Judge Awards Visitation to Accused Child Pornographer

August 15, 2002

by Katy Califa, NOW Intern

A Tennessee judge granted visitation rights on Aug. 9 to a man who was arrested for taking sexually explicit photographs of his 7-year-old son. The judge ruled that, despite the child pornography arrest, Ralph Gonnella deserves visitation rights because he is the child's biological father.

At the hearing, the boy's mother, Tamara Arrington, reportedly pleaded with the court to deny Gonnella unsupervised visitation rights with their son, saying she feared for the boy's safety. But after the ruling, she explained she had no choice but to comply with the judge's order. "If I take my son and go, I face charges," she told News Channel 5, a local news broadcast in Nashville. "[I am] trying to protect the rights of my son, the victim."

Arrington's plight echoes that of Debra Schmidt, who was sentenced to a year in jail earlier this year for attempting to protect her two young daughters from their father, Manuel Saavedra, a convicted sex offender who pleaded guilty in 1992 to lewd conduct with a 13-year-old female relative. After Schmidt ignored court orders allowing him visitation rights and fled with her daughters from California to Texas, a California judge ordered her extradition. Schmidt is now in federal custody, and the same court has awarded custody of the girls to Saavedra.

NOW President Kim Gandy said the judges' rulings in both cases reflects an frequent outcome in family courts—that men can harm children and get away with it, but women who dare to even raise the issue of protecting their children from abuse may lose custody altogether.

"It is extremely disturbing that the disregard of child sexual abuse has become so common in the family courts, even when it is clearly proved," Gandy said. "Especially at this time when the scandals in the Catholic Church have demonstrated how pervasive and damaging this abuse can be. Yet the judges choose to believe that child abuse doesn't happen in families, or among "nice" people, and they blame the mothers for bringing it to light."

"Who is going to protect our children from abuse when protective mothers are being jailed and threatened with jail?" Gandy continued. "This case demonstrates the dire need for legal reform of family laws at both the state and federal levels."