NEW CAMPAIGN: Ask DSM to Include Parental Alienation in Upcoming Edition
November 30, 2009
A group of 50 mental health experts from 10 countries are part of an effort to add Parental Alienation to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM V), the American Psychiatric Association's "bible" of diagnoses. According to psychiatrist William Bernet, adding PA "would spur insurance coverage, stimulate more systematic research, lend credence to a charge of parental alienation in court, and raise the odds that children would get timely treatment."
Few family law cases are as heartbreaking as those involving Parental Alienation. In PA cases, one parent has turned his or her children against the other parent, destroying the loving bonds the children and the target parent once enjoyed.
Fathers & Families wants to ensure that the DSM-V Task Force is aware of the scope and severity of Parental Alienation. To this end, we are asking our members and supporters to write DSM. If you or someone you love has been the victim of Parental Alienation, we want you to tell your story to the DSM-V Task Force. To do so, simply fill in our form by clicking here.
Once you have filled out our form, Fathers & Families will print out your letter and send it by regular US mail to the three relevant figures in DSM-V: David J. Kupfer, M.D., the chair of the DSM-V Task Force; Darrel A. Regier, M.D., vice-chair of the DSM-V Task Force; and Daniel S. Pine, M.D., chair of the DSM-V Disorders in Childhood and Adolescence Work Group.
DSM V is struggling with many weighty matters and as things currently stand, Parental Alienation might not get much notice or attention. By having our supporters write to leading DSM figures, we hope to draw attention to the issue.
Again, to write the DSM Committee about your story, click here.
Running these campaigns takes time and money–the postage and supplies alone on this campaign will be several thousand dollars. To make a tax-deductible contribution to support this effort, click here.
Together with you in the love of our children,
Glenn Sacks, MA
Executive Director, Fathers & Families
Ned Holstein, M.D., M.S.
Founder, Chairman of the Board, Fathers & Families
Fathers & Families' Letter to the DSM Committee
Dear DSM-V Task Force:
We are writing to you concerning DSM's consideration of Parental Alienation Disorder for DSM V. Few family law cases are as heartbreaking as those involving Parental Alienation. In PA cases, one parent has turned his or her children against the other parent, destroying the loving bonds the children and the target parent once enjoyed. We believe that Parental Alienation Disorder should be added to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM V).
Parental Alienation is a common, well-documented phenomenon that is the subject of numerous studies and articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. For example, a longitudinal study published by the American Bar Association in 2003 followed 700 "high conflict" divorce cases over a 12 year period and found that elements of PA were present in the vast majority of the cases studied. Some experts estimate that there are roughly 200,000 children in the U.S. who have PAD, similar to the number of children with autism. Both mothers and fathers can be perpetrators of Parental Alienation, but the true victims are always the children, who lose one of the two people in the world who love them the most.
DSM has accepted several relational disorders, such as Separation Anxiety Disorder and Oppositional Defiant Disorder, and PAD is a typical relational disorder. Any target parent of Parental Alienation would certainly believe that his or her child's sudden, irrational hatred constitutes some sort of a mental disorder. Dr. Richard A. Warshak explains:
PAS fits a basic pattern of many psychiatric syndromes. Such syndromes denote conditions in which people who are exposed to a designated stimulus develop a certain cluster of symptoms.
Inclusion of Parental Alienation in DSM V will increase PA's recognition and legitimacy in the eyes of family court judges, mediators, custody evaluators, family law attorneys, and the legal and mental health community in general. Children of divorce or separation--who are among society's most vulnerable--will benefit. We urge you to consider inclusion.
Together with you in the love of our children,
Glenn Sacks, MA
Executive Director, Fathers & Families
Ned Holstein, M.D., M.S.
Founder, Chairman of the Board, Fathers & Families
Send your own letter to the DSM Committee or send along ours by clicking here.
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Child Support Agency Overcharges Dad; Has to be Forced to Pay it Back; Custodial Mom Keeps the Excess
November 30, 2009
This article gives a fair idea of the mindset of state child support agencies (The Seattle Times, 11/22/09).Â
If you recall, I wrote a piece last week about Carol Rhodes who had worked in Michigan's child support bureaucracy for over 20 years. Fed up, she blew the whistle on practices there. According to her, state custody and child support workers care about little but money; the more a state collects the better because the more it collects, the more it's paid by the federal government. In her office, fathers weren't called "fathers," they were called "payers."  Custodial parents seeking upward revisions of child support orders were treated like honored guests; everyone else was treated like poor relations. Lying was encouraged by supervisers to get rid of that ilk.
Now it seems like Washington state child support workers may be drinking the same Kool-Aid. It seems that some ten years ago a child support worker made an error. The fact that the error did not decrease the amount owed by the non-custodial dad, but increased it, may be just a coincidence. Or it may not be.
The case went through at least three case workers over the ten years. The dad's wages were garnished in the incorrect amount, which was duly paid to the custodial mother who, strange to say, never objected or brought the error to anyone's attention.
Finally though, the error was discovered and it was not insubstantial - about a $21,000 overpayment. So the agency's lawyer sent the dad a letter saying it didn't owe him a cent because he didn't complain. One thing led to another, the attorney reversed himself and eventually, the agency coughed up the money, without interest.
I know what you're wondering. You're wondering if the state demanded reimbursement from the custodial mother who had benefitted from the error all along. Well, the answer is 'no.' For her, it's like drawing the card in the old board game Monopoly that read "Bank Error in your Favor - Collect $200." It's found money.
So the question arises, "how many other cases like this one are there?" Given that the state's preference is for more money not less, one would think that there are others, perhaps many others. The state agency that audited the child support agency agrees.
During a meeting with DSHS administrators, the whistle-blower investigator, Sandy Miller, was told that parents alleging wrongful child-support garnishments was a "common complaint."
Thanks to John for the heads-up.
‘Family Finder’ Program Helps Dad Spring Sons from Foster Care
November 29, 2009
Three weeks ago, Gabriela Naccarato got a new job. The caseworker, who helps find homes for children in Hillsborough County, became a full-time "family-finder." Instead of placing foster kids with strangers, she was asked to search for relatives who might be willing to raise them. Her work is part of a federal effort to put kids with family members who care for them instead of with strangers.
What a concept. It's been seven years since an Urban Institute study criticized child welfare agencies for ignoring fathers. It found that, when children were taken from single mothers due to abuse or neglect, about half the time no effort was made to locate the father. Children were channeled directly into the foster care system.  Of course, that's far more expensive than placing children with their actual parents when that's possible. And, unless a parent is truly abusive or dangerously neglectful, children tend to have better outcomes when raised by their parents than by strangers, even well-meaning ones.
This article reports on the new federal effort to connect children with parents or other relatives instead of plowing them into foster care (St. Petersburg Times, 11/16/09). It also reports on the results of that program in one family, the Navarretes.
Twenty or more years ago, Mario Navarrete moved to Texas from Mexico. He worked construction doing roofing work, which took him to whatever part of the country had work. He married and fathered four sons, but his wife divorced him. She also had him arrested on apparently trumped-up charges of burglary for removing his own possessions from their house. By the time he got out of jail, his wife and four sons had vanished.
For over a decade, never saw them or heard from them or his ex-wife. But late one night a couple of weeks ago, his telephone rang. It was Gabriella Naccarato who said,
"Hello, this is Gabby from Tampa. I'm a caseworker for foster care. I think I might have two of your sons."
He was the 51st Mario Navarrete she had called in Texas and Kentucky.
He told the caseworker, "I always prayed to God, every night: I want to see them again. I had only their pictures. I looked at them all the time."
So after work Friday — after coming home to hug his 8-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son — Mario climbed into his Ford pickup and headed for Florida.
He drove all night, through the next morning. More than 800 miles later, on Saturday afternoon, he met the caseworker. And saw photos of his boys. They were so big, so handsome. When could he see them?
Mario reunited with his two sons who were still young enough to be in foster care. The other two had "aged out" of the foster care system, meaning that they were 18 or older. But Emilio and Xavier, though teenagers, were still in the system. Mario reunited with them, but he also located Gabriel who had aged out. He drove to the east coast of Florida and picked him up.
Just how the three younger boys ended up in foster care isn't clear. It seems like the unnamed mother didn't have much to do with them, not providing food or even coming to pick up Gabriel when he was released from juvenile detention. Maybe she was at the end of her rope trying to deal with teenage boys without a father. Whatever the case, it looks like Emilio and Xavier saw foster care as their best alternative and did what they needed to do to get out of their mother's care and into the system.
What happens next isn't clear. Mario is the boys' dad, but he's got to pass background checks to be allowed to take them back with him to Kentucky.
But however the next chapter reads, it's almost certain to be more sensible than the ones preceding it. Surely that's the point of the "family finder" program of which Gabriela Naccarato is a part. If a father wants to - and is capable of - caring for his children, it makes sense to allow him to do that rather than dumping still more children on a foster care system that time and again fails the most vulnerable members of our society.
Â
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Part III: What if Poor Parents Got the Money We Now Give to Foster Parents?
November 29, 2009
Many times before, I've expressed my trepidations about how various issues regarding children have served to enormously expand state power into private lives. Perhaps no single thing serves this purpose better than the phrase "the best interests of the child." Beneath that banner have marched countless courts, judges, social workers, psychologists, police and child welfare agencies. Inappropriate expansion of state power over family life was the primary concern of Joseph Goldstein, Anna Freud and Albert Solnit, in their 1979 book, "Before the Best Interests of the Child." There they clearly expressed their skepticism about the ability of governments to provide better care than do parents.
But when it comes to expansion of power, governments don't often listen to the voice of reason or moderation. The simple fact is that, given an opportunity, or indeed just an excuse, governments tend to add to their power if they can. That's been proven to be true in family life over the past 40 years or so. Once relatively sacrosanct, the family is now fair game.Â
As I've written countless times, families find themselves fighting costly tooth-and-nail battles to keep custody of their children over the most trivial and absurd issues. One case in point was the family I wrote about not long ago who committed the unforgiveable sin of photographing their five-year-old girls in the bathtub. Quicker than you can say "It takes a village," the kids were in foster care where they stayed for two months. It cost the parents some $70,000 to wrest control back from the state.
If the "best interests of the child" is the excuse for this vast expansion of state power, the mechanism is money. For every child placed in foster care, and for every day it remains there, a foster parent is paid by the state. Rates vary of course, but, just as one example, the "base" rate paid in Maine for a child with no disabilities, was $500/month in 2008. Some of that is paid by the state and some by the federal government. Whatever you think about the daily, per-child stipends, it's a certainty that there wouldn't be many foster parents without them.
To expand its power, the state needs to make it worth people's while, and payments for foster care do just that. Just to make the purpose of all this clear, civil rights attorney Catherine Campbell pointed out in 2000 that the great majority of children taken by the state and placed in the foster care system were poor. Given that,
If the parents of these children were provided with the same monthly income received by a foster parent, most of their problems would vanish.
Whatever the literal truth of that statement, she makes a good point - as long as the state is spending money on these children, why not give it to the parents instead of to strangers?Â
Often, children placed in foster care are those of single mothers. That means the state has to make some cursory show of due process of law before separating a the child from its mother. But fathers without custody of their children don't even get that, minimal though it is.  An Urban Institute study showed child welfare workers trouble themselves to even contact barely half of the fathers of children they intend to place in care. That's true even though they know the identity of the dad in almost 90% of cases.
Money feeds the beast of state power and "the best interests of the child" is the battle hymn of the republic.
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Part II: The State Preference for Splitting up Families Using the ‘Best Interests of the Child’
November 28, 2009
As I said in my previous post on the "best interests of the child," the authors of the 1973 book, "Beyond the Best Interests of the Child" were so shocked at its misuse by courts, child welfare agencies and adoption agencies, that they wrote another book in 1979 to correct the misinterpretations.Â
There they clearly stated that the best interests of the child were presumptively served by maintaining intact families unless certain extreme things had occurred. Those things were the death, incarceration or incapacity of a parent, divorce and custody matters, request by a parent to terminate their rights, sexual abuse of a child by a parent, serious bodily injury done to a child by a parent, repeated injury done to a child by a parent and the refusal by the parents to authorize lifesaving medical care for the child. Period. According to the authors, no other situation warranted state intrusion into parental care of children.
Would anyone care to guess which book is cited time and again as authority by appellate courts, and which book is virtually ignored? California civil rights attorney Catherine Campbell wrote in 2000 that "little notice was taken" of the authors' second book in which they strove mightily to stop their first book's being used to take children from parents. It's message, Campbell added "was not what child abuse crusaders wanted to hear, and it was not heard." Indeed. The same year as her article, I did a Lexis/Nexis search of state and federal appellate court opinions. Goldstein, Freud and Solnit's first book had been cited 279 times versus 46 times for their second.
Campbell pointed out that those adults and children who are most abused by the "best interests of the child" are overwhelmingly poor. They are the most apt to be found wanting as parents and least able to combat the system of child removal and placement that Campbell called "a form of legalized kidnapping."
Come to think of it, the New Mexico case I sketched in my first post on this topic involved a man who was poor - he was a laborer.  The fact that he provided for his children and loved and cared for them, and ultimately did everything in his power to stop the adoption train that inexorably took his child from him, mattered little. As always, state power is wielded most savagely against those least able to oppose it.
And in the arena of family courts and child welfare agencies, among the relatively powerless must be counted fathers. That's not because fathers are necessarily poor; of course they're not. Fathers aren't necessarily poor in money, but in family court, they are poor in what matters at least as much - rights. The range of methods used to separate fathers from their children is truly astonishing, and often enough justified by "the best interests of the child."
Should a father be informed about the adoption of his child? No, the child is better off with its adoptive parents. If he finds out about the adoption and tries to stop it (as in the New Mexico case), he'll find the child already placed with the new parents and thus its "best interests" lie with them, not him. Should the dad be notified before his child is placed in foster care? Not so much; only about half of them are. What if Mom concealed her pregnancy from him until months or even years later, can he get custody? Probably not, because, well you know, the child would be upset by a new adult entering its life so, sorry Dad. What about a plain vanilla divorce and custody case? Can he get primary custody? Not likely; just 16% of dads in the United States manage that.
But who's griping? It's all in the child's best interests, right?
Back to Goldstein, Freud and Solnit, though. Here's a case that, as the article shows, warrants little comment (Dallas Morning News, 11/27/09). A man and his wife have a "history" of drug use. He walked into a bakery with their baby in a car seat, placed the child on a table, ordered and walked out without the baby. Now, no one would argue that that's appropriate childcare. Obviously it's not.  But the question the authors want us to ask is this: "Is it behavior that warrants taking the child from its parents in favor of foster care?" After all,
[T]o acknowledge that some parents...may threaten the well-being of their children is not to suggest that state legislatures, courts or administrative agencies can always offer such children something better...By its intrusion the state may make a bad situation worse; indeed, it may turn a tolerable or even a good stiuation into a bad one."Â
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The ‘Best Interests of the Child’ Concept – Misused from the Beginning
November 28, 2009
Even the casual observer of family law and practice can be struck by the astonishing, er, flexibility of the term "best interests of the child." For example, in 1995, a New Mexico court approved of the outright theft of a child by an adoption agency and his subsequent placement with an adoptive couple as in the "best interests of the child."Â
The boy had lived with the mother and father for all his year and a half of life.  One weekend when the father was out of town working, the mother took the child to the adoption agency, lied about the father's whereabouts and gave the child up for adoption.  Two days later, the father informed the adoption agency that he had no intention of giving up the child. But the agency kept the child with the adoptive parents anyway and let the glacial pace of the judicial system do the rest.Â
A year and a half later, the child was deemed to have "bonded" with the adoptive parents and the father was out of luck. The "best interests of the child," you understand, meant that breaking those new bonds was impermissible. At the same time, the "best interests of the child" did permit breaking the bonds between the father and the child. That's what I mean when I say the concept is "flexible."
The conduct of the mother and the agency violated New Mexico civil law, and the father sued them and won a judgment for monetary damages. Those damages were never paid as the agency receded behind the impenetrable veil of bankruptcy.
Given the mutability of the 'best interests' standard, it's interesting to know a little of its history. In 1973, Joseph Goldstein, Anna Freud and Albert Solnit published a book that would have enormous influence on family courts and child protective agencies nationwide, albeit not the one they intended. They were, respectively, a law professor at Yale, a child psychologist and a researcher at the Child Study Center at Yale. Their book was entitled "Beyond the Best Interests of the Child." It was an effort to guide courts and placement agencies that had to decide issues of family dissolution and child custody about how best to do that.
But by 1979, the same authors were so horrified at the misuse of their book by those very courts and child protective agencies that they wrote another one entitled "Before the Best Interests of the Child."
With their first book, they meant well; they truly didn't anticipate the distortions to which judges, social workers and child welfare agencies would subject its message. In it, they were dealing only with cases in which a family had already broken down and required intervention by the state to protect the children. The authors limited their discussion to that. The "best interests of the child" concept was discussed solely as a goal to be obtained after family breakdown.
But the courts and other state agencies had no intention of limiting their use of the book's concepts in the same way the authors did. In direct contradiction to the authors' intentions, states began using the "best interests of the child" concept to achieve family breakdown by state intervention and removal of the children.
That's what horrified the authors and prompted them to publish "Before the Best Interests of the Child" in 1979. Here's what they said:
[W]e believe that a child's need for continuity of care by autonomous parents requires acknowledging that parents should generally be entitled to raise their children as they think best, free of state interference. This conviction finds expression in our preference for minimum state intervention and prompts restraint in defining justifications for coercively intruding on family relationships...
So long as a child is a member of a functioning family, his paramount interest lies in the preservation of his family. Thus our preference for making a child's interests paramount is not to be construed as a justification in and of itself for intrusion. (Emphasis in the original.)
I'll write a bit more on this later, but remember what the authors said: the child's "paramount interests lies in the preservation of his family."Â
It's a concept that escaped the New Mexico courts back in 1995, even as it continues to escape so many today.
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The ‘Best Interests of the Child’ Concept – Misused from the Beginning
November 28, 2009
Even the casual observer of family law and practice can be struck by the astonishing, er, flexibility of the term "best interests of the child." For example, in 1995, a New Mexico court approved of the outright theft of a child by an adoption agency and his subsequent placement with an adoptive couple as in the "best interests of the child."Â
The boy had lived with the mother and father for all his year and a half of life.  One weekend when the father was out of town working, the mother took the child to the adoption agency, lied about the father's whereabouts and gave the child up for adoption.  Two days later, the father informed the adoption agency that he had no intention of giving up the child. But the agency kept the child with the adoptive parents anyway and let the glacial pace of the judicial system do the rest.Â
A year and a half later, the child was deemed to have "bonded" with the adoptive parents and the father was out of luck. The "best interests of the child," you understand, meant that breaking those new bonds was impermissible. At the same time, the "best interests of the child" did permit breaking the bonds between the father and the child. That's what I mean when I say the concept is "flexible."
The conduct of the mother and the agency violated New Mexico civil law, and the father sued them and won a judgment for monetary damages. Those damages were never paid as the agency receded behind the impenetrable veil of bankruptcy.
Given the mutability of the 'best interests' standard, it's interesting to know a little of its history. In 1973, Joseph Goldstein, Anna Freud and Albert Solnit published a book that would have enormous influence on family courts and child protective agencies nationwide, albeit not the one they intended. They were, respectively, a law professor at Yale, a child psychologist and a researcher at the Child Study Center at Yale. Their book was entitled "Beyond the Best Interests of the Child." It was an effort to guide courts and placement agencies that had to decide issues of family dissolution and child custody about how best to do that.
But by 1979, the same authors were so horrified at the misuse of their book by those very courts and child protective agencies that they wrote another one entitled "Before the Best Interests of the Child."
With their first book, they meant well; they truly didn't anticipate the distortions to which judges, social workers and child welfare agencies would subject its message. In it, they were dealing only with cases in which a family had already broken down and required intervention by the state to protect the children. The authors limited their discussion to that. The "best interests of the child" concept was discussed solely as a goal to be obtained after family breakdown.
But the courts and other state agencies had no intention of limiting their use of the book's concepts in the same way the authors did. In direct contradiction to the authors' intentions, states began using the "best interests of the child" concept to achieve family breakdown by state intervention and removal of the children.
That's what horrified the authors and prompted them to publish "Before the Best Interests of the Child" in 1979. Here's what they said:
[W]e believe that a child's need for continuity of care by autonomous parents requires acknowledging that parents should generally be entitled to raise their children as they think best, free of state interference. This conviction finds expression in our preference for minimum state intervention and prompts restraint in defining justifications for coercively intruding on family relationships...
So long as a child is a member of a functioning family, his paramount interest lies in the preservation of his family. Thus our preference for making a child's interests paramount is not to be construed as a justification in and of itself for intrusion. (Emphasis in the original.)
I'll write a bit more on this later, but remember what the authors said: the child's "paramount interests lies in the preservation of his family."Â
It's a concept that escaped the New Mexico courts back in 1995, even as it continues to escape so many today.
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Man Exonerated of Child Sexual Abuse After 18 Years
November 28, 2009
As you read this article, you might want to keep in mind all of the PAS deniers (Dallas Morning News, 11/27/09). They're the ones who say that parents don't try to turn children against the other parent after divorce. They're the ones who say those parents never succeed in making a child hate the other parent or do the worst possible things to him/her. (The names in the article have been changed.)
Paul Parks, an attorney and former U.S. Marine, married his college sweetheart, June.  They had three daughters, but separated in 1982 with Paul taking the girls to live with him. After six years of marriage, they divorced and Paul remarried Kathy. That lasted only 14 months, and when they broke up, Kathy suggested that June seek custody of the girls and claim sexual abuse by Paul.
That didn't work.  A family court in Dallas found no evidence to support the claim and he and June split custody of the children. June took them to California and Paul, with his third wife Michelle, followed.  But June renewed the sexual abuse allegations when she filed for sole custody in a California court. Again, the psychological report to the court cleared Parks and added that the children "may have been coached."
Previously, June had filed criminal charges that, given that two separate family courts had found the abuse claims to be unfounded, seemed to Parks likely to be dismissed. But Parks and his lawyer hadn't counted on PAS.
Over three years of upheaval in their lives - living first with Parks, then with June, then in foster care and then back with June - the girls' stories about life with father had changed.  In Texas, Dallas County social worker Peggy Nichols had interviewed the girls who were aged six and four at the time. They denied any inappropriate touching by Parks. But Nichols and June refused to accept that good news. They questioned the girls again and again, and by the time the criminal trial in California rolled around, the children took the witness stand and testified to sexual abuse by their father.
He was sentenced to two separate 10-year terms in prison. He served 2 1/2 years, was paroled and forced to register as a sex offender. Needless to say, he lost his license to practice law in the process.
That was all 18 years ago. His two daughters are now adults. They also now recant their allegations against their father. When they first contacted him in 2001, they didn't even know he had gone to prison. Somehow no one had gotten around to telling them that. June apparently told them that Parks had abandoned them.
But what about their testimony about sexual abuse?
They remembered, but said they did it to please the adults pressing for answers. "Daddy didn't do that," they told Michelle.
Their words rebut the PAS deniers even more than do reams of social science. They should ring in their ears for all time:
"Somebody had created this story and, over time, we were just coached and coerced to saying a complete lie," Nancy said, according to the court transcript.
Cindy testified that, "After being questioned and asked about it so many times, it's kind of like you feel like just giving in ... They're not gonna listen to me, so I might as well just tell them what they want to hear."
That's what happens when adults use children to destroy other adults.  The children learn what the adults want and comply. If that means hating daddy and never wanting to see him again, so be it. If it means telling a judge and jury that daddy touched you here and did this and said that, again, so be it.
Paul Parks is now a free man. The state has paid him several hundred thousand dollars as compensation for his wrongful conviction and incarceration. As to his ex-wife June and social worker Peggy Nichols, the article doesn't tell us if they've ever suffered a single consequence for what they did to Paul Parks, or if they ever will.Â
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In the U.K., Paternity Fraud is Criminal, but Never Prosecuted
November 27, 2009
I don't want to dwell on the astonishing variety of nonsense and self-contradiction in this article (The Independent, 1/25/09). It runs the gamut from outrageous to silly. In between, though, there are some nuggets worth saving.
The writer, Janet Street-Porter, takes on the issue of paternity fraud by telling us that a defrauded man's response is all "about virility." She moves on to inform us, without support and indeed as a complete non sequitur that "men have become disposable." If her article can be said to have a main point, it is that "blood" relations to children aren't important; care is. She doesn't notice that, earlier in her piece she'd said that,
Paternity fraud is a hot issue, with pressure groups such as Fathers for Life campaigning for compulsory DNA testing of children at birth.
So how can paternity fraud be so vital an issue if the biological relationship of father to child is not? She seems to miss the fact that it is precisely biology that makes paternity fraud fraudulent.Â
Into the bargain, essentially everything she refers to Matt Ridley as saying is a stretcher at best. The fact is that existing hunter-gather societies that have been studied by anthropologists are hardly monogamous. His claim that women in those societies were (are) monogamous is flat wrong. And what Street-Porter hoped to prove by bringing hunter-gather cultures, even imaginary ones like Ridley's, into the conversation on contemporary paternity fraud, I haven't the slightest idea.
Now to the nuggets. One is that the United Kingdom has apparently had a law for many years making it a crime for a woman to not tell the truth to the Child Support Agency about the paternity of her child. Another is that no mother has ever been charged under it. That's true despite the fact that some 19% of their paternity "identifications" have been false.
Of course, to bring a criminal action, the crown would have to prove that a woman either knew or had reason to believe that her identification was incorrect. That almost certainly explains, at least to an extent, the failure to prosecute. At the same time, if prosecutors never bring an action, how do they know what a woman did or didn't know about the paternity of her child?
The law applies only to women who are giving information to the Child Support Agency. That means that they're trying to find the right men to tag with child support. So it's mostly about single women, not married ones.  And by criminalizing false information about paternity, the law suggests that finding the right father matters. The failure to prosecute, on the other hand, suggests that it doesn't really matter; pretty much any guy will do. The main purpose of the law is to connect each child not with its father, but with a male source of funding.
Thanks to Patrick for the heads-up.Â
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British College Men Starting to Confront ‘Crisis of Masculinity’
November 27, 2009
[I]t is becoming imperative that we address the same issues of discrimination and exclusion for boys and men as we once did for women.
This article is both encouraging and infuriating (Daily Mail, 11/26/09). Writer Jenni Muarry's heart is in the right place. She recognizes that men, in today's society, are not the all-powerful creatures so many feminists insist us to be. She sees that sex roles have changed radically over the past 40 years or so and that that's left at least some men wondering how to be men. If breadwinner isn't the alpha and omega of masculinity, then what else is included?
Murray reports on a couple of new campus organizations in the U.K., one at Oxford called the Man Collective and one at Manchester University called MENS Society, which stands for Masculinity Exploring Network and Support. Interestingly, I reported on a similar organization at the University of Chicago a few months ago. So maybe men on college campuses are starting to respond to the widespread misandry in our culture and educational systems. That these young men, having lived their entire lives exposed to the anti-male constructs of that culture, are trying to come to grips with the realities of society, masculinity and misandric culture, is encouraging.
And Murray is encouraged. She knows it's a movement that is needed. Good for her.
But Murray, like the organizations she reports on, seems to think that all these young men need to do is figure out a way to understand masculinity and all their problems with being male will be solved. Just sort out the roles of breadwinner and father, tough guy and sensitive soul, and you've pretty much solved the problems of men in the English-speaking, post-industrial 21st-century world. Or so her theory seems to hold.
Needless to say, there's a bit more to it than that. Murray touches briefly on the educational system in which girls are now outstripping boys, but doesn't inquire about why that might be. Could it be that, as many researchers and commentators have observed, that the way we teach now is itself anti-male? What about the fact that children's books and early pedagogy are repleat with misandry? How surprised can we be, after decades of calling men stupid, that boys don't learn very well?
Are men having difficulty sorting out their role as parents? Murray sees that they are. But how much of that has to do with men's individual uncertainties and how much has to do with laws and public policies that frankly discriminate against fathers. How does a paternal custody rate of about 10% post-divorce encourage men to be fathers? How about a radically-unequal system of parental leave? How about a popular culture that routinely portrays fathers as uninterested in - and dangerous to - children?
Murray tells us that young men now can expect the women in their lives to have "grown up with the assumption of equality." Really? They believe in equally shared parenting? How about being drafted equally into the military? How about equalizing all the family laws that so radically discriminate against fathers? How about equalizing education? How about correcting popular culture? Do we hear a single peep out of feminist organizations about those important issues?
My guess is that Murray, if she were asked those questions, would give some good answers. She's anything but anti-male. But she seems to think that women revolutionized gender roles all by themselves. They didn't. They had (and have) the enthusiastic assistance of countless men, particularly those in state and national legislatures who passed countless laws benefiting women.
So now that we're starting to notice the manifold inequalities visited on men Murray informs us that,
It's up to them (men) now to try to sort it out.
No, actually it's up to everyone. If we want a fair, just and equal society, we'll all have to admit that the problems of masculinity require more than an adjustment of attitudes.  Laws and public policies need to be changed as well. And that'll never happen without women giving men the same enthusiastic support men have given women over the years. Fortunately, many women are doing just that. Murray is one of them, but she's got a ways to go before she really "gets it."
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