right? That's an inefficient outcome. And so procedural due process is an effort to try to limit how often we have an inefficient outcome, right? An inefficient outcome can also be that someone was the victim of abuse, right? Absolutely. Because allows procedural due process protections, you know, the the alleged abuser gets away.
SPEAKER_01:So and that happens all the time too. Happens all the time.
SPEAKER_02:So procedural due process is like a pilot with all of their check sheet items. And when you go through that check sheet and you check it off, the likelihood that that plane is going to fly and fly well is very, very high, right? Because you have all of those boxes checked.
SPEAKER_03:Right.
SPEAKER_02:You start to take away from procedural due process protections that civil and criminal courts have had for centuries with a abomination of a quasi-judicial process, which is the FAP IDC, right? You have just taken away a lot of those checklist items to limit an errant outcome. That's it. I mean, my background, I went to Johns Hopkins, I was an economics major, then I went to Georgetown, I studied public policy. I'm just cutting it straight, right? This is about efficiency and inefficiency. And the way you generate an efficient decision is you have protections in there to make sure you are going through a check by uh step-by-step process. Procedural due process in the criminal and the civilian enterprise of conducting law, right, has a number of those. What are those? You have an attorney, your attorney is present at the hearing, you know what charges are rendered against you. The evidence you have discovery, the evidentiary file that the court uses to render a decision, everybody has access to. And at some point it's closed off, no additional information is provided, no information is taken out. Everybody's making a decision off the same set of facts that have been provided, right? I mean, and then when a decision is rendered, right, the there's a transcript of the entire process. So you can go back and identify errors. FAP IDC doesn't do that. You know, this this cabal gets together and renders a decision. There is no transcript of it. You can't go back and say where was there an error occurred uh with respect to the policy? I mean, the policy itself for the FAP IDC says that you can only seek a reconsideration if there was an error in how the policy was applied during the hearing, or if information that should have been considered wasn't considered. If you're not party to the hearing, how do you even know the information that should have been presented? How would you even know? How do you know that a policy that was supposed to be applied wasn't applied? I mean, it it literally-esque situation.
SPEAKER_01:Have you been able to advocate for this FAT program to be abolished? I mean, I just don't understand. Like, I'm you know, and I and I'm sure my audience, if anyone is watching this closely that is a FAP proponent, uh, please please feel free to send me an email because right now I'm just not convinced that this is needed.
SPEAKER_02:I think fat from the clinical perspective is essential, right? We want families to have a safe place to be able to go and get resources and help if they're that part, yes.
SPEAKER_01:But I'm talking about this.
SPEAKER_02:The incident determination committee has come under significant scrutiny. Don't listen to Arahan Bedistani. The government accountability office just published a report in 2024. The GAO, okay, the GAO was primed by the Department of Defense then, Department of War now, to do a review of FAP, okay, and specifically the FAP IDC because of the the volume of complaints that are coming in.
unknown:Okay.
SPEAKER_03:Sure.
SPEAKER_02:And and the biggest complaint, the biggest complaint is how a substantiated claim is being leveraged in family court. Absolutely impacting the calculus of the family court's decision on rendering child custody to the person who is identified as the alleged abuser. You know, I have vignette after vignette. One of the most interesting vignettes that I had is a uh a service member's spouse came to me and said, Hey, Erhan, uh, I need some information about FAP IDC. I went to the FAP seeking resources for my service member's spouse because I thought they had some PTSD and they were doing some things and their behavior was a little worrisome for me because of the way they were behaving towards me. I felt a little afraid for my safety. So I went to FAP just seeking resources. FAP took that and lodged a complaint against the service member spouse. Okay, the service member spouse then in some way rebutted and then this non-service member female came under a FAP IDC hearing and was found to be the abuser.
SPEAKER_03:Wow.
SPEAKER_02:And she herself, she herself is a therapist who helps children.
SPEAKER_01:So I mean, she but she can't trust a process that doesn't have due process. So I mean that's that that's how I feel about the invisib administrative investigations.
SPEAKER_02:Nobody transferred, she has no idea what she was accused of. All she knows is she went seeking resources for her military service member spouse who had deployed multiple times and she thought had PTSD. And in the fact finders kind of questioning of the service member, he you know made an allegation against her and somehow they ran with that, right? And before you know it, you know, she's worried about her credentialing as a counselor.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, I bet.
SPEAKER_02:Right. And what is she? So this is just one example of how the system gets it wrong. And the reason it gets it wrong is because they don't have these procedural due process mechanisms in place. The GAO said, you know, we should really reconsider the IDC component of that, which is the same thing the Department of War multidisciplinary panel in 2001, two, and three said as well. So we have had iterations, you know, this being two decades since the last one, where the the parties at B, whoever's looked at this I was gonna say, somebody's keeping this going.
SPEAKER_01:Someone's keeping this alive, and somebody wants this to continue. Like somebody's benefiting by the fact that we're continuing to do it. To your point, yes, we should have FAP, we should have resources for people who are struggling with these issues. That's what the Fleet and Family Service Center is all about. And I 100% agree that that should happen. But to have this administrative hearing to determine crimes that law enforcement investigates, it is absolutely and which don't have due process protection.
SPEAKER_02:To that point, law enforcement investigates. What we have, and a lot of the vignettes that I receive from from those that reach out to me, Erhan, the same allegations were rendered in the civilian jurisdiction, and I was found not guilty. They actually never even rendered charges. So the allegation itself didn't have enough merit to warrant anything other than you know, initial inquiry from the local authorities, and then it just died. Okay. But FAP still found on that same set of facts that the person had a substantiated claim of emotional or physical abuse. So emotional abuse is a harder one, you know, civilian jurisdictions or criminal jurisdictions don't look at emotional abuse from a domestic violence standpoint. So they're not going to look at that. But physical violence, right? They are. And so when you have a world where, you know, Arlington County doesn't go with an accusation of physical abuse, but the FAP IDC renders a finding of substantiating it against a service member or their spouse, right? Now obviously we've got a real problem here.
SPEAKER_01:We do. And I bet what happens sometimes is that there are substantiated complaints and there are issues of domestic violence where there just isn't the evidence to prosecute, but there was a domestic violence incident. So the military is trying to give service members, if I can just assume noble intent, they're trying to give service members this other avenue to seek justice. But what that does is it doesn't fix the original root cause analysis problem. If the problem is that the civilian law enforcement refuses to prosecute legitimate cases, well, then we need to make civilian law enforcement better, or we need to make NCIS better, OSI better. And those investigatory agencies need to step up their game and apply better investigatory processes to these issues. Not let's create this administrative burden process where we can render a decision that nobody will understand how we made that decision. That doesn't fix it and doesn't apply the same level of scrutiny or resources that and it doesn't fix the root cause, it doesn't fix what was ever the problem to begin with. It sort of reminds me, this is so similar to the administrative and the UCMJ process. And I can make so many parallels where we didn't get our arms around what was really happening with these sexual assault cases. So what did we do? We just took all the decisions away from the commanders. We we pushed them to this special counsel that is now doing it, but it's not really fixing the issue, it's just shifting the burden elsewhere to now prolong these investigations and put people through year, one year to three years of a trial or of a court martial when we didn't fix the investigatory problems to begin with that may have caused these issues to continue to happen over and over again. So that's what we're doing. We're not doing root cause. It sounds to me anyway, Ern that we're not doing root cause analysis of what the actual problem is that we're supposed to be fixing.
SPEAKER_02:No, I think what we're what we're doing and what's going on with FAP is you know, there is a large volume of service members and family members that find themselves before FAP. I want to say maybe 30 to 40,000 allegations uh annually, of which maybe five to 10,000 will come back as being substantiated. You know, these are big numbers. And so there's a there's you know a generation generating kind of like a demand signal that this is this is big and there's a lot of you know issue within the service. And so it's it's it's a really hard thing, um, I think for a lot of people to say, look, we just got to close down the FAP IDC. And so I think getting rid of the FAP IDC just doesn't seem reasonable, but I think instituting additional procedural due process um mechanisms does. And I say that because, you know, the the paper that was published in the military law review uh back in January, about a 30, 40 page deep dive into this that I did, I tried to find the closest like system to what the FAP IDC is in another venue and kind of do a compare and contrast. And what I came up with was um, you know, the campus uh title uh nine hearings. So on college campuses across the US, starting in the mid-2000s, there was a significant push from the Department of Education for colleges to get more aggressive about investigating sexual harassment, sexual assault on campuses. And so they created administrative hearings on campuses. And so, you know, coeds, they they go out, you know, they they have uh an evening together, and then maybe there's uh issue of non-consensual sex. Now, the the person that did not consent now and has an issue can bring that before the Title IX uh sexual assault board on campus, and then now there's a hearing, counsel is not present, the the alleged abuser, alleged victim not present, right? And then this uh multi uh member panel from the college renders a decision, right? This created a number of cases uh throughout the US, which resulted in um students being removed from the campus as a result of that administrative hearing, and then having to uh seek recourse through the state court system. It took many, many years. But by the time it got up to the state supreme courts, those state supreme courts came back and said this Title IX hearing uh was not rendering appropriate procedural due process. And you need to make changes. And then in 2020, uh President Trump with Betsy DeVos as the Department of Education uh secretary instituted procedural due process protections, which allowed for things like counsel to be present at the Title IX hearing, for there to be cross-examination, right? To be able to cross-examine the person that you are saying is your alleged abuser or the abuser being counsel, the counsel for the alleged abuser being able to cross-examine the alleged victim, right? This is this is normal in the court system, but was not going on in these panels, um, or or in these, yeah, in these Title IX hearings. And so when you compare FAP IDC as it is today, it looks exactly like the old Title IX hearing process on college campuses that the state courts already came back and said, this this is a violation of constitutional rights, specifically procedural due process rights in colleges. You need to afford uh you know additional protections. And then Betsy DeVos changed it. And so, since that change now, you can cross-examine, you can have counsel present, you know exactly what you're charged of, you get to see the evidentiary file, right? So you're seeing like they've they've fixed up the issues that the FAP IDC still has. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, it just tells it tell it it speaks to me of just this overall issue with due process. We could be doing the same process with administrative hearings as well, or through the military investigative system. Where there could be other safeguards in place for those processes with the same thing that we're trying to get here with FAP. And what I guess my question would be is what can people do if they want to advocate for that? Can they it is is a this isn't something that has to change through law because it's not a change to the UCMJ. So this is something that the Department of War could fix, correct?
SPEAKER_02:It could, you know, the ultimate proponent for the family advocacy program and not only the program but the incident termination committee is uh the Office of Secretary of Defense Personnel and Readiness. And then they they through that office oversee each one of the services, you know, and their fat programs. But ultimately, what Congress mandated of the Department of War is that they have a program that looks to address uh you know domestic violence and child abuse in the family construct. That's it. There is no specific delineation in the congressional uh statute that requires an actual FAP incident determination committee, right? So this is additive. The services have created this, they've read into the the statute such to create this additive body, right? And so they could easily take away the additive body without any kind of congressional legislation. It's already or apply due process protections to the or apply due process protections, which I think is is the more reasonable approach, which is to say, look, you know, I think the optics are bad, that we just get rid of the FAP IDC. Um, so I just don't think it's it's a tenable course of action, it's a throwaway course of action, if you will, kind of to use a military term. But I think a legitimate, reasonable course of action is say, let's let's add the procedural due process mechanisms that we see in other forums to include civil and criminal hearings and what we see in the Title IX hearing processes on college campuses. And let's just do that, and we can start to improve the inefficiency of the system. And that way alleged victims and alleged abusers can come out with a narrative saying, I felt like I was I was represented well in this process, right? Because that's not what they're saying right now. Both parties feel disenfranchised, and that's been the steady-state kind of uh you know thought from 2000, 2001, 2003 when they reviewed it. And then here the more recent uh government accountability office report as well. So that that trend has continued. So why we haven't had a behavioral change, you know, a change in how the Department of War and specifically OSD PR manages the system, I don't know. I really don't know. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I wonder what it would take to get OSD PNR to examine this, other than us talking about it. I mean, that that is that is the the the black hole of of of of what many are I think are are frustrated with. I mean, next week I'll be talking to a a COVID uh mandate, uh reinstatement uh advocate in terms of the reinstatement not going as as promised. And there's been a number of of issues. We did see, um, thankfully, there's now a uh Barracks task force. I think I saw that just recently put out. So I do think that there are some positive momentum in some of the things that advocates have been wanting to see with this new administration, but you bring out another layer to this issue that's beyond the administrative system, beyond UCMJ reform, but now really looking at the FAT process and seeing what procedural due process protections can be put in place. And I did see, I don't know if you saw this, Urham, but the memo that the SEC war put out on the day he went to Quantico, you can see it on the DOW website, but they talked about there being a justice committee review board. And I found that really interesting because I didn't know there was a justice committee review board. I don't know who's a member of the Justice Committee Review Board, but it warmed my heart to think that there might be people within UPNR and within the Department of War that are aware of all these problems that I talk about on this podcast and that are looking at due process. I don't know if there's things you've heard on your end, but that's as far as I've gone.
SPEAKER_02:Anybody that's been in service long enough has either had a friend or themselves been, you know, associated with an allegation, right? And the allegation itself is it's like tar on you. You just can't get it off, or you see your friend that's dealing with it, right? And even if the allegation is unfounded, the damage with how it maybe um limits your ability for upward mobility, you know, you miss an opportunity for a review board because you're under investigation, all of these things play into it. It can it can damage somebody's career in the short term or the long term. The the damage that comes with the FAP IDC is now it is going to impact your civilian life and specifically your constitutionally protected child-parent relationship. And that's what's so dangerous about it because I don't think that even when the services decided that they were going to have a FAP IDC, that they ever intended for it to get outside of the you know service box, if you will. But it is, it's happening far too frequently. And the GAO report, the government accountability office report on it in 2024, and I spoke with the the analysts that put it together, you know, the fear is that people are personally, I mean, are are purposely, purposely leveraging it to get a decision of a substantiated claim so that they can then take that into the family court, right? So that is really, really scary, right? It's like the perfect weapon. It's like an IED. There is no solution for it, and you only get damaged by it when it's right up on top of you. You know, so service members don't see this coming, or a non-service member doesn't see it coming. All of a sudden they're dealing with an allegation of emotional or physical abuse through FAP, and a decision is rendered. They have no way of really fighting it, they have no idea what the issue was, and now it's front and center in family court in terms of determining should you have equitable parenting time, should you have 50-50. Well, there's a FAP IDC finding here that says it's substantiated for emotional abuse or physical abuse.
SPEAKER_01:That's devastating.
SPEAKER_02:Devastating. You're not going to be able to come back from that, forget about it. And the thing with child custody is once that initial order is written and published by the judge, yes, you can seek a change, but it's it's actually much more difficult than one would think. And if you never are able to, you know, expunge your record or prove that the FAP claim was false, then that's always going to be present in your record. And the court is not going to easily forget about the fact that there's substantiated record from the service of abuse, right? I mean, domestic violence is something we've got to take very, very seriously. A court is risk averse, even if they think that the process in which FAP came to his decision was maybe uh questionable at the end of the day. It's a finding from a body that is official. And so this is very, very dangerous. It's going on. And a lot of the most dangerous course of actions that I hear is, you know, service members have told me they know of service members who have committed suicide when they find themselves under a FAP investigation. Not because they're guilty, but because they know what it's going to lead to with respect to their parent-child relationship. The stress of that, not knowing how they're going to overcome it, leads to suicide.
SPEAKER_04:Well, that's the big problem.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, that's an unintended consequence, I think, of the program, but it is happening, it's a reality.
SPEAKER_01:Um the delayed investigation, I guess the delayed investigatory process is a huge problem within the military. And most of the people who are facing, I wouldn't say most, I think the finding was about 30%, but that's still quite a high number of people who are dealing with suicidal thoughts or having mental health issues, are also facing disciplinary problems. And the fact that these investigations have zero timelines, they can drag out for years putting somebody under this cloud of suspicion, not knowing which way it's going to turn out, being stuck in limbo. It is such a disservice to an alleged victim, it's a such a disservice to the alleged offender, and it has to be fixed. And this, like I said, applies to the administrative process, it applies to FAP, it applies to the UCMJ. We have to have processes in place within the military that we can trust. And when we send our our daughters and our sons off to war, we have to know that they're going to be protected within the chain, the chain of command. They're not going to just be protected overseas from getting shot at. They're going to be protected from their own chain of command to not have a system that can be so easily weaponized and not have proper due process protections in place. So I really thank you, Orhan, for bringing this subject to the attention of our listeners and the people watching this podcast, because I don't think that a lot of people thought through this portion of the due process system. It's a it's a three-legged problem now in my mind with the UCMJ and the court-martial process, with the administrative process, and also with FAP. So all I can hope is that the Under Secretary for Personnel and Readiness is taking a hard look at all of these issues. And I do appreciate the fact that they have a walking on eggshells and they've talked about the fact that the system has become weaponized, but it's so much bigger than that. It is a due process problem. And I wish that they would frame it like that, because it's not about too many complainants, it's not about all the victims are not really victims. That's not the issue. The issue is a problem with due process, and that's the way that we need to frame this conversation. So I'm hopeful that these things are being looked at. But if people want more information, uh, can they reach out to you? Or if this has impacted them and they want someone to talk to who's been through it or they want to be connected to resources, how can they find you?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, definitely. Go to uh my website, warriorfamilyadvocacy.com. Uh, you know, on the website, you can click if you're you know requesting help or support, fill it out. I'll get the email. And then generally what I do after that point is I just reach out and set up an opportunity to talk. If it's the FAP IDC or just having your military service leveraged against you in family court, right? Uh dealing with accusations that you're you're mentally unstable because of your military service or you have PTSD and you're not a fit parent. These are some of the things that um commonly take place in family court. And uh one, you know, I can empathize and and then also like assure the service member of the veteran, look, what you're going through, others have gone through as well. Um, and a lot of times that's what it looks like is look, take a knee, you know, drink water, take care of yourself. Are you eating? Are you getting sleep? This is gonna be a long road, but you're not gonna be able to do what you need to do if you're not engaging in self-care. Because at the point that a lot of folks reach out to me, you know, they're at the end of their rope. Um, and so that ends up being a lot of the advice that I give up front. And then, you know, as as uh as packaged as it could be, I mean, I I say, look, you you want to get a lawyer.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:At the end of the day, at the end of the day, look, if if you really care about retaining your your parent-child relationship and and trying to make a go of it up front, get an attorney up front. Don't try to do it yourself, pro se dig yourself a bigger hole, and now you're trying to get an attorney to dig you out of it because now you're just gonna compound the problem. So that's a lot of the stuff that I do. I can't give specific legal advice, but if anybody needs an attorney, I can help them find an attorney. And what Warrior Family Advocacy will do is at a minimum pay for that initial consult with an attorney so that you get your foot in the door, you meet with an attorney in the jurisdiction where your divorce slash parenting uh custody issue is is going on, and you can start figuring out what rights you have. And that I think a lot of times opens the door to people to to kind of calm down and kind of understand exactly the path before them.
SPEAKER_01:I love it. I love it. Well, thank you so much, Orhanna. Really appreciate your time. Uh Sean. Jovek, thank you so much for tuning in. He said, I just tuned in. Great podcast. And thank you for your service, Urham. So thank you so much. I will meet you backstage to say goodbye as I go full screen, but really appreciate your time and coming on the show.
SPEAKER_02:It was wonderful. It just flew by. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. All right, guys. That's a wrap for this week. Uh, for next week, I have another two guests on Wednesday and Thursday. I'll be uh welcoming John Franklin. He is a green beret, also very well known in the circles of people who are fighting for the proper reinstatement of those who got out over the COVID vaccine. So we'll catch up with where that cause currently is. As you guys know, I've talked about that in the past, how incredibly dedicated and persistent the advocates are on that issue, especially over on X. It's pretty impressive to see how so many people have worked together to advocate on that issue. And then the very following day, I have a shipmate that I served with uh in the Air Force from a previous command who was on the ground with the undocumented immigrants, I believe it was in Texas, as that issue was going down. And she's going to be sharing some of her firsthand experiences with the unaccompanied minors during the Biden administration. So I'm really looking forward to talking to her about her firsthand experiences working some of those very complex issues. So, with that, as I always do, appreciate your time tonight and joining us on the Stories of Service podcast. Please take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and have a good rest of your evening. Bye bye now.