I won’t get into the clinical specifics of abusive marriages; it’s not my field. But as a matter of legal services, the community pays woefully inadequate attention to the matter. There are many good honest people caught up in horrific family situations. Those issues might include domestic violence, drug use, a spouse or fomer spouse who is no longer religious, dead beat parents who don’t pay child support and myriad combinations of those issues and others. One common denominator among all those people is that they desperately need legal representation, and unless they are very well heeled or have parents who are of significant means, it isn’t available. (Remember the old joke where a prominent attorney says he wouldn’t be able to afford his own services? That’s what I mean. The cost of the legal services to really help these people is that high.) People are suffering much more in these situations than they need to because they cannot avail themselves of the legal services that might alleviate some or most of the difficulty. Attorneys, who are willing to do their part, cannot however afford to represent too many people for free; as they are called upon to do. They have families as well as staffs who have families etc. But, as a matter of trying to do their part would be willing to discount their fees to help some of these people. We in the frum legal community, especially those of us who specialize in family law, have long noted this problem and are dumbfounded by the complete lack of community response to it.
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