We Are Making Some Changes at Fathers and Families and at www.glennsacks.com…
October 16, 2010
We are making some exciting changes at Fathers and Families and at www.glennsacks.com and will be announcing them soon. For now, get the latest news and blog posts by visiting www.fathersandfamilies.org.
To participate in our latest Action Alert, concerning SB 292, a bill to raise child support levels in the worst economy since the Great Depression, click here.
Together with you in the love of our children,
Glenn Sacks, MA
Executive Director, Fathers & Families
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October 16, 2010
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Critics Premature in ‘Oath Keepers’ Child Custody Case
October 11, 2010
I've criticized child protective services plenty and I'm sure I will again. Child welfare agencies often err on the side of over-intrusion into families' affairs. They often act arbitrarily; they often ignore fathers in their zeal to place children in foster care. All that is true. But the fact that CPS agencies often err doesn't mean they always do or even that they do most of the time. So, when they take a child into custody, we shouldn't automatically assume that they're acting inappropriately.
The fact is that there's a lot of child abuse and neglect in this country and someone needs to try to deal with that. CPS has been given the job and it's one I know I wouldn't want. Making the call about who keeps their child and who loses theirs can't be easy. Telling the difference between dangerous neglect and the hardships of poverty must be like reading tea leaves at times.
So now we have the case of Johnathan Irish of Epsom, New Hampshire. He has some association with a group called "Oath Keepers." From what I can gather, they're an organization of current military service personnel, police, firefighters, national guard reservists, etc. Their mission is to remember and strictly adhere to the oath they took upon entering their particular lines of duty. That is, they mean to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Oath Keepers is a libertarian group. They believe in limited governmental intrusion into the lives and freedoms of Americans, but, given that their members are military personnel, police and firefighters, they're government agents. So how do agents of the government intend to limit governmental intrusion into private life? As a practical matter, that seems to mean that Oath Keepers vow to refuse orders of their superiors that they deem to violate the Constitution.
Exactly what connection Johnathan Irish has with the Oath Keepers seems uncertain, but apparently he has one. So when child protective services showed up at the hospital shortly after his girlfriend gave birth to their son/daughter, Oath Keepers and others who aren't favorably disposed toward CPS took to the streets in protest. Their claim is that, because Irish has some connection with Oath Keepers and because CPS took his child, they must have done so because of his connection with the group.
I'll admit, it got my dander up too. After all, I see plenty of high-handed intrusion by CPS all the time, so I'm ready to leap into the fray on the side of parents.
But this article says that the police claim that Johnathan Irish has an all-too-rich history of domestic violence and child abuse (Concord Monitor, 10/10/10). I of course don't know Irish's criminal history or even if there is one. But jumping to the conclusion that CPS took his child solely because of his association with a particular organization strikes me as dubious at best.
It's a classic case of jumping to conclusions before the evidence is in. We don't know what the facts are and anyone who claims they do -outside of a very few people very close to the case - is being irresponsible.
Let's see what happens.
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Adoption Industry’s Taking of John Wyatt’s Child is Fine with Anti-Dad Crowd
October 11, 2010
As I said in my previous piece on the Benjamin Wyrembek case, the anti-father crowd is up in arms about the fact that Ohio law has allowed him to stop the adoption of his child. From the first, all parties - lawyers, the adoption agency and the prospective adoptive parents - knew that Wyrembek was claiming his son as his own. But they went ahead anyway to try to force adoption on a little boy who has a fit and loving father. Now, almost three years later, they've lost at every level of trial and appeal.
Their cry is "the best interests of the child." Indeed, that's the first sentence of a piece in the Huffington Post bewailing Wyrembek's success at finally getting access to his own son. But what the Ohio Supreme Court has done in stopping this adoption is to recognize the fact that the "best interests of the child" standard is often nothing more than a stalking horse for separating children from their fathers. Those who say this adoption should be allowed to go through stand foursquare for the proposition that all adoptive parents have to do is get a child away from its father for a certain length of time and - bingo! - the child is theirs. To them, fathers' rights, children's rights, common sense, matter not a whit.
As I said in my previous piece, that point of view comes embarrassingly close to support for child theft. I gave the example of Edward Bookert whose son was snatched out from under his nose and, despite his rights, despite his every effort, he was unable to get his child back. Why? Litigation is a lengthy process and, by the end of it, courts often rule that "the best interests of the child" demand that fathers lose their children because they've spent so much time with the parents who are trying to adopt them. The concept is closer to that of adverse possession in real property law in which a person who seizes and holds another person's real estate for a prescribed period receives ownership.
This article reminds us of another case that comes perilously close to child theft (Washington Post, 10/8/10). It's the John Wyatt case that I've written about before. Wyatt is the Virginia man whose girlfriend, Emily Fahland became pregnant with his child, last year. She wanted to place the child for adoption as soon as it was born, but Wyatt made plain his desire to keep it and raise it. As her due date came closer, she began to withdraw from Wyatt and, despite his efforts to keep up with her, managed to go to a hospital, give birth and then sign away her rights on day two. That was all done while Wyatt was desperately trying to locate her and their child. Apparently the hospital was in on the effort to keep Wyatt separate from his child because when he got there, hospital officials said there was no patient there with the last name of Fahland.
By that time though, his daughter was winging her way to Utah with her adoptive parents and officials of a Utah adoption agency. Of course Wyatt didn't know where she was, but he rushed to court in Virginia and got an order granting him custody of his child. Meanwhile, the adoptive parents were in Utah filing their adoption proceeding.
All that happened in early 2009. The linked-to article says that Wyatt's case has been heard by the Utah Supreme Court which is expected to issue its ruling either late this year or early next.
John Wyatt has never set eyes on his child as far as I know, and several months have passed since her birth. In that time, she has been in the care and possession of her adoptive parents. So should John Wyatt lose his child because he was a few hours late to the hospital? The only reason he wasn't present for the birth is that Fahland had managed to give him the slip. Should courts reward deception of the father by the mother? How does the anti-dad crowd feel about that? Listen.
"Both the adoptive parents and the adoption agency believe it would be extremely detrimental to remove the child from the loving and stable home she has enjoyed for 19 months," the couple said in a statement released by their lawyer, Larry S. Jenkins. "Their primary concern has and always will be the best interests of the child."
Ah yes! The "best interests of the child." Once again the phrase comes up in the context of what can only be called kidnapping or child theft. Once again, a decent loving father finds himself fighting a system that perversely rewards exactly that. Benjamin Wyrembek succeeded. Let's keep our fingers crossed for John Wyatt.
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Letter to the Editor: Let’s commemorate the Chilean miners
October 10, 2010
Within the next week all the miners who have been trapped underground for over 2 months in Chile will hopefully be rescued. Miraculously it appears that there will be no loss of life and, hopefully, no lasting physical effects, although the psychological effects of being trapped for so long may take longer to come to terms with. We frequently refer to the sacrifices which men make by undertaking hard, dirty and often dangerous jobs and the fact that well over 90% of all workplace fatalities are men. It is high time that we recognised these men in the same way that women are fond of recognising their achievements. The men's movement should designate the anniversary of the date on which the last miner is freed as the day on which we recognise these men. What better day to choose than the anniversary of an event which could so easily have been an appalling tragedy, but which will now be a cause for celebration?
Malcolm - Cardiff, Wales
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Texas Attorney General Touts Support For Visitation, but Don’t Look Too Closely
October 10, 2010
This sounds about right.
It's an announcement by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott trumpeting his support for child visitation by non-custodial parents. As the state's attorney general, Abbott's office has the job of enforcing child support orders, so I was glad to see his commitment to the other side of the divorce and custody coin - visitation. As anyone who reads this blog very much knows, I'm highly critical of government agencies including family courts that come on like Rambo where child support is concerned but like Mr. Rogers when it comes to visitation orders.
And I'm no fan of Attorney General Abbott who's always seemed to be more of a self-promoter than a promoter of fathers' rights to their children. So, as I said, I was glad to see him issuing a publication about his initiative to promote enforcement of visitation orders. After all, since 84% of non-custodial parents are fathers, they're the ones left out in the cold when courts ignore the rights of NC parents to access to their children. Having the weight of the AG's office behind fathers would be no small thing.
And Abbott makes clear that he understands the value of maximal parental involvement in children's lives.
CHILDREN THRIVE ON THE SECURITY THAT comes from knowing both parents love and care for them. That is why the Office of the Attorney General is committed to helping parents stay involved in their children’s lives.
He goes on to say that children do better in many phases of life with two actively-involved parents. Plus, he knows that, when non-custodial parents aren't denied access, they're much more likely to pay child support. So clearly Abbott knows what's best for kids and is going to bat for non-custodial parents, right?
Then I read further.
Abbott's announcement is about federal money for "Access and Visitation" grants the AG's Office recently channeled to 10 different agencies and non-profit organizations in the state's largest counties to promote visitation. Those counties comprise millions of people and deal with who knows how many visitation cases every year.
So what sort of support is Abbott providing for such a worthwhile cause? $500,000. That's an average of $50,000 per grant. Harris County (Houston) and Dallas County, have over 2 million people each; Bexar County (San Antonio) has over 1 million. So what Abbott is ballyhooing in his publication works out to an average of $50,000 per agency to help enforce visitation orders.
Except, well, it turns out to be not that much. Why? Just go to the website for any of the organizations to which the meager funds are directed and you learn that their missions include visitation support, but are hardly confined to that. Indeed, most of them list as their main concern - can anyone guess? - child support enforcement. So what Abbott is doing under the claim of providing money for access enforcement is mostly going for yet more child support enforcement. If those organizations and agencies did nothing but access support, the $50k would be paltry enough, but they do nothing of the kind.
How much money does Texas spend on child support enforcement? It's hard to tell, but in this statement, Abbott says that the AG's Office's "Child Support Division collected a record $1.8 billion in child support..." in the previous year. Later he says that "Texas collects almost $7 for every dollar spent" on child support enforcement. So it's reasonable to conclude that the Child Support Division has a budget of about $257 million each year.
That puts the $500,000 Abbott is spending on visitation in some perspective. So as I said at the start, given the usual disdain for fathers' rights and fathers' access to their children, that "sounds about right."
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Ohio Dad Stops Adoption Try; Anti-Father Crowd Furious
October 8, 2010
I wrote recently about the Benjamin Wyrembek case in Ohio. He's the man who fathered a child with a married woman who, along with her husband, decided to place the child for adoption. But Wyrembek immediately moved to stop the adoption and claim paternity. He filed the appropriate document with the Putative Father Registry and moved the court for a DNA test to determine paternity. That testing showed Wyrembek to be the boy's father.
Despite all that, despite the fact that the child's father was claiming paternity, Jason and Christy Vaughn took custody and proceeded as if they were adopting him. Since then, they have fought Wyrembek every step of the way, and he's prevailed at each. But all those steps have taken time and now the boy is almost three years old.
What I reported previously is that the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that the adoption cannot go forward and that the boy must be united with his father. After that, the court entered a temporary stay of its order; now this article says that the stay has been lifted and there is at long last no obstacle between Benjamin Wyrembek and his son (Toledo Blade, 10/7/10).
The Ohio Supreme Court said Thursday it will not reconsider an earlier decision that allowed a Swanton man to have custody of his biological son.
The ruling appears to pave the way for Benjamin Wyrembek to be united with his nearly 3-year-old son, who has been raised since birth by an Indiana couple who were attempting to adopt the child.
And the anti-father crowd is fit to be tied! This article verges on the unhinged (Huffington Post, 10/6/10). It pretty much recycles the Vaughn's complaints which all boil down to this: the child has been in the Vaughn's home since he was born and, since they're the only family he's ever known, he should stay with them.
If you don't look at the actual facts of the case, that argument can have some appeal. After all, the child doesn't know or care about the law; his interest is in a loving and stable family which presumably the Vaughns provide.
But if you do look at the actual facts of the case, that argument breaks down in a heartbeat. That's because what the Vaughns, their adoption attorney and the adoption agency did, in attempting to force the little boy to be adopted, was done fully aware from the very beginning that his father wanted him and was moving legally for custody. The actual facts of the case make it clear that the Vaughns could, at any time, have simply acknowledged that the boy had a father, gone to Benjamin Wyrembek with his son, said "here" and handed him over. They could have done that on day one. It would have been the responsible thing to have done, the moral thing, the fair thing. But they didn't.
Instead, what they chose to do, probably in the hope that Wyrembek would get tired, or run out of money or patience, and simply give up, was to draw out the legal proceedings as long as possible. Their attorney surely knew very well that legally they had no right to the boy, but they dug in their heels in the hope that time would do what the law would not. But Benjamni Wyrembek didn't give up, and now, after losing every single battle in court they cry "the best interests of the child."
As I said in my first piece, that's been an effective method of depriving fit, loving fathers of their children in adoption cases in the past, but at least in Ohio, no more. I can't count the number of adoption cases I've read that rule in essence "the father's rights have been violated, but so much time has passed that we refuse to disturb the status quo."
The problems with all those rulings are almost too many to count, but the Vaughns, their attorney and Robin Sax writing in the Huffington Post seem willing to ignore them all. Fortunately, the Ohio Supreme Court and courts in other states of late, seem to see all too well the problems of allowing strangers to take a father's child from him, keep the child during the long pendency of litigation and then claim that, in some way unknown in law, the the father's rights have evaporated.
The first problem is that such an outcome would encourage child stealing. The whole concept that, if you can just keep a child away from its father for a month, a year, two years, then the child becomes yours should disturb everyone. What if a woman marched into the maternity ward of a hospital and marched out again with a newborn that wasn't hers? What if she successfully kept the child in her care for, say, three years? And what if authorities discovered the child, did genetic testing and determined whose mother the child really was? Would Robin Sax and the rest of those opposed to fathers' rights be moved to righteous indignation at the "biological" mother's claim on her child? Somehow I doubt it, but something very much like that - all dressed up in legal finery - is exactly what they're arguing for.
If you don't believe me when I say that adoption without the father's consent often looks like child-stealing, consider the case of Edward Bookert of New Mexico. He lived with, but never married Anna Medina who eventually gave birth to two daughters and a son. Bookert was a loving, hands-on dad and the sole support of Medina and their three children.
When their children were 1, 2 and 10 years old, the couple separated for a month during which time Medina placed the youngest child for adoption claiming Bookert had abandoned him. Contacted by the adoption agency, Bookert's "reaction was one of shock and disbelief." He told the agency that he would be there in two days to take custody of his child. Nevertheless, the adoption agency placed the child in the care of potential adoptive parents before Bookert got back to town and told him to hire an attorney if he wanted to contest the adoption. The New Mexico Supreme Court wrote that the case worker for the adoption agency La Familia,
"testified that he assumed that Bookert would eventually consent to the adoption."
Sound familiar? But, like Benjamin Wyrembek, Edward Bookert didn't give up as the agency assumed he would. Sadly, unlike Wyrembek, by the time the courts finally decided his contest of the adoption, they refused to give him custody despite finding him to be a fit parent. Why? Precisely the reason argued by the anti-father forces in the Wyrembek case, "the best interests of the child." He sued the adoption agency and got a judgment, but the agency slipped behind the iron curtain of bankruptcy. Edward Bookert was left with a worthless piece of paper and without his child.
I have spoken at length with Edward Bookert; he understands all too well the old saying "some people rob you with a six-gun and some with a fountain pen."
Let's be clear: that is what Robin Sax and the rest of the anti-dad crowd are arguing for. To them, the Edward Bookert case was a good and fair result. Yes, it places a father's rights totally in the hands of the mother, but why concern ourselves with that? Thank heaven the Ohio Supreme Court knows better.
The anti-dad crowd's opposition to Benjamin Wyrembek is so misguided, I'll write more about it later.
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Reading Versus Videogames
October 8, 2010
The following was submitted by reader Phil Leigh.
Boys lag educationally and many blame video games. Girls represent sixty percent of college seniors and dominate the rosters of high school class officers. Many credit the success of young ladies to their greater propensity for reading.
But literature and video gaming may actually be different forms of storytelling. Readers observe stories and imagine scenes. In contrast, a gamer participates in the plot thereby creating endless versions of the story.
During much of his twentieth century life Joseph Campbell taught mythology at Sarah Lawrence. His research led him to develop a theory that all stories conform to an ancient fundamental blueprint. He exposed the pattern and its meaning in his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
He concluded that all stories can be understood in terms of the “Hero Myth”. Essentially there are constantly repeating characters (archetypes) that are reflections of the human mind. Our minds divide themselves into these archetypes to play out the drama of our lives. Characters commonly repeated in storytelling such as the youthful hero, wise elder, and supreme villain, are twins of the archetypes within our minds. Fictions built upon such models are “lies” that tell a psychological truth.
Campbell identifies twelve stages to the universal plot. They have been famously summarized by a Hollywood screenwriter named Christopher Vogler.
The hero is introduced in his ordinary world (1) where he receives the call to adventure (2). Initially he is reluctant (3) but is encouraged by a wise elder to cross the first threshold (4) where he encounters tests and helpers (5). He reaches the innermost cave (6) where he endures the supreme ordeal (7). He seizes the treasure (8) and is pursued on the road back to his world (9). He is transformed by the experience (10). He returns to his ordinary world (11) with a treasure to benefit his world (12).
The “Hero Myth” is a skeleton that is often masked with details of the individual stories. Some stages may be deleted or the orders shifted. But the values of the myth are what are important. The images such as young heroes or aged wizards are merely symbols and can be changed infinitely to fit the applicable chronicle.
Even the biblical Exodus legend conforms – at least the Cecil B. deMille version. For example, we first see Moses in his ordinary world (1). God calls him to free the Israelites, (2) but he is reluctant (3). God encourages him to go unarmed with Aaron to Egypt (4). Pharaoh repeatedly tests his powers (5), but he must ultimately resort to the Passover Plague (6 & 7). He seizes the Israelite slaves (8) but is pursued to the Red Sea crossing and wanders the desert (9). He gets the Ten Commandments (10) and rejoins his people in their own world (11). God’s treasured Israelites are given a Promised Land where they may live in freedom and prosperity (12).
Vogler provides a number of other examples including contemporary tales. He explains that the myth can be used to tell the simplest comic book story or the most sophisticated drama. That’s why the hero can “wear a thousand faces.”
More to the point, however, is that Campbell’s hero structure also seems to apply to role-playing video games like the venerable Dungeons & Dragons. More current examples might include the “campaign modes” of Halo, Medal of Honor, and Call of Duty. Thus, game participants are not merely improving hand-to-eye co-ordination which others have noted translates to skills for remotely controlling drones and other weapons in actual warfare. Presumably they are also learning equally valuable psychological truths. They may resonate with different truths each time they play. Perhaps that is one reason the games are addictive – they fulfill a psychological compulsion to experience each variation.
All this is not to say that boys will improve their educational performance by playing video games. Reading will continue to be an essential part of learning. Furthermore, if Campbell is correct the psychological benefits of reading fiction are -- as Shelby Foote put it -- “worth a grown man’s time.” However, it is intriguing to ponder two lines of questioning.
First, if Campbell’s model applies to popular role-playing video games, do boys have some greater need to participate in storytelling? Are they more hardwired to assume responsibility for favorable outcomes? If so, could girls benefit from more game playing?
Second, would it be advantageous to integrate the two functions into a new activity? Can advanced computer and Internet technology ever enable such a thing?
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Yould Case Shows Credulity of DV Advocates
October 7, 2010
I'm writing once more about Rachel Yould for the sole purpose of illustrating just how credulous some domestic violence advocates can be.
As you'll recall, Rachel Yould is the Anchorage, Alaska woman who recently pleaded guilty to 15 counts of mail and wire fraud in her rather exotic scheme to obtain money from college loan funds dishonestly. You remember Yould; she's the woman who won a Miss Anchorage contest several years ago. She graduated from Stanford with apparently no grade under an 'A.' She was a Rhodes scholar and Fulbright fellow at Oxford. In short, she's smart as a whip. She's also doing 57 months in federal prison and will have to make restitution of the over $700,000 she stole.
How'd she do that? Well, she somehow found out about the little-known HALE (Harassment, Abuse and Life Endangerment) program of the Social Security Administration that allows people who are victims of domestic violence to get a new social security number. The SSA encourages those on the program to change their names as well. The idea is that if someone is being stalked by an abuser, they may need a new name and SSN for protection.
If that sounds to you like a program that's just begging to be misused, you and I think alike. And that's exactly what Rachel Yould, nee Hall, did.
Jeffery Toobin of The New Yorker has written a fairly extensive article on Yould in the October 4 issue. (I can't provide a link because you have to have subscription to read it.) It has much more information than any other piece about her to date. Yould, in begging the court for leniency, wrote a 50-page submission to the judge. In it she described the abuse she claimed she suffered at the hands of her father over many years. Toobin's piece pretty much conclusively shows what I've strongly suspected all along - that Yould's claims are a tissue of lies.
Rachel's mother divorced her father when Rachel was three and he only saw her occasionally during the summers after that. In her submission to the judge, she described abuse that was, by any definition, sadistic, brutal and terribly injurious. But oddly enough, Rachel never told a soul - not her mother, not her stepfather, not a doctor, not a teacher, not a school counsellor, not a friend. Equally odd is that, although she described her father's "mutilation" of one of her hips, her husband told Toobin that there's no physical manifestation of any injury. According to Rachel, her father brutalized her repeatedly during her summertime visits, but every summer she returned.
Her father, Robert Hall, adamantly denies harming to his daughter in any way. Rachel's mother says he was never violent toward her while they were married. Hall's second wife has two daughters by a previous marriage; she says Robert always behaved appropriately toward them. As late as age 21, Rachel was visiting with her father, going out to dinner with him and even sharing a hotel room with him. That too seems odd for someone who claims to have been sadistically tortured by the man throughout her early life.
So what we have - all we have - is her word for it. To believe that Rachel Yould was abused by her father, we have to believe her and her alone. There is no one else to ask; there are no records to reflect as much as a smidgen of her claims. And that's a problem because Rachel Yould is a liar. That's not me saying she's a liar, it's the United States Postal Inspection Service, it's federal prosecutor Rhetta-Raye Randall and last but not least, it's Yould herself who, when given the opportunity to clear her name at trial, declined to even try. Instead she pleaded guilty to multiple counts of fraud.
But those in the DV industry in Anchorage take her at her word. Even though she hadn't set eyes on her father in 15 years, even though she never produced a single scrap of evidence of DV victimization at any time in her life, local DV advocates accepted the notion that Robert Hall, who lived over 2,000 miles away, was an imminent threat.
Therefore, during the months leading up to her guilty pleas, local DV advocates established a "safety team" for her that soon was named "Team Rachel." She was surreptitiously moved from "safe house" to "safe house," often in disguise. Whenever she ventured out of her shelter, she was accompanied by an escort in case Robert Hall were lurking ready to pounce.
For Toobin to even interview Yould while she was awaiting sentencing, he had to sign a "non-disclosure contract" promising to never reveal Yould's whereabouts. He was then driven via circuitous routes to a place that was not the "safe house" that Yould was allowed to occupy by local DV advocates. He was met there by Yould and six other people - part of "Team Rachel" - all of whom were present during his interview.
When Toobin questioned the need for such "elaborate security precautions," given the fact that she hadn't seen or heard from her father in over 15 years, Yould claimed "his harrassment was continuing through proxies."
Intrigued, Toobin asked for an example. She replied that she had gone to an Anchorage coffee shop with one of her security escorts when "a man came up to me and took my picture and said 'Daddy says hello.'" Toobin then asked to talk to the escort but alas, the man had "been out of earshot" at the coffee shop and in any event had taken ill and would be unable to talk to the reporter.
What's next, "the dog ate my homework?"
Yould's claims of victimization to the SSA were similarly threadbare. The SSA website says that it prefers things like police reports and witness statements to prove the need for a new identity, but if Yould's case is any indication, it's a lot less demanding than that.
As far as I've been able to tell, she submitted no evidence of abuse at all to the SSA beyond her say-so. Shortly before she applied for her new number, she went to a judge in Anchorage to try to get a restraining order against her father who lived in Georgia at the time. Apparently, that was the very first time in her life that Rachel Yould/Hall had told anyone that she'd been abused. Needless to say, the judge in Alaska didn't have the jurisdiction to restrain a man who lived in a completely different state, so no order was issued. That's as close as Yould got to producing any non-partisan evidence of abuse.
And yet she succeeded in getting a new Social Security Number to go with her new (married) name.
So equipped, she was able to shake down various state and federal lending institutions of hundreds of thousands of dollars in "student loans." Her none-too-imaginative method was to sign her loan applications "Rachel Yould" along with her new SSN, and then co-sign it "Rachel Hall" and provide her old SSN, all the while being careful to alter her handwriting in each capacity. This is a Rhodes Scholar? Tony Soprano's boys are smarter than that.
Yould's defense to the charges of fraud was simple - it's all the fault of the SSA. Toobin quotes her submission to the court:
"The truth of this case, as I perceive it, is that the Harassment, Abuse and Life Endangerment program is endangering women like me through the reckless provision of instructions meted out by poorly trained and largely unsupervised field officers and government contractors."
Oh, so that's why you did the thing of signing under one identity and co-signing under another; the SSA bureaucrats didn't tell you not to. That's why you used your student loans to travel extensively, live for seven years in Japan and start a publishing venture that produced but a single magazine issue and only a dozen copies of that.
I urge people to read Toobin's piece if possible. I just can't do justice to the extreme lunacy of Rachel Yould, her claims of abuse and her claims of innocence. The hospitals and clinics she says she went to for her abuse, but whose records indicate none, the emails that proved her innocence but which "magically disappeared" (her words), are all there and much, much more. That the SSA's HALE program officials and the DV advocates in Anchorage could imagine in their wildest dreams that Rachel Yould was anything but a scam artist - and a poor on at that - simply beggars understanding.
Jeffrey Toobin wasn't fooled. Neither was federal judge John Sedwick who said her defense "borders on the ludicrous." True, but her defense to the charges of fraud was no more ludicrous than her claims of abuse, but they convinced DV advocates and government employees alike. The former may be of no great concern; I'm content to leave them to their fevered imaginings.
But a government program is different, particularly one whose sole function is to provide official disguise to those who request it. Don't they know that the program is a magnet for every kind of thief and miscreant? As such it should be done away with entirely. But failing that, it should be administered strictly; strict rules for the provision of evidence should be maintained; every application should be thoroughly investigated. But if Rachel Yould's case is any indication, it's administered by the same type of true believers who shuttled Rachel Yould in disguise among shelters all over Anchorage. Before too many more people and institutions lose too much more money, that needs to change.
Beyond that though, is the simple credulity of those who supposedly deal with issues of domestic violence. It's an article of faith with them that women who claim to be victims of domestic violence never lie. As Toobin points out, it's that credulity in Rachel Yould's case that allowed her to take up space and staff resources that could have been used by a truly injured woman. For years now, the domestic violence industry as it is currently configured, has proven its incompetence to deal with the problem. There are many reasons for that, but the blind credulity of those running the system is one of the main ones.
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Winnipeg Man with Alzheimer’s Jailed for Domestic Violence
October 7, 2010
Who's the crazy one in this article (CBC, 10/6/10)?
Rose McLeod of Winnipeg is married to Joe, who's 69 years old. Joe has Alzheimer's dementia and one morning in early September, Rose woke up to find her husband acting aggressively toward her because he didn't know who she was. There must have been some sort of altercation because Rose fell. She then called the police, who came and, pursuant to their mandatory arrest policy, arrested Joe. He's been in the prison's medical ward ever since. He's had at least 11 court appearances, but hasn't even had bail set.
Rose never wanted him to be arrested, but when mandatory arrest is the policy, she's got nothing to say. Call the cops and even hint at domestic violence and someone's going to jail. If he happens to be mentally incompetent and need care, that's his problem; he's still going to jail. Rose doesn't want him prosecuted either, but that too is none of her affair. The domestic violence system has him and it's not letting go.
There was a time that severe mental incapacity meant that a person couldn't be convicted of a crime because he/she couldn't appreciate the concept of right and wrong. Well, it's not exactly a secret that people with Alzheimer's dementia don't have a clue about what they're doing or what's going on around them. (My mother had it late in her life and she thought that the people on the television were visitors to her home. I told her that having Cary Grant come to visit you wasn't the worst thing that could happen, but she didn't understand.) But, like so many other traditional legal requirements, that of mens rea (mental capacity) apparently has become a casualty of our "war on domestic violence."
There was also a time when police, prosecutors and courts looked at cases individually and usually understood who the real criminals were and who they weren't. They had discretion about whom to prosecute and often used it wisely. Now the innocent and the guilty are scooped up in one big net. Does it occur to anyone that Joe McLeod has already spent more time in jail awaiting trial than he ever would have if convicted?
So, in addition to the fact that the "complainant" never wanted him arrested and doesn't want him prosecuted, Joe McLeod very plainly hasn't the mental capacity to commit a crime. Into the bargain, there is no way that imprisoning an old person who has Alzheimers can ever qualify as either sensible or humane. But he's been in jail for over a month and there's no sign he'll be out any time soon.
And another thing. Having cared for my mother during her years of suffering with Alzheimer's dementia, I know for a fact that one of the things that disturbs those people the most is a strange environment populated by people they don't know. It's a prescription for serious agitation and upset, and there's nowhere stranger than jail. I'll bet that Joe McLeod has no idea of where he is or who the people are around him. My guess is that he's been in restraints and/or heavily medicated from day one, although of course I don't know for certain.
Rose McLeod,
and Liberal MLA Jon Gerrard held a press conference Wednesday to express her distress.
Gerrard said putting a man with Alzheimer's in jail is "appalling."
I agree, but what do we know? The domestic violence system is a law unto itself, but as between it and Joe McLeod, I know which is the crazy one.
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