A 5-part series
Series Introduction
Modern legal systems run on records.
Depositions are transcribed. Hearings are recorded. Police interrogations are preserved. Financial transactions generate digital trails. Making and preserving records is not a mark of pure distrust. It recognizes that memories are fading and fallible and that consequential decisions require foundations that can be reviewed.
In Utah child custody disputes, however, one category of record departs from the norm. Original statements are not preserved so that context, sequence, tone, and overall accuracy remain available for review and verification.
Interviews with children involved in child custody and parent-time disputes are conducted without authenticated contemporaneous verbatim record via unedited audio-visual capture. Rather than preserved testimony, courts receive second-hand narrative summaries prepared after the fact through custody evaluator reports, guardian ad litem summaries, and therapist testimony.
The court therefore evaluates not the child’s own statements, but other people’s descriptions and interpretations of those statements.
That isn’t just an odd inconsistency. It is built into child custody and parent-time cases, and that design choice fundamentally changes the kind of evidence on which courts rely.
This series does not question the good faith of guardians ad litem or child custody evaluators. It does not challenge the sincerity of courts.
This series does not attempt to certify the motives of guardians ad litem, custody evaluators, or courts (good faith may be present in some cases and absent in others). Nor does it deny the value of professional expertise in family law. The issue examined here is structural: a system that substitutes second-hand summaries for preserved testimony.
Across three installments, this series examines:
- the fragility rationale commonly offered against recording;
- the evidentiary consequences of summary-only reporting; and
- the institutional implications for transparency, deference, and legitimacy.
When families accept difficult rulings, acceptance rests in large part on confidence that the process was careful and even-handed. Making and preserving records strengthens that confidence. When recording making and preservation is routine elsewhere but absent here, the difference deserves explanation.
The inquiry that follows is not adversarial. It is structural. And structural questions, when consequence is high, warrant careful attention.
Utah Family Law, LC | divorceutah.com | 801-466-9277This article is part of a five-part series (Introduction, Part I, Part II, Part III, and Conclusion) examining transparency and evidentiary design in child custody disputes. The next installment explores how the absence of preserved interviews affects fidelity, context, and judicial review in custody determinations.