Anti-Dad Advocates Going to Desperate Lengths to Roll Back Australia’s Family Law Act Amendments
June 30, 2010
Just when you thought they couldn’t sink any lower, down they go. Just when you thought you’d seen the extremes of their desperation, they come up with this (The Age, 6/24/10).
The anti-dad crowd in Australia has vowed to roll back the 2006 amendments to the Family Law Act since the minute they took effect. Since then they’ve spit out a regular stream of agitprop and disinformation aimed at reversing the quite meager gains of fathers represented by the amendments. The salient feature of all these efforts has been their singularly threadbare nature. I’ve said it before; if this is the best they have, the future of fathers’ rights to their children and children’s rights to their dads is bright.
As Pat Benatar used to sing, “Hit me with your best shot!” Well, apparently they have, but I confess, I didn’t feel a thing.
The linked-to article attacks equally shared parenting on the tired old basis that dads are violent and so shouldn’t have equal contact with their children. As by now most people know – and surely policy makers in Australia know – the vast majority of child abuse and neglect is done by mothers, not fathers. Boyfriends of single mothers provide their share as well. In the United States, for example, in no year in which the Administration for Children and Families has been keeping comparative statistics have mothers committed less than twice the abuse and neglect that fathers have.
So the old “dads are dangerous” snake oil is finding fewer and fewer buyers. But that’s all the anti-dad crowd has to sell, so they keep hawking the product in ever more strident voices.
Their latest effort relies, as you might expect, on a study. But before we get to that, we should take a look at the central fallacy of the piece, conveniently stated in its first sentence.
The Family Law Act is failing to protect children from ongoing trauma at the hands of abusive and violent fathers, a study has found.
Now we must set aside the fact that the study found no such thing. We must in fact set aside almost every single thing about the study as surely policy-makers will. But more about that later.
The article attacks the 2006 amendments because they are “failing to protect children…” So, does that mean that the Family Law Act prior to the amendments did protect children from parental violence? If so, countless DV advocates from before 2006 have a lot of explaining to do. In fact, neither the Family Law Act prior to the amendments nor afterward promised to shield children from harm at the hands of their parents. And of course neither law has done so.
But it’s only when a law shows the potential for giving fathers, for the first time in modern history, real power to assert their own parental rights, that the anti-dad crowd cries ‘foul.’ If these people gave a tinker’s ‘damn’ about protecting children, they’d have been clamoring for fathers’ rights all along, for the simple reason that, if statistics are any indication, fathers protect at least as well as mothers. But they didn’t and they don’t, and that tells us all we need to know about their true agenda.
Now to that study. The simple fact that The Age devotes an entire article to it says a lot. The study itself is so marginal, so obviously distorted by a political agenda that it’s essentially useless. What, for example, does the fact that it found no one to fund it tell you? Or contemplate its methodology: gender feminist DV advocates “recruited” people from DV shelters to tell their stories of abuse, and those same advocates found a grand total of 22 women who met their criteria. What were those criteria? What did a woman have to do or say to be chosen? The article doesn’t tell us and neither does the “study.”
As badly done as the study is, it’s better than the article. At least the study admits that its “sample is not representative” and therefore its “findings cannot be generalised” to the population at large. The article ignores those caveats entirely.
Add to all that the fact that the study of 22 women is 104 pages long. That’s because it consists mostly of quotations by the subjects that the authors thought supported their pre-set political ideas. So, despite its length, the study is astonishingly lacking in detail. For example, of the 22 carefully-chosen women, only three had a former partner who was actually convicted of some form of assault. Indeed, the most frequent abuse complained of was “emotional/psychological, financial, using children, using the system to abuse,” with actual physical abuse listed only after all those others.
That information would intrigue a reader more interested than the author of The Age piece, but the nitty-gritty details are left out. Of course almost everything of importance is left out to make way for the polemics of the study. To put it charitably, the study consists of selected quotations by a very small number of selected individuals whose statements support the political views of its authors. Again, this is the best they have?
The article ends by claiming that the study,
will put further pressure on federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland to amend the Family Law Act.
No, even if amending the Act were up to the Attorney General, the anti-dad crowd will have to come up with something better than this to stem the tide of fathers’ rights to their children and children’s rights to the fathers.
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Scottish Parliament Debates DV Against Men
June 30, 2010
Progress. At last, the Scottish Parliament has debated domestic violence with the express intention of focussing on violence done by women to men. I don't think I'm out of line saying that that wouldn't happen in this country in a million years.
But of course just last December, the Scottish government published its survey of domestic violence in that country and, like so many such studies that are done in an effort to find out the facts as opposed to further propagandizing the matter, it showed that men and women equally are DV victims. I wrote a piece here shortly after the survey came out.
The survey showed, for example, that 5% of men and 5% of women said they'd been a victim of DV in the previous year. It also showed that, of those victims, 80% had suffered either no injury at all or only a slight bruise or cut in the incident. That is, only 1% of the roughly 16,000 people surveyed said they'd been victimized and suffered a significant injury. Interesting too was the fact that only a tiny percent of the victims said they'd been victimized repeatedly. In short, the Scottish study gives a very good idea of who does DV, how serious it is, who needs intervention and who doesn't.
So perhaps that study provided the backdrop for the debate in Parliament. Whatever the case, though, this report by our good friend John Kimble tells us that much good was said in the debate, even if there seems to be little in the way of results coming from it (The Rights of Man, 6/19/10).
It appears that men's and fathers' best friends both in the Scottish and the British Parliaments come from the Liberal Democrats and, to an extent the Conservatives. Labour is still stuck in the old misandric paradigm they learned from gender feminists years ago. But Lib Dems and Conservatives more and more seem to be starting to get it. More and more they seem willing to reject the astonishing hypocrisy and outright falsehoods DV advocates have trafficked in lo these many years.
Listen to Lib Dem member Mike Rumbles and ask yourself when you expect to hear a similar statement in the U.S. Congress.
"I hope that we will all see the evil of domestic abuse for what it is—an evil that is perpetrated on the weaker member of a relationship. It is not a gender issue. If we treat it as such, no progress will be made in tackling its true evil. Members should not continue with the mistake of saying that it is simply a gender issue. It is about the abuse of one person in a relationship by their partner. Once we recognise that, we might at last get on the right track and have a chance of helping all those victims who really do need our help."
He's spot on. It's what so many people have been saying for decades now. If we're serious about reducing DV, we need to first admit what it is and who does it. That means consigning to the dustbin of history the radical feminist claims that only men commit DV and that it arises solely from a man's desire for control. In fact, we know the truth - that DV is a family dynamic, that it's a psychological phenomenon that can be treated, that men and women do it, and men and women are victims.
We've been taking the gender feminist approach to dealing with DV for almost 40 years. And yet almost daily we hear about our "epidemic" of domestic violence. It's past time to demand a change to what works and away from what doesn't. If the gender feminist way of dealing with the problem worked, we should have seen some results by now. But we haven't because their analysis of the problem has little to do with DV and much to do with separating men from their homes, their children and their freedom.
The debate in the Scottish Parliament won't change much of that. But it is one of those wonderful moments of clarity in which we see the bad old days passing, and the promise of better to come.
Thanks to John for the heads-up.
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British Airways Settles Sex Discrimination Suit with Man Who Sat Next to Minor
June 28, 2010
Here's an update on a case I reported on last year (BBC, 6/22/10).
Luxembourg citizen Mirko Fisher and his wife were passengers on a British Airways flight. Fisher was sitting by the window and his wife was in the seat beside him. At one point she asked him to switch seats with her. When he did, that put him beside an unaccompanied minor, just as his wife had been up to then. It also put him in violation of BA's policy that prohibits men from sitting beside unaccompanied minors. An apparently civil discussion ensued between Fisher and BA cabin personnel in which they informed him of the airline's policy.
He said: "I felt humiliated and outraged. They accuse you of being some kind of child molester just because you are sitting next to someone."
I disagree. In fact they treat you like a child molester because you're a man.
Remarkably enough, BA claimed its policy wasn't discriminatory. Hmm. I wonder how they figure that. It treats men and women differently based solely on their sex. It assumes that men, but not women, pose a danger to children. It humiliates men like Fisher by holding them up to public denigration, not because they've done anything wrong, but because of who they are. That's discrimination; they should look it up.
Now BA has admitted the obvious - that its policy constitutes discrimination based on sex and that applying it causes damage to men's reputations, feelings, personal integrity, etc. They paid Fisher about £2,900 to settle the case, all of which he's giving to charity, plus a like amount from his own funds. What seems more important to Fisher is the policy itself.
He said: "It is sex discrimination. I want this policy to be substantially changed as it is a matter of principle. Women are not treated like this."
Amazingly enough, BA still maintains the policy although it is said to be "under review." But an airline spokesperson proved the company still doesn't get it.
A BA spokesman said: "We had 75,000 children fly with us last year and it is an issue we take very seriously. We look after these children as we have been given this responsibility by their parents."
Good. We're all glad that BA wants kids to be safe. The point is that discriminating against men, holding them up to humiliation doesn't help keep kids safe. That's because men don't uniquely pose a threat to children. Maybe BA could ask the question "How many child molestations by men were there on our planes before we instituted this policy?" My guess is that the answer would be somewhere in the vicinity of zero.
Maybe someone could explain to BA that its policy is ineffective, morally repugnant, illegal and personally offensive. But of course they should have been able to figure all that out for themselves long ago.
Maybe if it pays a few more men like Fisher, British Airways will stop its disgraceful behavior.
Thanks to Malcolm for the heads-up.
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Kentucky SC: Biological Dads Have ‘Inherent, Equitable Rights’
June 28, 2010
Given the unusual facts of this case, and recognizing the inherent, equitable rights of biological parents who are deprived of parenting through no fault of their own, the grant of joint custody to Trevor cannot prevent Cahill from going forward with his paternity action.
That’s the Supreme Court of Kentucky writing in this case (Leagle, 6/17/10). Let me repeat the key words: “recognizing the inherent, equitable rights of biological parents who are deprived of parenting through no fault of their own…” Let me be clear; those words have the power to blaze trails into the law governing paternity fraud and adoption where none have gone before. They were written by the highest court in the state.
For twelve years I have studied the many ways in which fathers can be deprived of their rights by family courts and family law. One of the easiest ways is for mothers to keep the truth about paternity secret from dads. Over the years, I have read scores of cases in which a father was deprived of his parental rights through that simple expedient. Not once in all that time has there been a case that recognized the “inherent, equitable rights” of fathers." Not once in all that time have I read a case that recognized the simple principle that rights cannot be lost without some action on the part of the individual whose rights they are. I’ve said it before: the most heinous mass murder has, literally, greater due process rights than the most upstanding single father.
The simple “Due Process 101” rule is that no one can be deprived by the state of their rights absent notice that the state is trying to do that, and a hearing at which the person can attempt to defend himself. But in the case of fathers’ rights, that most humble of notions is often nowhere to be found. In paternity fraud and adoption cases, fathers are routinely stripped of their parental rights with neither notice nor a hearing.
But in Kentucky, at least, that may have come to an end.
The facts of the case are weird, the holding unremarkable. Follow the bouncing facts. Trevor and Bethany Smith got married in October, 2002 and divorced in December, 2003. Their petition for divorce recited that Bethany was then pregnant by another man. Their divorce was finalized in February, 2004, but they remarried on July 15, 2004. The child was born the next day. They divorced again in September, 2007. Shortly after that, Bethany informed Andrew Cahill that he was the father of the child who had been conceived during her first marriage to Trevor and born during the second.
Strange as those facts are, they give a pretty good indication of how ridiculous presuming paternity on the part of the husband can be in an era of readily available DNA testing. Technically, because the child was born during the term of their second marriage, Trevor was the presumptive father. That would be true despite the fact that (a) both parties had admitted the opposite in their first divorce proceeding and (b) accurate information about paternity was only a couple of mouth swabs away.
And that is what Andrew Cahill wanted - accurate information about paternity. He filed a suit to establish paternity and get custody if the child proved to be his. Trevor and Bethany resisted his claim of paternity and requested the trial court to block his request for testing. All three courts – trial, appeals and Supreme Court – ruled for Cahill.
As I said, apart from the odd facts, this is just an off-the-shelf paternity case, but the Supreme Court took it further than that. Cahill is just the type of dad I’ve been researching for years. He had a brief relationship with a woman who more or less simultaneously had a relationship with another man. In this case, it was her off-again/on-again husband. Cahill never knew the child was his until she told him some time after September, 2007. By that time the child was three years old.
Trust me on this. In the past, the court might have shed a few crocodile tears for the unknowing father, but ultimately would have ruled that bringing a new person into the child’s life would be too disruptive and therefore (altogether now) the best interests of the child required that he/she have nothing to do with the actual dad. No longer. If Cahill proves to be the child's father, he will have some measure of parental rights to be decided by the trial court.
In vain did people like me point out that bringing a new father into the child’s life is exactly what mothers do when they divorce and remarry. No, the child’s best interests either weren’t so important in those cases or, more likely, courts knew perfectly well that children adapt to those situations well enough. Whatever the case, the upshot was that if Mom wanted to remarry, she could; if Dad wanted a relationship with his child, well it was his tough luck.
And of course the fact that the dad’s absence during the important early life of the child had been brought about, not by him but by her, went entirely overlooked. In short, she controlled his parental rights as surely as if they were hers to begin with.
But in Kentucky, that has changed. Now we have the Supreme Court referring to “inherent” parental rights. That would seem to mean that simply being a biological parent creates parental rights. That is, they don’t come from legislative enactment or even from Constitutional authority. They come from the biological fact of parenthood.
They are “equitable” rights, i.e. not those created by law but by the facts of the situation. So dads in the dark about their paternity can no longer be deprived of those rights (called by the U.S. Supreme Court “far more precious than property rights”) simply by the nefarious actions of the mother. It’s an old rule of equity court that person who seeks equity must do equity and must have “clean hands.” Therefore, a mother who seeks to deny a father his equitable parental rights, must prove that her hands are clean. Lying to him about paternity or withholding the truth about it doesn’t qualify.
The court’s language is dicta, i.e. not a controlling holding. But ever after, attorneys and courts will be quoting those magic words “the inherent, equitable rights of biological parents” that the court said it was “recognizing.”
It’s the thin edge of the wedge.
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Boston College Researchers Slam Slate Article Claiming Fathers Lie About Parenting
June 27, 2010
It seems I'm not the only one to criticize the Slate piece entitled "Why Do Dads Lie on Surveys About Fatherhood?" Here it is again (Slate, 6/17/10). In fact, the article has received such a storm of complaints that the author, Katherine Lewis, has posted her own comment to it, desperately trying to make a silk purse and failing.
First, she used a recent study done by Boston College researchers for the proposition that fathers lie when asked about their parental behavior. Here's the response to her assertion by the people who conducted the research.
"While we appreciate your time and attention to this topic, the study authors at the Boston College Center for Work & Family want to make it clear that our research never addressed nor did it imply that the fathers we interviewed were “lying” about the time spent with their children. On the contrary, in the interviews we conducted we were impressed with the earnest and heartfelt commitment expressed by these men toward their families and their new role as fathers. As a qualitative research study, we sought to chronicle these men’s personal experiences as fathers and professionals. While we did not validate their self-reported estimates of time spent in parenting activities through other sources (e.g. their spouses or direct observation) as one might do in a time-use study, that was never our intent. We therefore [have] no basis to state that these numbers are accurate or inaccurate.
Our hope was that our research would provide a view into the quiet revolution that is taking place as men become more highly engaged in parenting. We believe all of us should be supportive of the efforts of these men and hope research like ours will lead to more equitable treatment of all workers as they deal with the challenges of balancing their professional and personal lives. To infer that our study is about how men misrepresent their parenting role is out of touch with our intent and in no way reflects our findings.
We encourage readers to access the full study report at www/bc.edu/cwf"
Stated more bluntly, it's a lie to say that their study was about men lying about their parental behavior.
Now, to be scrupulously honest myself, Lewis never said in so many words that the study was about dads lying. But what it did do (and, I would argue, intentionally so), is leave that impression. That's what happens when a writer entitles her piece "Why Do Dads Lie on Surveys About Fatherhood," leads off with the study and then moves into the phenomenon of aspirational lying. If you don't believe that that's the impression the piece leaves, just ask yourself "Why did the BC researchers feel the need to post a comment describing what their research actually does as opposed to what Lewis suggests?"
In addition to the BC researchers' take-down of it, the comments have been sufficiently hostile to move Lewis to backpedal and try to "explain." Trust me, you know your piece is bad if it doesn't explain itself. But while Lewis pretends that's what she's doing, in fact she's just trying to put a gloss on what she did. Sadly for her, that doesn't work either. In her own comment to her piece, she actually claims,
I'm surprised at the perception that this piece was an attack on men.
Well, Ms. Lewis, that's what happens when you call people liars in the headline of your article. It makes them angry. Toss in a little intellectual dishonesty of the sort I pointed out in my first piece, and they get angrier still. The misandry begins to look gratuitous. See how that works?
Of course she sees how that works. Lewis knew perfectly well that calling fathers liars was an attack on them. To pretend surprise that they would see it for what it is constitutes dissembling at its most craven. If Lewis did that little exercise in which she imagines writing such an article about mothers just before Mothers Day, maybe she'd get the point.
No, here's my educated guess at what surprised her. For about four decades now, various publications have offered up the most misandric stuff imaginable and gotten away with it. For reasons that always escaped me, misandry far worse than Lewis's nonsense was given a pass. So was misandry that was far less intellectually honest than her piece.
But now the worm is turning and it comes as a great shock to those who are used to, for example, denigrating dads just before Fathers Day. Their misandric parade is finally getting rained on and they don't like it one bit. The day is passing when writers and speakers could just toss off unchallenged the most amazing anti-male vitriol.
In short, facts and basic human decency are starting to take their toll on those who would continue the anti-dad propaganda of the past forty years. Contrary to the beliefs of some, many people prefer the truth to falsehoods; they prefer compassion to hatred; and they prefer the active involvement of fathers in the lives of children to fatherlessness. The Boston College researchers are clearly some of those people.
As Lewis said in her comment, "change is good."
Thanks to Kelly and John for the heads-up.
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UK Dads Refused Right to View Children’s Sonograms
June 25, 2010
Not long ago I linked to an article that had appeared in the Motherlode blog of the New York Times. It was a very moving piece by a man named Douglas L. who chronicled his descent from joyously expectant father to absent dad hoping a court would give him some face time with his daughter. That all happened in the space of less than a year.
Some of Douglas L.'s most telling comments were about his treatment by hospital staff. He, the concerned dad, the dad who was all too eager to care for both his wife and child, was treated as an interloper, a fifth wheel. Well, Douglas, you're not alone. Of course you're not; you never thought they did those things only to you. But here's a further description of how fathers are treated at maternity hospitals (The Guardian, 6/22/10). This one comes to us from across the pond.
It seems that the Basildon and Thurrock Hospitals in Essex, U.K. have a policy of keeping fathers out of the imaging room when their wives/partners are getting ultrasound imaging of their unborn children. Now, as everyone knows, viewing the sonogram image can be a real thrill for expectant parents. After all, its their first visual impression of their child, so it's a big event. But to Basildon and Thurrock, only the mom gets to see the image. Dad? He's irrelevant.
No, wait, it's worse than that; he's violent. The article linked to has several letters from Basildon and Thurrock responding to complaints about the policy. Among other claims they make is that dads are violent in the ultrasound room. Their evidence? One incident in two years, during which they performed almost 10,000 ultrasounds. Thruppence says he was ticked off at being excluded.
Basildon and Thurrock also claims that dads ask too many questions, which distract the imager from his/her job. As the article points out, it's interesting that other hospitals don't have that problem. To me, what's more interesting is that, to Basildon and Thurrock, the solution to dads asking questions is to exclude them. They don't put a sign up that says something like "Please don't disturb the technician while imaging is in progress." That would let the dads know to stick a sock in it until imaging was over. Once it was, they could ask anything they liked. But no, complete exclusion of any and all dads, irrespective of whether they were disruptive or not is the only answer B & T could come up with.
Interesting too is the fact that B & T is abetting paternity fraud. They say that, with dad in the room, the mom might not answer certain questions honestly, like the likely date of conception. Why wouldn't she do that? Because if she answered truthfully, "dad" might start to put two and two together. Again, other hospitals don't seem to have the problem.
Of course the vast majority of women want their partners there every step of the way. The article describes one woman who'd had a previous miscarriage and very much wanted her partner's support. But Basildon & Thurrock knew best. They denied her as well as him.
The Guardian writer points out the obvious larger truth:
Basildon hospital provides a useful illustration of the gulf between political support for fatherhood, and the experience of local fathers. Other examples abound. A father told us of going to an antenatal appointment with his wife, and finding that the midwife only had one chair in her office. She clearly was not expecting the mother to come along with an interested party.
Whenever I see an advert for yet another mothers and toddlers group, or hear of a Sure Start centre without a male toilet, I am reminded of how far we have to go. If parenting is to be shared, we need to let the fathers into the room.
Meanwhile, the new government says in its coalition agreement that it will encourage shared parenting from the earliest stages of pregnancy. David Cameron's and Nick Clegg's action show the way forward. Basildon shows us how much catching up there is to do.
Yep. That one line should be the motto for the whole movement. "If parenting is to be shared, we need to let fathers into the room." Like any good motto, it's true both literally and metaphorically.
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BC Dad: ‘This Child Has a Right to Interact with Her Father’
June 25, 2010
A detailed psychological analysis of the family found no evidence the child had been abused, but concluded instead that the mother had alienated her from her father. It also recommended that if the mother didn't change her behaviour, the child should live with her father."[The mother] has been using control as a coping mechanism of …perverse anxiety," wrote the psychologist. "There has clearly been a campaign of parental alienation."
That's from this excellent article about British Columbia dad, Dieter Geesing (CBC News, 6/22/10). He and his unnamed wife have a daughter who's now 10 years old. They're divorced and have a nice agreement about sharing parenting. The only problem is that Geesing's ex ignores it. Ok, that's not the only problem. The other problem is that the court ignores the fact that his ex ignores the agreement. Geesing hasn't seen his daughter in over a year.
So what's the result of his ex-wife's frank refusal to abide by the terms of the court order that reflects their agreement? Nothing. Nada. Nichts. Zip.
Records show there have been no consequences for the child's mother. Geesing has been told he has no legal recourse but to go back to court to ask the judge for help, which could take several months.
That, it turns out has real consequences, not only for the father but for the daughter as well.
"I love my child. It's not fair to her. You are cheating her of her childhood," he said tearfully. "This child has a right to interact with her father."
Indeed, it's clear from the article that the mother's alienation of the child began long ago. That's why the court included this requirement in its original order, a requirement that, not surprisingly, the mother has also ignored.
The court also instructed the mother to pay for and attend counselling to help establish a "healthier" relationship between father and daughter. A letter from the counsellor to the judge shows Geesing's ex-wife has since failed to co-operate.
I've said this a thousand times - courts don't enforce their own visitation orders. The penalties for failure to pay child support are swift, sure and known to all. The penalties for failure to abide by visitation orders are essentially nil. It's true in the United States. Australian academic John Hirst wrote a lengthy essay in part on the refusal of family courts there to enforce visitation orders. This article gives another example from Canada.
It also cites the work of the always-excellent Dr. Edward Kruk of the University of British Columbia. Dr. Kruk's research shows that, non-custodial fathers from all walks of life very commonly experience maternal interference in their visitation rights.
A 2009 study by Edward Kruk at the University of B.C.'s school of social work took a detailed look at the parental roles of 82 Vancouver-area fathers, from all walks of life, post-divorce.
Of the 82, 56 reported "lack of access" as their No. 1 problem. Thirty of the 82 fathers reported being completely disengaged from their children's lives.
Fathers' rights activist Jerry Arthur-Wong said,
"I know fathers who have been to court 50 times — in front of a judge — only to be told that they will get access but they do not," said Jerry Arthur-Wong, the executive director at Vancouver's only men's resource centre.
"It's like the court appearance had no impact on the other parent."
That's only to state the obvious. As John Hirst pointed out in his essay on the family court system in Australia,
Just as the Court had there imagined, leniency had disastrous consequences for children. Since access orders were defied with impunity, thousands of children were kept from their fathers, though the Court had ruled that their best interests required that they see them.
In other words, when mothers know that they'll face no consequences for doing so, they feel free to ignore visitation orders. And that is contrary to the best interests of children. Dieter Geesing's case should be Exhibit 'A.'
Years ago, Dr. Sanford Braver's research showed that the primary reason why non-custodial fathers don't pay child support is that they've been "parentally disenfranchised" which includes denial of visitation by the mother and refusal by courts to require her compliance. Of course non payment is wrong legally; neither party may legally refuse to comply with a custody order because the other party isn't complying. But as a practical matter, that's what the dads did. Braver wrote,
[W]e found a correspondence between the mothers' denial of visitation and the fathers' refusal to pay child support.
So the other side of the custody coin reads: 'Moms, if you want support paid in full and on time, let daddy see his kids.' The failure to enforce visitation orders hurts everyone - children, fathers and mothers alike.
And yet it continues. In spite of all we know about the value of fathers to children; in spite of courts' obvious need to have their own orders respected, it continues.
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BC Dad: ‘This Child Has a Right to Interact with Her Father’
June 25, 2010
A detailed psychological analysis of the family found no evidence the child had been abused, but concluded instead that the mother had alienated her from her father. It also recommended that if the mother didn't change her behaviour, the child should live with her father."[The mother] has been using control as a coping mechanism of …perverse anxiety," wrote the psychologist. "There has clearly been a campaign of parental alienation."
That's from this excellent article about British Columbia dad, Dieter Geesing (CBC News, 6/22/10). He and his unnamed wife have a daughter who's now 10 years old. They're divorced and have a nice agreement about sharing parenting. The only problem is that Geesing's ex ignores it. Ok, that's not the only problem. The other problem is that the court ignores the fact that his ex ignores the agreement. Geesing hasn't seen his daughter in over a year.
So what's the result of his ex-wife's frank refusal to abide by the terms of the court order that reflects their agreement? Nothing. Nada. Nichts. Zip.
Records show there have been no consequences for the child's mother. Geesing has been told he has no legal recourse but to go back to court to ask the judge for help, which could take several months.
That, it turns out has real consequences, not only for the father but for the daughter as well.
"I love my child. It's not fair to her. You are cheating her of her childhood," he said tearfully. "This child has a right to interact with her father."
Indeed, it's clear from the article that the mother's alienation of the child began long ago. That's why the court included this requirement in its original order, a requirement that, not surprisingly, the mother has also ignored.
The court also instructed the mother to pay for and attend counselling to help establish a "healthier" relationship between father and daughter. A letter from the counsellor to the judge shows Geesing's ex-wife has since failed to co-operate.
I've said this a thousand times - courts don't enforce their own visitation orders. The penalties for failure to pay child support are swift, sure and known to all. The penalties for failure to abide by visitation orders are essentially nil. It's true in the United States. Australian academic John Hirst wrote a lengthy essay in part on the refusal of family courts there to enforce visitation orders. This article gives another example from Canada.
It also cites the work of the always-excellent Dr. Edward Kruk of the University of British Columbia. Dr. Kruk's research shows that, non-custodial fathers from all walks of life very commonly experience maternal interference in their visitation rights.
A 2009 study by Edward Kruk at the University of B.C.'s school of social work took a detailed look at the parental roles of 82 Vancouver-area fathers, from all walks of life, post-divorce.
Of the 82, 56 reported "lack of access" as their No. 1 problem. Thirty of the 82 fathers reported being completely disengaged from their children's lives.
Fathers' rights activist Jerry Arthur-Wong said,
"I know fathers who have been to court 50 times — in front of a judge — only to be told that they will get access but they do not," said Jerry Arthur-Wong, the executive director at Vancouver's only men's resource centre.
"It's like the court appearance had no impact on the other parent."
That's only to state the obvious. As John Hirst pointed out in his essay on the family court system in Australia,
Just as the Court had there imagined, leniency had disastrous consequences for children. Since access orders were defied with impunity, thousands of children were kept from their fathers, though the Court had ruled that their best interests required that they see them.
In other words, when mothers know that they'll face no consequences for doing so, they feel free to ignore visitation orders. And that is contrary to the best interests of children. Dieter Geesing's case should be Exhibit 'A.'
Years ago, Dr. Sanford Braver's research showed that the primary reason why non-custodial fathers don't pay child support is that they've been "parentally disenfranchised" which includes denial of visitation by the mother and refusal by courts to require her compliance. Of course non payment is wrong legally; neither party may legally refuse to comply with a custody order because the other party isn't complying. But as a practical matter, that's what the dads did. Braver wrote,
[W]e found a correspondence between the mothers' denial of visitation and the fathers' refusal to pay child support.
So the other side of the custody coin reads: 'Moms, if you want support paid in full and on time, let daddy see his kids.' The failure to enforce visitation orders hurts everyone - children, fathers and mothers alike.
And yet it continues. In spite of all we know about the value of fathers to children; in spite of courts' obvious need to have their own orders respected, it continues.
Abusive Canadian Mom Gets Four Years in Prison
June 24, 2010
Almost every day, a piece flits across my screen by some blogger or another moaning about "abusers getting custody." Now, by "abusers" they mean fathers. (You see, I've cracked their code.) These are the people who propagate the story that, if fathers succeed in getting some sort of enforceable rights to their children, the kids will be abused. That's because, according to these people, only dads abuse children. Never mind that, there has never been a year in which the Administration for Children and Families has been comparing mothers' and fathers' abuse of children, that mothers did less than twice the abuse and neglect that fathers did. No, for this crowd, it's only dads who are dangerous to children. Period.
Perhaps it comes as no surprise that the same people who peddle this nonsense also drink the "believe the woman" Kool-Aid. So they've got websites that collect stories by mothers who say their ex-husband is an abuser and got custody, and then report those stories as true regardless of the facts. So several months ago, an op-ed by one of these people appeared in the Christian Science Monitor regaling us with another such story. The only trouble was that the woman's charges against the father of the child had been investigated by both the sheriff's department and the family court and found to be baseless. Add the fact that for years afterward, the child had been in dad's care and there had been no abuse.
But as I say, never mind all that; never mind that, in that case as in so many others, there was literally no evidence of abuse beyond the self-interested mom's say-so. Those who claim that abusive dads get custody stick to their talking points.
All of which is to lead up to this article (CBC, 6/21/10). A woman in Quebec has been sentenced to four years in prison for the brutal abuse of her eight children over more than a decade. She beat the young ones with wet rags, but as they got older, she graduated to hockey sticks. She held one girl's head under water because mom thought the girl had stolen her marijuana. Hey, what's a mother to do?
Provencial child protective authorities had been coming out to the house for ten years at least when finally one of the kids called the police and had Mommy Dearest arrested.
This is not exactly garden-variety child abuse. Any parent who hits a kid with a hockey stick has upped the ante on that. But one must ask where are the "abusers getting custody" forces? If they're really concerned about kids, what's their response to this or any of the countless other cases of custodial mothers abusing their kids? We're all waiting with bated breath.
Thanks to Jeremy for the heads-up.
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MN Court Bankrupts Father, then Jails Him for Failure to Pay Support
June 24, 2010
Last year I reported here on the case of Michigan woman, Edwina Nowlin, who was jailed by a judge for her inability to pay a fine her son had incurred. She was destitute and couldn't pay the fine, so the judge jailed her. Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, she appealed her incarceration saying that it is unconstitutional to be jailed for a debt that she was incapable of paying. She won. The court ruled that "debtor's prison" is an artifact of a bygone era and unconstitutional in the United States, at least when the person is unable to pay.
At the time, I wrote to the Michigan ACLU and asked if they thought the same reasoning could be applied to child support debtors. They didn't respond. But whatever the private thoughts of the ACLU attorneys may be on the matter, I'd still like to know.
So, I suspect would Jeff Dolan of Minnesota. Read about him here (National Post, 6/21/10). His is a story that should have sane people screaming.
Despite being somewhat learning disabled, Dolan graduated from high school and maintained employment in the construction trades. When the Minnesota economy started to go south, Dolan did too, moving to Texas to work in the oil fields. But when he came back to Minnesota, he was met by a restraining order filed by his wife claiming abuse. As few will be surprised to learn, it was part of her trial tactics in their divorce and custody case. So, lacking employment, Dolan tried to both defend the abuse allegations and get custody of his kids.
He was exonerated on the abuse charge, but was denied primary custody. Lawyers fees and court costs had bankrupted him and that made it impossible for him to come up with the child support he was ordered to pay. That meant that he lost his license to drive. At one point he was offered a well-paying job, but it required him to drive a car, so he couldn't accept it. It didn't take long for him to be jailed for non-payment of child support, so now he has to report his incarceration on any job application he makes.
As the article says, Jeff Dolan is no deadbeat, but the same court that requires him to support his children, simultaneously made certain he couldn't. If I were him, I'd talk to the local ACLU. There's precedent holding that a person can't be jailed for a debt he is unable to pay.
But whatever happens with Dolan, whatever happens to his children who are now effectively fatherless and who have no way of ever receiving the money he owes, consider this: this is the mess we have made. In our rush to brand every father a deadbeat, our elected representatives passed laws that assume just that. And yet, there's plenty of evidence that fathers want to support their children and desire a full relationship with them. Jeff Dolan certainly did and yet look what happened: a court that calls itself a family court, applying the laws of the State of Minnesota, accomplished a couple of remarkable things. It deprived, possibly forever, two children of their loving father and made sure he couldn't pay to support them.
Those two facts reflect a level of incompetence on the part of the "family" court system that would be hilarious if it weren't tragic. I'd call it "The Three Stooges Go to Family Court" but for the fact that real people - not movie actors - suffer the consequences. Maybe when they grow up Jeff Dolan's kids will go to the judge and ask for an explanation of why he destroyed their father and then took him from them. If they do, I know what he'll say. "It was the law."
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