doing, educating the lawyers and the judges and the public, I think we are halfway home after this job that you have done is accomplished.

Mr. BIAGGI. It is amazing. This whole undertaking started with one letter that was brought to my attention and it fascinated me. I didn't know the magnitude of the problem. After our first hearing in Washington, where some of the people present here today testified, there was a sudden outburst. Then we appeared on the Phil Donahue Show which may be regarded as controversial. But I say out of controversy oftentimes is born truth.

The response has been overwhelming. We received more than a 1,000 letters. The calls are endless. What we in effect have done is given hope to grandparents who have resigned themselves to the fact that theirs was a hopeless and futile undertaking. More people get involved, more people make appearances and talk about it-it is not necessary for me to do it alone. I know a number of you

have.

I see Mrs. Highto is here and the Kudler's are here, and so many that have testified. They travel everywhere to do it.

Dr. FREED. The Engel's will be my next clients. I think some time in May or June, when the climate becomes more favorable, as your hearings are publicized, as we are all doing the best we can on television, radio, I think at that point-their case, as you know, was lost, and not through ineptness, but through the fact it was not realized what this meant for the children.

I think as you rightfully say, it is a children's rights resolution. And any precious benefits that the grandparents derived are just so much the better. This will be my next pro bono case, for the Engel's, to try to get them a look-see with their grandchildren. Mr. BIAGGI. We would be interested in the outcome.

Dr. FREED. I will keep you advised.

Mr. BIAGGI. Thank you very much.

Mr. William Kraut, attorney and court mediator, Child Custody Disputes.

STATEMENT OF WILLIAM D. KRAUT, ATTORNEY AND COURT MEDIATOR, CHILD CUSTODY DISPUTES, WEST CHESTER, PA.

Mr. KRAUT. Good morning. I wish to thank you for holding these important hearings. I am happy to report that grandparents in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania have protection for the purpose of visitation with their grandchildren.

I would like to go on

Mr. BIAGGI. What kind of protection?

Mr. KRAUT. Pennsylvania has a statute called the grandparents visitation statute. It allows grandparents visitation with grandchildren in the event of dissolution of marriage.

Mr. BIAGGI. Let us stay with that. We know we have 42 States that permit the applicant to petition. I gather from what you are saying that this might be a little bit more.

Mr. KRAUT. No. This is an allowance to petition. Now, let me go on with Pennsylvania for a second. Pennsylvania has 67 counties. There are probably 67 different interpretations of this statute

within the Commonwealth. In our particular county, Chester County, we have what is called a conciliation process.

It is a mediation conciliation. Whenever a petition for visitation, be it parent or grandparent, it is filed with the court, prior to litigation, prior to the matter going to trial, all parties involved and any child over the age of 5 that is involved must appear for a mediation.

What takes place at that point is that the litigants and their attorneys appear. We hold it in the courthouse. It is in an informal setting rather than being on the bench. It is nonadversarial. The attorneys have learned over a time period not to cross-examine. They are welcome to be present.

But the processes will normally start off by my saying to the person who brought the petition, What caused you to bring it? There is normally some incident that has caused this action to take place. They will start in on what was the problem, what was the incident that caused this.

What happens is they initially start talking to me. The other side has a chance to respond, say that is not true, that is not the case, and so forth.

During the process of this mediation both sides are talking to me. Somewhere in the middle of the communication now stops being directed at me and starts in at another one. And for the first time in many heated contests, the parties are actually talking to each other, other than talking through their attorneys.

And what we are able to do is have the parties focus on what is best for the children, not what is best for the parents or grandpar

ents.

A lot of times what will happen is after numerous minutes of the conciliation conference, I will turn to the litigants and say, I have heard you now for 10, 15 minutes, and what I have heard is you talking about yourself or what he did to you or what she did to you; I have not heard you say one thing about the child. All of a sudden they stop and they think.

Our process goes on that after I talk to the parents and get a flavor of what is going on, I will excuse myself and take the children one at a time into another room. I have been doing this in the county of Chester for 2 years, and I did it for 3 years in the family court for the State of Delaware in New Castle County. I have probably interviewed over 2,000 children.

What amazes me is I found very few nonspecial children. I say to the children, mom has a lawyer, dad has a lawyer, part of my job is being your lawyer, going back to mom and dad saying this is what you think, if it is OK with you. I need the child's permission to repeat.

There are certain questions I will ask the children. I will start off with games and jokes, trying to guess their favorite color, their best friend, loosen them up a little. There will be certain questions I will ask them throughout.

One of the questions is, Tell me who loves you. And I am quite shocked at times when the children will not name somebody in their immediate family, be it a grandparent or a parent. Later on I will say, When I asked you who loved you, you told me your

mother, your brother, but you did not say dad did; is there a reason for that?

And the children will a lot of times come up with yes, and it was an incident or something that they heard or saw that felt that love was not there. I will go back to the grandparent or parent and the conciliation conference and say, This is not a moral judgment, this is not saying something you have done is wrong or evil, however, your child feels this way, and I think you better look at it and deal with the child on that issue.

It is done in such a way that the people do not feel defensive and we kind of break through some of the areas. The children are told their grandparents or parents are going to make the decisions, and if their grandparents and parents cannot, then the judge will; that they will not make the decision.

We don't want the children manipulating the situation of having somebody promise them something and 2 months later go back to the court and say, I want to go somewhere else.

They are also told what they have to say is very important and that their parents and grandparents and the judge will listen to it, but again the decision will not be theirs. Of course, if we have somebody 15, 16, 17, there is not some way we will be able to shackle them to do something they don't want to do.

I hear five to six of those a day, and we have about an hour scheduled for each, some have taken all day, some have settled in 25 minutes. I am happy to report in a couple of cases after the conference, families have reconciled and their is one case I know of where the parties were a day away from a divorce decree and got back together based on that conference.

If the parties do not reconcile, they are ordered by our court to both choose one psychologist. We have a list that we maintain, psychologists that are interested in the field will submit their resumes which we keep on file in the court. It is not a court-approved list. It is people that are interested.

If the parties do not want to choose from that list, they can choose anyone they would like. They both have to agree to go to the same person. The psychologists particularly like this program because they are then becoming a child advocate. The process goes on to look at what is best for the child.

If the parties agree, after the psychological evaluation they can come back with the psychologist to a second conference. That is not mandatory in our county. But they can come back to that conference and see if we can resolve the matter that way.

For 1982, statistically 70 percent of all custody visitation cases in our county resolved themselves at the conciliation processes. Only 30 percent went to trial.

I think the statistics are significant for a couple of reasons. The judges complain to me because all they see are the bitterly contested cases now. But I think we have found a program, and I am not saying our particular program is a panacea. There are probably many corrections that could be made in it, but we have found a program that appears to take this matter out of advocacy, out of litigation.

And I think it is extremely important that visitation and custody be taken out of the adversarial processes and put into a mediationconciliation process.

The parties are the parents, the grandparents. They know the children better than the psychologist or the judge will ever know them. They are told they want to be put in a situation where a judge on a 3-hour, 3-day, 3-week hearing is going to make a decision as to what is best for those children.

Certain people are going to want to. But they are never going to settle anything anyway. That is one of the reasons the court structure is there.

Most reasonable people, when it is put to them that way will say: Maybe we ought to do it, maybe we ought to make that decision. And they will work hard at it.

Most attorneys dislike custody litigation because nobody wins in it. At first they were very, very concerned about the program because it wasn't a judicial hearing in a sense and they were not allowed to advocate. Most of them over the 2 years that they have been coming into the program have found it a benefit, and most now find it is a proper method and a proper vehicle of trying to resolve these matters.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court Rules Committee is now investigating conciliation-mediation and will probably propose a court rule that this take place.

I was trying to research on how many States, how many cities have some form of mediation and consolidation.

In my written presentation which I would like to present for the record, I would like to go through what I was able to find.

California has a statewide mandatory program. Arizona, Delaware, and Connecticut have programs in place. From there the research becomes a little more haphazard. I find a lot of what I am about to say now is by court rule. The city of Seattle in the State of Washington has a program. The city of Portland in the State of Oregon. Camden County in New Jersey. Dane County in Wisconsin. Portland, Maine. Louisville, Ky. Cook County, Ill. Dallas, Tex. Lincoln, Nebr. Cambridge, Mass.

The following States I am not clear if there are statewide programs or not. Michigan, Hawaii, Minnesota, Alaska, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Virginia, and Wisconsin have programs.

In our State of Pennsylvania, as I said before, there are 67 counties. We found from those counties in a statewide survey, 51 responding. Of those, 27 had conciliation-mediation programs.

So as we can see if we take Pennsylvania as an example, out of the counties responding, 57.4 percent had some form of program. They were not all similar to the one in my county, the one I am familiar with. Certain ones, there are attorneys appointed as masters that sit and take testimony, they do not attempt to mediate or conciliate. They hold it as a judicial hearing.

I would like to point out that the speaker that I follow had very, very good ideas. I have one concern with what Dr. Freed was presenting. And I have had this concern in dealing with grandparents' visitation rights.

In my written statement I give a scenario of a husband and wife divorcing, both husband and wife having strained relationships with their families. That the children, if we take a case of the children being on a standard visitation schedule, which by the way our county is trying to get away from-what we consider standard is alternate weekends, from Friday to Sunday, alternate holidays, probably anywhere from 2 weeks to half the summer, and then in a lot of cases 1 night during the week for a dinner-if children are on that type of schedule in most middle-class families we find because of economics both parents having to work, so that the custodial parent only has for free time the weekends that the child is not with the other parents, when do we invest time with the grandparents, with the aunts, uncles, the extended family. I believe it is very important to do that.

Children also have activities and it can be that perhaps grandparents can take the children to some of the activities as well as spending time with them. I found in my work that what is very important to grandparents is that they have phone contact, written contact, being able to present gifts to the children, being able to see them on important days as well as having some type of schedule and routine visitation with them.

Children very much want to spend time with grandparents. The practical matter is how much time. And that has to be on a caseby-case basis. I don't think there is any way that we can make a suggestion that will deal with every case. I think we need to look and say that, based on the facts of this case, this is what would be practical.

The resolution that you have presented, Congressman Biaggi, to the Congress I very much applaud. I think that it is important that we have some codification. I am not sure it should be done in a Federal statute. I believe that if the States can adopt uniform laws that can be applied uniformly we would be much better off.

Mr. BIAGGI. That is exactly what we are trying to do. Actually, the sense of the Congress will serve as a catalyst and this whole undertaking is serving as just that. I know different State legislatures are starting to introduce legislation to modify their existing statutes or amend them, broaden them, reinforce them, to make the visitation privileges more available by virtue of a number of things, such as mediation and the like.

Mr. KRAUT. And your hearings are having a very positive effect. [The prepared statement of Mr. Kraut follows:]

PREPARED STAtement of William D. Kraut, Esquire, West Chester, Pa.

There is today a substantial change throughout our nation in the family constellation. Family divisions are a common occurrence and children have become fractured from the family as we in the past have known it.

One area where this fracture becomes grotesque is the separation of children from their grandparents. While this committee has viewed the role and rights of grandparents to spend time with their grandchildren, I wish to emphasize the need of the grandchildren to spend time with their grandparents.

Grandparents are an important teaching device for children. Besides the obvious of giving the grandchildren love, and in a great many cases, spoiling the grandchildren, grandparents give grandchildren a different perspective of the world and of life. I believe this to be important in the overall development of grandchildren. The grandparents also can give grandchildren stability when the immediate family is in turmoil.