Rapist seeking visitation with child he fathered after attack on teen victim

[happyslug]

51. Not in Pennsylvania and most other states UNLESS the abuse raises to the level of "Great harm".

The Courts will try to protect a child from abuse, for example requiring supervised visitation only (and sometimes the supervisor is a independent third party, that the Abuser has to pay to do the supervision). I have had several cases where a potentially abuser had to see the child under the supervision of a person in the field of child care and had to pay for the supervision BEFORE any visitation would occur. More common in Children and Youth Cases then in Custody cases, but done quite often.

Side Note: Pennsylvania does NOT attach Child support to Custody, these are two separate actions in Pennsylvania. For this reason the existence of a support order, gives the non-custodian parent any right to visitation NOR can the non-payment of support permit the custodian parent to deny the non-custodian parent any scheduled visitation. Furthermore if a non-custodian parent refuses to take the scheduled visitation, the Non-custodian parent still has to pay child support AND the custodian parent can then petition the court to reduce visitation to what ever the non-custodian parent is actually taking (and the opposite, if the non-custodian parent ends up with the child more then the Custodian parent, the Non-custodian parent can petition the court to change the custody order to reflect what is actually happening).